Manstein
Hitler's Greatest General
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the preeminent British military strategist comes this riveting biography of Manstein, Hitler's most controversial general.
Among students of military history, the genius of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (1887–1973) is respected perhaps more than that of any other World War II soldier. He displayed his strategic brilliance in such campaigns as the invasion of Poland, the Blitzkrieg of France, the sieges of Sevastopol, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, and the battles of Kharkov and Kursk.
Manstein also stands as one of the war's most enigmatic and controversial figures. To some, he was a leading proponent of the Nazi regime and a symbol of the moral corruption of the Wehrmacht. Yet he also disobeyed Hitler, who dismissed his leading Field Marshal over this incident, and has been suspected by some of conspiring against the Führer. Sentenced to eighteen years by a British war tribunal at Hamburg in 1949, Manstein was released in 1953 and went on to advise the West German government in founding its new army within NATO.
Military historian and strategist Mungo Melvin combines his research in German military archives and battlefield records with unprecedented access to family archives to get to the truth of Manstein's life and deliver this definitive biography of the man and his career.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Forget Rommel: Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, largely unknown to Americans because he served mainly on the Eastern Front, was the exemplar of Germany s military genius and self-delusion in WWII, according to this sweeping biography. Melvin, senior directing staff (Army) of the Royal College of Defense Studies in London, styles Manstein as a foresighted military intellectual and gifted improviser whose feats, from authoring the armored thrust through the Ardennes that defeated France in 1940 to his dogged parrying of vastly stronger Soviet forces, were the high points of German generalship. His main struggle, though, was with Hitler, whose stand-fast orders stymied the audacious mobile ripostes Manstein conceived to stem the Red Army s advance; their wrangling over strategy form a tragicomic thread running through the narrative. Melvin gives a lucid and well-paced, if somewhat bloodless, account of Manstein s campaigns. For all his brilliance, Melvin s Manstein emerges as a study in futility and self-deception, able only to delay the inevitable with his maneuvers, evasive about war crimes committed under his command at best willfully ignorant, perhaps actively complicit. A searching portrait of soldierly prowess in a disastrous cause, Melvin s comprehensive, judicious account will become the standard biography of Manstein in English. 16 pages of color photos, 16 pages of b&w photos.
