A Russian historian recounts the legendary Soviet defense of Brest against Nazi invasion in this lively and authoritative WWII chronicle. On June 22nd, 1941, Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa began with the Nazi attack on the Soviet frontier fortress of Brest. Across a massive front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the German forces advanced, taking the Red Army by surprise and brushing aside the first stunned defenses. But the isolated stronghold of Brest held out. The defenders, trapped and without hope of relief, put up a tenacious resistance against an entire Wehrmacht division as the Soviet front collapsed behind them. The heroic defense of Brest has become one of the legends of the Second World War on the Eastern Front, an example of selfless Soviet heroism in the face of Nazi aggression. Rostislav Aliev describes the fighting, hour by hour, in vivid detail. In the process, he strips away the myths and exaggerations that have grown up around this famous story. Using eyewitness testimony and extensive research, Aliev reconstructs each stage of the siege. From the shock of the initial artillery barrage, he describes the defenders’ chaotic struggle to organize resistance, their doomed counter-attacks, the continuous pounding of German guns and bombs, the grim fate of the Soviet survivors, and the extraordinary resistance of small groups of soldiers operating in the underground passages of the shattered fortress.
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
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.
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.
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 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 summer of 1941, as the Germans invade Russia, newspaper reporter Vasily Grossman is swept to the frontlines, witnessing some of the most savage atrocities in Russian history. As Grossman follows the Red Army from the defence of Moscow, to the carnage at Stalingrad, to the Nazi genocide in Treblinka, his writings paint a vividly raw and devastating account of Operation Barbarossa during World War Two. Grossman’s notebooks, war diaries, personal correspondence and newspaper articles are meticulously woven into a gripping narrative and provide a piercing look into the life of the author behind recent Sunday Times bestseller Stalingrad. A Writer at War stands as an unforgettable eyewitness account of the Eastern Front and places Grossman as the leading Soviet voice of ‘the ruthless truth of war’. ‘A remarkable addition to the literature of 1941 – 1945...a wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia... A worthy memorial to a remarkable man’ Sunday Telegraph
With Hitler's invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941, the Eastern front opened and politicians and generals around the world predicted the swift destruction of the Soviet armies. Nazi Germany threw its might against Russia: 5,000,000 men took part in the blitz attack along the Russian frontier. From interviews and primary evidence, much of it never previously published, unfolds the story of the Eastern Front, interweaving accounts of the men and women who served with the progress of the war itself. A tale of unbelievable heroism.
Historians consider the Battle of Rzhev "one of the bloodiest in the history of the Great Patriotic War" and "Zhukov's greatest defeat". Veterans called this colossal battle, which continued for a total of 15 months, "the Rzhev slaughterhouse" or "the Massacre", while the German generals named this city "the cornerstone of the Eastern Front" and "the gateway to Berlin". By their territorial scale, number of participating troops, length and casualties, the military operations in the area of the Rzhev - Viaz'ma salient are not only comparable to the Stalingrad battle, but to a great extent surpass it. The total losses of the Red Army around Rzhev amounted to 2,000,000 men; the Wehrmacht's total losses are still unknown precisely to the present day. Why was one of the greatest battles of the Second World War consigned to oblivion in the Soviet Union? Why were the forces of the German Army Group Center in the Rzhev - Viaz'ma salient not encircled and destroyed? Whose fault is it that the German forces were able to withdraw from a pocket that was never fully sealed? Indeed, are there justifications for blaming this "lost victory" on G.K. Zhukov? In this book, which has been recognized in Russia as one of the best domestic studies of the Rzhev battle, answers to all these questions have been given. The author, Svetlana Gerasimova, has lived and worked amidst the still extant signs of this colossal battle, the tens of thousands of unmarked graves and the now silent bunkers and pillboxes, and has dedicated herself to the study of its history. Svetlana Aleksandrovna Gerasimova is a historian and museum official. After graduating from Leningrad State University with a history degree, she worked in the Urals as a middle school history teacher, before moving to Tver, where she taught a number of courses in history and local history, and about museum work and leading excursions in the Tver' School of Culture. She earned her Ph.D. in history from Tver State University in 2002. For more than 20 years, S.A. Gerasimova has been working in the Tver' State Consolidated Museum, and is the creator and co-creator of a many displays and exhibits in the branches of the Museum, and in municipal and institutional museums of the Tver' Oblast. Recent museum exhibits that she has created include "The Battle of Rzhev 1942-1943" and "The Fatal Forties … Toropets District in the Years of the Great Patriotic War." She has led approximately 20 historical and folklore-ethnographic expeditions in the area of Tver' Oblast and is the author of numerous articles in such journals as Voprosy istorii [Questions of History], Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv [Military History Archive], Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal [Journal of Military History] and Zhivaia starina [The Living Past], and of other publications. In 2009, she served as a featured consultant to a Russian NTV television documentary about the Battle of Rzhev, which quickly became controversial for its very frank discussion of the campaign. Stuart Britton is a freelance translator and editor residing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has been responsible for making a growing number of Russian titles available to readers of the English language, consisting primarily of memoirs by Red Army veterans and recent historical research concerning the Eastern Front of the Second World War and Soviet air operations in the Korean War. Notable recent titles include Valeriy Zamulin's award-winning 'Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943: An Operational Narrative ' (Helion, 2011), Boris Gorbachevsky's 'Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front 1942-45' (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Yuri Sutiagin's and Igor Seidov's 'MiG Menace Over Korea: The Story of Soviet Fighter Ace Nikolai Sutiagin' (Pen & Sword Aviation, 2009). Future books will include Svetlana Gerasimova's analysis of the prolonged and savage fighting against Army Group Center in 1942-43 to liberate the city of Rzhev, and more of Igor Seidov's studies of the Soviet side of the air war in Korea, 1951-1953.
