Red Phoenix Rising : The Soviet Air Force in World War II

"Sales/posting to the USA suspended." Hard cover dust wrapper, xix/428pp, b&w photos, maps. Light wear to edges of dw/boards, top free corners of boards very lightly bumped; a near fine copy. The original version of this book, Red Phoenix, was hailed by the Washington Post as both "brilliant" and "monumental." That version has now been completely overhauled in the wake of an avalanche of declassified Russian archival sources, combat documents, and statistical information made available in the past three decades. The result, Red Phoenix Rising, is definitive. The saga of the Soviet air force, one of the least chronicled aspects of the war, marked a transition from near annihilation in 1941 to the world's largest operational-tactical air force four years later. Von Hardesty and Ilya Grinberg reveal the dynamic changes in tactics and operational art that allowed the VVS (Soviet Air Forces) to bring about that remarkable transformation. Drawing upon a wider array of primary sources, well beyond the uncritical and ultra-patriotic Soviet memoirs underpinning the original version, this volume corrects, updates, and amplifies its predecessor. In the process, it challenges many "official" accounts and revises misconceptions promoted by scholars who relied heavily on German sources, thus enlarging understanding of the campaigns fought on the Eastern Front. The authors describe the air campaigns as they unfolded, with full chapters devoted to the victories at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. By combining the deeply affecting human drama of pilots, relentlessly confronted by lethal threats in the air and on the ground, with a rich technical understanding of military machines, they have produced a fast-paced, riveting look at the air war on the Eastern Front.…