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.

American OSS officers accompanied by Chetnik guerrillas on the move from the original evacuation airstrip in Pranjani, Serbia in anticipation of Soviet Red Army advances, September 10, 1944. The OSS officers were part of OSS operations Halyard and Ranger.

Eastern Front

Hazardous Balkan Air Rescue

By Kevin Morrow

Black puffs from flak bursts began blossoming in the air around Lieutenant Tom Oliver’s Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber high over the town of Bor, Yugoslavia. Read more

A German tanker stands on the Russian steppe near Voronezh after emerging from the turret of his PzKpfw. III tank. In the summer of 1942, Hitler mounted an armored thrust to the south along the Eastern Front, and it led to ruin.

Eastern Front

Derailing Case Blue

By Pat McTaggart

After the brutal defensive fighting during the winter of 1941-1942, Adolf Hitler was ready for another round with the Russians. 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

Eastern Front

Konstantin Rokossovsky: Marshal of Two Historic Enemies

By Blaine Taylor

The year was 1944, and the embattled Soviet Union’s top-level field commanders were meeting in conclave to discuss Operation Bagration, an upcoming offensive against the retreating German Army. Read more

Eastern Front

Soviet Operation Bagration Destroyed German Army Group Center

By Victor Kamenir

Overshadowed by the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Soviet Union’s Operation Bagration on June 23 is one of the least-covered campaigns of World War II. Read more

Eastern Front

The Battle of Moscow: WWII’s First Critical Turning Point

By Jeff Chrisman

Many consider the Battle of Moscow in late 1941 to be the first turning point of World War II on the Eastern Front. Read more

Spanish soldiers—now known as the Blue Legion—dash forward during an assault against Soviet positions defending Leningrad during the summer of 1943. The Spaniards’ eagerness for battle cost them heavy casualties.

Eastern Front

The Blue Division and the Spaniards Who Fought Against Stalin

By Blaine Taylor

The Russian winter of 1941-1942 hit with terrible ferocity. Battling the deadly, numbing cold as well as the massive numbers of Red Army troops were soldiers from sunny Spain. Read more

Eastern Front

Nazi Stuka Ace Hans Rudel

By Ludwig Heinrich Dyck

In the village of Seiferdau, Southern Prussia, an eight-year-old boy with an umbrella jumped out of a second-story window. Read more

Eastern Front

German Spymaster Reinhard Gehlen

By William F. Floyd, Jr.

When Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, chief of the German General Staff, presented German leader Adolf Hitler with estimates of Russian strength for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler declared that the numbers were “completely idiotic” and “pure bluff.” Read more

Eastern Front

Savage Struggle for Leningrad

By Blaine Taylor

Leningrad was the sacred city of Soviet Communism. The port city on the Neva River, 400 miles northwest of Moscow, began life in 1703 as Petrograd, or St. Read more

Eastern Front

Hitler’s Death in the Führerbunker

By Flint Whitlock

His world was literally crashing down in flames around him. Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which he had created out of nothing but his own will—an empire that he had once boasted would last for a millennium—was on fire and being torn apart by shot and shell, besieged on all sides. Read more

Eastern Front

Heroic Warsaw Airlift

By Patrick J. Chaisson

Warsaw was burning. Captain Jack Van Eyssen first saw it as a dull glow on the night horizon, 35 miles distant. Read more

Eastern Front

Battle of Berlin Prelude: Küstrin, and Death on the Oder

By Pat McTaggart

“We felt that we were already dead men,” wrote former Captain Albrecht Wüstenhagen in a May 1988 letter to the author of his time in the fortress garrison of Küstrin. Read more

Eastern Front

The T-34 Tank: The Story of Soviet Russia’s Rugged Armored Vehicle

By Phil Zimmer

December 1941 was a dark month and the end of a dark year for the Soviets as the Germans pressed ever onward toward Moscow, the lair where Joseph Stalin and his minions plotted what to do next against the Nazi juggernaut that had, in a few short months, rolled over everything before them. Read more

Eastern Front

A Tale of Two German Snipers on WWII’s Eastern Front

By Phil Zimmer

The three Soviet T-34 tanks edged forward slowly as the drivers scanned for the concealed Germans that lay ahead. Read more

Eastern Front

Operation Barbarossa: How Stalin was Blindsided by Berlin

By Richard Z. Freemann, Jr.

“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.”

—Winston Churchill (1950)

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, as the sun slumbered, 3.6 million soldiers, 2,000 warplane pilots, and 3,350 tank commanders under skilled German command crouched at the border of Soviet-occupied Poland ready to invade the Communist nation Joseph Stalin had ruled with steel-fisted brutality for years. Read more

Eastern Front

Race to Moscow

By Victor Kamenir

The troops of Germany’s Army Group Center were more than a week into a fresh offensive to capture Moscow on July 14 when they approached the historic battlefield of Borodino where the Russians delayed Napoleon’s advance on Moscow in 1812. Read more

In their first major battles of World War I, American Expeditionary Force troops helped blunt multiple offensives launched by the German Army in the spring of 1918.

Eastern Front

World War I Doughboys’ Bloody Baptism

As the fateful day drew to a close, the exhausted World War I soldiers of the German 25th and 82nd Reserve Divisions huddled in their trenches. Read more