Carefully researched ... This valuable addition to the body of work about Stalingrad goes a long way toward righting the balance between myth and reality. Mr. MacGregor vividly describes the frantic Soviet efforts to beat back Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army as it reached the city ... MacGregor makes a compelling case that [Stalin] had begun to learn from his mistakes.
It’s not often I find myself complaining of a book being too short ... Ordinary soldiers hardly figure in the narrative. This gives a false impression of ordered decision-making that does not do justice to a battle that was, for the most part, chaos. MacGregor’s approach brings to mind the war books once popular among those armchair generals who preferred battles cleansed of blood and dirt ... This book nevertheless improves significantly in the final chapters when the narrative is taken over by a handful of German diarists who left behind achingly personal recollections of defeat ... MacGregor finds Lidin’s words 'poignant.' I find them unnerving ... Unfortunately, the Lighthouse is not mentioned again until page 183, then given only brief attention. MacGregor efficiently demolishes the legend, but gives too little detail.
Splendid ... MacGregor writes with great fluency and narrative drive, and his account of the context to the battle and the complexity of its fraught swings of fortune and misfortune is compellingly terse ... However, MacGregor’s real coup is not so much the exposure of the propaganda-myth of 'Pavlov’s House' but the access he was given to the unpublished letters and memoirs of a German officer who was present at the battle from its inception to its end.
Uncertain focus notwithstanding, the battle makes for a compelling account, and MacGregor effectively uses primary sources ... MacGregor’s telling, however, is notably rough. In addition to presenting readers with the usual alphanumeric thicket of names pervasive in military histories, the author has a propensity for convoluted, awkward sentences that make the reading experience a slog. That the drama of the conflict, with the fighting waged room by room, still comes through is no small testament to the story’s bones, but readers will find a more satisfying study in Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad.
