From a world expert on Hitler's war in Russia, this book on the operation that changed the course of World War II includes updated information on casualty numbers and opposing forcesHere, David Glantz challenges the time-honored explanation that poor weather, bad terrain, and Hitler's faulty strategic judgement produced German defeat, and reveals how the Red Army thwarted the German Army's dramatic and apparently inexorable invasion before it achieved its ambitious goals. On June 22, 1941 Hitler unleashed his forces on the Soviet Union. Spearheaded by four powerful Panzer groups and...

At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German Army Group Center's Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of Germany's Third Reich, and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht's Armed Forces] massive invasion of the Soviet Union code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Union's Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat...