21 Four hundred thousand tankers Among many examples, cf. Dmitriy Loza, Commanding the Red Army’s Sherman Tanks: The World War II Memoirs of Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitriy Loza, trans. and ed. James F. Gebhardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), and Evgeni Bessonov, Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army (London: Greenhill, 2005). Both are from a later period than that covered in this book—but not many tanker veterans of the earlier years seem to have survived to record their experiences. Artem Drabkin and Oleg Sheremet, T-34 in Action: Soviet Tank Troops in WWII (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008), synthesizes the stories of eleven tankers—again all but one from the war’s later period.
22 Given the right catalyst This was increasingly provided by an emerging cadre of talented leaders. See Richard N. Armstrong, Red Army Tank Commanders: The Armored Guards (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1994).
23 Guns had been important Chris Bellamy, Red God of War: Soviet Artillery and Rocket Forces (London: Brassey’s, 1986). Petr Mikhin, Guns Against the Reich: Memoirs of an Artillery Officer on the Eastern Front (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2010), begins at Rzhev and takes its narrator through Stalingrad and Kursk.
24 Russia’s people behaved heroically Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead: The Rise & Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
25 Hope that their sacrifices Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), and Roger R. Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), combine to present the Soviet soldiers’ human dimensions.
26 Gorbachevsky … recalls a postwar discussion Gorbachevsky, Through the Maelstrom, p. 376.
27 Best understood in terms of synergies On the wider links between army and party, the best overview is Manfred Messerschmidt, “The Wehrmacht and the Volksgemeinschaft,” Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 4 (1983): 719–744. On the military aspects, cf. Robert M. Citino, The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920–1939 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), and James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992).
28 Soldiers were confident Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), and Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), retain their place as standards. On the issue of participation, see particularly Thomas Kuhne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 95–136.
29 “Band of brothers” Roger Beaumont, “On the Wehrmacht Mystique,” Military Review 66, no. 6 (July 1986): 45–56.
30 Mastery demanded study and reflection Dennis E. Showalter, “Prussian-German Operational Art, 1740–1943,” in The Evolution of Operational Art: From Napoleon to the Present, ed. John Andreas Olsen and Martin van Creveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 35–63. The quotation is from pp. 35–36. The meme of war as an art form is a major theme of Robert M. Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). The panzer arm is discussed specifically in Dennis E. Showalter, Hitler’s Panzers: The Lightning Attacks That Revolutionized Warfare (New York: Berkley Caliber, 2009).
31 Product of improvisation Wilhelm Deist, “The Rearmament of the Wehrmacht,” in Diest et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. 1, The Build-up of German Aggression, trans. Ewald Osers et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 373–540.
32 Deconstruct the concept of blitzkrieg Cf. Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, trans. J. T. Greenwood (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005), and from a broader perspective, Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
33 Chronic shortage of staff officers The problem of staff overwork is a central theme of Geoffrey P. Megargee, Inside Hitler’s High Command (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).
34 A matrix of “hardness” The concept is best demonstrated in Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying: The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
1 “Made a balls of it” Quoted in Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), p. 410.
2 His most embarrassing Ken Ford, The Mareth Line, 1943: The End in Africa (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2012), is a good introduction to this sequence of operations.
3 Last half million warm bodies Bernd Wegner, “Grundprobleme der deutschen Kriegfuhrung nach Stalingrad,” in Frieser et al., Ostfront, pp. 3–41.
4 Postwar historians in general Alfred Zins, Die Operation Zitadelle: Die militargeschichtliche Diskussion und ihre Niederschlag im offentlichen Bewusstsein als didaktisches Problem (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986).
5 Negotiating a Russo-German peace Bernd Wegner, “Bundnispolitik und Friedensfrage,” in Frieser et al., Ostfront, pp. 42–60.
6 Hitler’s iron determination Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), pp. 391–497.
7 Wait until 1944 Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, trans. Constantine Fitzgibbon (New York: Dutton, 1952), pp. 306–307.
8 Manstein’s answer was elastic defense Erich von Manstein, Verlorene Siege (Bonn: Athenaum Verlag, 1955), pp. 473–483. The English version’s treatment of Kursk is one-fifth the length of the the German and far more anodyne. Cf. Melvin, Manstein, pp. 349–355.
9 Operations Order No. 5 Ernst Klink, Das Gesetz des Handelns: Die Operation “Zitadelle,” 1943 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1966), pp. 277–278.
10 Lacked the strength to participate Bodo Scheurig, Alfred Jodl: Gehorsam und Verhangnis (Schnellbach: Verlag Bublies, 1999), pp. 225–226.
11 “So capable and soldierly a person as Manstein” Guderian, Panzer Leader, p. 302.
12 Minor surgery Alexander Stahlberg, Bounden Duty: The Memoirs of a German Officer, 1932–45, trans. Patricia Crampton (London: Brassey’s, 1990), p. 295.
13 Manstein’s absence cleared Zeitzler’s field Mark Healy, Zitadelle: The German Offensive Against the Kursk Salient, 4–17 July 1943 (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2008), pp. 45–47. The text of Operations Order No. 6, essentially Zeitzler’s work, is in Klink, Gesetz des Handelns, pp. 292–294.
14 Point calls for explanation Showalter, Hitler’s Panzers, pp. 224–238, offers an overview of the German panzers in the first half of 1943. Cf. Richard L. DiNardo, Germany’s Panzer Arm (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 11–20, and Thomas L. Jentz, Germany’s Panther Tank: The Quest for Combat Supremacy (Atglen,
