Red Army
The German panzers approached the Russian artillery column as it moved to a new position. As the troops trudged toward their new firing point, six panzers appeared, rampaging into the Russian rear area, no doubt searching for vulnerable targets to destroy. Read more
Red Army
Snipers played an important a role in World War II, just as much as any tank, airplane, or artillery piece. Read more
Red Army
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
Red Army
In the predawn hours of April 24, 1945, SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg received orders from Army Group Vistula defending Berlin to immediately lead the remnants of the 57th Battalion of the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne from its staging area at the SS training camp at Neustrelitz to the German capital. Read more
Red Army
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
Red Army
“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
Red Army
By Nathan N. Prefer
To the Soviet military, it is known as the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. Although it had no official name to the Japanese, it has become known in the West as Operation August Storm. Read more
Red Army
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
Red Army
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
Red Army
World War II spanned six long years from 1939 to 1945. The Allied powers, principally The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, defeated the Axis powers, led by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. Read more
Red Army
By the summer of 1942, the venerable and battle-proven Messerschmitt 109E was all but replaced by the improved Me-109F in front-line units. Read more
Red Army
As many World War II enthusiasts know, many battles in the war were fought in places that held no prior historical significance. Read more
Red Army
The 83rd U.S. Infantry Division had been mobilized for World War I in September 1917. Its unit patch was a downward-pointing black triangle with the letters O-H-I-O stitched as an abstract gold monogram in the center. Read more
Red Army
The waning months of 1943 were a bleak time for the German forces in southern Russia. Since the massive battle at Kursk in July, the Red Army had pushed the armies of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group South hundreds of kilometers to the west. Read more
Red Army
The area between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains had been relatively quiet since the end of Operation Bagration late in the summer of 1944. Read more
Red Army
On April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler, Reich Chancellor and Führer of Germany, emerged from his underground bunker in the center of Berlin. Read more
Red Army
During the last half of 1944, the Wehrmacht in the east had been forced to cede just about everything it had conquered since the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941. Read more
Red Army
From Leningrad to Murmansk, columns of Soviet Red Army troops stormed down roads and trails into Finland’s dense forests, lakes, and swamps, seeking to cut Finland in half. Read more
Red Army
Smolensk Russia, Headquarters, German Army Group Center (AGC), December 3, 1941; Army Group commander, 61-year-old Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock is a troubled man. Read more
Red Army
It was November 24, 1942. Speeding across the snow-covered landscape of eastern Ukraine, the personal command train of German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein was on its way to the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk, where he would take up his new assignment as commander of Army Group Don. Read more
