[1] Born in Port Chester, New York, Glantz received degrees in history from the Virginia Military Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Glantz had a career of more than 30 years in the U.S. Army, served in the Vietnam War, and retired as a colonel in 1993.
[2] Glantz was a Mark W. Clark visiting professor of History at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina.
[3] Glantz is known as a military historian of the Soviet role in World War II.
[5] Fellow historian Jonathan Haslam, in a review about his book on Operation Mars, criticized him for some of his stylistic choices, such as hypothetical thoughts and feelings of historical figures apart from references to documented sources.