East front WW2 books

[Sgt Barker]

A case in point is Prokhorovka. For decades the Soviets put out that it was a tremendous tank battle that they won. Killing hundreds of Tigers and Panther tanks and breaking the back of German tank forces. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Good point. My interest in the east front started in the 60s as a kid, and it took me years to realize that what I read was 1) not in the source language 2) written mostly by people who had an ax to grind and 3) was published in countries that were currently in a state of (cold) war with each other. Kind of shot my faith that anything I read was accurate.

With age and school came a bit of wisdom though, namely that there are primary sources out there, and that not everyone is a partisan and some even strive to be objective. Maybe that's why wargames appealed - if you can just recreate the facts (terrain, weather, forces... granted by no means always factually available but somewhere there *are* facts about all of them) then we can argue later about what it "meant."

With the decades passing and the fall of the USSR IMO both sides records attained more accuracy. More primary sources open up. As well, time passing means that there are simply more eyes on it, so analysis, the "but does it make sense?" part is greater. Yeah, some wargames are a joke when it comes to trustworthiness on facts. But in the case of HPS (the only one's I'm really following anymore), they say they are using the best raw data out there rather than secondary sources (or sceonday sources that are accepted translations of raw data).