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.

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

Eastern Front

Soviet Military Intelligence: Richard Sorge

By Pat McTaggart

The Siberians are coming!” It was a cry that spread terror through the ranks of the German Wehrmacht in the winter of 1941. Read more

Eastern Front

Roles of Women in World War 1: The Russian Battalion of Death

By Don Duffy

By spring 1917, Russia had borne the heaviest burden of World War I. Russian reports counted more than six million men killed, wounded, or interned as prisoners of war. 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

With armor support, Red Army soldiers advance toward a burning farmhouse in the rugged Carpathian Mountain region. Hitler thought that the Soviet counteroffensive had run out of steam—but he was wrong.

Eastern Front

The Battle of Targul Frumos: A Defensive Stand on the Eastern Front

By Pat McTaggart

May 1, 1944. Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Stepanovich Konev had a right to be pleased with himself and his men as he gazed at the maps spread before him. 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

A panther tank and panzer grenadiers of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking help to break the encirclement of the Russian town of Kowel in the strategically important area of the Pripet Marshes.

Eastern Front

Waffen SS General Felix Steiner’s WWII Legacy

By Pat McTaggart

“Where is Steiner?” Adolf Hitler demanded as his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him in April 1945. “Is he attacking yet?” Read more

German soldiers and tanks on the offensive in Russia during the winter of 1942 move across the snowy landscape of a Russian village. This photo first appeared in Signal, a magazine published for members of the German military.

Eastern Front

The German SS at Rzhev: Loyal to Their Deaths

By Ludwig Heinrich Dyck

Early in December 1941, Operation Typhoon, the German drive on Moscow, withered in the face of tenacious Soviet resistance and one of the worst Russian winters in living memory. Read more

Eastern Front

How Did Benito Mussolini Die? The Story Behind Il Duce’s Last Moments.

By Wil Deac

It was shortly before seven o’clock on the rain-drenched morning of April 27, 1945, the day before the death of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Read more

Eastern Front

Lilya Litvak: The Red Air Force’s Female Fighter Ace

By Michael D. Hull

When German panzer and infantry columns rumbled across the frontier into Russia on June 22, 1941, the Soviet Air Force was woefully unready for war. Read more

Eastern Front

Breaking out of Hell: The Korsun–Cherkassy Pocket

By Ludwig H. Dyck

On January 26, 1944, in the midst of the Ukrainian winter, the tanks of Gen. Ivan S. Read more

Bloodied but unbowed, a group of wounded Red Army soldiers awaits evacuation after a grueling battle against strong German forces around the Crimean port city of Sevastopol.

Eastern Front

Sturgeon Catch 1942: The Siege of Sevastopol

by Ludwig Heinrich Dyck

By late October 1941, the armies of the Third Reich had swept deep into western Soviet Russia. Read more

Eastern Front

Cauldron of Death: the Demyansk Salient and the Eastern Front

by Pat McTaggart

On the vast Eastern Front, the Demyansk salient represented little more than a smudge on the battle map. Read more

Eastern Front

Bradenburgers: Germany’s Special Forces in World War II

by Jon Latimer

War had been raging for 10 days, and Wehrmacht columns were pouring through Poland in a ceaseless torrent. Read more

Eastern Front

Russo-Japanese Clash at the Battle of Nomonhan

By Glenn Barnett

In May 1939, Mongolian herdsmen and part-time militia cavalry crossed the Khalkhin Gol, or Halha, River near the village of Nomonhan in Manchurian-claimed territory. 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

Shortly after a surrender to U.S. forces, German officers hand out rations of bread to hungry soldiers.

Eastern Front

The German 11th Panzer Division: Giving Up the Ghost

By Brig. Gen. Raymond E. Bell Jr.

It was an impressive sight. Upon the reviewing stand as honored guest was General Dwight D. Read more

In this painting by German war artist R. Hanzl, a Spanish mortar crew, equipped and uniformed by the Germans, fires on a Russian town.

Eastern Front

The Spanish Blue Division Along WWII’s Eastern Front

By John W. Osborn, Jr.

To their Russian enemies they were the “Spanish mercenaries of Hitler’s Fascist lackey, Franco.” To Hitler himself, “One can’t imagine more fearless fellows. Read more

A squad of Red Army machine gunners leap from tanks in an effort to halt the German advance. Soviet losses were heavy but Hitler soon called a halt to the successful Operation South Wind to mount another—Operation Spring Awakening—an attempt to secure vital oil reserves in Hungary that proved to be a failure.

Eastern Front

Operation South Wind’s Battle for the Gran Bridgehead

By Major General Michael Reynolds

By the end of 1944, the Soviet Red Army had surrounded the Hungarian capital of Budapest and established strong defensive positions running from Esztergom on the Danube to Lake Balaton. Read more

A forlorn group of German soldiers carries the body of a dead comrade on a makeshift canvas stretcher. After a series of rapid successes on the Eastern Front, the Germans were subjected to the harsh Russian winter, followed by the sledgehammer blows of a rejuvenated Red Army.

Eastern Front

From the Luftwaffe: Joachim Benz on the Eastern Front

By Joachim Benz, as told to Peter D. Fyfe and Ward Carr

Following service as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery during the early 1970s, Ward Carr decided to remain in Germany, residing in Frankfurt. Read more

Eastern Front

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