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Two good books both cover the fighting between Germany and Russia in 1941, a brief historian’s summary of the strategic issues involved and a much longer ex-diplomat’s account of the tactics of the greatest land battle ever fought. Each author is used to explaining himself clearly, one in lectures, the other in dispatches; the reader is never in doubt about what either means.
Professor Lukacs’s many books include studies of The Last European War, 1939-1941, now 30 years old, and more recently of the duel between Churchill and Hitler in the summer of 1940. He turns now to examining the motives both of Hitler and of Stalin towards each other as their temporary alliance of August 1939 began to unravel. He reveals, with sardonic accuracy, the mistakes of earlier commentators, such as the right-wing American journalists who assert that Roosevelt and Churchill handed eastern Europe over to Stalin at Yalta in 1945; Stalin, without whose aid the other two could hardly have mastered Hitler, conquered eastern Europe for himself.
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