The German siege and Soviet defense of Leningrad in World War II was an epic struggle in an epic war, a drama of heroism and human misery unmatched in the annals of modern warfare. While innumerable writers have dealt at length with the besieged city itself, David Glantz provides for the first time the definitive military history of the conflict waged beyond the city's borders. One of the first major Soviet cities threatened by the German blitzkrieg, Leningrad was as much a symbolic target as it was a strategic one for Adolf Hitler, who fully expected the birthplace of the Russian Revolution to be reduced to rubble quickly and with ease. The Red Army's ferocious defense of the city, however, made that impossible. Glantz digs deep to recount the full story of how these two military giants bludgeoned each other for nearly three years with a relentless barrage of offensives and counter-offensives designed to crush one another, in horrendous weather and a harsh terrain and with staggering loss of life on both sides. His richly detailed history shows how battles and campaigns were conceived, engaged, and resolved—including a half dozen or more "forgotten battles" that took place during the blockade. From a crazy quilt of military operations, Glantz reconstructs the border battles of June and July 1941; the little-known battles to liberate southern Leningrad oblast, including the battles for Luga, Narva, Pskov, and Ostrov; and the liberation of northern Leningrad oblast, comprising the Vyborg operation and failed attempts to invade Finland. He explains how these battles shaped the struggle for Leningrad and how they impacted other theaters of operation along the Eastern Front, eventually forcing the Germans into their long and costly retreat back toward Berlin. Glantz also provides insights into conditions within the city, adding new details to the horrors of the siege; sheds new light on partisan warfare in the countryside surrounding Leningrad; and corrects errors found in earlier works, revealing among other things the fate of those Soviet commanders who were purged or repressed because of their poor performance in battle. Based on an unparalleled access to Russian archival sources and going far beyond the military aspects of such renowned works as Harrison Salisbury's 900 Days, Glantz's book is a testament to the nearly two million Russians who lost their lives during the Leningrad conflict and confirms his status as the preeminent authority on the Russian military experience in World War II.
Author
David M. Glantz is an American military historian and the editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Glantz received degrees in history from the Virginia Military Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Defense Language Institute, Institute for Russian and Eastern European Studies, and U.S. Army War College. He entered active service with the United States Army in 1963. He began his military career in 1963 as a field artillery officer from 1965 to 1969, and served in various assignments in the United States, and in Vietnam during the Vietnam War with the II Field Force Fire Support Coordination Element (FSCE) at the Plantation in Long Binh. After teaching history at the United States Military Academy from 1969 through 1973, he completed the army’s Soviet foreign area specialist program and became chief of Estimates in US Army Europe’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (USAREUR ODCSI) from 1977 to 1979. Upon his return to the United States in 1979, he became chief of research at the Army’s newly-formed Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 1979 to 1983 and then Director of Soviet Army Operations at the Center for Land Warfare, U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from 1983 to 1986. While at the College, Col. Glantz was instrumental in conducting the annual "Art of War" symposia which produced the best analysis of the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front during the Second World War in English to date. The symposia included attendance of a number of former German participants in the operations, and resulted in publication of the seminal transcripts of proceedings. Returning to Fort Leavenworth in 1986, he helped found and later directed the U.S. Army’s Soviet (later Foreign) Military Studies Office (FMSO), where he remained until his retirement in 1993 with the rank of Colonel. In 1993, while at FMSO, he established The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, a scholarly journal for which he still serves as chief editor, that covers military affairs in the states of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union. A member of the Russian Federation’s Academy of Natural Sciences, he has written or co-authored more than twenty commercially published books, over sixty self-published studies and atlases, and over one hundred articles dealing with the history of the Red (Soviet) Army, Soviet military strategy, operational art, and tactics, Soviet airborne operations, intelligence, and deception, and other topics related to World War II. In recognition of his work, he has received several awards, including the Society of Military History’s prestigious Samuel Eliot Morrison Prize for his contributions to the study of military history. Glantz is regarded by many as one of the best western military historians of the Soviet role in World War II.[1] He is perhaps most associated with the thesis that World War II Soviet military history has been prejudiced in the West by its over-reliance on German oral and printed sources, without being balanced by a similar examination of Soviet source material. A more complete version of this thesis can be found in his paper “The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941-1945).” Despite his acknowledged expertise, Glantz has occasionally been criticized for his stylistic choices, such as inventing specific thoughts and feelings of historical figures without reference to documented sources. Glantz is also known as an opponent of Viktor Suvorov's thesis, which he endeavored to rebut with the book Stumbling Colossus. He lives with his wife Mary Ann Glantz in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Glantzes' daughter Mary E. Glantz, also a historian, has written FDR And The Soviet Union: The President's Battles Over Forei
