Serviceable but lackluster account.
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 the Russian 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.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8110-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Hallahan's polemic against internal regulations within the national armaments industry is also a history of America's war machine since the founding of the Springfield Arsenal during the Revolution. Because the British had forbidden manufacture of muskets and ammunition in the colonies, the Americans had to invent an irregular form of warfare based on guerrilla tactics that made the best use of limited amounts of precious ammunition. The Revolutionary War demonstrated the effectiveness of the rifle, used as a sniper's weapon from long rage and from behind cover, over the bayoneted musket favored by the British. The rifle triumphed. But Edgar Awardwinning mystery writer turned military historian Hallahan's (Tripletrap, 1989, etc.) thesis, in germ, is that an obsession with conserving ammunition was to dominate American small-arms thinking for the next two centuries, resulting in the M- 16, which fires in economical bursts of three to five shells but which is outgunned by the continuously firing Kalashnikov. GIs found this a murderous disability in Vietnam, where they often abandoned their M-16s in favor of the Russian weapon. Ultimately, of course, Hallahan's target is the sclerotic, tradition-bound mentality of military establishments in general. We see the evolution of the US Ordnance Corps from its inception by the ebullient Henry Knox, the brilliant artillery engineer of the Revolution, and follow its aggrandizement into the arena of modern warfare, where the ``fixed tradition'' of the ``grave-belly long- range sharpshooter'' persisted. Hallahan guides the reader with a sure hand through the obscure but somehow ghoulishly intriguing complexities of weapons logistics: the creation, for example, of Earle Harvey's T-25 automatic rifle after WW II becomes, in the author's hands, a psychological and Cold War political thriller. Such dramatic narrative is unexpected in a book devoted to a subject that would at first appear to be of interest only to West Point cadets and jarheads. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19359-0
Page Count: 578
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Plodding narrative and slack writing plague this account of the fierce 1870s events that set the stage for the legends surrounding Billy the Kid. Hoping, in part, to discern the true character of William Henry Bonney, Jacobsen, a New Mexico assistant attorney general, relates the complicated circumstances and events comprising the Lincoln County War. Billy the Kid was one of the Regulators, a gang of ruffians (or, Jacobsen asks, were they concerned citizens?) aiding an English businessman, John Tunstall, in his feud with The House, the local political machine. Founded by Lawrence Murphy in 1873, The House was a store and a commodities brokerage that owned the only federal contracts within 200 miles. It was also a bank that protected its own monopoly, and Murphy was also the local probate judge. Tunstall, all of 24, dared to challenge The House by establishing his own ``store'' and ranch. He went into business with Alexander McSween, a former House attorney who'd been recently fired in a squabble over the estate of Murphy's late partner. Battle was joined in the courts, on the range, and in petty street fights. Both sides enlisted quasi-legal posses to harass and ``attach'' property belonging to the opposition; one such posse killed Tunstall in February 1878 while repossessing his ranch and cattle. The Regulators, working for McSween, retaliated by occupying the town of Lincoln. The ensuing Five Days' Battle, in which US Army troops supported The House, resulted in McSween's death in a hail of gunfire. Jacobsen follows the story through contemporary news accounts, court proceedings, and correspondence up to 1881, when Billy the Kid was killed by avaricious Sheriff Pat Garrett. Perceptive, methodical, and dull. (28 photos & 2 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8032-2576-8
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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