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Stalingrad Trilogy #4
Endgame at Stalingrad: Book Two: December 1942 February 1943 The Stalingrad Trilogy, Volume 3
In Book Two of the third volume of his magisterial Stalingrad Trilogy, David Glantz continues and concludes his definitive history. Book Two finds the Red Army’s counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, well underway.
Drawing on materials previously unavailable or believed lost, Glantz gives a closely observed account of the final ten weeks of Germany’s ill-fated Stalingrad campaign. In short order, the Red Army parried and then defeated two German attempts to rescue the Sixth Army, crushed the Italian Eighth and Hungarian Second Armies, severely damaged the German Fourth Panzer and Second Armies, and finally destroyed the German Sixth Army in the ruins of Stalingrad. With well over half-a-million soldiers torn from its order of battle, Hitler’s Axis could only watch in horror as its status abruptly changed from victor to vanquished. This book completes a vivid and detailed picture of the Axis defeat that would prove decisive.
This concluding chapter, relating events even more steeped in myth than those that came before, is especially bracing as it takes on controversial questions about why Operation Uranus succeeded and the German relief attempts failed, whether the Sixth Army could have escaped encirclement or been rescued, and who, finally was most responsible for its ultimate defeat. The answers Glantz provides, embedded in a fully-realized account of the endgame at Stalingrad, make this book the last word on one of history’s epic clashes.
“Glantz is the world’s top scholar of the Soviet-German War.”—Journal of Military History
“Glantz and House are writing the definitive history of the Stalingrad campaign. Their trilogy, backed by meticulous scholarship and refreshingly fair minded, significantly alters long-accepted views of several important aspects of the campaign. . . . A monumental work that is unlikely to be surpassed as an account of the most important single campaign of the Second World War.”—Evan Mawdsley, author of Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945
“A magisterial study that draws on a wealth of previously inaccessible Red Army records and will be indispensable reading for all serious students of the battle.”—Michael K. Jones, author of Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed
Drawing on materials previously unavailable or believed lost, Glantz gives a closely observed account of the final ten weeks of Germany’s ill-fated Stalingrad campaign. In short order, the Red Army parried and then defeated two German attempts to rescue the Sixth Army, crushed the Italian Eighth and Hungarian Second Armies, severely damaged the German Fourth Panzer and Second Armies, and finally destroyed the German Sixth Army in the ruins of Stalingrad. With well over half-a-million soldiers torn from its order of battle, Hitler’s Axis could only watch in horror as its status abruptly changed from victor to vanquished. This book completes a vivid and detailed picture of the Axis defeat that would prove decisive.
This concluding chapter, relating events even more steeped in myth than those that came before, is especially bracing as it takes on controversial questions about why Operation Uranus succeeded and the German relief attempts failed, whether the Sixth Army could have escaped encirclement or been rescued, and who, finally was most responsible for its ultimate defeat. The answers Glantz provides, embedded in a fully-realized account of the endgame at Stalingrad, make this book the last word on one of history’s epic clashes.
“Glantz is the world’s top scholar of the Soviet-German War.”—Journal of Military History
“Glantz and House are writing the definitive history of the Stalingrad campaign. Their trilogy, backed by meticulous scholarship and refreshingly fair minded, significantly alters long-accepted views of several important aspects of the campaign. . . . A monumental work that is unlikely to be surpassed as an account of the most important single campaign of the Second World War.”—Evan Mawdsley, author of Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945
“A magisterial study that draws on a wealth of previously inaccessible Red Army records and will be indispensable reading for all serious students of the battle.”—Michael K. Jones, author of Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed
768 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2014
3 people are currently reading
268 people want to read
About the author
David M. Glantz
102 books221 followersDavid M. Glantz is an American military historian and the editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
Glantz received degrees in history from the Virginia Military Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Defense Language Institute, Institute for Russian and Eastern European Studies, and U.S. Army War College. He entered active service with the United States Army in 1963.
He began his military career in 1963 as a field artillery officer from 1965 to 1969, and served in various assignments in the United States, and in Vietnam during the Vietnam War with the II Field Force Fire Support Coordination Element (FSCE) at the Plantation in Long Binh.
After teaching history at the United States Military Academy from 1969 through 1973, he completed the army’s Soviet foreign area specialist program and became chief of Estimates in US Army Europe’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (USAREUR ODCSI) from 1977 to 1979. Upon his return to the United States in 1979, he became chief of research at the Army’s newly-formed Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 1979 to 1983 and then Director of Soviet Army Operations at the Center for Land Warfare, U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from 1983 to 1986. While at the College, Col. Glantz was instrumental in conducting the annual "Art of War" symposia which produced the best analysis of the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front during the Second World War in English to date. The symposia included attendance of a number of former German participants in the operations, and resulted in publication of the seminal transcripts of proceedings. Returning to Fort Leavenworth in 1986, he helped found and later directed the U.S. Army’s Soviet (later Foreign) Military Studies Office (FMSO), where he remained until his retirement in 1993 with the rank of Colonel.
In 1993, while at FMSO, he established The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, a scholarly journal for which he still serves as chief editor, that covers military affairs in the states of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union.
A member of the Russian Federation’s Academy of Natural Sciences, he has written or co-authored more than twenty commercially published books, over sixty self-published studies and atlases, and over one hundred articles dealing with the history of the Red (Soviet) Army, Soviet military strategy, operational art, and tactics, Soviet airborne operations, intelligence, and deception, and other topics related to World War II. In recognition of his work, he has received several awards, including the Society of Military History’s prestigious Samuel Eliot Morrison Prize for his contributions to the study of military history.
Glantz is regarded by many as one of the best western military historians of the Soviet role in World War II.[1] He is perhaps most associated with the thesis that World War II Soviet military history has been prejudiced in the West by its over-reliance on German oral and printed sources, without being balanced by a similar examination of Soviet source material. A more complete version of this thesis can be found in his paper “The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941-1945).” Despite his acknowledged expertise, Glantz has occasionally been criticized for his stylistic choices, such as inventing specific thoughts and feelings of historical figures without reference to documented sources.
Glantz is also known as an opponent of Viktor Suvorov's thesis, which he endeavored to rebut with the book Stumbling Colossus.
He lives with his wife Mary Ann Glantz in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Glantzes' daughter Mary E. Glantz, also a historian, has written FDR And The Soviet Union: The President's Battles Over Forei
Glantz received degrees in history from the Virginia Military Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Defense Language Institute, Institute for Russian and Eastern European Studies, and U.S. Army War College. He entered active service with the United States Army in 1963.
He began his military career in 1963 as a field artillery officer from 1965 to 1969, and served in various assignments in the United States, and in Vietnam during the Vietnam War with the II Field Force Fire Support Coordination Element (FSCE) at the Plantation in Long Binh.
After teaching history at the United States Military Academy from 1969 through 1973, he completed the army’s Soviet foreign area specialist program and became chief of Estimates in US Army Europe’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (USAREUR ODCSI) from 1977 to 1979. Upon his return to the United States in 1979, he became chief of research at the Army’s newly-formed Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 1979 to 1983 and then Director of Soviet Army Operations at the Center for Land Warfare, U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from 1983 to 1986. While at the College, Col. Glantz was instrumental in conducting the annual "Art of War" symposia which produced the best analysis of the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front during the Second World War in English to date. The symposia included attendance of a number of former German participants in the operations, and resulted in publication of the seminal transcripts of proceedings. Returning to Fort Leavenworth in 1986, he helped found and later directed the U.S. Army’s Soviet (later Foreign) Military Studies Office (FMSO), where he remained until his retirement in 1993 with the rank of Colonel.
In 1993, while at FMSO, he established The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, a scholarly journal for which he still serves as chief editor, that covers military affairs in the states of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union.
A member of the Russian Federation’s Academy of Natural Sciences, he has written or co-authored more than twenty commercially published books, over sixty self-published studies and atlases, and over one hundred articles dealing with the history of the Red (Soviet) Army, Soviet military strategy, operational art, and tactics, Soviet airborne operations, intelligence, and deception, and other topics related to World War II. In recognition of his work, he has received several awards, including the Society of Military History’s prestigious Samuel Eliot Morrison Prize for his contributions to the study of military history.
Glantz is regarded by many as one of the best western military historians of the Soviet role in World War II.[1] He is perhaps most associated with the thesis that World War II Soviet military history has been prejudiced in the West by its over-reliance on German oral and printed sources, without being balanced by a similar examination of Soviet source material. A more complete version of this thesis can be found in his paper “The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941-1945).” Despite his acknowledged expertise, Glantz has occasionally been criticized for his stylistic choices, such as inventing specific thoughts and feelings of historical figures without reference to documented sources.
Glantz is also known as an opponent of Viktor Suvorov's thesis, which he endeavored to rebut with the book Stumbling Colossus.
He lives with his wife Mary Ann Glantz in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Glantzes' daughter Mary E. Glantz, also a historian, has written FDR And The Soviet Union: The President's Battles Over Forei
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 5, 2024
That Glantz's "Stalingrad" trilogy ultimately comprises five books (counting the documentary companion) tells you something of the scale of detail involved here. However, all but the most dogged students of the Eastern Front in World War II might be better off sticking to the forthcoming condensed version of this work.
Originally written: May 27, 2017.
Originally written: May 27, 2017.
December 15, 2020
Not for everyone by any means. If you want an insanely detailed, tactical level study of every step of the eastern front Glantz is for you. Otherwise you should avoid.
June 13, 2025
I don’t have too much more to say about Glantz’s Stalingrad “trilogy.” This final book was just as detailed and informative as the others. Together, these four books are indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the Battle of Stalingrad.
July 17, 2014
This book concludes the Stalingrad trilogy. Well, for most part, seeing how there is also the companion volume containing orders, AAR and similar, planned additional book covering later oeprations in region. And is actually fourth physical book, seeing how third volume was split into 2 books.
As with previous books, this is standard Glantz work. Very detailed, dry to read. This books covers period after Uranus ended with Germans at and near Stalingrad encircled and Red Army left with holding the tiger by its tail.
For me the most important and interesting part covers German relief attempt, Operation Wintergewitter (Winter Storm). Not only the attempt itself which was pretty well covered rpeviously but rather events surrounding it. Such as Soviet operations along Chir river which prevented Germans from concentrating more forces for attempt or launch two pronged assault as initially planned. Or Little Saturn which collapsed the attempt later when Axis positions elsewhere started to give.
Glantz, as previously in series, attempts to dispel existing myths and shed some additional light on events. While it's pretty much agreed that aerial resupply was doomed from the start some controversy exist about Paulus' failure to attempt simultaneous brek out and link with releif force.
Glantz argues that if that was attempted before Wintergewitter stalled and was driven back (23. December) part (40-60%) of trapped force might escape but would have to abandon most of heavy equipment. With hindsight and loss of entire force anyway that might have been worth it. Of course the other side of the coin is that keeping Axis forces trapped tied down 7 Soviet armies which would otherwise be free to wreak havoc elsewhere. Book also studies in detail the chain of events why order for breakout wasn't given, attempts to peer into thinking of key players and their motives.
Overall it's a nice conclusion to excellent series and, as I stated before, will serve as benchmark for study of this battle for years, if not decades, to come. Even if Glantz sometimes refers to Paulus as "von", which he wasn't.
As with previous books, this is standard Glantz work. Very detailed, dry to read. This books covers period after Uranus ended with Germans at and near Stalingrad encircled and Red Army left with holding the tiger by its tail.
For me the most important and interesting part covers German relief attempt, Operation Wintergewitter (Winter Storm). Not only the attempt itself which was pretty well covered rpeviously but rather events surrounding it. Such as Soviet operations along Chir river which prevented Germans from concentrating more forces for attempt or launch two pronged assault as initially planned. Or Little Saturn which collapsed the attempt later when Axis positions elsewhere started to give.
Glantz, as previously in series, attempts to dispel existing myths and shed some additional light on events. While it's pretty much agreed that aerial resupply was doomed from the start some controversy exist about Paulus' failure to attempt simultaneous brek out and link with releif force.
Glantz argues that if that was attempted before Wintergewitter stalled and was driven back (23. December) part (40-60%) of trapped force might escape but would have to abandon most of heavy equipment. With hindsight and loss of entire force anyway that might have been worth it. Of course the other side of the coin is that keeping Axis forces trapped tied down 7 Soviet armies which would otherwise be free to wreak havoc elsewhere. Book also studies in detail the chain of events why order for breakout wasn't given, attempts to peer into thinking of key players and their motives.
Overall it's a nice conclusion to excellent series and, as I stated before, will serve as benchmark for study of this battle for years, if not decades, to come. Even if Glantz sometimes refers to Paulus as "von", which he wasn't.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews