The Battle for Moscow

by Albert Seaton

Release Date: March, 1997

Edition: Paperback

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Historically Obsolete

This review was written on Jan 2, 2004. I had been given the hardbound "Battle for Moscow" as a 2003 Christmas present, and, upon finshing the book,wished to share my impressions of it with anyone out there who might be considering buying/reading this book. I am a novice to the study of WWII, and am interested particularly in the Eastern Front. I have read several books in the last year on this topic, as well as having skimmed others. I hope sometime to get around to more accounts by other authors (eg. Ziemke, Erickson, Winston Churchill, Clark, Zhukov, Guderian at al).

I have read the following:

David Glantz

"The Battle of Kursk",
"The Soviet Partisan Movement",
"When Titans Clashed",
"Zhukov's Greatest Defeat",
"Barbarossa 1941",
"Stumbling Colossus",

Donald Sommerville

"World War II day by Day"

John Erickson,

"Road to Stalingrad"

I also read what I thought was an excellent 30+ chapter overall account of WWII online, but the site has gone down.

Last summer, from my local library, I signed out Seaton's "The Russo-German War". Unfortunately, I could not bring myself to read past the first few chapters because it was so heavily cast from the Nazi viewpoint. If a historical treatise is one-sided then this bias should be reflected in the title and the promotional descriptions - Seaton's book should be retitled "The Russo-German War From the German Perspective". With an honest title I would have known what to expect when I opened the book. I got the impression from Seaton, however, that he was presenting his version as a balanced, neutral historical document. The disappointing result was that I often found myself in an imaginary argument with the author as I read the book. I had to shield myself from a somewhat one sided viewpoint which could be considered at best from the German viewpoint compiled with German data, and at the worst sympathetic with the German side. Interestingly, just enough material from the Soviet vantage was given so as to give the unsuspecting reader the illusion of balance.
I bore exactly the same reservations about "Battle for Moscow" as I had regarding "The Russo-German War". The book alternated between descriptions of what the Germans were doing, and descriptions of what the Russians were doing. Sounds balanced, right? No, it wasn't, because the quantity and quality of the descriptions were not even, and anyone can see it if they have read the book. This book should have been titled "Operation Typhoon - 70% from the German viewpoint, 30% from the Russian viewpoint".

Seaton's bias was brought into sharp relief by his "what if" conjectoring. I find it irritating that so often we in the West wishfully ask "what if" questions which would have resulted in the Nazi side faring better. Where does this come from? Why ask such questions? One could just as well ask "what if" questions which would have resulted in the Soviet side faring better. For example, if the Soviets had not made certain mistakes, maybe they would have liberated France before June 1944, resulting in a completely Soviet Western Europe. There are many possible "what ifs", but they reveal more about the our own biases than they shed light on what actually happened. By the way, I don't wish the Soviets had taken over France, it was just an example.

I find that David Glantz's books are a very good remedy to the distortion found in books like "Battle For Moscow". Yes, Glantz's accounts are heavily written from the Russian archives, but he is very up front about where he is coming from. If you examine his book titles and the promotional descriptions, you will be given an honest preview of what is in the book.

In defense of Seaton and others, it is true that when "Battle For Moscow" was first published less historical data were available from Russia compared to that from Germany. This problem has been overcome since 1989, however, therefore the older books should be updated or else be allowed to fall out of print since they are historically obsolete.

My advice - don't buy this book - read Erickson and Glantz instead. A good start would be David Glantz's "When Titans Clashed".

The good and the bad ...

The Good: Concise and accurate one volume account of Operations Barbarossa and Typhoon from their start until the Soviet winter counterattck in February of 42. Seaton, as mentioned in a previous review, minces no words in expressing how he feels about the blunders of both the German and Soviet stratgists.

The Bad: Seaton uses a convoluted grammatical style. The book reads in many parts like a German translation. The book is full of run on sentences. Choice stylistic tidbits like, "Von Bock, overbearing with both superiors and subordinates, was not, however, inhibited from severly restricting the freedom of his own army commanders, even to the extent of meddling with matters which were scarcely his concern (p27)", tax the nerves after a while.

Ugly: One of my pet peeves with military history books is that they should contain at least one good map that permit the reader to follow the action described in the text. All of Seaton's maps are pretty lousy. They seem hand drawn and are devoid of any detail. His operational maps are a mish mash of arrows and dots that somewhat resemble the physical location where the combat occured.