The Road to Berlin (Stalin's War with Germany Volume II) (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

The Road to Berlin (Stalin's War with Germany Volume II) (Cassell Military Paperbacks) | John Erickson | Critically lacking

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The Road to Berlin...

	The Road to Berlin (Stalin's War with Germany Volume II) (Cassell Military Paperbacks) John Erickson Cassell, 2004 - 896 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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The follow-up to the acclaimed The Road to Stalingrad tells the compelling story of the Red Army's epic struggle to drive the Germans out of Russia and back to Berlin. Using Soviet, German, and Eastern European primary sources, John Erickson describes fighting and hardship on an almost unimaginable scale. The detailed narrative covers battles on all the fronts. The inside information on the Soviet system of war reveals how, under maximum stress, the Russian army achieved near-impossible feats in the field and the factories. All the diplomatic moves and counter-moves, including the all-important conferences at Tehran and Yalta, also come vividly alive.

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Best book on the Russian-German war

John Erickson's 2-part history of the Soviet-German war in 1941-1945 is the definitive English-language publication on the topic, and this is the second volume. Because the Second World War was basically won and lost on the Eastern Front, and because conquest of the Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe was Hitler's primary motivation for going to war in the first place, this book is a must-read for anyone truly interested in military history or the history of the 20th Century in general.

There is a lack of maps in the book, so I would suggest to the reader that they invest in a WWII atlas of some sort if they really want to follow what is happening. And the book is mostly told form the Soviet perspective, but that is not such a bad thing as there are far more English-language books about the Third Reich anyway. But there is nothing else written in English that comes close to Erickson's history in terms of overall balance and exhaustive, well-documented research.

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Critically lacking

This is a book with two fatal flaws. It describes battles and campaigns from the end of Stalingrad to the taking of Berlin. It does this with only 16 very poor maps. This is fatal flaw No. 1. The maps have no topicologic features ( mountains, rivers,swamps, etc are missing) and frequently have few of the major targets delineated. Even worse, in a number of cases, there are no maps at all describing major actions.
Fatal flaw No. 2 mirrors Fatal Flaw No.1. The text introduces armies, divisions, corps almost in passing. It has no lists of critical units and commanders. This, plus the lack of maps makes following a particular endeavor extremely difficult.
The book does have interesting information on Allied conferences; on the Russian treatment of Poland and other Eastern European nations. Its analyses of Stalin is excellent, painting a picture of him as cynical, machiavellian, but amazingly competent; expecially compared to both Churchill and Roosevelt.
Would I but this book again? No. Would I borrow it?
Maybe. Large tracts of it, expescially compared to masterworks like Shelby Foote's histories of the Civil War are incredibly dull and untractable. Too bad,because clearly Erickson had a world of information.
One last thing: there is little analyses, no portrait of the Russian or German soldiers who bore the brunt of the European war.

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