David M. Glantz

So it was two offensive operations in October film.

There was also a very messy airborne component that David Glantz actually touches on in his volume on Soviet airborne operations.

But nevertheless, the October offensives fail and Vatutin, who had experienced operational setbacks in his military career earlier in the year, who had actually advocated for an aggressive Soviet posture in the summer of 1943, yet a person who Stalin allowed to stay on in a front-level command position.

He and his staff develop a concept of switching the point of main effort from Bukrin and secretly repositioning forces in that Lutej bridgehead this very small, very, very small swampy area north of Kyiv, and using that as the staging point for this third and ultimately successful Kyiv offensive operation.

Instead, both advanced alternative proposals based on their understanding of the actual situation on the ground.

According to historian David Glantz, Eremenko's alternative plan would eventually form the conceptual basis for Operation Uranus, the strategic masterpiece that would encircle and destroy the Sixth Army.

Yet at this moment in early October, neither alternative was accepted.

Instead, Rokossovsky was pressured to restart the Kotluban offensive, the very operation he had warned against.

However, independent of that public discussion, there's been a lot of historians writing away at whatever university that are not motivated to, uh, publish an opinion piece in a newspaper.

Uh, people like Gerhard Weinberg or David Glantz.

If you've read some books, listeners and viewers out there, about World War II especially, about the Eastern Front in English, Glantz is a big, is a big, uh, significant figure there, well respected.

And, uh, they're also interested in this, and they're not trying to publish an opinion piece during the Cold War.

Yeah, Leningrad was something I had always wanted to write about and very rapidly realized this is not something you can...

If you do massage it into one volume, either you leave a lot of stuff out or you do what David Glantz did, which is you end up with, you know, a cinder block of a book.

It's just enormous.

So by doing it in two volumes, I thought it was... a way of making it more digestible, shall we say.

I have loads of stuff that I have barely scratched the surface of.

I am blessed with having a lot of very kind friends and acquaintances who have been astonishingly generous in sharing their collection of, you know, from their raids on the archives.

It's impossible to write about the Eastern Front without spending a lot of your time stepping in the footsteps of David Glantz, for example.

And David has been astonishingly kind and generous in sharing a lot of his data.