‘My choice this year is, without any doubt, Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, a magnificent winter tapestry… it reads like an accessible novel rather than the superb history book which it really is’.
‘Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad is superb: a gripping and dispassionate account of alternating folly and endurance’.
‘I have recently read and been hugely impressed by Stalingrad by Antony Beevor’.
‘Stalingrad is distinguished not only for its exhaustive research and sheer narrative drive, but for its portrayal of the ordinarily human during one of the most atrocious battles of the century’.
‘A brilliantly researched tour de force’.
‘Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor is the best battle history for many years—balanced, dramatic, dreadful’.
‘Stalingrad by Antony Beevor cannot fail to leave one moved’.
‘As good a piece of war history as I have ever read’.
‘Revealing, profound and thoroughly unputdownable, Stalingrad is an extraordinary achievement which transcends its genre… It felt as if I was reading a classical epic drama of the scope of War and Peace’.
‘A classic… Stalingrad is only bedtime reading for those who do not dream’.
‘This book is overpowering… Beevor’s description of the events of the battle remain with the reader long after the book has been closed’.
‘This retelling of the Battle of Stalingrad has proved to be a surprising runaway hit. It is no small achievement to have reached such a wide audience with the pity of this particular war’.
‘Truly powerful’.
‘Stalingrad’s heart-piercing tragedy needed a chronicler with acute insight into human nature as well as the forces of history. Antony ‘Beevor is that historian’.
‘A wonderfully readable work of history’.
‘A masterly account of hubris and nemesis on a classic scale… he has written an authoritative and profoundly human study’.
‘The Stalingrad story is biblical in its extremes of barbarism and heroism, and Antony Beevor has told it superbly’.
‘Superb… a story you’ll never forget. There has never been a battle like this one, and there has never been a book about a battle such as this’.
‘Antony Beevor has produced a compelling and extraordinary story, richly detailed and engrossingly written. Western scholars owe him a very great debt. We now have the real history of Stalingrad without myth or embellishment’.
‘One is convinced by his scholarship, and increasingly moved by the drama… he succeeds brilliantly’.
‘This brilliant tapestry’.
List of Illustrations
1. Autumn 1941. Soviet prisoners of war being herded to the rear
2. July 1942. German infantry marching towards Stalingrad
3. A village destroyed in the advance
4. German tanks on the Don steppe
5. August 1942. German artillery outside Stalingrad
6. Dr Beck, chaplain of the 297th Infantry Division
7. Paulus, Hitler, Keitel, Haider and Brauchitsch at the Wolf sschanze
8. September 1942. Tanks of the 24th Panzer Division advancing
9. September 1942. Red Army tank troops listening to a speech from Khrushchev
10. The view which greeted Russian reinforcements about to cross the Volga
11. German officer and soldiers attacking factory buildings
12. Russian infantry defending
13. October 1942. Round-up of Stalingrad civilians
14. 62nd Army HQ. Krylov, Chuikov, Gurov and Rodimtsev
15. Red Army assault squad in the ‘Stalingrad Academy of street-fighting’
16. One of Chuikov’s divisional commanders with a young woman signaller
17. October 1942. German infantry occupying a destroyed workshop
18. ‘Noble Sniper’ Zaitsev from the Siberian 284th Rifle Division
19 and 20. November 1942. Operation Uranus: the encirclement of the Sixth Army
21. Junkers 52 transport taking off
22. December 1942. German artillery from Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army
23. Trapped Sixth Army soldiers retrieve parachute canisters
24. January 1943. General Rokossovsky
25. January 1943. German infantry retreating through a blizzard
26. January 1943. General Edler von Daniels marches into captivity
27. January 1943. Goering on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s assumption of power
28. January 1943. Field Marshal Paulus and General Schmidt after surrendering
29. A German soldier booted and prodded out of a bunker
30. Remnants of the Sixth Army marched off to captivity
31. German and Romanian prisoners
I am particularly grateful to the Arkhiv Muzeya Panorami Stalin-gradskoy Bitvi (the Archive of the Panoramic Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad) in Volgograd for providing illustrations 10, 14, 18, 19 and 20.
Helmut Abt Verlag, Bis Stalingrad, Alois Beck: 6
AKG London: 24, 30
Archive Photos, London: 12, 15
Bundesarchiv, Koblenz: 2, 21
Getty Images, London: 1, 3, 17, 22, 23, 25
Imperial War Museum, London: 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 26, 28, 29, 31
Methuen & Co Ltd, Paulus and Stalingrad: A Life of Field Marshal Paulus, Walter Goerlitz: 13
Private collection: 27
Topham Picturepoint, Edenbridge, Kent: 16
Westdeutsches Verlag, Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Gibt Bekannt, Martin H. Sommerfeldt: 7