New David Glantz book being released!

[krichter33]

David Glantz has a brand new book coming out called, "The Battle for Belorussia."

http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Belorussia ... ess+kansas

[Jeff Leach]

About a year ago Mr. Glantz told me he was working on a 'updated, and more detailed versions of the three Art of War Symposium'. I suspect this is the first volume of the series. If it is so the volume probably deals with a number of important operations in the period Summer 1943 - Summer 1944 and not a history of the third year of the war on the Eastern Front. Kind of like his book From the "Don to the Dnepr: Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942 - August 1943."

Upon rereading the discription of the book it sounds like the book only cover the Soviet first attempt to recapture Belorussia. It is still most probably an update of some of the material covered in '1985 Art of War Symposium : from the Dnepr to the Vistula, Soviet offensive operations, November 1943 - August 1944' and 'Forgotten Battles of the Russian-German War' volumes 5 and 6. One or two years to research, write and get published a book about these series of operations seems way too short amount of time if the author is doing new research with primary source material. The best to hope for is something similar to the Smolensk book: Soviet documents linked by some explanatory text and the German side of things based on secondary sources.

This isn't a critism of Mr. Glantz' work (he has done more than any single person to advance a more accurate history of the War on the Eastern Front)), which is an essential research tool - The Soviet side of things for the first time in English.

[Mori]

One or two years to research, write and get published a book about these series of operations seems way too short amount of time if the author is doing new research with primary source material. The best to hope for is something similar to the Smolensk book: Soviet documents linked by some explanatory text and the German side of things based on secondary sources.

From my experience, 2 years to publish such a book is doable - but it depends on the scale you choose and whether you have a top down structure.

First paramater is the scale you pick. Writing on a military campaign at platoon or army group level leads to different sources and different amount of work. Also, if the campaign involves 200 divisions, it's probably moot to aim at a book at divisional level - as no reader would be able to follow.

Researching original material depends on your accumulated knowledge of the archives, on what you have off-the-shelf, and on what extra you need to get . Glantz is certainly an expert for all that, and even if he were not, the time it'd take in the archives proper would be 10-30 man-days, which is 2-6 weeks of time. Getting secondary material may be the same order of magnitude, maybe a bit less.

Reading/processing the material again depends on your experience, but also whether you have an analytical framework to sort what you need from what is useless. Many of the documents are repetitive in nature, and if you don't have any problem reading German and Russian, it should take from 2 to 6 months.

You would of course write and read more or less at the same time. Once you've read all the material on, say, September 1943, you have enough to write the corresponding chapter. The chapter after then comes quickly as its "initial situation" is what you had at the end of the chapter before.

Again, speed of writing depends on experience, structure, and... on amount of primary material you wish to quote. Glantz has sometimes filled hundreds of pages with quotes of documents - a very quick way to "write".

Making maps depends whether you do them alone or can get some expert help. In the later case, you work parallel (author makes a draft, graphist produces it). Depending on what you wish, you can do 5-10 maps per week. A typical book of military history would have 10 to 30 maps, and you should be done in less than a month.

Therefore, if the topic at hand is something you're familiar with, I believe you can get the manuscript ready in 12 months, which makes the printed book available in 14 months. If you are less at ease with the topic, and/or if there are extra complexities (e.g., more than 2 nations and therefore more than 2 sets of sources - think of the Allied army in N-W Europe ; naval or air topics requiring in depth investigations ; political history etc.), you could get the job done in 18-20 months, ie publishing in ca. 2 years after beginning.