Forczyk, Robert Generalship on the Eastern Front, 1941–45

A Study in Command

The war on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945 was the longest-lasting air-ground conflict in military history and played a decisive role in the defeat of the Third Reich. This study attempts to analyse the command and leadership of the warring parties. The scale of the conflict was immense. It lasted over 46 months, involved over 10 million soldiers at its peak, and claimed approximately 15 million military casualties and approximately 20 million civilian casualties. More than 50 per cent of all German military losses between 1941 and 1945 occurred there, and by the time the Western Allies invaded France in June 1944, the Wehrmacht had already been decimated. Who were the generals who led these campaigns on the Eastern Front? Conventional historiography of the Second World War tends to focus on a few prominent leaders, ignoring the mass of commanders and staff officers who actually fought most of the war. This study by renowned Eastern Front historian Robert Forczyk attempts to correct this imbalance. Generalship on the Eastern Front provides an objective analytical framework for evaluating high-ranking German and Soviet commanders on the Eastern Front from the perspective of leadership at the general rank and battle command, examining a total of 54 German and 140 Soviet officers.