Glantz, David M. The Stalingrad Trilogy. Companion to "Endgame at Stalingrad"

In Companion to Endgame at Stalingrad, the final volume of his acclaimed Stalingrad trilogy, David Glantz completes his authoritative account of one of the most notorious battles of the Second World War, the campaign that sealed Germany's defeat on the Eastern Front and proved to be the turning point of the war. In documenting the final days of the Battle of Stalingrad, particularly the Red Army's counteroffensive known as Operation Uranus, Glantz addresses a variety of myths and controversial questions surrounding these events, particularly questions about why Operation Uranus succeeded and the German relief attempts failed, whether the 6th Army could have escaped or been saved from encirclement, and who ultimately bore the greatest responsibility for its final defeat. In addition to a variety of traditional sources, this work draws on two important categories of documentary material that were previously unavailable to researchers. The first category comprises extensive records from the combat report of the German 6th Army, which had been largely lost since the end of the war and were only recently rediscovered and published. The second category comprises a large amount of newly declassified Soviet and Russian archival materials, including excerpts from the daily operational reports of the Red Army General Staff, a variety of orders and instructions from the Stavka (High Command), the People's Commissariat for Defence (NKO) and the General Staff of the Red Army, as well as the daily records of the Soviet 62nd Army and its subordinate divisions and brigades for most of the time during which the fighting in Stalingrad itself took place. Due to the ongoing controversies and myths that characterise this period, many of these documents are included verbatim in English translation in this companion volume, providing concrete evidence to support the conclusions presented in Volume 3. The companion volume thus makes a significant contribution to the unprecedented detail and new perspectives, interpretations and assessments of the later phases of the Battle of Stalingrad presented in this final volume.