So you have finished your research, gathered the books, journal articles and primary research material for your essay/dissertation/thesis and now have to start turning this into your text and argument. You are faced by a mass of research on one side and a blank piece of paper on the other. How do you convert one into the other?
Phillips O'Brien in his book 'How the war was won' has produced an attractive new way of understanding the Second World War in which he claims the Western Allies were the main contributors to victory by their creation of a new type of warfare - an air-sea 'super battlefield' and their destruction of the lion's share of the production of the German and Japanese war economies. He makes the valid point that by comparison the war's main land battles, such as Kursk only involved relatively small amounts of territory and destroyed only small amounts of cheap equipment such as tanks while the air-sea supper battlefield covered large parts of the globe and consumed well over half the German and Japanese economic output in aircraft alone before we take account of shipping.
In the previous post, I set you, the reader, the challenge of comparing both contemporary and current accounts of a single day of fighting at divisonal level during the Battle of Kursk. In this post I will give you some further information and lead you towards my conclusion. Of course you may have your own ideas.
One of the major issues with the historiography of the Soviet-German War is that German accounts of the war had an almost unchallenged run for over forty years between 1945 and 1991. Former German generals found a willing audience in American soldiers and historians who were struggling to counter the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the prospect of a Third World War.
The aim of this exercise is to demonstrate some of the problems with one-sided Germanicentric scholarship by examining one of those rare occurances, a divisional sized battle which has primary and secondary sources from both sides.
Recent years has seen the advent of smaller, lighter computers such as netbooks or powerful tablets such as the iPad Pro or Microsoft's Surface Pro and new Surface Go.
This blog post discusses some of the ways these can be used in archives and libraries to help improve the efficiency of your research. A tablet is able to scan documents, take notes, record citations, provide internet access to library catalogues, integrating and automating many of these tasks. Forget lugging a notebook, pencils, camera, spare batteries, change for the photocopier up the stairs into the library. Just take your tablet!
Motor vehicles have always been regarded as an indicator of modernity, technological advancement, and industrial progress, right from the time of the first motor car in 1885. The Soviet Union was no exception, and there is an extensive Soviet historiography of the development of motor transport and its use during the German-Soviet War. The aim of this article is to put the wartime military and economic use of Soviet vehicles into a wider context, highlighting how mechanization was not the only important variable in successful logistics. The case study here will be the role of transportation in the logistics of a Soviet combined arms army (общевойсковая армия) utilizing detailed primary source material from the pamyat-naroda.ru website.
In December 1941, the nature of the Second World War was changed irrevocably by the German defeat at the Battle of Moscow. Up to this point Germany had been able to win each of her individual wars in a single campaign, utilising the Heer's military expertise to overcome Germany's enemies one by one and using a fixed stock of military personnel and materiel. However the Soviet Union had managed to bend before the German storm and although her pre-war army had been destroyed, had created new armies and divisions in sufficient time to halt the German advance outside the capital, so forcing the need for a second campaign. This fact changed the nature of the war from one of single military operations to one of a series of campaigns utilising national economic output to equip and sustain multiple operations continuously over a period of years. From this point onwards, the level of mobilisation of a country's economy would be a significant factor in winning or losing the war.
Which poses the question what were the relative sizes of the German and Soviet economies? After all Germany could call on the resources of an occupied Europe while the USSR had lost large amounts of territory, around 60-80 million people and 40% of its economic base. By contrast one in every three 'German' soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front was not a German national.
Newly available archive material from Russia now makes possible a detailed breakdown of a late war Tank Army, showing both its combat and support units in great detail down to company level . This new information expands the current knowledge provided by existing English language sources.
