Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia (Images of War) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Photos are great, text is less so. A four to five star book, but have to deduct one for the text.

If you are a specialist and have many other volumes on world war two then you will love the previously unpublished images, often of unusual support vehicles and non-combat situations. In fact, there are few images of the "sharp end" of combat. Many are of units moving up to the front or support units behind the front lines.

Most of these were likely taken by simple soldiers rather than being the usual PK (propaganda kompagnie) images. The latter accounts for some out of focus/blurry images as they are often of moving subjects and not posed situations (no tripods and slow film speeds leading to motion blur). It's a look behind the scenes of WWII.

The text is somewhat hit or miss. A fair number of captions are grossly incorrect (wrong vehicle identification), again, not a problem for a specialist who might actually enjoy spotting these errors.

Others are less than accurate: An MG34 mounted on an anti-air tripod is followed by the comment "Throughout the war support units were issued with light machine guns for self defense and were able to counter low flying enemy aircraft quite regularly", although this may have been the wish of the people issuing the weapons, it was hardly likely to be the outcome with any but the slowest flying of aircraft. I also wonder why he would need to include the word "enemy" in the sentence.

It's often best to stop after the first sentence of a caption to avoid the often inane comments which follow. For example the caption of a photo of an artillery piece contains the following observation: "The power of these heavy field guns could hurl its destructive charge miles into the enemy lines, sometimes with devastating results.

Occasionally said "insights" are repeated word for word in a subsequent caption just a few pages later. Others, like the previous example, have been "lifted" verbatim (or nearly so) from other volumes of the series (supposedly by a different author -otherwise known as plagiarism (!!)). "Motorcyclists that decided to avoid the roads and travel cross-country often found it a perilous undertaking and the casualty rate among motorcyclists was inevitably high." was also in the "Crushing of Poland" volume although the syntax used in the latter is rather fractured (see my review of that volume if you are curious).

In summary: enjoy the photographs, particularly if you are knowledgeable enough to figure out what you are looking at on your own and are very interested in the mundane aspects of WWII, read the text at your own risk, trying to find an occasional pearl among the gravel.