Book Review - Battle of the Cities
Urban Warfare on the Eastern Front
by Anthony Tucker-Jones
Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2023
Hardcover ISBN 978 1 39907 200 7
Reviewed by: Charles Knight
Anthony Tucker-Jones’s Battle of the Cities: Urban Warfare on the Eastern Front provides a thorough overview of operational-level urban warfare on the Eastern Front, structured around 20 significant urban engagements. It presents as being dense and well researched, and for each battle it provides not only context and conduct, but great detail about participating formations, their origins, their commanders, and their movements and locations. In this account, the main actors are army divisions, with occasional accounts of regiments or battalions fighting in the streets at key moments. The chapters are also peppered with cameo appearances by figures such as Shostakovich, Khrushchev and Beria, and with snapshots such as Stalin holding a military parade at the height of the battle for Moscow. Rather than applying an evocative and sometimes first-person storytelling technique like that of colleagues such as Antony Beevor, Tucker-Jones takes a traditional historian’s approach. The reader will not learn about shifting tactics or the evolution of Soviet Storm groups, but they will find the crucial political and operational contexts for these developments.
The introduction provides an excellent overview of warfare on the Eastern Front but does not foreshadow the structure of the book itself. The body of the volume is divided into short chapters dealing with each of the major urban battles. This approach will be particularly useful for researchers; however, they may be disappointed by the absence of footnotes and citations. Students will similarly appreciate the richness and density of the information presented, yet this characteristic can make it difficult to absorb and follow the action on a first reading. This challenge is compounded because the spatial and temporal relationship between the sometimes-concurrent battles is not intuitive. To address this and to better contextualise the battles, the reader may find it useful to initially sketch a timeline chart in conjunction with the map on page xii. There is also merit in starting with the short final chapter, which sketches the art of urban warfare.
The chapters are anchored and enlivened by excursions deep into the history of the cities and peoples. There are vignettes that recall defensive battles during earlier invasions by the Mongols, the French or the alliance that confronted Russia during the Crimean War. The economic role played by the cities of the Western USSR during the spectacular modernisation from the 1920s onwards is linked to descriptions of their military-industrial (and therefore strategic) significance as war developed. For example, there is an interesting account of the shifting production arrangements for the crucial T-34 tank. Less expected are sketches on topics such as the cultural connections between France, prominent French leaders and the city of Odes(s)a.
In addition to offering the above economic, industrial and historical reference points, this book serves to introduce other key actors who are often missing from popular understandings of the war on the Eastern Front. The operations and effects of the air forces on both sides are examined in relation to ground manoeuvre, while the often-overlooked role of naval forces and transport shipping is also accounted for. This reviewer was certainly not previously aware of the role of the Romanian Navy at Sevastopol. In a similar vein, the reader learns about the central role of the Romanians in capturing Odes(s)a in 1941 or that of the Spanish Blue Division at Leningrad. The involvement of these currently obscure actors is reinforced at other points in the text by meaningful details such as the Blue Division soldiers changing back into Spanish uniforms in Vienna on the way home.
The inevitable necessity of ‘interference’ by political leaders in military matters has been well argued in Eliot Cohen’s and Lawrence Freedman’s writings on command. Tucker-Jones stays detached when describing the processes and effects of Hitler’s decisions, and offers balancing descriptions of Stalin’s sometimes terrifying interactions with his commissars and generals. Indeed, balance is retained throughout. For instance, the treatment of the 1944–45 Battle of Warsaw gives a good account of the various factors being considered by both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, and refrains from political value judgement about the former’s failure to act in support of the Polish Home Army. Similarly, the author’s brief treatment of the role of Ukrainians fighting alongside the Germans in the Ukrainian Liberation Army and other organisations does not avoid the topic. Although Tucker-Jones benignly frames such Ukrainian participation as ‘duped’, this assessment is balanced with consistent acknowledgement of the Ukrainians’ massive suffering and the country’s contribution of manpower to the Soviet Union’s struggle against fascism.
Overall, this book provides excellent and distinct accounts of the 20 key ‘Battles of the Cities’ during the Great Patriotic War. The reader can follow how the cities of the Western Soviet Union initially delayed the rapid Wehrmacht ‘advancing tide’ and then became focal points for envelopment after failures of manoeuvre and resultant dogma (fuelled by its failure to withdraw) saw entire defending armies lost. As the Soviets learned, cities which could not be bypassed (because of their location and communication nodes) became ‘breakwaters’ where the inexorable blitzkrieg expended time and blood, or remained besieged thorns in the German rear. The book shows how a strategy of ‘no retreat’, backed by the commitment of sufficient combat power, became decisive—fixing the German 6th Army at Stalingrad for the counterattack that changed the course of the war. Tucker-Jones resists allocating disproportionate text to that well-researched, well-understood decisive battle. Instead, he draws our attention to how that Soviet victory reflected operational ‘lessons learned’ in earlier urban battles. For example, he highlights the significance of the 1941 Battle of Rostov-on-Don as the first successful Soviet urban counteroffensive. As fortunes reversed and the Red Army advanced west, the various accounts of battle show how the dogma of ‘no retreat’ handicapped the Wehrmacht in turn.
This is a book about how the leaders, generals, admirals and air marshals executed operational urban war at scale. It might be better entitled Battle for the Cities: The Context for Urban Warfare on the Eastern Front, yet it remains important background reading for those wanting to understand urban war, and extremely valuable for comparative assessment of recent battles in Ukraine.
