Germany’s 1941 Campaign in the Ukraine and Southern Russia : How Germany Lost on the Eastern Front

How Germany lost the Second World War is a topic that remains hotly debated to this day. On the one hand, conventional wisdom still explains Germany’s defeat during the War as inevitable chiefly because of the brute force economic and military power the Soviet Union and Allies wielded against Germany. Yet there is a growing community of historians, military analysts, and defense experts alike challenging such long-standing beliefs.The three volumes of _How Germany Lost: An Analysis of Germany’s 1941-1942 Campaigns in the Ukraine and Southern Russia_ aims to be the flagship of those challengers. These books build off the general outline provided by the author’s previous work, and advance those arguments in several new and interesting directions. Not least of which via getting granular in defeating a dated conventional wisdom ill-equipped to not only explain Germany’s defeat in Eastern Europe, but also help us understand the course of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict.This first volume offers the reader a unique approach to understanding how and why the Second World War ended as it did; doing so by applying long-standing rules of successfully waging war to the specific facts and circumstances of Germany’s 1941 campaign in the Ukraine and Southern Russia. How Germany Lost also advances a new conceptual framework for understanding the war’s outcome. It will show that Germany possessed all the tools needed to win the war regardless of the numerical superiority of its foes, but lost anyway due to a negligent approach to the fundamentals of effective war-making. This book further shows that even in making those errors, and for the reasons frequently overlooked and misunderstood but discussed here, Germany came far closer to locking down hegemony over Europe than conventionally believed. In doing so Volume One offers the reader a new approach for understanding what determinants explained the war’s outcome, while refuting arguments advanced by those clinging to quantitative reasons for German defeat. This is accomplished here by building upon the existing literature, synthesizing the best available knowledge about the war, and using that information to analyse how Germany lost the war.This book serves as a bridge between academic publications and popular histories. Perhaps the most important idea the general military history enthusiast is meant to take from these pages is that Germany lost by dint of being outsmarted and outhustled: not outmuscled. To that end How Germany Lost Volume I provides a unique basis for understanding why the events that unfolded in Eastern Europe during 1941 ended in the manner that they did, and why the lessons learned therein still resonate on the same battlefields of today.