Autor v této knize podává podrobný a poutavý přehled události, k nimž došlo od zahájení operace "Barbarossa" a v nichž hrála, alespoň v první fázi této operace, hlavní roli německá Luftwaffe. Události jsou popisovány chronologicky - od zahájení útoku, po kterém následovaly ohromné úspěchy, přes první porážku Němců u Moskvy, zahájení ústupu na západ, bitvy o Stalingrad a u Kurska, vyhnání Němců z Kyjeva až po hořký konec na jaře roku 1945. Popsány jsou i boje nad Baltským mořem a útoky Luftwaffe na konvoje dopravující do SSSR válečný materiál. Text doplňují mapky bojiště, tabulky s údaji o složení jednotlivých leteckých jednotek a velký počet dokumentárních fotografií. ( )

A well-detailed military history of the air campaign over the Eastern Front in World War 2 (the Great Patriotic War to Russians). The author is former RAF, and the result is that his approach is very much that of a mainstream military historian, with lots of Orders of Battle and descriptions of actions centred on the names of units, which does rather make the average reader glaze over a bit.

But the scale of the Eastern Front means that there is enough room to put those accounts in and still talk in reasonable detail about the wider picture. The book goes a lot for that wider picture, with accounts of the Arctic Convoys and the war in the Karelian isthmus, although that tends to concentrate on the aviation campaign against the convoys; so we unexpectedly have a quite detailed account of the German Fw.200 Condor units based on the northern Norwegian coast and the routing of the convoys, which does rather stretch the concept of the "Eastern Front" a bit (as far north-west as the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland, in fact!).

The other extreme of the Eastern Front is also covered, in terms of the efforts of the German, Italian and Romanian armies in the Caucasus to seize Russia's strategic oil fields. The level of detail in this account was new to me; however, given the nature of the war in the East, there is a lot of discussion of general military strategy and the movements of ground troops. The reader who is only expecting an account of aviation should be prepared for this.

One of the things I noticed about the narrative is that it does tend to jump around chronologically, often with a lot of backtracking and some odd statistics comparing, for example, bombs dropped by the Germans in one sector at the beginning of the campaign with bombs dropped by the Russians in a different sector at the end of the campaign. This I failed to see the point of. The collapse of the German advance and the withdrawal to Germany is glossed over very quickly, as are the events at the end of the war. The last year on the Eastern Front is covered in the first half-page of the final chapter, before the author starts out on his summing up. The end of the war with Finland is particularly sketchy, and the separate (and surprisingly favourable) peace concluded between Finland and Russia is only sketched; and what happened to the Germans in Finland after the armistice is not examined in any detail (and the events hinted at are, I think, wrongly described. The German refusal to pull out of Finland after the armistice is left on the page as it is; the fact that the Finns turned against their former allies to evict them, and did so effectively, is not mentioned). Indeed, the whole Continuation War is only treated in the briefest of detail and as an adjunct to the siege of Leningrad, which rather disappoints after the early focus on the Karelian theatre generally.

Apart from an early lapse into the characteristic British establishment criticism of Communism, the book is fair in its treatment of the Soviet units, tactics and strategy. It gives the Soviets full credit for pulling back their situation after the initial reverses of Operation Barbarossa. It salutes the individual efforts of Soviet airmen and women, even when the tactical planning and the bulk of Soviet air operations were carried out unimaginatively and by rote; it credits Soviet designers with producing the right aircraft at the right time; and it tells the story of the introduction of the mobile Maintenance Battalions, which provided technical and mechanical backup to Soviet squadrons in the field, when they were rapidly moving from one improvised airstrip to another. Again, this was new to me, and put a number of things I had previously understood about the Soviet air force in the East into a new perspective.

Although no direct comparison is made between Hitler's and Stalin's style of command, these matters are touched on. The contrast is made between Hitler's chaotic interference in tactical matters and Stalin's more measured command style, operating through the Stavka (Soviet High Command) and being open to persuasion by reasoned argument over many issues. That's not to say that this offers any sort of revisionist picture of Stalin; purges and removals are mentioned and the areas where the Soviets made early organisational errors and suffered for them are not glossed over. Perhaps this book isn't the place to consider how Stalin came to political power through an organisation that valued grass roots organisation and planning (even though this was mainly learned at the feet of his arch-rival, Trotsky!) as opposed to the more overtly political approach taken to organisation and planning by the Nazis, who were more concerned to sway opinions and not to mobilise the mass of people and the economy; and how these two different approaches were reflected in the mobilisation of the resources available to each side when it came to war. That would require a military historian with a feel for and knowledge of the politics, and Brookes isn't that writer. Rather, that aspect to the conduct of the war on each side is only hinted at.

Throughout, the story is of early German success creating a false sense of superiority; as the front became more and more extended, German forces became more thinly spread until they could not stem the Russian counter attacks, even if there were notable individual victories. The author makes a point of filling in other air campaigns on the Western front that were contemporary with events in the East, pointing out that those campaigns - particularly the area bombing of the Reich - caused units and other resources to be be withdrawn from the East, proving that you cannot fight a war on two fronts without a lot of personnel and material which Germany just did not possess. Again, there is a subtext here, of undermining the Left's call - especially in Britain - for a "Second Front Now!" and claiming that the bombing campaign in fact provided that Second Front, and thus undermining the modern left's criticism of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany as a war crime.

The book is illustrated with contemporary photographs, which are well reproduced but not generally directly relevant to the text they appear against. This book is far from the worst offender in this respect, however, and there were remarkably few gross errors by the publisher's designer, which makes a pleasant change.

The book dates from 2003 and so had the benefit of early access to Soviet sources, though more has appeared since then. That should not prevent anyone with an interest in the subject keeping an eye out for copies and acquiring it when they can. ( )