The Retreat - Hardcover

'A mass of first-person material that has been cleverly assembled to paint a striking picture' * BBC History Magazine * 'Jones deserves full credit for the remarkable personal testimonies he has amassed' * Max Hastings, Sunday Times * 'A gripping account of the opening stages of Hitler's war of extermination against the Russians. Michael Jones shows how the Wehrmacht nearly captured Moscow, which would have won the Second World War for the Nazis, and why they were eventually flung back at the cost of over 900,000 casualties. In many ways this was even more of a fulcrum moment of the war than the battle of Stalingrad, and Jones tells the story of the struggle with verve and scholarship' * Andrew Roberts *

At the moment of crisis in 1941 on the Eastern front, with the forces of Hitler massing on the outskirts of Moscow, the miraculous occurred: Moscow was saved. Yet this turning point was followed by a long retreat, in which Russian forces, inspired by old beliefs in the sacred motherland, pushed back German forces steeled by the vision of the ubermensch, the iron-willed fighter. Many of Russia's 27 million military and civilian deaths occurred in this desperate struggle. In THE RETREAT, Michael Jones, acclaimed author of LENINGRAD, draws upon a mass of new eye-witness testimony from both sides of the conflict to tell, with matchless vividness and comprehensiveness, of the crucial turning point of the Second World War - the moment when the armies of Hitler could go no further - and of the titanic and cruel struggle of two mighty empires.