Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Modern War Studies)

by David M. Glantz

Release Date: May, 1998

Edition: Hardcover

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Glantz-the Master of Soviet/German military studies

David Glantz's book is a very well laid out rebuttal of the claims made in the book Icebreaker that the Soviet Union was preempted while preparing it's invasion of German territory. The impressive aspect of this book though is not simply in the extremely well documented arguments made by Glantz but also in the complete lack of polemics to answer Viktor Suvorov. Glantz is supremely even-handed in laying out his arguement.
In quantity, quality and organization of information, this book is exceptional. For many years the German aspects of the war preperation and German claims of Soviet intent were nearly all that were available. Well the passage of time has changed that and Glantz has done a masterfull job incorporating previously unavailable Soviet documents. Using these and also a much smaller number of German resources, he provides nearly indisputable evidence of the Soviet State's inability to correct command and control, supply, rear support, communications, and soldiers training issues prior to the German invasion. Using these same documents, Glantz also shows how the military purges which removed some 54,000 officers from the armed services between 1937 and 1941 absolutely crippled the red army throughout the first 6 months of the war and greatly hindered combat readiness in general and the the formation of mechanized corps and the air force in particular. Furthermore, he goes on to detail the absolutely deplorable condition of the strategic reserves in the early part of the war. These reserves forming in the interior had few officers and NCOs, little food, almost no equiqment and non-existent transportation in many instances.
The only complaint that I can make with this book is in it's readability. Glantz, unfortunately, makes the reading of this book every bit as enjoyable as perusing the instructions to a DVD player. That being said, Stumbling Colossus is intended to be a serious study of the preperations and mistakes that the Soviet government made prior to the beginning of general war, not a historical survey written for a mass audience. It is furthermore intended to answer the revisionists who claim that it was in fact the Soviet government who intended agressive war in the summer or fall of 1941 but were simply beat to the punch by a preemptive German strike. In short, this book is simply an indespensible source of information for anyone interested in the myriad reasons behind the near lightning military defeat of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941

A sideways Glantz at Suvorov

Suvorov book "Icebreaker" elicited a response in the form a book titled "Stumbling Colossus" by non other than David Glantz a prolific heavy weight author who specialises on the Eastern Front. Glantz's book claims to obliterate the Suvorov myth by proving that the Red Army in 1941 was beyond putting up a reasonable defence let alone launching a surprise attack. Unlike Suvorov he bases his work on recently declassified Soviet documents and reams of statistical data.

One would have expected Glantz to tackle Suvorov head on and take apart his book paragraph by paragraph. To the frustration of many a reader this does not happen and it appears that he talks past Suvorov for most of the time. Nevertheless he succeeds in proving to the reader that the Soviet War machine was in no fit state to even consider any pre-emptative strike and therefore due to this one fact the whole of Suvarov can therefore be consigned to the rubbish bin. It is as if a child asks the question "What would happen if the moon fell down?" and the father answers that this can never happen.

If Suvorov book raises one question that begs a direct answer from Glantz, it is to why the Red Army, assuming that it had adopted a defensive posture with over a year to prepare this strategy, had not done a better job of it. In fact it seems that the Red Army performance at the opening of Barbarossa bordered on nothing less than gross negligence. The onus was on Glantz to illuminate on the strategy that the Red Army was trying to achieve, rather than suggest that they had no strategy at all. The Suvorov thesis that an army in an offensive mode deployed offensively can offer up nothing but a poor defence if surprised, seems attractive in a vacuum created by a lack of other evidence

Glantz's book is by no means an easy reader. His books are about as much fun as reading a technical manual. His writing style reveals very little of the author or his viewpoints, but instead stick to a rigid presentation of the facts as revealed in copious amounts of Russian documents he has examined. However his contribution to the study of the Eastern front is immense and writing style aside he has made a massive contribution to our understanding of this epic struggle. This is not a book for the layman as it takes a dedicated few, hungry for the knowledge to wade through copious amounts of dry statistics