Antony Beevor - any good?

[Fenris]

I'd not heard of this author before but there was an article in the local press spruking his work and when I looked further I found a number of favourable (popular press) pieces on him.

Anyone read his work(s) have their own opinion for me?

Thanks

Fenris

[SelfLoadingRifle]

Beevor is a former soldier and is probably the best military historian around right now. His works are detailed, beautifully researched and also extremely readable. I find them difficult to put down.

Stalingrad would be a good book to start on.

SLR

[GerryCMBB]

I have read D-Day -- Battle for Normandy. V. readable as SLR says. Mix of big picture and individual stories.

Gerry

[Bigduke6]

I would say his books are good for the general reader. They paint a solid big picture and he does a fair job of bringing in the the individual. He's a competent writer and the text flows. He's sort of a latter-day Cornelius Ryan, his technique is to weave the grand story toghether with the personal incidents.

That said, IMO, Beevor's books are less "battle and fighting and men in combat" books, and more "societies at war" books. If you want to learn about the progress of operations, how logistics impacted, or how the grunts did tactics, his books are less useful.

My criticisms would be that Beevor covers little new ground, and that his sourcing outside the English language is less than ideal. For instance he, in my opinion, relies heavily on Soviet general staff reports and much less on personal accounts and individual interviews to document the Red Army's activities, and more personal accounts and less Wehrmacht reports for the Germans. This gives his text, again in my opinon, a subtle slant; German activity is more human and fallible, while Soviet activity seems more ruthless and authoritarian. The imbalance runs throughout the text.

The main criticism I have is, Beevor avoids controversy. The best-known example would be his treatment of Soviet atrocities as Red forces invaded Germany: he catalogues them, offers accounts by rape victims, and slams the Red Army's discipline across the organization, and paints Red soldiers as sex-crazed with a pretty broad brush. In other words, he offers the standard NATO treatment of what happened to the German civilians when Soviet forces crossed into Germany from Poland: rape, mayhem, and Asian-style destruction.

I wouldn't try to excuse what the Soviets did in Germany, but Beevor's treatment leaves out, simply does not mention, several probable contributing factors, most importantly German behavior, for years, during their occupation of the western portions of the Soviet Union.

Rape is not excusable. But, to put it frankly, in the minds of many Soviet soldiers of the day, not interfering if a fellow soldier raped a German woman was probably a reasonable act. The Germans had for years as occupiers in the Soviet Union not just raped but enslaved, torn apart families, and not just murdered but engaged in genocide; and the scale of those crimes was so great, generally speaking, most of the Soviet soldiers fighting in Germany either had a family member who had suffered personally under that occupation, or had a buddy in his squad who did.

On a primitive human tribal, widespread rape is legitimate vengeance against a hostile tribe: it demonstrates to the women of that tribe the inability of their own men to protect them. A common Soviet response to the rape accusations is "well the Germans did worse to us, and the German women were left alive." There is elemental anger involved. Polish and even Soviet women forced into German labor were raped as well, and the standard Russian explaination runs along the lines of "some of them volunteered and others were unlucky, but in a war you can't do what the Germans did in the Soviet Union, and then expect an avenging army to maintain perfect discipline when it enters the attackers' territory."

Also missing is the economic disconnect between Germany and the Soviet Union; the moment the Red soldiers entered Germany they were confronted with a level of individual wealth in houses and farms and cities etc., that most of them had never conceived of. The reaction "The Germans were this rich, this well off, and they decided not just to attack us and enslave us? We'll teach those rich bastards not to try that again!" is almost a universal thread in Red Army soldier letters and accounts. It's been a while since I read Downfall, but if I recall right Beevor never even mentions this.

In Downfall, Beevor pretty much avoids the Why of Red atrocities in Germany. On the one hand it's a fair go it's complicated and controversial and requires backstory that might distract from the direction of his text. And relatively speaking, it's a lot easier to find personal accounts by German rape victims than Soviet soldiers who raped or condoned it. But at the end of the day, it's hard to discuss what the Soviets did to the German civilians, fairly, without considering the Red soldier, who at bottom was, in most cases, a young unmarried man who believed he was fighting a war to avenge what had happened in his own country.

A less controversial, but equally compelling question that Beevor really never gets into, is why the Germans didn't quit sooner, what with the Red Army ransacking their country and the Wehrmacht coming apart at the seams. To do so is to open another line of not really politically safe questioning about German attitudes towards authority, and contradictions between the German officer corps' willingness - and as a group they prided themselves on being able to think on their own, better than any other nation's officers - to follow orders when doing so contributed directly to their country's increased ruin. Beevor has plenty of interviews with German officers, but if he asks them "What about the German officer's commitment to to sacrifice your life if necessary for the good of the nation?" the answers don't make it into Downfall.

Beevor keeps to the grand battle narrative, which is safe and generic. If that's what the reader is looking for, Beevor is great.

[beatmasta]

I'm currently reading the D-Day and have not been too impressed about it. It covers well the subject but in my opinion on too broad scale. It's a good book but nowadays I like more first hand accounts of smaller scale. Like the scale the CM covers in the game.

And one thing that bugs me a bit but won't be a problem for you is that I read a translated book, not the original english text. And the translator is definitely not a historian as there's lots of dumb translations. Not Beevors fault but makes the reading annoying.

[JonS]

I found these two reviews (by the same reviewer ... it's a limitation of Amazon) of his D-Day book quite insightful:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R37Q8HVN63MN37

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RL6SXFWQA34AX

[snake_eye]

Read D-Day and the Fall of Berlin.

To get into the mood of the time, these books are surely the best I have read for years.

D-Day:

Sure, they let you know a lot about what higher up knew and did about the general situation they had to face. However lower ranks, as well as simple soldiers and junior officers are not left aside.

One must say that Antony BEEVOR had access to a lot of declassified documents at the time he did his books. ULTRA was one of them on the allied side, like the fall of the wall was on the Soviet side.

However, I would advice these books only as a complementary source of information to a book that you might read.

If you read the excellent book about the 29th Infantry Division in Normandy “Beyond the Beachhead” from Joseph Balkoski, you will be into the action within the Division. If you read later D’Day you will understand things that were not even known to the commanding general of that Division Charles H. Gerhardt, at that time. More, you will have a very different idea of why the British and American fighting went on the way it did. There were reasons and they truly impacted the way the battles were fought.

Fall of Berlin:

When you read “The fall of Berlin” you can read how the seeds of the cold war were already present in late 1944. My father at the time being an officer in Patton’s army received in the last days of April ’45, the surrender of the rest of a battalion with all their weapons. The German officer, well dressed, with his accompanying orderly carrying his luggage just said that he was, with his men at his order, to carry on the fight against the Russians. The Russians as it is better known now feared that the Germans made a separate truce with the Anglo-American. Staline thought in the last months of the war that the Allied and the Germans will fight against Russia. The fact that the Germans were surrendering on the west front, more easily than on the east front made him think that they did so in order to allow the allied to reach Berlin more quickly.

For the rest, the end of the war with its brutal executions, rapes, force labour, extermination, and so on being recalled in the book are just what war is about. It does not mind which side did it first or second, they did it. The human race did it again in Yugoslavia, in other places and will probably do it again elsewhere..

As Saint Exupery said about a famous French aviator having survived a terrible crash in the cordillera de los Andes.“What he did not one animal will have done it” The same is true in war, not one animal will do what a human is capable to do to another human.

You learn in the book a lot about the way thing were dealt in the Russian army and we are far away from the propaganda movies and books of the ‘50’s and 60’s. You are a bit lost at the description of all the unit fighting since it is a wild melee ending in a maelstrom.

However, as strong as are the descriptions There are no exaggeration in Antony Beevor narration. I have met in my teens quite a few people having gone through that ordeal and I had a certain tendency to think that they were not telling it the way it happened. I was wrong, they just wanted to say just what was necessary and forget it as fast as they could. They did not want to open the Pandora box once again.

So you can have a real good time reading D-Day, but I won’t say the same with fall of Berlin. But that is because of my age, having been closer from these ordeals within my family and probably because memories deeply buried inside me were brought to me once again while reading that excellent if difficult book.

[gunnergoz]

Bigduke6 once again proves IMO why he is one of the more balanced and credible posters on the forum.

[LongLeftFlank]

Yup, another great post BD6.

[umlaut]

I´ve read Stalingrad and D-Day. I think Stalingrad is brilliantly told and manages to get the story across on both the perpective of the generals and the grunts in the rubble.

D-Day disappointed me, as I think he neclected the grunts´ perspective.

[Nidan1]

My criticisms would be that Beevor covers little new ground, and that his sourcing outside the English language is less than ideal. For instance he, in my opinion, relies heavily on Soviet general staff reports and much less on personal accounts and individual interviews to document the Red Army's activities, and more personal accounts and less Wehrmacht reports for the Germans. This gives his text, again in my opinon, a subtle slant; German activity is more human and fallible, while Soviet activity seems more ruthless and authoritarian. The imbalance runs throughout the text.

In my reading experience over the years, I have seen very few, if any, personal accounts of the war experiences of the common Red Army soldier in WW 2. Unfortunately the mass of written material released in the west over the last 60 years has been from Generals and upper echelon Soviet personalities.

One would think that of the millions of human beings that served in the Red Army during the war, some personal records of common soldiers would have survived destruction or political repression.

You make excellent points about the conduct of both German and Soviet soldiers as the battlefield switched from one country to the other. The savagery visited on the civilian populations of both countries is inexcusable. However German behavior was political and mostly a matter of policy, where the behavior of the Red Army was a result of lack of discipline in some cases, and pay back for German behavior.

It would be great to have some novels or factual accounts written by young Red Army soldiers, The world deserves to read and understand what was going through their minds during the most brutal battles ever seen.

BigDuke6 or anyone else, if you can turn us on to any published accounts of common Red Army grunts please do.

I have read Beevor's "Stalingrad" and found it a good read, without a lot of new information. I have not read "D-Day".

[Vanir Ausf B]

BigDuke6 or anyone else, if you can turn us on to any published accounts of common Red Army grunts please do.

http://www.amazon.com/Commanding-Red-Armys-Sherman-Tanks/dp/0803229208

http://www.amazon.com/On-Roads-War-Cavalryman-Eastern/dp/1844151441/ref=pd_rhf_cr_s_cp_3

http://www.amazon.com/Tank-Rider-Into-Reich-Army/dp/1853675547/ref=cm_cr_dp_asin_lnk

http://www.amazon.com/PANZER-DESTROYER-Memoirs-Army-Commander/dp/1844159515/ref=la_B004GJBBD6_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346629339&sr=1-1

[JonS]

BigDuke6 or anyone else, if you can turn us on to any published accounts of common Red Army grunts please do.

"Star" by Emmanuel Kazakevich (I think) (which used to be on line, but I'm dashed if i can find it now) and "Stalingrad to Pilau" immediately come to mind. Oh, and Dimitry Loza "Commanding the Red Army's Shermans".

Then the well runs dry.

Dry, except for this: http://web.archive.org/web/20070607181914/http://www.redarmystudies.net/index_sort.htm

[Nidan1]

http://www.amazon.com/Commanding-Red-Armys-Sherman-Tanks/dp/0803229208

http://www.amazon.com/On-Roads-War-Cavalryman-Eastern/dp/1844151441/ref=pd_rhf_cr_s_cp_3

http://www.amazon.com/Tank-Rider-Into-Reich-Army/dp/1853675547/ref=cm_cr_dp_asin_lnk

http://www.amazon.com/PANZER-DESTROYER-Memoirs-Army-Commander/dp/1844159515/ref=la_B004GJBBD6_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346629339&sr=1-1

Thank you much! All published in English in the last 15 years, hopefully this trend continues.

[Nidan1]

"Star" and "Stalingrad to Pilau" immediately come to mind. Oh, and Dimitry Loza "Commanding the Red Army's Shermans".

Then the well runs dry.

I remember reading excerpts from "Star" on the internet years ago, not sure how long.

It was my first taste of the world of the common Red Army grunt.

[JonS]

I remember reading excerpts from "Star" on the internet years ago, not sure how long.

It was my first taste of the world of the common Red Army grunt.

Yeah, I just spent a bit of time looking for exactly that, although "Star" isn't exactly a helpful Google search term ...

I think it may have been on the Red Army Studies site that Andreas et al had going for a few years about a decade ago, but the internet Archive thinks differently.

[Collingwood]

Also missing is the economic disconnect between Germany and the Soviet Union; the moment the Red soldiers entered Germany they were confronted with a level of individual wealth in houses and farms and cities etc., that most of them had never conceived of. The reaction "The Germans were this rich, this well off, and they decided not just to attack us and enslave us? We'll teach those rich bastards not to try that again!" is almost a universal thread in Red Army soldier letters and accounts. It's been a while since I read Downfall, but if I recall right Beevor never even mentions this.

I was going to say - "but he does", but I'm not so sure now, it's been a while since I read it.

I've enjoyed most of Beevor's output. We shouldn't rely on any single author for an education as each writer has strengths, weaknesses and blind spots. If you enjoy reading history Beevor is worthwhile - if you keep in mind some of BD6's points.

[Fenris]

Thanks all for the detailed input.

Cheers.

[Bigduke6]

Well Hell son, on the Soviet personal histories, that's easy. Go here:

http://iremember.ru/

There's plenty to keep you busy. Just remember that the Russian-language side is about 10 times bigger than the English.

If one can read Russian there is also a mass of personal account literature out there. It came in three waves: general officer accounts during the 1950s-60s, other officer accounts during the 1970s-80s, and personal memoires - usually to interviewers wanting to get the account on the record before the veteran died - in the 1990s through the present. I'm talking thousands of volumes. Pretty much any aspect of the war you want: female pilots of night bombers, Sturmovik drivers, punishment battalion commanders, a malcontent scout who miraculously survived a couple of years in the front OspetsNaz battaion, Is-2 commander, etc. etc.

I would guess that very little of it has been translated into English, because of low demand for such books. It certainly is done sometimes, there's Loza's book on operating Shermans inside a Mech Corps for instance.

As to the German vs. Soviet brutality question, I'm just not sure, but my gut feeling is that humans are humans. Just as the Red Army raping everything that it could catch once inside Prussia is sort of an accepted reality in Western accounts of the war, so is the German army murdering and raping while it was inside the SU, an accepted fact inside Russia/Belarus/Ukraine today.

Just as, in Germany, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who were civilians at the time, that will or did testify to the brutality of the Soviet soldiers, there are what seems to me like the same amount of old people now, who were young then, who saw the German soldiers violate centuries military tradition and treat Soviet citizens like animals, or worse.

As an aside, it seems to me that the German army probably did not rape to the scale the Red Army did in Prussia from say Jan-May 1945, but that the Wehrmacht and the SS operated field brothels with women forced to service troops, for years, during the German occupation of the western portion of the SU. One can make the arguement this meant the Germans were more disciplined and organized in raping Soviet women, but in terms of the scale of the crime and numbers of perpetrators and victims?

Worse, I have to suspect that at least part of the "Red Army gone amok in East Germany" story, is NATO Cold War propaganda. This is not to say it didn't happen, but it is to say I suspect propaganda agencies in western governments actively sought out and publicized the "Red Army as rapists" story, to convince western taxpayers it was a good idea to finance big militaries in their own countries. It was in the interest of too many western government officials to blow up that story, for me to believe our perception of it now is based purely on sober historical fact. What I can't say is, of course, to what degree the information was manipulated.

Looking at the other side of the brutality equation, in the Soviet Union, the western view is, roughly, it was just Einsatztruppen and maybe a few rear area Germans committing crimes of brutality against the Soviet civilians, and that in general the German soldiers conducted themselves properly.

The prevailing Soviet/modern FSU view is very different, and it is wide-reaching. In the former Soviet Union, the view is, a majority of Wehrmacht soldiers were just men forced to fight in a war, but that there was a substantial minority willing to take advantage of Nazi policy on "race" and occupied portions of the SU, i.e., murdering or raping Soviet citizens is not murder or rape, as Soviet citizens are by Nazi definition not human. In the lands that were occupied, without question, the view is the brutality was not just the work of a tiny minority of specialists, nor that the Wehrmacht managed to keep its troops under control most of the time. It is a substantial disconnect from the western view.

When you consider the occupied portions of the SU were also the scene of what was probably the biggest and best-organized insurgency of modern military history, and several years of civil war with ethnic cleansing to boot, and then remember the German army was the occupying force during all this, and that this was a total war, then at least for me it's pretty hard to buy the line "it was only the Einsatztruppen and the SS" that was brutal to the Soviet citizenry in a big way.

I come back to humans and humans, and that if put young male humans into a situation where they can get killed randomly, and are told killing is ok, it is not so easy to keep them under control, once they understand other rules are out the window.

My suspicion is the Soviet recollections are valid and that the Wehrmacht, as an organization, was a lot nastier to civilians on the Eastern Front than it is given credit for. It probably wasn't systemic, my guess it probably was that minority of Wehrmacht personnel - maybe substantial, maybe a minor percentage, but in either case far beyond the norms of conventional military discipline - who for whatever reason chose to murder or rape Soviet citizens, because the chances of being punished were minimal, and probably also because they felt like they were going to die anyway or that the civilians were complicit and they deserved it.

Which is almost exactly what you will hear on the Red Army side, when it comes to the behavior of the Red Army in East Prussia.

In my reading experience over the years, I have seen very few, if any, personal accounts of the war experiences of the common Red Army soldier in WW 2. Unfortunately the mass of written material released in the west over the last 60 years has been from Generals and upper echelon Soviet personalities.

One would think that of the millions of human beings that served in the Red Army during the war, some personal records of common soldiers would have survived destruction or political repression.

You make excellent points about the conduct of both German and Soviet soldiers as the battlefield switched from one country to the other. The savagery visited on the civilian populations of both countries is inexcusable. However German behavior was political and mostly a matter of policy, where the behavior of the Red Army was a result of lack of discipline in some cases, and pay back for German behavior.

It would be great to have some novels or factual accounts written by young Red Army soldiers, The world deserves to read and understand what was going through their minds during the most brutal battles ever seen.

BigDuke6 or anyone else, if you can turn us on to any published accounts of common Red Army grunts please do.

I have read Beevor's "Stalingrad" and found it a good read, without a lot of new information. I have not read "D-Day".

[Collingwood]

When you consider the occupied portions of the SU were also the scene of what was probably the biggest and best-organized insurgency of modern military history, and several years of civil war with ethnic cleansing to boot, and then remember the German army was the occupying force during all this, and that this was a total war, then at least for me it's pretty hard to buy the line "it was only the Einsatztruppen and the SS" that was brutal to the Soviet citizenry in a big way.

The 20th century was brutal to soviet citizens, no doubt about it.

Hopefully our OP doesn't now mind this wandering off on a different tangent. I'm very interested in 20th century Soviet history, not just ww2 and my reading of the collective lot of the average soviet citizen - no pun intended - is that it is possibly one of the hardest places to be born in Europe - not just for what happened during WW2, but before and after at the hands of their own government.

And the shame is that while Germany post WW2 was de-nazified the USSR was never de-bolshevized (if that's a word). Apparently there is still a great deal of denial going on about what happened under Stalin.

[wolf66]

My suspicion is the Soviet recollections are valid and that the Wehrmacht, as an organization, was a lot nastier to civilians on the Eastern Front than it is given credit for. It probably wasn't systemic, my guess it probably was that minority of Wehrmacht personnel - maybe substantial, maybe a minor percentage, but in either case far beyond the norms of conventional military discipline - who for whatever reason chose to murder or rape Soviet citizens, because the chances of being punished were minimal, and probably also because they felt like they were going to die anyway or that the civilians were complicit and they deserved it.

Which is almost exactly what you will hear on the Red Army side, when it comes to the behavior of the Red Army in East Prussia.

I think that Wehrmacht behaviour in SU was also influenced by the very active and cruel partisan activity there - so revenge was part of the behaviour there too ......

[LukeFF]

I've not read this one yet, but I've heard good things about it:

http://www.amazon.com/Writer-War-Vasily-Grossman-1941-1945/dp/0375424075/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=32T3ABBIG3LG6&coliid=I3PJOCPPJLE6O

[Petrus58]

I've not read this one yet, but I've heard good things about it:

http://www.amazon.com/Writer-War-Vasily-Grossman-1941-1945/dp/0375424075/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=32T3ABBIG3LG6&coliid=I3PJOCPPJLE6O

I have read it and it's excellent. I would also thoroughly recommend Grossman's novel, Life and Fate, which is set during the war on the Eastern front, and is widely considered to be one of the 20th centuries literary masterpieces.

[poesel]

A few years ago there was an exhibition here in Germany called 'Die Verbrechen der Wehrmacht' ('the crimes of the Wehrmacht').

Until then the general view on the Wehrmacht was that they 'just' did their job and weren't much involved in any war crimes. The SS and the Nazis were the main culprits.

They got a lot of media attention (unsurprisingly). They even had to pull it back for a while because they had labeled some photos wrong. But in the end it changed the view on the Wehrmacht (at least a bit) and took much of the glory out of it. The exhibition showed that the Wehrmacht was well aware of the crimes and took an active part.

No one goes unguilty out of a war.

[Bigduke6]

The 20th century was brutal to soviet citizens, no doubt about it.

Hopefully our OP doesn't now mind this wandering off on a different tangent. I'm very interested in 20th century Soviet history, not just ww2 and my reading of the collective lot of the average soviet citizen - no pun intended - is that it is possibly one of the hardest places to be born in Europe - not just for what happened during WW2, but before and after at the hands of their own government.

And the shame is that while Germany post WW2 was de-nazified the USSR was never de-bolshevized (if that's a word). Apparently there is still a great deal of denial going on about what happened under Stalin.

At least in terms of what the Western view of Stalin is. In Russia, the official line is that Stalin and his brutality were necessary because that was what it took to defeat Nazi Germany, and had the Germans defeated the Soviets the entire Russian nation would have been enslaved and eventually eliminated, because the Nazis considered the Russians not just racially inferior, but subhuman, similar to the Jews.

The official Kremlin line these days is, a strong central government is good for Russia, so without getting into a debate on whether or not that's the case, modern Russia's view of Stalin fits that fairly well.

But of course Russia isn't all the Soviet Union. In the Baltic states Stalin is seen as responsible for invasion and setting back the region several decades, and in most (but not all) parts of Ukraine he's seen as responsible for genocide. In Georgia he's a "great man with human failings", in Azerbaijan and Armenia he's a Georgian thug, and in Central Asia he's just another one of the "Russians" that ruled the Kremlin. And in the Russian Far East he's either a national hero or a vicious dictator, in rough terms depending on whether the person you're talking to has ever had relatives in the gulag or not.

Come to think of it, to my taste Beevor maybe could have done more on the personal characters of some of the key figures. But that's nitpicking, considering the subject he did a solid job and I recommend his East Front books. They're not ideal for CM scenarios but that's not the only definition of a worthwhile military history book.