DON

As Hitler's difficulties on the Russian front mounted, he became increasingly suspicious of his generals (and they reciprocated heartily). His prejudice against operational flexibility and maneuver, his lack of sympathy for his troops, and his tendency toward self-deception became increasingly dangerous. Nothing illustrates these defects more strikingly than his conduct in the fall and winter of 1942.

In August 1942 General Friederich von Paulus' Sixth Army reached and invested Stalingrad, an important industrial center on the west bank of the Volga, and tried to bombard it into submission. The Russians held with grim determination. Every round of ammunition, every ounce of food, everything needed to maintain an army had to be ferried by the Russians across the river under heavy German bombardment. The city was reduced to rubble-but rubble favors the kind of house-to-house defense put up by the Russians.

Hitler set his heart on the capture of the city. On November 9 he publicly stated: "I wanted to get to the Volga and to do so at a particular point where stands a certain town. By chance it bears the name of Stalin himself. I wanted to take the place and . . . we've pulled it off, we've got it really, except for a few enemy positions still holding out . . .”

Ten days later the Russians smashed the German-Rumanian

RAKOTINO

BEKETOVKA

VOLGA

front northwest of Stalingrad and within a fortnight encircled the Sixth Army. Paulus and his staff beseeched Hitler to let them withdraw. He refused and gave Reichsmarschal Goering the explicit task of keeping the Sixth Army supplied by land and air, but it was impossible. Paulus began the siege with 300,000 men. On February 2, 1943, he surrendered the remnants of 22 German divisions, totaling about 123,000 men. The Russian winter offensive rolled on until the Germans and their satellites had lost,

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killed and captured, more than 500,000 men in 3 months of bitter fighting. The Russians regained 185,000 square miles of territory.

Plievier's novel is like classical tragedy. The soldiers are accustomed to death, even to mass deaths, but isolated and with a new sense of identity in disaster, they realize that Hitler is condemning them to a useless death. . . Men desert whenever they can; radios are tuned to London and Moscow; there is open talk of Nazi corruption; generals and other officers who have failed on other fronts or have fallen into Hitler's disfavor are assigned to Stalingrad as a form of execution. Yet Plievier's hope is in human

love, sharing, honesty, and the respect of man for man. Even the blood bath of Stalingrad cannot extinguish that hope.

Incidentally, even the name Stalingrad no longer exists, although the city has been rebuilt. After the death of the Russian dictator, it was renamed Volgograd.

All three novels in Plievier's great trilogy have been translated into English and are available in hardbound or paperbound format: Stalingrad (Berkley BG-102 paperback); Moscow (Ace D 194 paperback); and Berlin (Ace G 371 paperback). Other German accounts of Stalingrad are Defeat in the East by Juergen Thorwald (Ballantine F 336 paperback), The Road to Stalingrad by Benno Zieser (Ballantine 168 paperback), Stalingrad by Heinz Schroter (Ballantine F 834 paperback), and The Betrayed by Michael Horbach (Berkley G 297 paperback). Field/Marshal Erich von Manstein's Lost Victories (Henry Regnery Company) and Colonel/General Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader (Ballantine F 225 paperback) also deal with the German operations in Russia. You will find William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Crest A-522 paperback) an excellent overall account of Nazi Germany.

The Russian side of the battle is told in The Battle for Stalingrad by Marshal Vassily Chuikov, who commanded one of the armies engaged there. It is published in this country by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston Company.

THE AUTHOR: Nicholas Monsarrat was born March 22, 1910, in Liverpool, England. He attended Winchester College and Cambridge University. After graduation, he was employed as a freelance writer and as a broadcaster for British Broadcasting System. During World War II, Monsarrat served in the Royal Navy, mostly on the Atlantic convoy route about which he writes so well. He commanded a corvette, later a frigate, and was demobilized with the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. From 1948 to 1953 he served as Director of Public Information in South Africa, and in a similar capacity in Ottawa, Canada, in 1953-56. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He currently lives in Ottawa, with his wife and two sons.

Mr. Monsarrat's published works include This Is the Schoolroom (1939); Depends What You Mean by Love (1947); Three Corvettes (1948); My Brother Denys (1949); The Cruel Sea (1951); The Story of Esther Costello (1953); The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956); The Ship That Died of Shame and Other Stories (1959); The Nylon Pirates (1960); The White Rajah (1961). Most of these are available in paperback format.

Our choice, The Cruel Sea, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was made into a motion picture film starring Jack Hawkins.

THE NOVEL: This is a story of the Battle of the Atlantic, the titanic struggle waged by the Allied Navies to keep the supply routes of the world open despite attacks by Axis surface and submarine forces and aircraft. Britain adopted the same blockade