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If you read and want factual then read...Move over Beevor, make soom room for Jones!

Article about: Having just seen the thread that relates to the books of Beevor I thought that I would shine the light on another author who I think should be widely read. Don't get me wrong, I like the boo

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    Default If you read and want factual then read...Move over Beevor, make some room for Jones!

    Having just seen the thread that relates to the books of Beevor I thought that I would shine the light on another author who I think should be widely read. Don't get me wrong, I like the books of Mr Beevor but I would put the works of Michael Jones (or Michael K Jones in some references) above his as being better researched. They are very absorbing and do a good job of busting some myths, such as his book Stalingrad and the myths of Pavlov's House & Zeitsev (with Beevor buying into the Zeitsev myth). In the former for instance Michael Jones shows that far from a small garrison of 24 as has been reported elsewhere the fortification sometimes held up to 100 men and was led by officers while Pavlov was a NCO, but the smaller number sounded better from a propaganda perspective. What I particularly like about Jones's work is that there are plenty of first hand accounts from all sides interspersed in the narrative.

    Another book that I would rate as one of the best that I have read is Jones's Leningrad: State Of Siege which not only covers the fighting outside the city but also covers the day to day lives within the city and how the city officials were living a healthy life while the citizens were resorting to any measure to survive. What particularly stuck in my mind with this book is at the beginning there is a meeting between some German veterans of the siege and a Russian who asks them how could they of done it, knowing that they were starving people to death inside the cauldron. With the first hand accounts from those living in the city you get a haunting sense of what they had to endure.

    His latest book, After Hitler, deals with the European conflict in the days after Hitler's death. While this book does cover the fighting from the British drive to cut the Russians off from Denmark to the fighting after the surrender in Czechoslovakia, more so than his other works this does delve more into the political arena both at the Army HQ level and Supreme Leaders levels. Until I read this book I never realised just how drawn out the surrender agreement was with the stage managed signing at Lüneburg Heath being treated more as an armistice by the Dönitz Government while the signing at Rheims angered the Russians as they only had a low ranking representative present instead of Zhukov and wanted the official surrender signed in Berlin. It also covers how the Dönitz Government tried to use any chance to play one side off against the other to further its own political agenda.

    His books on World War II are:
    Stalingrad
    Leningrad: State of Siege
    The Retreat: Hitler's First Defeat
    Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin
    After Hitler: The Last Days of the Second World War in Europe
    Last edited by hucks216; 05-17-2015 at 05:44 PM.

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