On 22 June 1941, the first German shells smashed into the Soviet frontier fortress of Brest—Hitler's Operation Barbarossa had begun. As the Wehrmacht advanced, taking the Red Army by surprise, the isolated stronghold of Brest held out in one of World War II's most legendary defenses. This graphic account chronicles the siege of Brest during the opening days of Operation Barbarossa. • Detailed, hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fighting, based on new archival research and eyewitness testimony • Describes how the Red Army garrison held out against a German division • Dispels the myths surrounding this remarkable story
One of the prime objectives for the Allies following the D-Day landings was the capture of sufficient ports to supply their armies. The original Overlord plans assumed that ports along the Breton coast would be essential to expansion of the Normandy beach-head. This included the major ports at Brest and on Quiberon Bay. The newly arrived Third US Army (TUSA) under Lt. Gen. George S. Patton was delegated to take on the Brittany mission. In one of the most rapid mechanized advances of the war, TUSA had the ports of Avranches and Quiberon encircled by the second week of August 1944. But changing priorities meant that most of TUSA was redeployed, meaning only a single corps was left to take the Breton port cities. The fight would drag into 1945, long after German field armies had been driven from France. Using full colour maps and artwork as well as contemporary accounts and photographs, Brittany 1944 is the fascinating story of the siege of Germany's last bastions on the French Atlantic coast.
The Great Patriotic War began on 22 June 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Over 10 million Soviet soldiers took part in the war and of those about 12,600 earned the Soviet Union's highest military award the Hero of the Soviet Union for deeds of great daring and self sacrifice. This book covers the male recipients of the Hero of the Soviet Union award during the Great Patriotic War. Snipers, fighter pilots, partisans and spies are all included, together with the famous aces Pokryshkin and Kozhedub, who both gained the award an amazing three times.
Sunday, June 22, 1941: three million German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union as part of Hitler’s long-planned Operation Barbarossa, which aimed to destroy the Soviet Union, secure its land as lebensraum for the Third Reich, and enslave its Slavic population. From launching points in newly acquired Poland, in three prongs—North, Central, South—German forces stormed western Russia, virtually from the Baltic to the Black Sea. By late fall, the invasion had foundered against Russian weather, terrain, and resistance, and by December, it had failed at the gates of Moscow, but early on, as the Germans sliced through Russian territory and soldiers with impunity, capturing hundreds of thousands, it seemed as though Russia would fall. In the spirit of Martin Middlebrook’s classic First Day on the Somme, Craig Luther narrates the events of June 22, 1941, a day when German military might was at its peak and seemed as though it would easily conquer the Soviet Union, a day the common soldiers would remember for its tension and the frogs bellowing in the Polish marshlands. It was a day when the German blitzkrieg decimated Soviet command and control within hours and seemed like nothing would stop it from taking Moscow. Luther narrates June 22—one of the pivotal days of World War II—from high command down to the tanks and soldiers at the sharp end, covering strategy as well as tactics and the vivid personal stories of the men who crossed the border into the Soviet Union that fateful day, which is the Eastern Front in microcosm, representing the years of industrial-scale warfare that followed and the unremitting hostility of Germans and Soviets.
In the spring of 1941, having abandoned his plans to invade Great Britain, Hitler turned the might of his military forces on to Stalin's Soviet Russia. The German army quickly advanced far into Russian territory as the Soviet forces suffered defeat after defeat. With brutality and savagery displayed on both sides, the Eastern front was a campaign in which no quarter was given. Although Hitler's decision to launch 'Barbarossa' was one of the crucial turning points of the war, at first the early successes of the German army pointed to the continuing triumph of the Nazi state. As time wore on, however, the Eastern front became a byword for death for the Germans. In War Without Garlands, Robert Kershaw examines the campaign largely through the eyes of the German forces who were sent to fight and die for Hitler's grandiose plans. He draws on German war diaries, post-combat reports and secret SS files. This original material, much of which has never before been published in English, sheds new light on operation 'Barbarossa', including the extent to which the German soldiers were genuinely surprised at the decision to attack Russia, given the well-publicised non-aggression pact. Barbarossa was a brutal, ideologically driven campaign which decided the outcome of World War II. This seminal account will be required reading for all historians of World War II and all those interested in the course of the war.
The first half of a two-part study on Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s plan to invade Soviet Russia during World War II, and what went wrong. At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German Army Group Center’s Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Hitler and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the Soviet capital. Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht’s massive invasion of the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat its Communist ruler, Josef Stalin. Between 22 June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500 kilometers into Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, by doing so satisfying the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safely behind those two rivers. With the Red Army now shattered, Hitler and most Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks. The ensuing battles in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. Once across the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, a surprised Wehrmacht encountered five fresh Soviet armies. Quick victory eluded the Germans. Instead, Soviet forces encircled in Mogilev and Smolensk stubbornly refused to surrender, and while they fought on, during July, August, and into early September, first five and then a total of seven newly mobilized Soviet armies struck back viciously at the advancing Germans, conducting multiple counterattacks and counterstrokes, capped by two major counteroffensives that sapped German strength and will. Despite immense losses in men and materiel, these desperate Soviet actions derailed Operation Barbarossa. Smarting from countless wounds inflicted on his vaunted Wehrmacht, even before the fighting ended in the Smolensk region, Hitler postponed his march on Moscow and instead turned his forces southward to engage “softer targets” in the Kiev region. The “derailment” of the Wehrmacht at Smolensk ultimately became the crucial turning point in Operation Barbarossa. This groundbreaking study, now significantly expanded, exploits a wealth of Soviet and German archival materials, including the combat orders and operational of the German OKW, OKH, army groups, and armies and of the Soviet Stavka, the Red Army General Staff, the Western Main Direction Command, the Western, Central, Reserve, and Briansk Fronts, and their subordinate armies to present a detailed mosaic and definitive account of what took place, why, and how during the prolonged and complex battles in the Smolensk region from 10 July through 10 September 1941. The structure of the study is designed specifically to appeal to both general readers and specialists by a detailed two-volume chronological narrative of the course of operations, accompanied by a third volume and a fourth, containing archival maps and an extensive collection of specific orders and reports translated verbatim from Russian. The maps, archival and archival-based, detail every stage of the battle.
During the first few weeks of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Heinz Guderian's Second Panzer Group played a leading role, cutting through the defenses on the border, then taking part in the massive encirclement battles near Minsk, Smolensk, and Kiev. The extraordinary speed of the advance reflects the experience of the Wehrmacht as a whole during the first phase of the war on the Eastern Front. That is why David Higgins’s graphic narrative, which describes how Guderian’s forces achieved enormous success before they were forced to halt, is such compelling reading. It is a fascinating story, vividly told. Drawing on a wide range of official German and Soviet records, he reconstructs the entire course of Second Panzer Group's advance, covering each stage in unprecedented detail. His narrative offers a German perspective and an inside view of what the opposing commanders knew during each operation and shows how important logistics became as the German supply lines stretched deep into the Soviet Union. It also explains how Soviet resistance and reinforcements, declining strength and the onset of the Russian winter combined to bring Guderian to a stop at Tula where he was relieved of his command. The high hopes with which the German army had launched the campaign were dashed only a few months later before Moscow. This in-depth study the of operations of Second Panzer Group gives the reader a telling insight into what went wrong.
A masterful and comprehensive chronicle of World War II, by internationally bestselling historian Antony Beevor. Over the past two decades, Antony Beevor has established himself as one of the world's premier historians of WWII. His multi-award winning books have included Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945. Now, in his newest and most ambitious book, he turns his focus to one of the bloodiest and most tragic events of the twentieth century, the Second World War. In this searing narrative that takes us from Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 to V-J day on August 14, 1945 and the war's aftermath, Beevor describes the conflict and its global reach -- one that included every major power. The result is a dramatic and breathtaking single-volume history that provides a remarkably intimate account of the war that, more than any other, still commands attention and an audience. Thrillingly written and brilliantly researched, Beevor's grand and provocative account is destined to become the definitive work on this complex, tragic, and endlessly fascinating period in world history, and confirms once more that he is a military historian of the first rank.
