David M. Glantz
Trivia Quiz

David M. Glantz is a retired United States Army Colonel and the foremost Western authority on the Eastern Front of World War II. Born on March 11, 1942, Glantz spent five decades systematically documenting the Soviet-German War — a conflict responsible for roughly 80 percent of German military casualties yet long distorted in Western historiography. His combination of military service and archival scholarship gave him a uniquely rigorous lens for understanding operations that shaped the modern world.

A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, Glantz served a distinguished career as a U.S. Army officer before transitioning into full-time historical research. Following the Cold War's end and the partial opening of Soviet military archives, he became one of the first Western historians to work directly with these records. He taught himself Russian to access primary sources without translation intermediaries — a capability that set his scholarship apart from virtually every peer of his generation.

Glantz has authored or co-authored more than 50 books, an output that dwarfs the careers of most academics. His landmark co-authored work with Jonathan House, 'When Titans Clashed' (1995), remains the definitive single-volume history of the Soviet-German War. Other major works include 'Colossus Reborn,' 'Stumbling Colossus,' 'Zhukov's Greatest Defeat,' and exhaustive multi-volume studies of Operation Barbarossa and the Siege of Leningrad, each drawing on thousands of pages of previously classified Soviet documents.

In 1988, Glantz founded the Journal of Slavic Military Studies and established the Biennial Symposium on the History of the Soviet Military, creating the institutional infrastructure for a new field of Western scholarship. These contributions were particularly significant because they predated the Soviet Union's collapse, positioning Glantz to lead the wave of archival research that became possible after 1991. His work influenced military doctrine, intelligence analysis, and graduate curricula at military colleges across the United States and Europe.

Glantz's most enduring contribution may be his exposure of battles that official Soviet historiography had suppressed or distorted. His book 'Zhukov's Greatest Defeat' revealed the catastrophic failure of Operation Mars at Rzhev in 1942 — a disaster personally commanded by Marshal Zhukov that Soviet records had deliberately obscured for decades. By insisting on documentary evidence over official narratives, Glantz permanently altered how historians, soldiers, and the public understand the conflict that decided World War II.