Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis, and Military Simulation, Volume I (1) (Operation Barbarossa by Nigel Askey)

Product Description

In June 1941 the German Wehrmacht launched Operation Barbarossa: the attack on the USSR and the largest land invasion in recorded history. The titanic battles that followed led to the greatest loss of life ever experienced in a military campaign. Since the end of WWII there has been intense discourse about the key operational and strategic decisions made by the German and Soviet high commands on the East-Front, especially during the critical period from July to September 1941.
Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis, and Military Simulation focuses on 1941 – when the USSR came closest to defeat. It includes full analyses of the belligerents’ armed forces, weapons, equipment, personnel, transport, logistics, war-production, mobilisation and replacements. Uniquely, the work formalises a sophisticated military simulation methodology extending from the tactical to the strategic level, and applies this methodology to each of the belligerents. Volume I, the first of six volumes, is primarily concerned with the structure of this methodology, but uses many of the events and weapons from Operation Barbarossa as illustrative case studies. The complete work represents the most historically accurate, advanced and comprehensive quantitative analysis yet, of the 1941 campaign on the East-Front.
Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis, and Military Simulation is the culmination of over ten years of research and collation. It brings together an immense amount of information from many published and unpublished sources, and presents it with contextual history and analyses. The professional researcher or amateur scholar of WWII is provided with a comprehensive data source, containing the details of all the armed forces involved on the East-Front during 1941, as well as the relevant economic and logistical support. Currently no other single work provides a comparable reference of the actual Soviet and Axis land, air and naval forces involved in what was the most decisive and destructive campaign of WWII.
 

Review

As a professional military historian with a special interest in the Eastern Front in WW2, I have spent decades researching and writing about Adolf Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. In all these years, however, I have never found a published source on the topic more unique, provocative and insightful than Nigel Askey’s series of books entitled: Operation Barbarossa: The Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis, and Military Simulation. These books represent the culmination of the author’s many years of intense and comprehensive research into published and unpublished source materials (German, Soviet, and Russian) addressing the Barbarossa campaign (June-December 1941) in virtually all its aspects. Only in these books will one find the most exquisitely detailed orders of battle hitherto published, as well as voluminous data on topics ranging from war production, mobilization, and logistics to the effectiveness of land, air, and sea weaponry of both belligerents. Just as significant, Askey’s ground-breaking work formalizes perhaps the most sophisticated military simulation methodology yet conceived, embracing a full range of tactical, operational, and strategic simulations. These volumes are so valuable at so many levels: the war gamer, serious military historian, and military history “buff” will discover in them, time and again, data and insights pertaining to Operation Barbarossa that won’t be found in toto in any other single published source material. I could not recommend them more highly. (Dr. Craig W.H. Luther, author of Barbarossa Unleased and The First Day on the Eastern Front)

“Special thanks to Nigel Askey for his exceptional research work on the ‘Operation Barbarossa – the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis, and Military Simulation’ series of books”. ‘War in the East 2’ manual c