PositiveAir Mail... comprehensive ... What, then, is the significance of the German winter campaign of December 1941–February 1942? Although Stahel poses the question in his introduction, he does not provide a direct answer. One obvious justification for this meticulously researched work is the number of myths it explodes—the most fundamental being the claim that the winter campaign represented a strategic victory for the Soviet Union ... Stahel has done a vast amount of research, including what must have amounted to months in the German military archives in Freiburg. His arguments are convincing, his prose always lucid. On the debit side, the fact that he is arguing against an interpretation which emphasized the \'significance\' of this period in the context of the overall war naturally diminishes the importance of his subject. One also wonders whether the general reader will want 560 pages on three months of war on the Eastern Front. Yet this is a serious work of scholarship: a well-argued piece of revisionist history, and a reminder that, for all the misery and slaughter in the West, it was even worse in the East.