In Europe

missing. Of the 300,000 men in the 6th Army, a little under 6,000 went home at last.
    The Second World War cost the lives of 8–9 million soldiers in the Red Army, and left 18 million wounded. In addition, it has been estimated that between 16–19 million Soviet citizens lost their lives during the war. Estimates of the total number of Soviet casualties hover around 25 million, five times that of the Germans.
    The Soviet Union's victory was due largely to the prowess of field marshals Zhukhov, Timoshenko and Vasilevsky, General Alexei Antonov and a number of other outstanding military leaders. Stalin had enormous charisma, he was able to whip up the entire Soviet Union to incredible achievements and sacrifices, he was intelligent and in the end he developed a good sense of military strategy. But he remained, in the words of Volkogonov, ‘an armchair general: he was practical, vicious and persevering by nature’, someone who had ‘fathomed the secrets of war at the cost of bloody experimentation’.
    In the face of adversity, and rather than revise his strategy, Stalin was sometimes unable to come up with any better plan than to mete out punishment. Infamous is Order Number 227 issued by Stalin on 28 July, 1942, under the title ‘No Step Backwards’. From that moment on, anyone who surrendered was to be considered a ‘traitor to the homeland’. In order ‘to combat cowardice’, every army was to organise three to five well-armed detachments which would move along as a second front behind the first wave of attack, and shoot down any soldier who hesitated. ‘Cowards and those who sow panic are to be destroyed on the spot.’
    ‘How many matches were burned?’ some Soviet commanders wouldask after a battle, when they wanted to know about their own losses. Or: ‘How many pencils were broken?’ For that is a forgotten element of the Russian triumphs: the huge toll in human lives paid by the Soviets for Stalin's ‘brilliant strategy’.
    As noted, the situation at Nazi headquarters was not so very different. Although the two leaders differed in character, Hitler too was a dilettante who had come to believe in his own mythical power. Indeed, Speer singled out dilettantism as the essence of Hitler's military leadership: ‘He had never learned a profession, and had essentially always remained an outsider. Like many autodidacts, he could not judge the real significance of professional expertise. With no understanding of the complex difficulties of every great assignment, he therefore insatiably took on more and more new functions.’
    During his first years in power Hitler's dilettantism worked very effectively in Germany, probably because the country and its military had always been run rigidly and bureaucratically. According to Speer, Hitler's earlier economic and military successes were attributable to his lack of knowledge of the old, fixed rules, and to the reckless energy of a layman who scarcely realises the risks he is taking.
    As soon as any significant adversity arose, Hitler was in a quandary. When the German Army ‘failed’ before Moscow in December 1941, he could come up with nothing better than to place the entire
Wehrmacht
under his personal supervision. Like Stalin he was bound and determined to make all important decisions himself, and would on occasion suddenly meddle in the most trifling details of a military operation. But where Stalin let himself be protected by a number of excellent generals and staff officers, Hitler refused to delegate a thing.
    Stalin was willing to be convinced. Hitler, due to his own war experience and his subsequent successes, was convinced that he was a second Napoleon. In Speer's words:‘The greater the failures, the more pronounced and grim his ineluctable dilettantism became. The penchant for unexpected and surprising moves had long been his strength; now it hastened his demise.’

Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN
Odessa
    WHEN I ARRIVE IN KIEV, THE WHOLE CITY IS CELEBRATING. STARTING at the station is a long string of loudspeakers, all singing the same thing. Freely translated: ‘When the chestnuts blossom in Kiev, my heart will open to you.’ Everyone has the day off, there is to be a race for soldiers, and dozens of veterans, seventy-five, eighty years old, their chests hung with ribbons and medals, proud of their uniforms, are walking around with their wives, most of them with a row of medals pinned to their blouses as well.
    This is the generation that won the