The greatest military campaign of all time continues to attract interest from scholars and analysts. David Stahel's new book is a worthy contribution on many levels. First, it is the product of a German scholar and thus emanates from a scholarly community that has been all but missing in action in the writing of operational history over the past few decades. It is solidly researched, and it features a controversial and strongly argued thesis. Stahel sees Operation Barbarossa not as botched in execution, but as “unavoidably doomed to failure” (p. 2), the product of a military establishment, an officer corps, and a Führer alike who all badly misjudged the power, resilience, and general robustness of the Soviet state. A Wehrmacht that fixated narrowly on military operations—its maneuver scheme, above all—and tended to ignore broader issues such as intelligence, supply, replacements, and military occupation was never going to be able to smash the Red Army and the Soviet state in one single, seamless campaign.

From the start of their invasion in June 1941, therefore, the Germans encountered one nasty surprise after the other in Stahel's account: superior Soviet tanks, especially the medium T-34 and the heavy KV-1 tanks; an abysmal road network consisting of “unsealed, unmaintained sand tracks,” in the words of Army Group Center's Kriegstagebuch (p. 159); Soviet formations that fought grimly to the death in some places and launched bold, if foolhardy counterattacks in others; encirclements that were tough to close and even tougher to hold with the limited forces at hand; and logistical difficulties beyond anything experienced in the brief campaigns that had characterized the first two years of the war. Soviet losses were huge in all this, but German losses, too, were far heavier than in earlier campaigns, and Stahel paints a convincing portrait of a German army whose sharp edge was already well into the process of being blunted during the first weeks of the fighting.

If he had stopped there, this book would be recommended without reservation to any student of the campaign. Unfortunately, in his zeal to make his point, Stahel tends to overreach. The Germans certainly experienced their share of problems on the road to Moscow, and scholars have been writing about these things for decades. But “unavoidably doomed from the start” is a dubious concept, especially for an author such as Stahel who explicitly claims Karl von Clausewitz as his analytical lodestar. In his enthusiasm for the impressive Soviet achievement in 1941 (one chapter title speaks of the Germans “awakening the bear”), Stahel goes so far as to describe the Soviet state in 1941 as “a militarized juggernaut” (p. 448). If so, it was a funny kind of “juggernaut,” one that had to surrender hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory in that first campaigning season and that suffered some four million casualties in the process, about three million of whom fell into Germans hands as prisoners of war. Even Stahel himself concedes that the shock of the German invasion “induced nothing short of utter chaos” in the Soviet Union (p. 156) and that Soviet losses were “horrendous” (p. 159), assessments that are in complete harmony with the scholarly consensus. Stahel goes on to argue that the Red Army could afford such losses, but it is doubtful that any military establishment on earth could have survived a second campaigning season such as the one the Red Army had to endure in 1941.

The author also spends a great deal of time and energy lecturing other military historians about their faults, their uncritical acceptance of German myth and propaganda, the “stoutly uncritical military histories” (p. 450) they write, and their admiration for the professionalism of the German generals. He is especially hard on scholars in the “English-speaking world,” a place where, he says ominously, “military histories abound,” as if that should be some sort of cause for suspicion. He contrasts this dire state of affairs with the apparently happier situation in Germany, where “the campaigns and battles fought by the German generals do not form the principal subject of interest for academics” (p. 443).

Certainly, Stahel is correct in pointing out that the German generals worked hand-in-glove with Hitler and that none of them should ever be treated as a hero. They directed his war, and they enthusiastically carried out his murderous racial policies. They certainly were guilty of what Stahel labels “inflated self-assurance” (p. 51). They led the Wehrmacht into disaster, after all. I know of no serious scholar working in the west today who is disputing any of these points, however. And while there was a definite overenthusiasm for the Wehrmacht in the west during the Cold-War era, that situation has certainly changed for the better. Indeed, Stahel's own bibliography is packed with English-language works written by Geoff Megargee, Richard Overy, Ben Shepherd, and others too numerous to mention. Finally, his implied denigration of operational history stands out as a curious thing, indeed, in a book that features more than 400 pages of often excruciatingly detailed operational analysis.

This is a serious book and a welcome contribution to the military debate over Operation Barbarossa, a debate that has largely been carried out in the “English-speaking world” up till now.