Berlin 1945
Blick über den Pariser Platz auf das Brandenburger Tor Anfang Juni 1945

Titanomachia

Frank Ellis reviews an updated account of an epic struggle

David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Revised and Expanded edition, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 2015, Appendices, Index, Maps, Tables, Bibliography, pp. xv + pp.557, ISBN 978-0-7006–2121-7

When Titans Clashed was first published in 1995, and the authors, as they note, benefitted from the first wave of the declassified release of archival material resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such, meanwhile, has been the accumulation of monographs on the war and the release of new archival material that the authors considered it necessary to update the 1995 publication.

The title itself raises two problems: in terms of manpower and matériel the Soviet Union was indeed a TITAN, Germany was a titan; nor did the Red Army stop Hitler.
True, Soviet losses in dead, wounded and devastation went way beyond anything endured by Britain and the United States but without the Anglo-American Alliance the Soviet Union alone would not have stopped Hitler. I wonder whether Hitler, towards the end of the war when Germany was facing defeat, looked back at the summer of 1940 and realised that the failure to have captured or to have destroyed the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) at Dunkirk, within his grasp, was the moment when Germany lost the war. Churchill politically could have survived the capture or the destruction of the BEF. He would have been replaced and his successor would have concluded a deal with Hitler. Continue reading →