In Retreat from Moscow, a bold, gripping account of one of the seminal moments of World War II, David Stahel argues that instead it was its first strategic success in the East. The Soviet counteroffensive was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. Despite being pushed back from Moscow, the Wehrmacht lost far fewer men, frustrated its enemy's strategy, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative.Hitler's strategic plan called for holding important Russian industrial cities, and the German army succeeded. The Soviets as of January 1942 aimed for nothing less than the destruction of Army Group Center, yet not a single German unit was ever destroyed. Lacking the professionalism, training, and experience of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army's offensive attempting to break German lines in countless head-on assaults led to far more tactical defeats than victories.Using accounts from journals, memoirs, and wartime correspondence, Stahel takes us directly into the Wolf's Lair to reveal a German command at war with itself as generals on the ground fought to maintain order and save their troops in the face of Hitler's capricious, increasingly irrational directives. Excerpts from soldiers' diaries and letters home paint a rich portrait of life and death on the front, where the men of the Ostheer battled frostbite nearly as deadly as Soviet artillery. With this latest installment of his pathbreaking series on the Eastern Front, David Stahel completes a military history of the highest order

    The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a million Leningraders had died of starvation.Anna Reid's Leningrad is a gripping, authoritative narrative history of this dramatic moment in the twentieth century, interwoven with indelible personal accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists on both sides. They reveal the Nazis' deliberate decision to starve Leningrad into surrender and Hitler's messianic miscalculation, the incompetence and cruelty of the Soviet war leadership, the horrors experienced by soldiers on the front lines, and, above all, the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the relentless search for food and water; the withering of emotions and family ties; looting, murder, and cannibalism- and at the same time, extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice.Stripping away decades of Soviet propaganda, and drawing on newly available diaries and government records, Leningrad also tackles a raft of unanswered questions: Was the size of the death toll as much the fault of Stalin as of Hitler? Why didn't the Germans capture the city? Why didn't it collapse into anarchy? What decided who lived and who died? Impressive in its originality and literary style, Leningrad gives voice to the dead and will rival Anthony Beevor's classic Stalingrad in its impact.

    It was fought over a territory the size of France. It cost the Russians as many casualties as the British lost in the whole of the World War I. And it marked the first strategic defeat the Wehrmacht had suffered in its hitherto unstoppable march across Europe. During the first half of 1941 Moscow and its people were living in a kind of peace in a world of war. In spite of the horrors of Stalinism many ordinary people managed to find their own ways of enjoying themselves, and when war surprised a country unprepared, thanks to Stalin's obduracy, most rose with enthusiasm to defend their country and their city. One of the points of the book is to try and show how people find a kind of normality even in the hardest of circumstances, in peace and in war. On the 22 June the Nazi armies invaded and raced across the country. By the end of the year they were held, finally, in the suburbs of Moscow (as it were on the A4 at Heathrow). Based on huge research and scores of interviews, this book offers an unforgettable and richly illustrated narrative of the military action; telling portraits of Stalin and his generals, some apparatchiks, some great commanders. It also traces the stories of individuals, soldiers, politicians and intellectuals, writers and artists and dancers, workers, schoolchildren and peasants. The war remains a highly emotional matter for Russia and there are troubling questions like the role of Stalin or the appalling cost of victory. The book concludes with reflections on these issues.

    Tow ferocious, excruciating years later, his forces met a final devastating defeat in the frozen streets of Stalingrad. Now this entire campaign has been recreated so accurately and vividly by the author of The Foxes of the Desert that you can hear its noise, feel its exhaustion, gasp at the blunders on both sides, follow every movement of the great armies.

    . . has written the outstanding history of the Soviet-German war in English, or, for that matter, any language. The research alone is breathtaking. Erickson has mastered all the Russian sources and compared them with the German records. . . . He has shed light on many heretofore murky matters.”—Reid Beddow, Washington Post Book World“Masterly. . . . A vividly detailed yet comprehensive account of the decisive Eastern-front battleground.”—Christopher Hudson, London Evening Standard“The outstanding book on the Soviet war in any language.”—A. J. P. Taylor, Observer“This authoritative book by a first-class military historian is easily read.”—Philip Warner, Daily Telegraph

    The Soviet Army's intent to take revenge for the horror that the Nazis had wreaked on their people produced a conflict of implacable brutality in which millions perished.From the great battles that marked the Soviet conquest of East and West Prussia to the final surrender in the Vistula estuary, this handsome volume from Osprey recounts in chilling detail the desperate struggle of soldiers and civilians alike. These brutal campaigns are brought vividly to life by a combination of previously unseen testimony and astute strategic analysis recognizing a conflict of unprecedented horror and terrible suffering. Author Prit Buttar spins a mesmerizing tale accompanied by rare photographs and informative maps.

    Overy's engrossing book provides extensive details of teh slaughter, brutality, bitterness and destruction on the massive front from the White Sea to the flank of Asia.--Chicago Tribune The Russian war effort to defeat invading Axis powers, an effort that assembled the largest military force in recorded history and that cost the lives of more than 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians, was the decisive factor for securing an Allied victory. Now with access to the wealth of film archives and interview material from Russia used to produce the ten-hour television documentary Russia's War, Richard Overy tackles the many persuasive questions surrounding this conflict. Was Stalin a military genius? Was the defense of Mother Russia a product of something greater than numbers of tanks and planes--of something deep within the Russian soul?

    Few of them were to survive the five long years of bitter struggle.A posting to the Eastern Front during the Second World War was rightly regarded with dread by the German soldiers. They were faced by the unremitting hostility of the climate, the people and even, at times, their own leadership. They saw epic battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and yet it was a daily war of attrition which ultimately proved fatal for Hitler s ambition and the German military machine. In this classic account leading military historian James Lucas examines different aspects of the fighting, from war in the trenches to a bicycle-mounted antitank unit fighting against the oncoming Russian hordes. Told through the experiences of the German soldiers who endured these nightmarish years of warfare, War on the Eastern Front is a unique record of this cataclysmic campaign."

    They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan -- as the ordinary Russian soldier was called -- remain a mystery. We know something about hoe the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought.Drawing on previously closed military and secret police archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Catherine Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Soviet Union Army rank and file. She follows the soldiers from the shock of the German invasion to their costly triumph in Stalingrad, where life expectancy was often a mere twenty-four hours. Through the soldiers' eyes, we witness their victorious arrival in Berlin, where their rage and suffering exact an awful toll, and accompany them as they return home full of hope, only to be denied the new life they had been fighting to secure.A tour de force of original research and a gripping history, Ivan's War reveals the singular mixture of courage, patriotism, anger, and fear that made it possible for these underfed, badly led troops to defeat the Nazi army. In the process Merridale restores to history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.

    But the voice on the airwaves was not the familiar one of Joseph Stalin; it was the voice of his deputy, Molotov. Paralyzed by Hitler's unexpected move, Stalin disappeared completely from public view for the crucial ten days of war on the Eastern Front. In this taut, hour-by-hour account, Constantine Pleshakov draws on a wealth of information from newly opened archives to elucidate the complex causes of the Soviet leader's reaction, revealing the feared despot's unrealized military stratagems as well as his personal vulnerabilities, while also offering a new and deeper understanding of Russian history.

    It was also one of the war's bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come.Cornelius Ryan's compelling account of this final battle is a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, “to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to exist more militarily correct than to win.”It is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II.

    Now, drawing on sources newly available since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, historian and journalist Chris Bellamy presents the first full account of this deadly conflict.Bellamy outlines the lead-up to the war—in which the fragile alliance between Hitler and Stalin was unceremoniously broken—and takes us headlong into the hostilities. He presents a shocking picture of battle in which the traditional restraints of “civilized” warfare were shed. He makes clear how the Soviets quickly rallied against Hitler, choosing homegrown despotism over foreign domination in a struggle that the Russian people call the Great Patriotic War.Bellamy charts the early gains of the German army, whose advances into Soviet territory were brought to a halt in Moscow in the winter of 1941, and whose defeat was sealed in the Battle of Stalingrad, the most merciless campaign of the bloodiest front. He shows how Soviet men—and women—joined to fight a war whose casualties were later steeply underestimated by their government, and how even the true death toll, at 27 million, does not take into account the millions of lives on both sides that lay shattered in the aftermath.Finally, Bellamy examines the far-reaching consequences of the battle’s outcome—the reverberations of which are still felt today—and argues that the cost of victory was ultimately too much for the Soviet Union to bear.A magisterial study, and an essential addition to our understanding of contemporary world history.

    It signaled the beginning of the end for the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler; it foretold the Russian juggernaut that would destroy Berlin and make the Soviet Union a superpower. As Winston Churchill characterized the result of the conflict at Stalingrad: " the hinge of fate had turned." William Craig, author and historian, has painstakingly recreated the details of this great battle: from the hot summer of August 1942, when the German armies smashed their way across southern Russia toward the Volga River, through the struggle for Stalingrad-a city Hitler had never meant to capture and Stalin never meant to defend-on to the destruction of the supposedly invincible German Sixth Army and the terror of the Russian prison camps in frozen Siberia. Craig has interviewed hundreds of survivors of the battle-both Russian and German soldiers and civilians-and has woven their incredible experiences into the fabric of hitherto unknown documents. The resulting mosaic is epic in scope, and the human tragedy that unfolds is awesome.

    So Gunter Koschorrek, a fresh young recruit, wrote his notes on whatever scraps of paper he could find and sewed the pages into the lining of his winter coat. Left with his mother on his rare trips home, this illicit diary eventually was lost—and did not come to light until some 40 years later when Koschorrek was reunited with his daughter in America. It is this remarkable document, a unique day-to-day account of the common German soldier’s experience, that makes up the memoir that is Blood Red Snow.

    Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army.Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.