About the Author

David Stahel is the author of over a half dozen books about World War II, several focusing on Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union (including Operation Typhoon and The Battle for Moscow). He completed an MA in war studies at King's College London in 2000 and a PhD at the Humboldt-Universit�t zu Berlin in 2009. In his research he has concentrated primarily on the German military in World War II. Dr. Stahel is a senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, and he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Reviews

"An engaging, fine-grained account of an epic struggle, one that restores contingency and perspective to a battle that has been mythologized for too long . . . Mr. Stahel describes these days brilliantly, switching among various levels of command while reminding us of the experiences of the soldiers on the ground and the civilians caught up in the Nazi 'war of annihilation' . . . [Readers] will surely be thankful to him for taking a fresh look at a crucial series of battles about which we wrongly thought we already knew everything there was to know." --Brendan Simms, The Wall Street Journal "Stahel has done a vast amount of research . . . His arguments are convincing, his prose always lucid . . . This is a serious work of scholarship: a well-argued piece of revisionist history, and a reminder that, for all the misery and slaughter in the West, it was even worse in the East." --Tim Bouverie, Air Mail "Stahel has created a well-researched, compelling account of an oft -misunderstood period of the Second World War . . . Stahel renders the conflict in exquisite detail, breaking down the fighting to days and even hours to provide a blow-by-blow analysis. . . a formidable piece of scholarship, unafraid to tackle assumptions about the war and build a more complex, nuanced picture of the German Army in 1941-1942. It is a text driven by perspective: those of the German high command, of ordinary soldiers, and of military historians concerned to conceptualise victory in war." --Alexander Izza, Military History Matters