Eastern Front

Eastern Front

The Eastern Front during World War II includes the area of military confrontation involving the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviet Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht clashed along the extended Eastern Front, which stretched thousands of miles from the Black Sea in the south to Finland and the approaches to the Arctic Circle in the north.

A flight of Soviet IL-2 Stormoviks attack a German oil depot in the Crimea. Their mission: Protect the last Soviet stronghold at Sevastopol.

Eastern Front

Dueling Aces in Sevastopol

By Christer Bergström and Andrey Mikhailov

In June 1942, the Black Sea port of Sevastopol on the Crimea was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of World War II. Read more

Eastern Front

Axis Powers: The Infamous Tripartite Pact

By Blaine Taylor

On the evening of September 26, 1940, American radio announcer and journalist William L. Shirer noted in his later famous Berlin Diary that the next day Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano would arrive there from Rome, adding that most people thought it was for the announcement that Francisco Franco’s Spain was entering the war on the side of the Axis. Read more

Eastern Front

Meat Grinder at Yelnya

By Pat McTaggart

The smell of victory was in the air as the forces of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center continued to drive deep into the Ukraine during the final week of June 1941. Read more

A Roman soldier dictates a letter to a scribe outside a permanent Roman camp in Germany.

Eastern Front

Roman Generals: Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo

By Harold E. Raugh, Jr.

Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo was probably born between 4 bc and ad 1. His younger half-sister was first the mistress and then the consort of Gaius Caesar Germanicus, better known as the Emperor Caligula. Read more

U.S. troops hit the beach in North Africa on November 8, 1942. Operation Torch was the first major offensive action by American troops during the war against Nazi Germany.

Eastern Front

Operation Torch and The Assassination of Admiral Jean Darlan

By Peter Kross

Less than a year after the sudden and devastating Japanese attack against the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the American military was about to embark on a large-scale offensive operation against German and Italian forces in North Africa. Read more

German soldiers in winter camouflage defend their lines against oncoming Russians.

Eastern Front

Furious Fight in a Frozen Hell

By Pat McTaggart

It was the third winter in Russia for the men of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group South, and things were going from bad to worse. Read more

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