Glantz David M., House Jonathan M. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler

Revised and Expanded Edition. — University Press of Kansas, 2015. — 568 p. — (Modern War Studies).When the first edition of this book was published in 1995, the authors gratefully benefited from the modest first wave of archival materials released by the Russian Federation, which increased our knowledge of the war twofold and enabled us to add substantial Russian context and detail to what had previously been a largely German perspective on the war. Thanks to those initial releases, the book’s first edition restored a modicum of truth and accuracy to the Soviet side of the war by identifying battles forgotten or concealed for political reasons and by adding more candid detail to the description of battles already well known. Likewise, a clearer understanding of what the Red Army actually achieved tempered the obvious German bias so evident in the historiography on the war during the Cold War years. However, despite those beneficial releases, yawning gaps still existed in the historical record of the war in 1995, the most vexing of which was the paucity of accurate numbers quantifying the scope and ferocity of the struggle. Now, most of those gaps have been filled, and the missing numbers are becoming readily available. With this passage of time, the amount of archival materials available to flesh out an accurate description of the war, particularly from the Soviet perspective, has increased more than a hundredfold. Up to 60 percent of the war’s content remained largely conjecture in 1995, but by 2015, this figure had decreased to roughly 10 percent. As a result, clarity is replacing opaqueness and truth is steadily winning out.