Operation Mars
I'm not a big fan of Zhukov's Greatest Defeat, by David M. Glantz, the latest military history volume on my reading list. Its chief virtue is that it's really the only book, in English, on Operation Mars, one of the big battles on the Eastern Front in World War II. So if you want to read about that campaign, this is the book.
It does extensively describe that campaign, with a number of maps, and operational-level details on what happened during this attempt by the Soviets to eliminate the Rzhev salient in late 1942, and crush the Germans' Army Group Center. The thesis of the book is that this campaign was not just the diversion that Soviet official histories say it was, but was as important an attack as the Stalingrad encirclement, and intended to be even more crucial and successful. The numbers involved in the attack, the persistence of the attacks, and the frightful casualties the Soviets too, while still pressing the assault, all support this contention.
So I'm glad I got that information, and reading the book has increased my knowledge of Soviet strategy in 1942 and 1943. I can't recommend the book to you, however, on any other grounds than that.
First, there's an annoying problem with the maps. The idea behind the map presentations was a good one. First show the front as it was before the attack, then show the salient itself, then isolate the various attack sectors, and go around the circle showing the opening phase, then go around the circle for the next phase, and so on.
The problem is that the maps weren't coordinated with the narrative. There is a great tendency to mention villages in the text that are marked, but not named, in the closest map. Most commonly the village is named, somewhere, but not when you need the information. In many cases units are named, but not shown on the current map.
Next is the problem of style. Glantz is perhaps the foremost scholar of the Soviet front, so this is a scholarly treatment, full of information. Glantz is not a gifted writer, so the text is uniformly dry. What makes this worse than just dull, however, is that Glantz makes crucial stuff up.
Oh, sure, he's using a technique of "creative non-fiction," but the technique is bulldroppings, and deserves no respect. Specifically he invents thoughts, dialogue, and scenes for which there is no real evidence. He tells us what Stalin was thinking, and defining his character by those thoughts; but in fact we don't know what he thought. We barely know what he said, in many cases. So there are phony "realizations" and invented "decisions" and the like. Because these aren't presented with the weasel words that historians often use ("must have been thinking", "was certainly puzzled by"), there is no signal to the reader that we have conjecture. And that means that we can't differentiate between genuine quotes and phony ones, or ideas that have been made up versus something that might have been in a letter.
Every one of these instances infuriated me, but happily Glantz doesn't remember to try to enliven his text with them very often (they're thickest in the opening pages), and mostly reverts to his normal dry, but reasonable, narrative.
For a scholarly volume, some bizarre choices have been made. At the end of the book we get full orders of battle for the Soviet Kalinin and Western Fronts, but we don't get the German order of battle. Hunh??
A final note: There's a review on Amazon that claims that this book is riddled with errors and typos, especially swapping right-versus-left flanks, and swapping cardinal directions. The edition I read has many typos, but they're mostly confusions between plurals and possessives; plus some word choice errors. I found only two mistakes of the type mentioned on Amazon in the whole thing, and I was looking for them. I suspect either an earlier edition, or a mistaken reviewer, is to blame.
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Njal's Saga, Robert Cook, trans.