Victor Kamenir

The virtue of this book is that it takes one beyond cryptic little symbols and gives you a sense of what was happening at the level of the corps and the division in the Soviet Red Army in the opening weeks of the German invasion. Kamenir gives particular emphasis to the rather ramshackle state of the Soviet units, the impact of the purges on the Soviet military leadership, and how the failure to mobilize in a timely fashion hamstrung both the Soviet command-and-control capability and the mobility of the artillery and logistical units; in the last case much was expected of civilian assets destined for use in wartime.

One also gets the flavor of Soviet generalship, particularly that of Mikhail Kirponos, commander of the so-called Kiev Special Military District; and the flavor is not sweet. Kirponos owed his rapid promotion to the bloody season of the Great Purge and he appears to have been inept as a military technician and lacking the guile to either deal with his commissar or with high-powered military delegations from Moscow. This is as compared to the soon-to-be-famous Konstantin Rokossovskiy, who handled his ill-prepared mechanized corps about as well as could be expected, while at the same time keeping intrusive political officers at arms-length.

Another plus is that there are an adequate number of maps and the order of battle data is rather good.

The downside of this book is that the author has been let down by dodgy editing in terms of too many instances of poor spelling having been allowed to pass uncorrected and the insufficient use of appropriate articles of speech; it's as though war had been declared on the words "the" and "an." There's also the small matter that I have no sense of author's reputation for veracity, though on the basis of this book I would certainly read another of his works.… (more)