John Erickson

Who was John Erickson?

John Erickson was a British historian who wrote extensively on the Second World War. His two most well-known books – The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin – dealt with the Soviet response to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, covering the period from 1941 to 1945.

Erickson was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the British Academy; he later gave a considerable amount of on-screen opinion to the Battlefield series, in programmes dealing with the Eastern Front and armoured warfare and appeared in subsequent documentaries.

He was Professor Emeritus and Honorary Fellow in Defence Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His wife, Ljubica Erickson, spent many years with her husband researching Russian military affairs, in particular the Soviet Army and the Soviet-German war.