Comprehensive overview of the war on the Eastern Front from the
commencement of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the last battle in
Berlin in 1945.
The significance of the Second World War and its relevance to the lives
of so many, has generated a legacy of published material on the topic
sufficient to fill a library quite a few times over. Yet
disproportionately few publications deal exclusively with the true
cauldron of the conflict - the brutal and uncompromising war between
Germany and the Soviet Union; and fewer still attempt to provide, in a
single volume, a comprehensive overview of that war from the
commencement of Operation Barbarossa to the last battle in the
rubble-strewn streets of Berlin. Drawing on information from Soviet
archives that has only become available since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, Cataclysm: The War on the Eastern Front 1941-1945, is
unquestionably the most successful attempt so far to achieve that
goal.
As Winston Churchill acknowledged, the Red Army tore the guts out of the
Wehrmacht, and the story of how that happened, a story in which the
events at Stalingrad were just one part, deserves to be told with
greater frequency and to be understood more widely. From the enormous
amount of detailed information currently available on the military
struggle on the Eastern Front, condensing the events of a war of such
scale and duration into a succinct narrative in a meaningful and
balanced way has long been a challenging task. Yet the mortal conflict
between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia is deserving of the
effort.
Cataclysm focuses on the ground fighting along the Eastern Front, for
it was overwhelmingly the ground war that determined the outcome of the
conflict. With the aid of concise supporting maps, the book provides a
clear and comprehensive account of the ebb and flow of a four-year long
conflict conducted across a thousand miles of frontline in the vast
region between the Elbe and Volga. For anyone wishing to understand the
war in on the Eastern Front, Cataclysm is essential reading.
