Red Army Tank Commanders: The Armored Guards

by Colonel Richard N. Armstrong

Tank and mechanized forces spearhead Red Army operations from the gates of Stalingrad to the center of Berlin. This new book profiles Six Soviet commanders who rose to lead six tank armies created by the Red Army on the eastern front during the Second World War: Mikhail Efimov Katukov, Semen Ill'ich Bogdanov, Pavel Semenovich Rybalko, Dmitri Danilovich Lelyushenko, Pavel Alekseevich Rotmistrov, and Andrei Grigorevich Kravchenko. Each tank commanders' combat career is examined, as is the rise of Red Army forces, and reveals these lesser known leaders and their operations to western military history readers. Richard N. Armstrong, a colonel in the United States Army, has served in military intelligence since 1969, and holds a military historian specialty. He has published historical and professional articles on Red Army operations and Soviet military affairs. He wrote the Combat Studies Institute monograph, Soviet Operational Deception: The Red Cloak, and edited Red Armor Combat Orders; Combat Regulations for Tank and Mechanized Forces 1944.

Genres: History

476 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Military biographies of the Tank Army commanders, who were important enough in the overall defeat of Nazi Germany that they deserve to be remembered and even emulated as military leaders: Mikhail Katukov, Semen Bogdanov, Pavel Rybalko, Dmitri Lelyushenko, Pavel Rotmistrov and Andrei Kravchenko.. The Soviet Pattons. The chapters cover their early pre-war careers, their "educations" as commanders of the small armored units the Red Army was reduced to using in response to the overwhelming blitzkrieg of the Wehrmacht, and finally their command of the "tank armies" themselves. A Tank Army was a very large armored and highly mobile unit designed to carry out sweeping maneuvers into the operational depth of the enemy, hopefully bringing about his destruction. These generals were masters of the art of mobile warfare. Richard Armstrong is an expert on the Soviet military, and perhaps it is years of reading stilted Communist military literature which is responsible for his somewhat plodding writing style. The maps (one per chapter) are computer-generated, two-color and hard to read. Still, all in all, this is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who is interested in the development of the Soviet military during the Second World War, or the Eastern Front in general - so to speak.