a favorable light, while a memorandum from a staff officer is more likely to
provide the most accurate information given to the commander. Public
pronouncements by political leaders rarely indicate the true beliefs of the
speaker, while transcripts or private minutes of meetings more often reflect the
actual opinions of the participants.

An authorized lie can survive despite the existence of contradictory fact.
As a youth in the 1930s, I heard a widely circulated story of the German worker
employed in a factory supposedly making parts for baby carriages before Hitler
openly renounced arms limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. The
worker's wife was pregnant and being a clever lad, the worker decided to steal
parts and assemble a carriage for the expected baby. With great cunning, he
was able to steal examples of every part made by the factory, but every time he
tried to assemble a baby carriage, it turned out to be a machine gun. The story
remains with me not only because it satirized the thinly veiled German violations
of the treaty but also because it revealed that no matter how deceptive the
camouflage, if one assembles the facts, the truth will emerge; and the challenge
is to recognize the truth despite the authorized lies. Unfortunately, even the
factory worker believed that he was still making parts for baby carriages.

In any study of a battle, one of the first priorities is to determine who
participated. The previous dearth of information concerning the Red Army has
been alleviated by the release of some information. Details concerning the
orders of battle of the Red Army and the German Army have been compiled by
the author over the past forty years--the former in a computer database and the
latter in more conventional hard copy. To document each mention of a Soviet
or German unit would have resulted in at least 200 additional pages of footnotes
of limited interest to most readers. The Soviet order of battle information came
from German intelligence records based on information from spies, prisoners of
war, intercepts of radio transmissions by units, Soviet publications and
broadcasts, and captured documents. This material was combined in a computer
database with the published Soviet order of battle data. When the German
information was compared to the Soviet data, remarkably few irregularities
surfaced. Reinhard Gehlen, the chief of the Fremde Heer Ost (Foreign Armies
East) used the data during World War II to develop forecasts of Russian inten-
tions and potential strength, presenting conclusions that were often ignored. The
German order of battle information came from hundreds of published sources,
the most notable the series by Georg Tessin. ¹

Many individuals deserve recognition for contributions in completing this
work. The consultations with Colonel David Glantz and Robert Volz were
invaluable. William H. Robins, a fellow student at Durham University, read the
manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. James VanDe Bogert, Calvin
Wittmus, David McNamara, David Schmidt, and many others provided informa-
tion, support, and encouragement.

No scholarly work could succeed without resources. The librarians of the
Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin were unstinting in their

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