From Leningrad to Narva: An Illustrated Study of the Battles in the Northern Baltic Area, January-September 1944

Regardless of the publisher & horizontal format, this is NOT a picture book. There are a few full page pics of medium quality & lots of smaller images, but there is about an equal amount of text giving a basic overview of the 9 month struggle in northern Russia/Estonia 1944. Printed well on good paper.

Refreshing from the perspective of being put together by a non-Balt, non-Russian this synopsis provides a neat view of some of the battle for Leningrad and the subsequent german retreat into Estonia. Quite a jab at estonian historian/politician Mart Laar. Tells the truth about the german command providing the estonians and latvians with inferior weapons, logistics than supplied to german soldiers.

I was keenly anticipating this book because the author Nevenkin had produced the seminal, super detailed work Fire brigades. Sadly, This book falls far short of that mark.It tells the whole story of the battles around Leningrad, Volkhov and Narva, and from 1941 to 44. But it only tells this in very broad overview. We don't get any good detail, mostly just names of places and the dates they fell. It's bare bones, there's no meat to the story. For a subject that's spread over 100s of km, There are no maps, none, nada. This is a criminal mistake and shoddy production. I know the subject area quite well, so I could mentally fit together some places mentioned, but it won't make sense to anyone who hasn't already got this geographical knowledge. And there were plenty of places I'd never heard of, so had to just guess at their significance.There's much more detail in Newton's, Tiekes and Buttar's books, so it's this books photos that are it's selling point. Their captions though, are pretty pathetic. One quick sentence that briefly identifies the subject, but offers no detail about unusual features, missing lots of opportunities to expand the info. Some captions are just repeated verbatim, some are mislabelled, some are plain wrong. They are all brief and largely dull: "german siege gun destroyed by Russian artillery", but what type of siege gun? Which unit? The gun in the picture is a rare, interesting, large calibre piece, only used by a handful of units in the war. So identify the gun, then a bit of research into artillery units present in that area, and that should reveal its type and owners. But he couldn't be bothered. Most of the captions feel like "he couldn't be bothered" . And so on..The pictures themselves are a mixture, some new ones are very interesting and some are dull fillers eg shots of men getting medals, when nothing in the text tells us what action they got the medal for, and men from units that are never mentioned in the texts.So basically this book just gives me a few new interesting images with hopeless captions, and a wiki style potted history that tells me less than I already knew. And for someone with no previous knowledge of these battles, you'll get a confusing map-less account with no details.AVOID

Waited for this book for quite a while as not much available on this subject.Unfortunately not up to Mr Newtons Retreat from Leningrad, There is some nicebits & good photos to commend it , 4 stars for the photos , Still waiting?

Super