Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War

The Red Army

by David M. Glantz

In Stumbling Colossus , David Glantz explored why the Red Army was unprepared for the German blitzkrieg that nearly destroyed it and left more than four million of its soldiers dead by the end of 1941. In Colossus Reborn he recounts the miraculous resurrection of the Red Army, which, with a dazzling display of military strategy and operational prowess, stopped the Wehrmacht in its tracks and turned the tide of war.

A major achievement in the recovery and preservation of an entire nation's military experience, Colossus Reborn is marked by Glantz's unrivaled access to and use of Soviet archival sources. This allows him to illuminate not only Russian victories in the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, but also to rescue a host of major "forgotten battles," many of which had been suppressed to preserve reputations and national pride. As he reveals in unprecedented detail, disastrous defeats vied with resounding victories throughout the early years of the conflict, as the Red Army struggled to find itself in the "Great Patriotic War."

Beyond the battles themselves, Glantz also presents an in-depth portrait of the Red Army as an evolving military institution. Assessing more clearly than ever before the army's size, strength, and force structure, he provides keen insights into its doctrine, strategy, tactics, weaponry, training, officer corps, and political leadership. In the process, he puts a human face on the Red Army's commanders and soldiers, including women and those who served in units—security (NKVD), engineer, railroad, auto-transport, construction, and penal forces—that have till now remained poorly understood.

The world's top authority on the Soviet military, Glantz has produced a remarkable study that adds immeasurably to our understanding of the one part of World War II that's still struggling to emerge from the shadows of history.

Genres: History, World War II, Nonfiction, Military History, Military Fiction, Russia, Russian History

828 pages, Hardcover

First published February 24, 2005

About the author

David 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

Reviews

[happy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways Col Glantz’ look at the Red Army between Jun 1941 and Dec 1943 is a must read for anyone interested in World War II on the Eastern Front. Col Glantz’ Colossus Reborn could readily be subtitled, to paraphrase a 60’s title, “Everything You Wanted to Know About the Red Army, But Were Afraid to Ask.”

Starting with Germany’s Operation Barbarossa and the Red Army’s reaction, Col Glantz gives the reader an overview of operations of the first 30 months of the war between Hitler and Stalin. He gives readers reasons for the poor performance of the Soviets and what the Soviet High Command, Stavka, tried to do about it. One thing the author does make clear that even while the Panzers were driving deep in Russia, the Red Army was trying to mount strategic offensives to counter act the German advance. Obviously they were not very successful. Col. Glantz gives many reasons for their failure, from the lack or inexperience of leaders, top to bottom, in the lack of material, obsolete or missing equipment, and the fact the that the Wehrmacht was simply the best military on the planet in June of 1941. As the war progresses, the Red Army learns from its disasters, reorganizes, reequips with modern and quite frankly better equipment, esp armor than the Germans, develops new doctrines on war fighting, reorganize types of units for better control, and essentially becomes better than the Germans in war fighting.

After discussing the war from a strategic prospective, Col Glantz gets down to the meat of the book. In the next sections he takes each combat arm and in some cases combat support arms, to use US Army terms, and presents how and why they changed over the 2 ½ yrs covered in the book. These chapters are full of charts and tables showing Order of Battle information, TO&E, manning levels ect. For example, the author includes how Red Army Armor formations evolved over this time frame, from bulky, hard to control formations with obsolescent equipment to the lean fighting units of 1943 and beyond. One thing I took out of this is just how much smaller Red Army Divisions were than comparable US Formations. For example, a US armor division was had a TO&E strength of between 12-14K people, an armor platoon had 5 tanks. A comparable Red Army tank division in 1943 was between 6-8K people and a tank platoon was 3 tanks strong. This disparity was throughout alltypes of units. As an old signal officer, on stat I found interesting is that in Jun '41, the Red Army Fronts were short 65% of their authorized radios and what radios they did have were obsolete. This lack went all the way down the command chain. No wonder they had command and control problems!

After examining the various types of units, the author looks at how the army went of approximately 5 million under arms on the eve of war in 1941, to over 25 million by the fall of Berlin. He looks at how units were raised, where the people manning them came from, how leaders were trained and developed. This look at leadership goes for the jr LTs leading platoons to the Marshalls of the Soviet Union leading the various Fronts (Army Groups) and the Stavka itself. He also examines Stalin’s changing view of his Generals and as the war ground on, his willingness to accept their suggestions and viewpoints, even when they ran counter to his, especially Zhukovs.

The author also looks at a formation that as far as I know had no comparison in the US Army – Penal Battalions. One this the author makes clear is that the penal battalions, if you survived, was a way to reenter the Army as a whole with a clean slate. Also there really weren't that many of them, roughly one per front. When people left their records were scrubbed clean and they were assigned to normal units.

Finally, Col Glantz looks at all the senior leadership of the Army and gives a brief biographical sketch of them and an assessment as to their effectiveness or lack thereof. He also tells of their fate after the war. The fate of surprising number of them is unknown. Col Glantz includes fairly decent maps and illustrates the volume with pictures of both equipment and Soviet leaders.

I have a difficult time rating Col Glantz books on the Great Patriotic War. They are all extremely well researched, using material for Russian archives in addition to Western sources. However, his writing style tend to be a bit stuffy. He can be extremely dry and textbooksish. For information, this is a definite 5 star maybe even a 5+ star read. However, his writing style is a 3 or lower. All in all I ended up rating this a weak 4 stars, 3.75, for Good Reads. I would highly recommend this for anyone at all interested in WWII on the Eastern Front, but a casual reader would probably get a little frustrated with the writing style.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An in-depth portrait of the Red Army during the early part of the war against the Germans.

[Emmanuel Gustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in bits and pieces over a very long time, because it can be extremely dry and is frankly very hard to digest in one piece. Because it is clearly intended to be a reference work on the structure of the wartime Red Army, it is in places as lively as any dictionary. In many ways this is "the encyclopaedia of the Red Army, 1941-1943" and not at all the kind of military history people read for entertainment.

This book is a mercilessly detailed study of how an army of millions of men was mobilised, organised and re-organised. As such it covers not only the elements amateurs would think about first (tanks, artillery, riflemen, generals, political commissars) but also the complex command structures of a huge army and the plethora of organisations it needs for road transport, railways, food, clothing, signals, cryptography, intelligence, and so on, with a description of the evolution of each and every element through five years of war. The Soviet state struggled to give this huge and fiendishly complex organisation a manageable form, organising and reorganising until it had finally arrived at a structure that worked well enough. Glantz spends quite a few pages describing what he calls "command turbulence", the rapid replacement of commanding officers deemed unsatisfactory by the Soviet leadership. Although he concludes that after the upheaval of the first year of war, the USSR established a relatively stable team of proven officers to lead its frontline forces.

Such a detailed study of a very large army in all its complexity is fairly unique, and this makes it worth the considerably effort to get through it. There are some sections that are livelier, especially the final chapter that describes the experience of the common soldier. But much of it is the history of a bureaucracy, albeit a military one.

It isn't flawless, although that shows mostly in elements that are outside the core competence of the author. For some reason he seems to have thought that czar Alexander II was in command in 1914-1917, and while I can sort of identify the "Boeing B-25" bomber, I struggled a bit with the "IaK-26" fighter. Also, if you are looking for a description of how the Red Army's materiél was developed and further evolved, you won't really find it here. This is a book on the army's structure.

The final conclusion of the author is that the war effort of the USSR has been misrepresented, in part because of simplistic assumptions about the structure and competence of its army, and in part because both Soviet and Western historians have focused too much on a selection of famous campaigns that they regarded as (potential) turning points. It remains to be seen, as Russia has slid back in an autocratic regime under Putin, whether there will be further opportunities to improve our understanding of the war effort of the USSR.

[Iain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth borrowing for the first 50 pages alone which is an excellent summary of the first three years on the Eastern Front.