Stalingrad — Antony Beevor

Beevor's account of the battle of Stalingrad — the largest and most destructive single engagement in the history of warfare — draws on Soviet and German archives to reconstruct not just the operational history but the experience of the men who fought it. The book is unsparing about the conditions — the starvation, the cold, the systematic cruelty — and equally direct about the command decisions on both sides that condemned hundreds of thousands of soldiers to death.