German soldiers were genuinely surprised to be informed they were invading Russia because of the well-publicised non-aggression pact between the two nations. This book covers the pitiless campaign that resulted, viewing it almost entirely through the eyes of ordinary soldiers and junior officers. Extensive use is made of diaries, letters and oral accounts previously unpublished in English, including secret SS Files that monitored rumours and reactions from the German Home Front throughout these events.

The Russian soldier’s refusal to surrender and fight to the death, despite being out manoeuvred or surrounded was to break the temp of German Blitzkrieg in Europe for the first time. Spectacular German victories in the early heady days when it was rumoured at home that paratroopers had landed in Moscow proved to be Pyrric. German fighting power was degraded by appalling casualties as early as the high point at Smolensk in September 1941. The Wehrmacht had to pause to regain operational tempo for its mobile forces. Despite the Soviet catastrophe at Kiev in the Ukraine and in the autumn battles in the mud before Moscow when whole Russian armies were removed from the Soviet order of battle, the German Army had ‘victored itself to death’. The final German assault in the winter of 1941 was as reckless as it was unsustainable.

War Without Garlands was ‘kein Blumenkrieg’ as the German soldiers called it. No longer were returning German soldiers feted by garlands of flowers tossed by an adoring public as had happened after the fall of France in 1940. It soon became the longest and costliest campaign to date in the war.

The book reveals the extent to which a Christian army manned by ostensibly ‘decent’ soldiers became accomplices to savage ethnic cleansing directed against the so-called Untermensch or ‘sub-human’ Russian civilian population, Jews and prisoners of war. Soviet atrocities were meted out in return and these controversial actions are objectively examined from the perspective of victims on both sides.

The typical experience of the ordinary German and Russian soldier is chronicled and analysed during the summer and winter battles of 1941-2. The ‘seed-corn’ of the German Blitzkrieg experience perished during these battles, fundamentally altering the fabric and psyche of the Wehrmacht throughout the remainder of the war. The Germans always had misgivings about the onset of Russian winters after this campaign.

This is a frank appraisal of a brutal and pitiless conflict.