Choice Outstanding Academic Title A groundbreaking account of the
Soviet Air Force in World War II, 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 nothing less than 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 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 our
understanding of the brutal campaigns fought on the Eastern Front.
The authors describe the air campaigns as they unfolded, with full
chapters devoted to the monumental 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 complex military
machines, they have produced a fast-paced, riveting look at the air
war on the Eastern Front as it has never been seen before. They
also address dilemmas faced by the Soviet Air Force in the
immediate postwar era as it moved to adopt the new technology of
long-range bombers, jet propulsion and nuclear arms. Drawing
heavily upon individual accounts down to the unit level, Hardesty
and Grinberg greatly enhance our understanding of their story's
human dimension, while the book's more than 100 photos, many never
before seen in the West, vividly portray the high stakes and
hardware of this dramatic tale. In sum, this is the definitive
one-volume account of a vital but still underserved dimension of
the war—surpassing its predecessor so decisively that no fan of
that earlier work can afford to miss it.
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