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 Another interesting book for summer reading. |
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
BOOKS
The Attack Wasn't a Surprise
By JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN
June 22, 2005; Page D12
Sixty years after the end of World War II, President George W. Bush and a host of other leaders convened in Moscow to commemorate the Allied victory over the Axis powers. Most of the controversy around the May 9 ceremony centered on the president's visit to Latvia and his insistence on reminding the world of how the Baltic states were betrayed both at the outset of the war -- when the Hitler-Stalin Pact permitted the Soviet Union to occupy and then incorporate them -- and at its close, when the Red Army's liberation led to decades of Soviet domination.
As it happens, there was another episode of Kremlin culpability between these two events, equally momentous but often overlooked: the criminal negligence with which Stalin allowed Nazi Germany to mount a surprise attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
Even in retrospect, the scale of Hitler's assault is astonishing. According to Constantine Pleshakov in "Stalin's Folly" (Houghton Mifflin, 320 pages, $26), the Germans advanced with more than 3.2 million soldiers, 2,000 airplanes, 3,350 tanks and 7,184 pieces of artillery, and they quickly crushed Soviet defenses, advancing 350 miles in the first 10 days. The 900-day siege of Leningrad began on Sept. 8, 1941. Minsk was taken in August and Kiev in September. German troops reached the suburbs of Moscow in December. Soviet losses were staggering. Around Kiev alone, five Soviet armies were destroyed, leading to the capture of more than 600,000 Soviet soldiers.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union was foreseeable. Why did Stalin let it happen?
With the seizure of so much territory, German mobile shooting units (the notorious Einsatzgruppen) followed behind the conquering Wehrmacht. By the end of 1941, they had murdered almost a million Soviet Jews, all before the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, when German leaders called for the use of gas chambers.
As David E. Murphy makes compellingly clear in "What Stalin Knew" (Yale University Press, 352 pages, $30), it was Stalin's stubborn arrogance that permitted this catastrophe to unfold. He had ample evidence of what was coming: Soviet spies in Europe and Japan -- as well as the U.S. State Department, the British government and the Soviet border guard -- provided consistent reports that the Nazis were preparing to launch an offensive in the spring of 1941. Just hours before the invasion, German deserters crossed the frontier to alert Soviet troops.
Stalin dismissed all such warnings. He became obsessed with the idea that if he did not provoke Hitler there would be no war. Indeed, Stalin did everything he could to satisfy his obligations as an ally. He permitted the Japanese to send strategic material across Soviet territory to Germany; he allowed German ships to seek repairs at the Soviet naval base above the Arctic Circle in Murmansk; and he provided information about weather conditions in the North Sea for the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in the fall of 1940 -- all to no avail. He even permitted the Luftwaffe, Mr. Murphy notes, the "freedom to conduct unlimited reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union" -- perhaps his gravest error.
Together, "Stalin's Folly" and "What Stalin Knew" provide a new perspective on Operation Barbarossa, as Hitler's invasion was called (in honor of a 12th-century German emperor). Both Mr. Murphy and Mr. Pleshakov gained access to formerly closed Soviet archives and draw captivating and dramatic details from the files they found there.
Mr. Murphy, in particular, who headed the CIA's base in Berlin in the 1950s before becoming chief of Soviet operations at CIA headquarters, approaches the subject with studied judgment. His conclusion is irrefutable: By dominating every aspect of policy, Stalin left his country vulnerable, not least its noncombatant civilians. Few if any Soviet officials -- in the political or military branches of government -- would dare to question Stalin's resolve or provide information and analysis that would contradict what they knew he wanted to hear.
With the benefit of hindsight -- given the carnage on Soviet soil -- it is easy for us to condemn Soviet generals and diplomats for not insisting that Stalin face the obvious truth of the invasion's inevitability. But then we would have to ignore the fact that only a few years earlier the Great Purge had carried off tens of thousands of Red Army officers and virtually the entire Central Committee. Stalin set the rules in such a way that few sane men who valued their lives would dare to disagree with him.
In "Stalin's Folly," Mr. Pleshakov, a Russian historian, offers a close analysis of the first 10 days of the German offensive, at times providing an hour-by-hour account of how Stalin and his generals behaved in the summer of 1941. He captures the confusion among the officers and soldiers, who sensed the scale of the catastrophe but were unable to take any initiative of their own. Armies who should have been ordered to retreat were sent into hopeless counteroffensives. Empty directives were issued to "destroy the enemy" -- as if such an order from the mighty Stalin could hold back the German onslaught.
Mr. Pleshakov speculates that Stalin looked on Hitler as "an alter ego, a soul mate in an odd way," perhaps in Stalin's mind "the only person on earth who matched his greatness." For someone like Stalin, whose suspicious nature all too often expressed itself as deadly paranoia, it seems ironic that, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn once observed, Hitler was the only person Stalin ever really trusted and Hitler betrayed him
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 Another interesting book for summer reading. -- ceo/cfo - (5711 Byte) 2005-6-23 周四, 06:47 (747 reads)
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