Greatest Battle or Miracle at Philadelphia

Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II

Author: Andrew Nagorski

The battle for Moscow was the biggest battle of World War II—the biggest battle of all time. And yet it is far less known than Stalingrad, which involved about half the number of troops. From the time Hitler launched his assault on Moscow on September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, seven million troops were engaged in this titanic struggle. The combined losses of both sides—those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded—were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. But the Soviet capital narrowly survived, and for the first time the German Blitzkrieg ended in failure. This shattered Hitler's dream of a swift victory over the Soviet Union and radically changed the course of the war.

The full story of this epic battle has never been told because it undermines the sanitized Soviet accounts of the war, which portray Stalin as a military genius and his people as heroically united against the German invader. Stalin's blunders, incompetence and brutality made it possible for German troops to approach the outskirts of Moscow. This triggered panic in the city—with looting, strikes and outbreaks of previously unimaginable violence. About half the city's population fled. But Hitler's blunders would soon loom even larger: sending his troops to attack the Soviet Union without winter uniforms, insisting on an immediate German reign of terror and refusing to heed his generals' pleas that he allow them to attack Moscow as quickly as possible. In the end, Hitler's mistakes trumped Stalin's mistakes.

Drawing on recently declassified documents from Soviet archives, including files of the dreaded NKVD; on accounts of survivors and of children oftop Soviet military and government officials; and on reports of Western diplomats and correspondents, The Greatest Battle finally illuminates the full story of a clash between two systems based on sheer terror and relentless slaughter.

Even as Moscow's fate hung in the balance, the United States and Britain were discovering how wily a partner Stalin would turn out to be in the fight against Hitler—and how eager he was to push his demands for a postwar empire in Eastern Europe. In addition to chronicling the bloodshed, Andrew Nagorski takes the reader behind the scenes of the early negotiations between Hitler and Stalin, and then between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill.

This is a remarkable addition to the history of World War II.

The Washington Post - Constantine Pleshakov

Maybe a place this layered in history and secrecy cannot be revealed by a single writer and, instead, asks for the efforts of several devotees. Andrew Nagorski is definitely a devotee, and his new book is a landmark in studies of Russia precisely because it skillfully unwraps myths, martyrs and demons. Moscow's urban legends are not about gators in the sewage. They're about October 1941…The book is a fine diplomatic and military history, but its real triumph is in the voices Nagorski collected in numerous interviews with survivors.

Publishers Weekly

Journalist and foreign correspondent Nagorski combines published sources and interviews in this history of what he calls the largest, deadliest and most decisive battle of WWII. The often cited Russian winter did not account for the battle's outcome, he asserts, nor did German military overstretch. The tide wasn't turned by Hitler's increasingly erratic command decisions either. Moscow, Nagorski argues, was won by the Soviet government, the Red Army and the Russian people. Stalin's decision to stay in the city provided a rallying point-otherwise his mistakes as a commander and his brutality as head of state might have handed the Germans a victory they couldn't win in combat. A Red Army still learning its craft lost more than two million soldiers before Moscow, many of whom were victims of teenaged officers and obsolete weapons, failed tactical doctrines and logistical systems. Even the vaunted Siberian divisions were short of everything, including winter clothes, as they fought in sub-zero temperatures. Nor were Moscow's residents the united folk of Communist myth. Nagorski's sources luridly describe panic, looting and wildcat strikes as the Germans approached. Still, he concludes that whatever the shortcomings of Moscow's defenders, their deeds don't require heroic myth: the truth is honorable enough. (Sept.)

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The Wall Street Journal

"Enthralling history of the defense of the Soviet capital."

WWII History Magazine

"[A] remarkable account of the battle...Highly recommended."

Edwin B. Burgess - Library Journal

Following in Norman Davies's footsteps, Nagorski (senior editor, Newsweek International) details the titanic 1941 struggle before Moscow, in which seven million troops participated, with 2.5 million casualties. At this crucial point, before the United States was in the war, Stalin's conscript army gave Hitler's its first defeat. Had the Nazis been able to invest Moscow, the years after would have looked very different. Nagorski digs into newly declassified Soviet archives with worthy results.

Kirkus Reviews

An examination of what was indeed the greatest battle, numerically and perhaps otherwise, in history. Nagorski (Last Stop Vienna, 2003, etc.), a former Newsweek Moscow bureau chief, draws on recently declassified Soviet archives to explore unknown aspects of the half-year-long battle for Russia's capital over the fall and winter of 1941-42. One of them comes after the war, when Soviet commander Marshal Zhukov, now defense minister, requested an estimate of Soviet casualties; when he received it, he ordered its author, "Hide it and don't show it to anybody!" And for good reason, as Nagorski shows: Overall Russian casualties in the battle were 1,896,500, against the Germans' 615,000. Not that the Germans had it easy; convinced that Moscow would be taken before the winter came, Adolf Hitler failed to provide cold-weather gear for his men, thousands of whom died of frostbite and exposure. The news in Nagorski's book isn't much news at all: Neither Hitler nor his Soviet counterpart, Josef Stalin, shied from sacrificing soldiers for their respective totalitarian causes, so that the Armageddon-sized battle was all but inevitable. Still, this was something new: Soviet soldiers who had been captured and then liberated, for instance, were sent into battle in human-wave assaults, with almost zero chance of survival, while even the most loyal Soviet soldier often went into battle without a weapon, told to scavenge one from a dead German. Small wonder that the casualties were so heavy. Though he considers what might have happened had Hitler not split his forces into three fronts and instead gone straight for Moscow, Nagorski's account lacks the big-picture clarity of other journalistic studies of theRussian war, such as Harrison Salisbury's The 900 Days; the battle scenes are uninspired, too, as military-history buffs of the Cornelius Ryan school will quickly note. Serviceable but lackluster account. Agent: Robert Gottlieb/Trident Media Group

Table of Contents:

Contents

A Note on Transliteration

Introduction

-1-

"Hitler will not attack us in 1941"

-2-

"Look how smart we are now"

-3-

The Price of Terror

-4-

Hitler and His Generals

-5-

"Moscow is in danger"

-6-

"The brotherhood of man"

-7-

Panic in Moscow

-8-

Saboteurs, Jugglers, and Spies

-9-

"O Mein Gott! O Mein Gott!"

-10-

"Don't be sentimental"

-11-

"The worst of all worlds"

-12-

The Deadliest Victory

Notes

Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

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Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787, Vol. 1

Author: Catherine Drinker Bowen

Miracle at Philadelphia is Catherine Drinker Bowen's classic history of the Federal Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, the stormy, dramatic session that produced the most enduring of political documents - the Constitution of the United States.

Saturday Review - Margaret L. Coit

A fascinating story brilliantly told…

Book Week - Henry Steele Commager

The most readable of all accounts of the Philadelphia convention. Miss Bowen has been successful beyond any of the general historians…she has brought to the retelling both imagination and art.

Book-of-the-Month-Club News - Allan Nebins

Our greatest peacetime story is here retold in terms that would delight the general reader while satisfying the critical scholar.

What People Are Saying

Virginia Kirkus
Many historians have written of this particular "miracle," but never has the tale been told more vividly than in this book by one of America's foremost biographers.
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