John Erickson

Soviet Ground Forces and the Conventional Mode of Operations

The Bulletin is produced by the RUSI/RMAS Research Centre for the Study of Soviet Affairs (Military studies, questions of peace and disarmament; the State and the people). Co-directors: Professor John Erickson, MA, Department of Defence Studies, Edinburgh University and Mr P. H. Vigor, The Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

Soviet Breakthrough Operations: Resources and Restraints

Abstract The Bulletin is produced by the RUSI/RMAS Research Centre for the Study of Soviet Affairs (Military studies, questions of peace and disarmament; the State and the people). Co-directors: Professor John Erickson, MA, Department of Defence Studies, Edinburgh University and Mr P. H. Vigor, The Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

The Soviet Union at war (1941–1945): An essay on sources and studies

(1963). The Soviet Union at war (1941–1945): An essay on sources and studies. Soviet Studies: Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 249-274.

The Great Patriotic War

The plight of one soviet soldier was an instance of the condition into which the Red Army had been plunged, in June 1941, unable either to attack or defend. The ensuing haplessness laid bare a warfare state without a functioning war machine, lacking a high command, bereft of operational plans. Not that the road to the catastrophe of 1941 was without its warning signs. They were strewn from east to west, beginning in Spain in 1936, moving from Lake Khasan in 1938 to Khalkin-gol and Zhukov’s declared “victory” in 1939, the “liberation march” into eastern Poland in 1939, and the humiliating disasters of the 1939–40 “Winter War” with Finland. What they conveyed were shortcomings in Red Army organization and performance disregarded or uncorrected, poor training, questionable morale, indifferent leadership, outmoded equipment, grave deficiencies in supply. What the war with Finland also demonstrated was dangerously defective strategy.

Reviews : Michael Alfred Peszke, Battle for Warsaw 1939-1944, Boulder, CO, East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York), ISBN 0-88033-3243, 1996; xi + 325 pp.;

There was also the random factor of sheer chance, the wrong place at the wrong time, whether in Red Orchestra agents picked up for some fluke of coincidence or Andr6 Rougeyron’s terrifying account of the RAF Mosquito raid on rail links at Celle which engulfed a prison train. The hapless prisoners, evacuated by the SS from Buchenwald ahead of the advancing Allies, jammed in metal coal trucks became the inadvertent, innocent victims of a devastating attack which left 2500 of them dead. Agents for Escape is a timely reminder of how awful, grim, heart-rending, savage and unpredictable it all was for ordinary, innocent people, for being Jewish, for just being there, for just taking up a stance. The effort to be decent, to sustain a humble but irreducible moral resilience is in dire contrast with that moral degeneracy exhibited, even flaunted in the plush boardrooms and the secretive banks, smug and snug on the side-lines.

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Today both the Soviet and the non-Soviet world have a common interest in one pressing problem which involves not so much the vagaries of detente as the eventual resolution of the Kremlin succession issue, and it is here that the pattern of recruitment to the leadership may be most visible. The succession problem has plagued successive Soviet regimes, but for all the labyrinthine Muscovite intrigue and palace plots, certain rules have emerged — arbitrary affairs, to be sure, but something of a guide as to how things might be conducted.

Recruitment Patterns for the Leadership

William Proxmire, Report from Wasteland: Americas Military-Industrial Complex. Praeger Publishers: New York, Washington, London, 1970. X +248 pp.

The Military-Industrial Complex

6.95. Herbert York, Race to Oblivion: A Participants View of the Arms Race. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1970. 256 pp.

The Army, the Party and the People

6.95. Ralph E. Lapp, Arms Beyond Doubt: The Tyranny of Weapons Technology. Cowles Book Company, Inc.: New York, 1970. Vii +210 pp.

The Army, the Party and the People: (1) U.S.S.R.

5.95. Chalmers M. Roberts, The Nuclear Years: The Arms Race and Arms Control, 1945-I970. Praeger Publishers: New York, Washington, London, 1970. Xi + 159 pp.