What do you think?
Rate this book
199 Days: The Battle for Stalingrad
The story of the siege by the acclaimed author of Hitler's War
In 199 Days, acclaimed historian Edwin P. Hoyt depicts the epic battle for Stalingrad in all its electrifying excitement and savage horror. More than the bloodiest skirmish in history-a momentous conflict costing three million lives-the siege was a hinge upon which the course of history rested. Had the Red Army fallen, the Nazi juggernaut would have rolled over Russia. Had the Germans not held out during those last few months, Stalin would have painted Europe red. Now, over 50 years after the most extraordinary battle of the second millennium, the truth about this decisive moment is finally revealed.
In 199 Days, acclaimed historian Edwin P. Hoyt depicts the epic battle for Stalingrad in all its electrifying excitement and savage horror. More than the bloodiest skirmish in history-a momentous conflict costing three million lives-the siege was a hinge upon which the course of history rested. Had the Red Army fallen, the Nazi juggernaut would have rolled over Russia. Had the Germans not held out during those last few months, Stalin would have painted Europe red. Now, over 50 years after the most extraordinary battle of the second millennium, the truth about this decisive moment is finally revealed.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
2 people are currently reading
113 people want to read
About the author
Edwin P. Hoyt
237 books30 followersEdwin P. Hoyt was a prolific American writer who specialized in military history. He was born in Portland, Oregon to the publisher Edwin Palmer Hoyt (1897–1979) and his wife, the former Cecile DeVore (1901–1970). A younger brother, Charles Richard, was born in 1928. Hoyt attended the University of Oregon from 1940 to 1943.
In 1943, Hoyt's father, then the editor and publisher of The Oregonian, was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as the director of the Domestic Branch, Office of War Information. The younger Hoyt served with the Office of War Information during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. In 1945 and 1946, he served as a foreign correspondent for The Denver Post (of which his father became editor and publisher in 1946) and the United Press, reporting from locations in China, Thailand, Burma, India, the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Korea.
Edwin Hoyt subsequently worked as an ABC broadcaster, covering the 1948 revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Arab-Israeli conflict. From 1949 to 1951, he was the editor of the editorial page at The Denver Post. He was the editor and publisher of the Colorado Springs Free Press from 1951 to 1955, and an associate editor of Collier's Weekly in New York from 1955 to 1956. In 1957 he was a television producer and writer-director at CBS, and in 1958 he was an assistant publisher of American Heritage magazine in New York.
Starting in 1958, Hoyt became a writer full-time, and for a few years (1976 to 1980) served as a part-time lecturer at the University of Hawaii. In the 40 years since his first publication in 1960, he produced nearly 200 published works.
While Hoyt wrote about 20 novels (many published under pseudonyms Christopher Martin and Cabot L. Forbes) the vast majority of his works are biographies and other forms of non-fiction, with a heavy emphasis on World War II military history.
Hoyt died in Tokyo, Japan on July 29, 2005, after a prolonged illness. He was survived by his wife Hiroko, of Tokyo, and three children, Diana, Helga, and Christopher, all residing in the U.S.
In 1943, Hoyt's father, then the editor and publisher of The Oregonian, was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as the director of the Domestic Branch, Office of War Information. The younger Hoyt served with the Office of War Information during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. In 1945 and 1946, he served as a foreign correspondent for The Denver Post (of which his father became editor and publisher in 1946) and the United Press, reporting from locations in China, Thailand, Burma, India, the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Korea.
Edwin Hoyt subsequently worked as an ABC broadcaster, covering the 1948 revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Arab-Israeli conflict. From 1949 to 1951, he was the editor of the editorial page at The Denver Post. He was the editor and publisher of the Colorado Springs Free Press from 1951 to 1955, and an associate editor of Collier's Weekly in New York from 1955 to 1956. In 1957 he was a television producer and writer-director at CBS, and in 1958 he was an assistant publisher of American Heritage magazine in New York.
Starting in 1958, Hoyt became a writer full-time, and for a few years (1976 to 1980) served as a part-time lecturer at the University of Hawaii. In the 40 years since his first publication in 1960, he produced nearly 200 published works.
While Hoyt wrote about 20 novels (many published under pseudonyms Christopher Martin and Cabot L. Forbes) the vast majority of his works are biographies and other forms of non-fiction, with a heavy emphasis on World War II military history.
Hoyt died in Tokyo, Japan on July 29, 2005, after a prolonged illness. He was survived by his wife Hiroko, of Tokyo, and three children, Diana, Helga, and Christopher, all residing in the U.S.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 31, 2020
When the Nazis attacked Russia, Stalin was "completely paralyzed and shocked and incapable of action." He had purged his military in 1937/38 and was totally unprepared to put an effective army on the field. Luckily he kept General Zhukov who became the keystone for eventual victory.
In the beginning months of the battles, the Nazis were totally inhuman and the Russians learned to hate them with a passion that was deep and terrible. Hitler had ordered that no Russian, military or civilian, be left alive and that soldiers would not be held responsible for the atrocities that they committed. They took him seriously and the author does not avoid the issue. And Stalin said that if the Germans wanted a war of extermination, they would have it and he ordered "Death to all Germans".
The author follows the several and successful battles won by the Germans and then Hitler made the mistake of taking charge of the military and his lack of judgement began to become apparent. And suddenly the winter was upon them, killing almost as many Germans as the battles did.
I will not go into the specifics of the military tactics that led up to the Germans taking over 9/10ths of the city of Stalingrad. But the manufacturing section of the city was still standing and Stalin told his people, "Not one step backward". Hitler underestimated the number of troops that Stalin could call from the far reaches of Russia and the importance of the war machinery coming out of the factories in Stalingrad. It was at this point that the war turned against the Nazis and thus began the slow and deadly retreat.
The book has a multitude of maps and maybe a little too much attention to military tactics which makes it a slow read. But it is a complete and fascinating look at one of the turning points in WWII. Recommended.
In the beginning months of the battles, the Nazis were totally inhuman and the Russians learned to hate them with a passion that was deep and terrible. Hitler had ordered that no Russian, military or civilian, be left alive and that soldiers would not be held responsible for the atrocities that they committed. They took him seriously and the author does not avoid the issue. And Stalin said that if the Germans wanted a war of extermination, they would have it and he ordered "Death to all Germans".
The author follows the several and successful battles won by the Germans and then Hitler made the mistake of taking charge of the military and his lack of judgement began to become apparent. And suddenly the winter was upon them, killing almost as many Germans as the battles did.
I will not go into the specifics of the military tactics that led up to the Germans taking over 9/10ths of the city of Stalingrad. But the manufacturing section of the city was still standing and Stalin told his people, "Not one step backward". Hitler underestimated the number of troops that Stalin could call from the far reaches of Russia and the importance of the war machinery coming out of the factories in Stalingrad. It was at this point that the war turned against the Nazis and thus began the slow and deadly retreat.
The book has a multitude of maps and maybe a little too much attention to military tactics which makes it a slow read. But it is a complete and fascinating look at one of the turning points in WWII. Recommended.
March 8, 2021
It is not generally my intention to post single-star reviews here. This book is a work of nonfiction, however, and seemingly a highly-regarded one; my reasons for offering a negative review concern manifest flaws in the use of his materials. Knowledge of these flaws will significantly affect one's estimation of the book. This review, then, serves as a warning.
One of the selling points of this book is its use of archival materials, many of which, naturally, are in German. I have a long background in this language, and as I read this book back in the summer of 2001, I grew to question the author's facility with it.
At first, it was merely the appearance of typographical errors, which could have multiple explanations. I saw General Blumentritt's first name presented as Günthen, rather than Günther, and the famous sniper's name appeared as Heniz Thorwald instead of Heinz Thorwald. In both cases, the errors were replicated consistently in the index. It was not until Chapter 25 that I found evidence of comprehension errors on the author's part.
Chapter 25 covers the first half of October 1942, and concludes with an incident related by French volunteer Guy Sajer in his excellent memoir of the war, The Forgotten Soldier. Hoyt acknowledged his use of Sajer's book, and I had been happy to see this when I began Hoyt's volume, because I had recently read the same book. The incident was fresh in my mind, and this made it easy to retrieve the relevant section for comparison subsequently.
The passage in question concludes with a quote from a soldier's song. Here is the original form of the text, from page 301 of my edition of The Forgotten Soldier:
Märkische Heide,
Märkische Sand,
Sind des Märkers Freude,
Sind mein Heimatland ....
In Hoyt's book, this is reproduced with one word missing. The word "Märkers" is absent, rendering the third line ungrammatical. While I had hardly memorized the words from Sajer's memoir, the evident break in the sentence drew my attention to the fact that this text was incorrectly rendered:
Maerkische Heide,
Maerkische Sand,
Sind des Freude,
Sind mein Heimatland ...
(For non-speakers of German, the word "Maerkische" is not misspelled. The letters ae are an alternate way of writing ä.)
It was Hoyt's translation of these words that truly made me stop and wonder:
Marching on grassland
Marching on sand
Without joy
Outside my homeland ...
This reconstruction of the text is patently incorrect, relying on two key mistranslations.
The first concerns the word märkische. This is an adjective based on the noun Mark, which does mean "march" ... but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the act of marching, of walking in cadence with others. That meaning of the word "march" is Marsch in German. A Mark is a "march" or "march county," a province existing on a disputed borderland where conflict with another power is likely. In the Middle Ages, a March would be governed by a Marquis or Markgraf, who enjoys higher status than Counts because of the difficulties involved with governing a frontier zone.
My personal translation of the first two lines would be:
Frontier grassland,
Frontier sand,
Even more serious is the error implicit in the last two lines, leaving aside the absence of the word "Märkers". Hoyt's use of the word "without" in the third line and "outside" in the fourth line admits only one conclusion: that Hoyt has mistaken the German verb "sind" (third person, plural, present tense of "sein", the German verb for "to be") for the French/Spanish/Italian preposition "sin" (meaning "without").
My translation of the final two lines from Sajer's book would be:
Are the frontiersman's joy,
Are my homeland.
These errors are grave for two reasons. The first concerns methodology. The author wishes us to find value in his research because of his use of primary sources in the original language, yet his ability to use German appears to be so bad that he mistakes the German verb sind for the French preposition sin, and as for his translation of Märkische, it looks very much as if he plucked the definition out of a German/English dictionary. (In my copy of the Langenscheidt Compact Dictionary: German, page 397, there is no entry for the adjective märkisch, but there are three entries for the root noun Mark. The first is defined as "marrow" or "core" and the second is about money. The third is presented as "march" with the descriptor "hist" for historical.) If this is indeed the case, how can any of his conclusions be trusted?
The second concerns his conclusions. Hoyt attempts to argue that the morale of the German Army was already bad before the disaster at Stalingrad. His translation of the soldiers' song appears to support that conclusion, but only because his translation reverses the meaning of the song. He wishes to have us believe that it is a lament about endless marching and being away from home, when the actual meaning of the song is about soldiers happily claiming conquered territory as their own. While there is always the possibility that the soldiers sang with irony, this is not suggested by Sajer in his own book. The very next line after this quote was "We were still the masters, and no one under heaven could judge us." (Page 301) This does not sound like an exercise in gallows humor.
The effort to retrieve this information from Sajer's book revealed yet another flaw in Hoyt's book. The incident that Hoyt described was reproduced with reasonable accuracy apart from the mischaracterization of the song at the end, but it did not belong in Chapter 25. In fact, it did not belong in a book about the Stalingrad campaign at all. Chapter 25 is about the first half of October, 1942. The incident in Sajer's book (pages 296-301) are in his section "Winter, 1943 - Summer, 1944". The incident took place more than a year after the other incidents in chapter 25, and long after the capitulation of the last Germans in Stalingrad.
This calls into question every other anecdote related in Hoyt's book. The stories may well be real incidents, but how can we know that they took place when and where Hoyt tells us? And if they did not take place when or where Hoyt placed them, the book as a whole would fall apart.
Caveat emptor.
One of the selling points of this book is its use of archival materials, many of which, naturally, are in German. I have a long background in this language, and as I read this book back in the summer of 2001, I grew to question the author's facility with it.
At first, it was merely the appearance of typographical errors, which could have multiple explanations. I saw General Blumentritt's first name presented as Günthen, rather than Günther, and the famous sniper's name appeared as Heniz Thorwald instead of Heinz Thorwald. In both cases, the errors were replicated consistently in the index. It was not until Chapter 25 that I found evidence of comprehension errors on the author's part.
Chapter 25 covers the first half of October 1942, and concludes with an incident related by French volunteer Guy Sajer in his excellent memoir of the war, The Forgotten Soldier. Hoyt acknowledged his use of Sajer's book, and I had been happy to see this when I began Hoyt's volume, because I had recently read the same book. The incident was fresh in my mind, and this made it easy to retrieve the relevant section for comparison subsequently.
The passage in question concludes with a quote from a soldier's song. Here is the original form of the text, from page 301 of my edition of The Forgotten Soldier:
Märkische Heide,
Märkische Sand,
Sind des Märkers Freude,
Sind mein Heimatland ....
In Hoyt's book, this is reproduced with one word missing. The word "Märkers" is absent, rendering the third line ungrammatical. While I had hardly memorized the words from Sajer's memoir, the evident break in the sentence drew my attention to the fact that this text was incorrectly rendered:
Maerkische Heide,
Maerkische Sand,
Sind des Freude,
Sind mein Heimatland ...
(For non-speakers of German, the word "Maerkische" is not misspelled. The letters ae are an alternate way of writing ä.)
It was Hoyt's translation of these words that truly made me stop and wonder:
Marching on grassland
Marching on sand
Without joy
Outside my homeland ...
This reconstruction of the text is patently incorrect, relying on two key mistranslations.
The first concerns the word märkische. This is an adjective based on the noun Mark, which does mean "march" ... but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the act of marching, of walking in cadence with others. That meaning of the word "march" is Marsch in German. A Mark is a "march" or "march county," a province existing on a disputed borderland where conflict with another power is likely. In the Middle Ages, a March would be governed by a Marquis or Markgraf, who enjoys higher status than Counts because of the difficulties involved with governing a frontier zone.
My personal translation of the first two lines would be:
Frontier grassland,
Frontier sand,
Even more serious is the error implicit in the last two lines, leaving aside the absence of the word "Märkers". Hoyt's use of the word "without" in the third line and "outside" in the fourth line admits only one conclusion: that Hoyt has mistaken the German verb "sind" (third person, plural, present tense of "sein", the German verb for "to be") for the French/Spanish/Italian preposition "sin" (meaning "without").
My translation of the final two lines from Sajer's book would be:
Are the frontiersman's joy,
Are my homeland.
These errors are grave for two reasons. The first concerns methodology. The author wishes us to find value in his research because of his use of primary sources in the original language, yet his ability to use German appears to be so bad that he mistakes the German verb sind for the French preposition sin, and as for his translation of Märkische, it looks very much as if he plucked the definition out of a German/English dictionary. (In my copy of the Langenscheidt Compact Dictionary: German, page 397, there is no entry for the adjective märkisch, but there are three entries for the root noun Mark. The first is defined as "marrow" or "core" and the second is about money. The third is presented as "march" with the descriptor "hist" for historical.) If this is indeed the case, how can any of his conclusions be trusted?
The second concerns his conclusions. Hoyt attempts to argue that the morale of the German Army was already bad before the disaster at Stalingrad. His translation of the soldiers' song appears to support that conclusion, but only because his translation reverses the meaning of the song. He wishes to have us believe that it is a lament about endless marching and being away from home, when the actual meaning of the song is about soldiers happily claiming conquered territory as their own. While there is always the possibility that the soldiers sang with irony, this is not suggested by Sajer in his own book. The very next line after this quote was "We were still the masters, and no one under heaven could judge us." (Page 301) This does not sound like an exercise in gallows humor.
The effort to retrieve this information from Sajer's book revealed yet another flaw in Hoyt's book. The incident that Hoyt described was reproduced with reasonable accuracy apart from the mischaracterization of the song at the end, but it did not belong in Chapter 25. In fact, it did not belong in a book about the Stalingrad campaign at all. Chapter 25 is about the first half of October, 1942. The incident in Sajer's book (pages 296-301) are in his section "Winter, 1943 - Summer, 1944". The incident took place more than a year after the other incidents in chapter 25, and long after the capitulation of the last Germans in Stalingrad.
This calls into question every other anecdote related in Hoyt's book. The stories may well be real incidents, but how can we know that they took place when and where Hoyt tells us? And if they did not take place when or where Hoyt placed them, the book as a whole would fall apart.
Caveat emptor.
August 24, 2017
Any book that uncritically cites Robert Conquest and Nazi generals in the first chapter is a piece of garbage.
May 29, 2024
Lots and lots of names and places, but Hoyt did a good job of not letting it get confusing. Basically a history of Hitler and Stalin being morons and letting MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of their soldiers and citizens die just because they needed to prove what big dogs they were. If I was Russian or German and reading this, it would be particularly infuriating.
July 19, 2018
The story of the siege by the acclaimed author of" Hitler's War"In 199 Days, acclaimed historian Edwin P. Hoyt depicts the epic battle for Stalingrad in all its electrifying excitement and savage horror. More than the bloodiest skirmish in history-a momentous conflict costing three million lives-the siege was a hinge upon which the course of history rested. Had the Red Army fallen, the Nazi juggernaut would have rolled over Russia. Had the German's not held out during those last few months, Stalin would have painted Europe red. Now, over 50 years after the most extraordinary battle of the second millennium, the truth about this decisive moment is finally revealed.
July 22, 2013
Not a bad overview of the battle. The content is a little dated and seems to stick a little too close to the soviet propaganda version of the story. Antony Beevor's book on Stalingrad is more detailed and up to date,
July 22, 2015
A decent overview of the Battle of Stalingrad. This seems to be a source that Dan Carlin drew heavily upon for his excellent Hardcore History podcast episode on this subject, quite a few quotes were either lifted from this book or from a common source.
Read
December 17, 2010Good read. A great deal has been written on this subject. Good perspective.
July 29, 2013
Historia que viene a completar la visión dada por otros autores que han escrito sobre el tema.
January 3, 2008
Not Edwin Hoyt's best book by any means, rather sparse on detailed information really.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews