Operation Barbarossa

Meat Grinder at Yelnya

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

Operation Barbarossa

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

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

Operation Barbarossa

V-E Day: Victory at Last for World War II’s Allies

Within his reinforced concrete bunker, 50 feet below the garden of the New Reichs Chancellery on Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, German dictator Adolf Hitler, his soon-to-be bride Eva Braun, and several hundred friends, SS guards, and staff members could feel the concussion and hear the unending drumroll of thousands of Soviet artillery shells reducing the already-battered capital city of the Third Reich to unrecognizable rubble. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Leningrad & Tikhvin: Nazi Winter Repulse During Operation Barbarossa

The men of Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s Heeresgruppe Nord (Army Group North) had little sleep during the night of June 21, 1941. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Savage Struggle for Leningrad

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

Operation Barbarossa

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

Operation Barbarossa

Race to Moscow

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

Operation Barbarossa

New Mexico: Atomic Spy Capital

New Mexico and its capital of Santa Fe bring to mind some beautiful images. Stunning sunsets, unlimited vistas, a plethora of art galleries, the spectacular food enlivened with the local green chile, an ancient Native American culture that still thrives, and a Spanish heritage tradition going back to within 50 years of Columbus’s arrival all make for a unique cultural and physical environment. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Innovative Soviet Fighter Ace

According to contemporary Soviet news sources, fighter Ace Alexander Pokryshkin was the most famous pilot in the Red Air Force during World War II. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Panzer General Strachwitz

The wide tracks of Soviet T-34S and colossal KV-1S crunched through the snow. Night had fallen west of Belgorod on March 15, 1943. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

The Waffen-SS: Evolution of Armed Evil

In 1933, before the Waffen-SS, there was a portion of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel (SS), armed and trained along military lines and served as an armed force. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Escape to Tashkent: Fleeing Operation Barbarossa

In the fall of 1941, the Polish writer Aleksander Wat, recently released from confinement in a Soviet prison, made his way east across the vast expanses of the Soviet Union. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

William “Wild Bill” Donovan: America’s Spymaster in WWII

On July 14, 1940, William Donovan stood on the pier fronting New York harbor and waited to board the Pan Am flying boat named the Lisbon Clipper for a flight that would take him to Portugal and then to London, his ultimate destination. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’s Drive to the Don

Rostov was the key to the Caucasus and the rich Soviet oil fields that lay along the Black and Caspian Seas. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

The Red Army’s Bloody Clash at Izyum

During the winter of 1941, both the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht experienced a terrifying bloodletting. Adolf Hitler’s seemingly invincible armies, having advanced hundreds of miles inside the Soviet Union, were slowed by the October muddy season that had turned all but a few roads into almost impassible quagmires. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Joseph Stalin’s Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov: A Soviet Survivor

In the summer of 1941, as the Nazi German blitzkrieg rolled over the Russian Red Army defenses at the embattled city of Leningrad, today once more St. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Soviet Partisans: The Rag-Tag Scourge Along WWII’s Eastern Front

The concept of Soviet partisans participating in Russia’s wars was nothing new in 1941. During Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1812, small bands of civilians harassed the French and their allies both before and after the retreat from Moscow. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

The Italian Army in Russia: from Barbarossa to Stalingrad

The most successful Italian Army of World War II was a political creation of dictator Benito Mussolini. Read more

Operation Barbarossa

The Red Army’s T-34 Tank: The Eastern Front and Beyond

In 1942, careworn Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler lamented to his military intimates at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia, “If I had known that there were so many of them, I would have had second thoughts about invading!” Read more

Operation Barbarossa

Romania’s Disaster at Stalingrad

World War II involved some of the most complex alliance systems in the history of warfare. Read more