Osprey Battles and Histories : Ostfront : Hitler's War on Russia 1941-1945 (1998)

The Russian front was the decisive theatre of World War 2. Here the great mass of the German army and Luftwaffe were locked in battle with the Red Army in the largest land campaign in history. On a 1,200-mile front from the Arctic Circle to the Caspian Sea, in baking summer heat and winter temperatures of -40ºC, millions of men and women fought the most vital battle of the war. Had the Germans won in the East, a Nazi victory in World War 2 would have been almost inevitable. In 1941 the Germans suffered their first significant defeat at the gates of Moscow. Twelve months later their army was decisively defeated at Stalingrad. In April 1945 the Red Army stormed Berlin itself and ended the war in Europe. Hitler's flawed dream of conquest in the East brought about the end of the Thousand Year Reich, and all in little over a thousand days.

Contents

• Introduction
• Hitler and the Wehrmacht
• The Red Army
• To the Gates of Moscow
• Attack and Counter-attack
• Verdun on the Volga - Stalingrad
• The Correlation of Forces
• The Last Blitzkrieg
• The Writing on the Wall
• Prussian Roulette
• Goodbye to Berlin
• Notes
• Index
• Select Bibliography