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Rating: 
Summary: A lucky man's story
Review: Evgeni Bessonov served as a platoon and a company commander in the Red Army during WWII. He was posted in the 49th Mechanized Brigade of the 4th Tank Army. He served continuously in the brigade from the Orel offensive (August 1943) to the encirclement of Berlin in April 1945 when he was wounded. He was almost unbelievably lucky to survive since he served among a tank rider batallion, commanding men who rode to the battle on tanks of the vanguard of breakthrough advances. He took a part in five stragegic offensives and in each one his batallion lost at least 80% of its men. This book contains Bessonov's memoirs about the war, covering the time between his graduation from high school five days before the war started up to his transferral out of the brigade in Fall 1945. The text gives a very vivid picture of life (and death) in the spearhead of the Soviet offensive. As most of the books on the East Front of WWII have been written from the German perspective, this book is a valuable for giving the front-line perspective of the opposing side. Since this book was written almost 60 years after the events, it is possible that it contains factual mistakes due to faulty memory, as do most of such memoirs that are written without a support of a diary. In particular, I suspect that most of the ever-present German "Tiger" heavy tanks were actually misidentified Panzer IV medium tanks. However, such small shortcomings don't seriously devalue the book. In short: this book is a one-of-a-kind account of war among the Soviet 'tankodesantniki'.
Rating:
Summary: Honest memoirs from the other side of the hill
Review: Evgeni Bessonov took part in the Great patriotic War while he served in the 49h Mechanized Brigade of the 6th Mechanized Corps of the 4th Tank Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front (commanded by the dynamic Marshal Ivan Konev). In this book he recounts many of his wartime adventures, at least as far as his memory perimtted, because the writing was made many years after the war. Bessonov was a junior officer who commanded a platoon of 12 - 20 tank riders, the men who rode in battle on top of the Soviet tanks, mainly T-34s and later IS-2s. Although he saw much action and was wounded some times he was not lucky when it came to promotion and didn't manage to command his own company. Albeit he made the Army his carreer after the end of the war. The book is important because it presents the war from the view of a simple Soviet warrior and is particularly revealing regarding the strength of the Luftwaffe even late in 1944 (when according to history books German aircraft had been disappeared from the sky of the Eastern Front, but quite the contrary was true!) and of the qualities of the German soldiers, whom he regarded as tough, well trained, cunning and strong opponents, from whom one could expect anything, anytime. Bessonov started his wartime carreer in August 1943 and finished it just a week before the fall of Berlin, when he was seriously wounded fron an artillery shell. The book contains some good maps but many of the places mentioned are not to be found on them. I didn't also understand why the translator kept calling the artillery and mortar rounds as "mines" throughout the text.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Read
Review: I just finished reading this book and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. The author gives a fresh perspective of the fighting on the Eastern Front during WWII. The author was an infantry officer who "specialized' in riding on tanks into battle. He provides very detailed accounts of tank/infantry cooperation during urban battles (relevant if you are a soldier on the way to Iraq) and dispels the myth that the Soviet Army was a faceless mass that just steamrolled over the German Army. He changes the "face-less mass" belief. He shows the human side of the Soviet soldier and his many tales of life with his comrades shows they were not communist robots, but humans who loved, mourned and lost. Overall this book is worth every penny and worth reading. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Just an OK book
Review: This book's strength is that it is entirely credible. When the author says something, he has been there, done that, and you believe him. This book's weakness is just what the author says that it is: He is not a very good writer. In the early chapters he admits that writing has never been his forte. Nevertheless, this is head and shoulders above those ghost written books whose style reads like the authors served their time in the journalism brigade. I recently read With the Old Breed by Sledge which has all of the authenticity but the writing itself is far better. This book does not favorably compare. I have been waiting, incidentally, for the definitive Russian history of WWII now that the USSR has fallen and we could get something besides Soviet propaganda. This is a step in that direction. Time is running out in that the veterans are aging rapidly. One hopes that some qualified person is out there digging, interviewing and recording before the heroism of the soldiers of the Red Army is lost to history.
Rating:
Summary: Just an OK book
Review: This book's strength is that it is entirely credible. When the author says something, he has been there, done that, and you believe him. This book's weakness is just what the author says that it is: He is not a very good writer. In the early chapters he admits that writing has never been his forte. Nevertheless, this is head and shoulders above those ghost written books whose style reads like the authors served their time in the journalism brigade. I recently read With the Old Breed by Sledge which has all of the authenticity but the writing itself is far better. This book does not favorably compare. I have been waiting, incidentally, for the definitive Russian history of WWII now that the USSR has fallen and we could get something besides Soviet propaganda. This is a step in that direction. Time is running out in that the veterans are aging rapidly. One hopes that some qualified person is out there digging, interviewing and recording before the heroism of the soldiers of the Red Army is lost to history.
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