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...Stalin arrived at eight o'clock. Novikov reported to him that two aircraft were ready for immediate take-off. One would be piloted by Colonel-General Golovanov, the other by Colonel Grachov... Novikov invited the Supreme Commander to fly in Golovanov's plane. Stalin appeared, at first, to accept the invitation, but after taking a few paces, suddenly stopped. "Colonel-Generals don't do much flying," he said. "We had better go with the colonel." He turned in Grachov's direction. Molotov and Voroshilov followed him. "Shtemenko will fly with us, too, and keep us informed about the situation on the way," Stalin said as he mounted the ramp. I did not keep him waiting. About the authorSergei Shtemenko was born in 1907 in the Cossack village of Uryupinskaya (now the town of Uryupinsk) on the River Khopyur, a tributary of the Don. His nationality is Russian. On finishing secondary school in 1926, he entered an artillery-training establishment, which launched him on his long career in the Army. After finishing the Red Army Mechanization and Motorization Academy in 1937 Shtemenko completed the General Staff Academy, and in 1940 he began his many years of service on the General Staff. During the war, as Chief of the Operations Department and Deputy Chief of the General Staff, he was directly involved in planning operations and campaigns and frequently visited the front to supervise their execution. From 1948 to 1952, Shtemenko served as Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR. Between 1953 and 1962 he held leading posts in a number of military districts and was Chief of Staff of Land Forces. He is now Chief of Staff of the Joint Armed Forces of the Countries of the Warsaw Pact. He holds the rank of General of the Army and has been awarded many Soviet and foreign decorations.… (more)
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The middle three quarters of the book are an excellent recounting of the war from the Soviet perspective. However, to reach that point you first have to traverse the opening chapters which recount history as seen through a heavy reality distortion field. For instance, after Hitler invades Poland, the Soviet Army rushes in to liberate western Byelorussia and the western Ukraine to protect them from Hitler. You remember those regions don't you. No? Well they were commonly referred to as eastern Poland. No mention is made of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and he glosses over the Finnish-Soviet "Winter" War launched by Stalin.
The disaster of the first year of war is hardly discussed at all. Partly this is because Shtemenko was just a junior staff officer at the time. His reminiscences of this period mostly focus on life of the junior staff and what it was like to live and work in the Soviet subway system. Of course, it is also difficult to portray the Soviet General Staff in a good light during this time. The army was teetering on collapse. Mistake after mistake was being made. Lives where thrown away in futile attempts to halt the progress of the German army.
The end also suffers from heavy handed propaganda. Since the book was written in 1970, the book takes every opportunity to present Americans as incompetent barbarians who resorted to the atomic bomb against Japan because they didn't know how to properly use tank armies. Of course he doesn't mention how you defeat a navy with tanks, or how you get a massive tank army onto some place like Iwo Jima. It's a clever bit of misdirection which almost certainly made his Soviet readers nod in agreement. He ignores the issue of how you would launch the sort of massive amphibious operation it would take to defeat Japan. This is almost funny when you consider how their only experiences with amphibious assaults were mostly bungled affairs.
Shtemenko can't really be faulted for his selective memory and obvious biases. This is a personal memoir. It isn't intended as a comprehensive and unbiased history of the war. It must be read as one man's vision of the war as seen from his own personal perspective. Taken in that light, the book is a gripping insider's view of how you go about controlling a military machine as massive as the Red Army. It's a wonderful source book for historians, both professional and amateur. Far from being limited in its value by its obvious flaws, the book is important exactly for those flaws. It casts a light not only on the history of the era, but on the distorting lens with which it is viewed inside the former Soviet Union.
If you are a military history buff, particularly one who is interested in the Soviet-German war, I would highly recommend Shtemenko's "The Soviet General Staff at War."