Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin's war on the Eastern Front By Anthony Tucker-Jones

 Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin's war on the Eastern Front

By Anthony Tucker-Jones

Anthony Tucker-Jones was born in 1964 in the United Kingdom. Before even attending college, he started writing freelance as a defense journalist for publications like Jane's Defense Weekly, Jane's Intelligence Review, and the Middle East Strategic Studies Quarterly (all of the sudden I’m taken back to being a kid, leafing through Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft at the library looking for anything new about the F-22 {I was always more into tanks myself}); he sold his first article in 1981 and continued until 1988. He also attended the University of Portsmouth from 1982 to 1985, graduating with a BA in historical studies. He then attended Lancaster University from 1987 to 1988 and graduated with an MA in International Relations and Strategic Studies. At this point, he was recruited by British Defense Intelligence. He served as Soviet Bloc Politico-Military Affairs Desk Officer in the last years of the Cold War, then Liaison Officer for NATO from 1991 to 1994, Liaison Officer for the UN Special Commission for Iraq for a year after that, and worked as a Regional Assessment Coordinator which is a Staff Officer for the Director of that department. He was then Deputy Head of the Global Weapons Trade department serving from 1996 to 2001, ending his career as Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator in 2002. He returned to writing, focusing on military history and defense and has published over 50 books on those topics, which is impressive to say the least. He has also served as a public speaker and commentator for print, online, and broadcast media, appearing on BBC Radio, Channel 4, ITN, Russia Today, Sky News, and Voice of Russia. He also served as an expert witness for the Military Court Service. Today's review is one of his more recent works: Slaughter on the Eastern Front, which was published in May 2017 by The History Press. The History Press is a British publishing company specializing in local and specialist history and is one of the largest independent publishers in the field. It was created in 2007 when Alan Sutton (the founder) bought NPI Media Group and reformed the core elements of the business under The History Press. With that, let's turn to the book itself.

Slaughter on the Eastern Front focuses on the epic and brutal event that was the war in Eastern Europe between the Axis powers and the Soviet Union. During the period between 1941 and 1945 when the war in Europe finally ended, an unimaginably vast conflict unfolded from the borders of occupied Poland to the very suburbs of Moscow. The front lines would stretch from near the Arctic circle down to the Caucasus Mountains which mark the border between Europe and the Middle East. Here millions of men, thousands of tanks and planes and guns, and unknowable tons of supplies would be devoured in a savage war where the existence of entire peoples and races were at stake (oddly enough the 70s singer-songwriter Al Stewart has a pretty good song about the eastern front called ‘Roads to Moscow’, I recommend it - It’s very haunting {So I sat down and had a listen and damn it is haunting.  I’m adding a link to the song at the bottom of the review folks}). Make no mistake, if the Nazis had won here it would have meant the destruction of entire nations. Hitler intended nothing less but to create a vast colonial-settler state in Eastern Europe, believing that was the only way to ensure the survival and dominance of the German people over not just Europe but the entire world. To do that he would have to destroy hundreds of millions of human beings and he was utterly prepared along with the cult of madmen he had cultivated in the SS to do so. In fact, to be honest, he might not have been prepared for the sheer madness brewing in the SS under Himmler but that's a topic for a different review (I’ve been assured that Top Men are still looking into this issue at this very moment). However to achieve this goal he wasn't fighting against a continent of divided tribes, many of whom were centuries behind the technology of the European settlers and still reeling from the onslaught of apocalyptic diseases; he was fighting against the Soviet Union - An industrial, united nation full of over a hundred million healthy men and women who did not want to be wiped out for German ambition and were prepared to battle to the last for their very right to exist.

Mr. Tucker-Jones advances the idea in his book that the war and its conduct was the result of both sides ignoring, at least in the beginning, their intelligence services (I am uncomfortable with the idea of messy empirical reality muddying up my internally-consistent and neat ideology {isn’t that always the way?}). This failure led to Stalin completely ignoring evidence of Hitler's intent to attack in the summer of 1941, leaving his nation open to the devastating assault that occurred and the millions of casualties that followed. It also more fatally meant that Hitler completely underestimated the Red Army and its ability to rebuild from defeats and losses that would have been fatal for just about any other nation or military, barring the Nationalist Chinese Army which did fight on against the Japanese Imperial Army despite suffering comparable loses in men and equipment or theoretically the United States military which has the resources and manpower but has never suffered a comparable disaster. It is in fact the incredibly impressive feat of the Red Army to not just rebuild after losing over a million men and thousands of tons of equipment but to do so when large stretches of industrial and heavily populated parts of the country were under enemy occupation as is highlighted in the book. The Red Army not only rebuilt itself after highly damaging losses, but did so while under fire and fighting in its metaphorical living room. This would be like having to rebuild the US Army while an enemy occupies the West Coast and the American Southwest including Texas and is advancing to give you an idea of the sheer difficulty of the task (We will not abandon our Whataburgers to the fascists! Not one step backwards!{Didn’t know chicken strips with toast had such a special place in your heart} (additionally, this makes me picture a partisan Bobby Hill kicking Nazis between the legs all over occupied Texas)). On top of that, the Red Army managed to integrate lessons learned from its defeats and improve its performance and leadership as well as improve its equipment. While on the equipment side of things it had a lot of help from the Western Powers, specifically the United States, it is still an achievement that earns the Red Army a place of respect among historical military organizations (just don’t ask them to publicly acknowledge lend-lease nowadays).

That's all in the future in 1941, however; the Red Army of that time was considerably less than it had been and would be. Stalin's purges had left the officer corps critically undermanned and under-trained with most of the veterans of the Russian civil war either dead or in prison camps (look, knowing which end of a rifle to point away from you means you could point it at Stalin, so clearly measures must be taken). Those officers who survived were either skilled but utterly apolitical or completely loyal but ranging in skill, some having no business holding command (Voroshilov being the prime example of how playing office politics will get you way further in life than simply being good or even brilliant at your job). Now, the Red Army was very dependent on its officer corps as its enlisted pool was filled out with conscripts at the time mostly serving 2-year terms and having no strong NCO corps (non-commission officers being  senior enlisted men such as sergeants and above.). This meant that junior officers were the main instructors and small unit leaders of the army but with their senior leadership in ruins and many of their own grabbed they weren't uniformly able to provide such training and leadership. To make it clear: 80% of the Colonels in the Red Army were gone and so were 90% of the general officers, and 40,000 medium-ranked officers were dead or imprisoned (surely, nothing bad can come of this). 90% of the remaining officers had received no higher-level military training and 40% hadn't even received intermediate-level training. Of the officers in service in 1941 75% had held their post for under a year (again, nothing bad can come of this). This didn't mean that the Red Army was an incapable force, but without leadership it couldn't be used properly (Also being saddled with the commissar corps and dual-leadership arrangements if memory serves - officers who squander their whole commands are one thing but revisionism simply can’t be tolerated {The commissar corps is whole another bag of issues but yes I imagine it didn’t help}). Mr. Tucker-Jones demonstrates this by taking us to the Finnish War, and the Battles of Khalkin Gol. The battles of Khalkin Gol where the Red Army under Zhukov smashed the Imperial Japanese Army in Mongolia showed what the Red Army with proper leadership could do. It was also completely ignored by Nazi Intelligence in favor of the Red Army's performance in Finland which fed Hitler's belief that the Red Army and the USSR was a rotten half-destroyed structure that he could bring down with a divisive enough blow (confirmation bias is a hell of a thing, although if someone used Finland as their sole reference point you’d be forgiven for concluding the Red Army could be rolled up by the rat king’s army from The Nutcracker).

While Nazi intelligence did try to warn Hitler of the vast reserves available to the USSR, Hitler dismissed such warnings as defeatism. Meanwhile in the east warnings were sounded of Nazi invasion only to be dismissed by Stalin as English trickery (dastardly limeys and their provocations). Soviet Generals would attempt to prepare for the invasion but were severely hampered by their own government although they would be successful in setting up reserve lines behind the front for reinforcement and for an in-depth defense. Mr. Tucker-Jones leads us carefully through the conflict showing us the drive for Moscow and how it was hampered by Hitler constantly ignoring his own intelligence officers and his somewhat confused strategic directives. That said, even if Hitler had gone all-in on taking Moscow, I'm not sure he could have done so. Army Group Central, the Nazi command that would prove to be the USSR's single greatest foe in the war, was simply at the end of its logistical tether when they reached the Moscow suburbs (maybe the only time in history where suburban sprawl was a net positive). Especially when you factor in the fanatical resistance put up by the city's population with large groups of civilians voluntarily fighting Panzer Corps with nothing but light arms and not nearly enough light arms at that. Hitler would constantly switch goals during the war according to Mr. Tucker-Jones and simply refuse to accept intelligence that didn't fit his own preconceptions and prejudices. While this might not have saved the Red Army, it certainly provided extra breathing room to work with. From there Mr. Tucker-Jones provides us a complete overview of the eastern war, touching on the siege of Leningrad, to the battles for Ukraine and the battle of Stalingrad and Kursk. Showing us how at each point Hitler and at times Stalin would ignore or dismiss intelligence reports that led to unnecessary defeats and losses. In this, I have to admit that Hitler is ahead of Stalin, who seemed to have learned his lesson after 1941 in large part. However, Kursk is a direct result of Hitler not learning his lesson and attacking right into prepared defenses that he was warned were there and ready for him! As the Red Army pushed the Nazis out of their homeland and across Eastern Europe, we see that Hitler still refused to follow his own intelligence. Demanding counterattacks that bled out the Nazi war machine's strength and wasting the entire Army Corps in futile last stands in “fortresses” that existed only in his own mind (later leading to intense depictions of these manic directives in films which would eventually become grist for internet memes). It swiftly became a mad train wreck you can't look away from. The Red Army, however, grew more adept at taking advantage of their intelligence and using it. Which they did, all the way to Berlin (If I recall correctly, there was a diverging trend where Stalin was increasingly comfortable with delegating military decisions to his general staff, whereas Hitler took on more and more personal control of his military down to the level of tank turret procurement {Stalin did delegate more as the war went on and Hitler did remain very much hands on.  Of course Hitler also was using cocaine eyedrops (yikes but also very on-brand, I’m surprised these didn’t come back in the 80s) and had been exposed to at least a half dozen attempts assassination attempts by German Army Officers, which likely led to a lack of trust.  Stalin on the flip side was assured of the Red Army’s loyalty}).

Mr. Tucker-Jones does adapt the air that the entire thing could have been avoided if Hitler had listened to his intelligence officers. I'm not entirely convinced of that. Sooner or later Hitler is marching east, it has simply been too large a part of his overall goal for Nazi Germany to not do so (The drive to the east in WW1 being a similar instance of fears of a rising Russian menace prompting immediate action, then mixing in the annihiliationist racial ideology and Germany getting high on its own blitzkrieg propaganda). For that matter, while Stalin wasn't planning on attacking soon, I do think if the Nazis had shown weakness he would have dived in for a share of the spoils; to not do so would have meant waiting for the Armies of the West to show up on his doorstep and I don't think he was capable of that (“socialism” in “one” “country”* {Silently points to all the pre-WWII annexations (adding inverted commas for extra spiciness)}). That said Mr. Tucker-Jones is very convincing that much of the bloodshed was unnecessary and was brought about due to the leadership of both nations ignoring their own intelligence services in favor of bias and preconception, although he proves that the Nazis were the more deeply guilty party in this and that they never really learned to stop doing so. The book provides a good general overview of the Eastern front, even going into the politics of Axis allies like Romania and Hungary and Bulgaria's constant refusal to provide troops to fight the Soviet Union. That said, because of the sheer size of the subject, Mr. Tucker-Jones can't really go into any great detail on any specific subject (Editor recommendation - Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor, just to name a personal favorite. Also, Ivan’s War for a good  exploration of the Red Army at the level of individual soldiers). Still, I think the book serves well for people who are just starting to look into the Eastern Front or are just in need of a good, solid overview. I'm giving Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin's war on the Eastern Front by Anthony Tucker-Jones an A- for that.

This was a long review wasn’t it?  I hope you enjoyed it!  If you did, please consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for as little as a dollar a month you get a vote on what books get reviewed. Hope to see you there!  Next week we take a look at Stalingrad with a special guest editor who actually visited the city recently!  I hope you’ll join me for Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig until then stay safe and keep reading!  

Purple text is our guest editor Mike

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

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