Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941: Volume 1 - The German Advance, the Encirclement Battle and the First and Secon (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941: Volume 1 - The German Advance, the Encirclement Battle and the First and Secon (en Inglés)"
At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German Army Group Center's Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany's Third Reich, and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht's [Armed Forces] massive invasion of the Soviet Union code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Union's Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat its Communist ruler, Josef Stalin. Between 22 June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500 kilometers into Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, by doing so satisfying the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safely behind those two rivers. With the Red Army now shattered, Hitler and most Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks. The ensuing battles in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. Once across the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, a surprised Wehrmacht encountered five fresh Soviet armies. Despite destroying two of these armies outright, severely damaging two others, and encircling the remnants of three of these armies in the Smolensk region, quick victory eluded the Germans. Instead, Soviet forces encircled in Mogilev and Smolensk stubbornly refused to surrender, and while they fought on, during July, August, and into early September, first five and then a total of seven newly-mobilized Soviet armies struck back viciously at the advancing Germans, conducting multiple counterattacks and counterstrokes, capped by two major counteroffensives that sapped German strength and will. Despite immense losses in men and materiel, these desperate Soviet actions derailed Operation Barbarossa. Smarting from countless wounds inflicted on his vaunted Wehrmacht, even before the fighting ended in the Smolensk region, Hitler postponed his march on Moscow and instead turned his forces southward to engage "softer targets" in the Kiev region. The 'derailment" of the Wehrmacht at Smolensk ultimately became the crucial turning point in Operation Barbarossa. Appeal: This study exploits a wealth of Soviet and German archival materials, including the combat orders and operational of the German OKW, OKH, army groups, and armies and of the Soviet Stavka, the Red Army General Staff, the Western Main Direction Command, the Western, Central, Reserve, and Briansk Fronts, and their subordinate armies to present a detailed mosaic and definitive account of what took place, why, and how during the prolonged and complex battles in the Smolensk region from 10 July through 10 September 1941. Its structure is designed specifically to appeal to both general readers and specialists by including a detailed two-volume chronological narrative of the course of operations, accompanied by a third volume, and perhaps a fourth, containing archival maps and an extensive collection of specific orders and reports translated verbatim from Russian. The maps, archival and archival-based, detail every stage of the battle. Structure and contents of Volume 1: Within the context of a fresh appreciation of Hitler's Plan Barbarossa, this volume reviews the first two weeks of Operation Barbarossa and then describes in unprecedented detail: Introduction: Plan Barbarossa, Opposing Forces, and the Border Battles, 22 June-1 July 1941; Army Group Center's Advance to the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers and the Western Front's Counterstroke at Lepel' 2-9 July 1941; Army Group Center's Advance to Smolensk and the Timoshenko "Counteroffensive," 13-15 July 1941; Army Group Center's Encirclement Battle at Smolensk, 16 July-6 August 1941; The First Soviet Counteroffensive, 23-31 July 1941; The Battles on the Flanks (Velikie Luki and Rogachev-Zhlobin), 16-31 July 1941; The Siege of Mogilev, 16-28 July 1941; Armeegruppe Guderian's Destruction of Group Kachalov, 31 July-6 August 1941; Armeegruppe Guderian's and Second Army's Southward March and the Fall of Gomel', 8-21 August 1941; The Second Soviet Counteroffensive: The Western Front's Dukhovshchina Offensive, 6-24 August 1941 and the Reserve Front's El'nia Offensive, 8-24 August 1941; The Struggle for Velikie Luki, 8-24 August 1941.
David M. Glantz es un historiador y militar norteamericano nacido en 1942 en Port Chester (Nueva York). En 1963, tras cursar estudios en el Instituto Militar de Virginia y en la Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill ingresó en el Ejército de EEUU sirviendo en el cuerpo de artillería en la “plantación” de Long Binh, Vietnam. Estudió para convertirse en Soviet foreign area specialist y sirvió en el USAREUR (United States Army Europe) en la sección de inteligencia. Fue Director of Soviet Army Operations en Fort Leawenworth y en 1993 se retiró del Ejército y fundó The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, publicación de la que es actualmente editor jefe.
Su interés por su objeto de estudio comenzó precisamente siendo Director de Investigación para esta publicación en 1979 y desde su primer proyecto sobre la campaña de Lorena del Tercer Ejército del general Patton, pasando por investigaciones sobre Manchuria y operaciones aerotransportadas soviéticas, David M. Glantz se ha convertido en el mayor experto occidental en la operativa del Ejército Rojo durante la Gran Guerra Patriótica.
Es conocido por sus numerosos libros del Ejército Rojo durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. En sus propias palabras reconoce haber tenido como principal influencia a su profesor John Erickson, antiguo director de la Escuela de Estudios Eslavos de la Universidad de Edimburgo y especialista, a su vez, en estudios militares soviéticos. Entre sus obras destacan La batalla por Leningrado, la Tetralogía sobre Stalingrado (cuyo primer volumen, A las puertas de Stalingrado, vio la luz en 2017, el segundo, Armagedón en Stalingrado, en 2019 y el tercero, Desenlace en Stalingrado I. Operación Urano en 2022), o Choque de titanes. Según David M. Glantz, esta última obra fue un intento por reproducir la obra de otro de sus grandes inspiradores, Malcolm Macintosh, esta vez junto a Jonathan House, profesor de historia militar.
Sus estudios han desmitificado la imagen de incompetencia del Ejército Soviético durante la Operación Barbarroja, siendo el hilo conductor de todas sus obras cómo este ejército se transformó desde aquella fuerza descrita como torpe por fuentes alemanas hasta el fino instrumento de combate de Manchuria. Actualmente, David M. Glantz es miembro de la Academia de Ciencias Naturales de la Federación Rusa y sus prolíficas obras han comenzado a ser traducidas al español. En 2020 le fue concedido el prestigioso premio Pritzker Military Museum & Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.
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