Author: Soviet General Staff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781915113047
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
The Iasi--Kishinev Operation, 20-29 August 1944: The Red Army's Summer Offensive into the Balkans details the Soviet preparation and conduct of the Red Army's massive offensive into Romania in the summer of 1944. The seventh of the ten strategic operations conducted by the Soviet armed forces that year, the operation successfully carried out the task of destroying German forces in northern Romania and taking Germany's Romanian satellite out of the war, and was the first step in Stalin's consolidation of a Balkan empire. The study, unlike many others in this series, is based only in part on materials published by the Soviet General Staff's historical section. Nonetheless, this and other material was written and published for the purpose of generalizing the experience of the war's experience for training commanders and staffs in the preparation and conduct of multi-front offensive operations. The study is divided into two parts. The first deals with the operation as a whole. This includes the preparations by the Second and Third Ukrainian fronts for launching the operation. This includes an overall strategic appreciation of the situation as it obtained by the summer of 1944 and the Stavka's instructions for carrying out an operation along the southern strategic direction. This is followed by a minute examination of the two fronts' plans for organizing and exploiting a breakthrough of the enemy front, as well as the individual army commanders' plans for their own sectors. The study concentrates on such standard operational indices as the length of the attack front, the density of forces along the breakthrough front, the echeloning of forces for the attack, and cooperation among the combat arms. Whereas the first part offers an operational-strategic overview of the operation, the second is firmly focused at the tactical-operational level. This study is actually a doctoral dissertation dealing with the Third Ukrainian Front's 37th Army, which played the leading role in the front's offensive across the Dnestr River, from where it subsequently linked up with the Second Ukrainian Front's forces to encircle the German Sixth Army. Many of the operational indices highlighted in the first part are repeated here in even greater detail. The successful conclusion of the Iasi--Kishinev operation destroyed the German position in the Balkans and laid the groundwork for the Red Army's subsequent advance into Hungary and Central Europe. As one of the army's more successful offensive operations, it is worthy of study by history buffs and professional officers alike.
Author: Grant T. Harward
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501759973
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
Romania's Holy War rights the widespread myth that Romania was a reluctant member of the Axis during World War II. In correcting this fallacy, Grant T. Harward shows that, of an estimated 300,000 Jews who perished in Romania and Romanian-occupied Ukraine, more than 64,000 were, in fact, killed by Romanian soldiers. Moreover, the Romanian Army conducted a brutal campaign in German-occupied Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and civilians. Investigating why Romanian soldiers fought and committed such atrocities, Harward argues that strong ideology—a cocktail of nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism—undergirded their motivation. Romania's Holy War draws on official military records, wartime periodicals, soldiers' diaries and memoirs, subsequent war crimes investigations, and recent interviews with veterans to tell the full story. Harward integrates the Holocaust into the narrative of military operations to show that most soldiers fully supported the wartime dictator, General Ion Antonescu, and his regime's holy war against "Judeo-Bolshevism." The army perpetrated mass reprisals, targeting Jews in liberated Romanian territory; supported the deportation and concentration of Jews in camps or ghettos in Romanian-occupied Soviet territory; and played a key supporting role in SS efforts to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. Harward proves that Romania became Nazi Germany's most important ally in the war against the USSR because its soldiers were highly motivated, thus overturning much of what we thought we knew about this theater of war. Romania's Holy War provides the first complete history of why Romanian soldiers fought on the Eastern Front.
Author: Soviet General Staff
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
ISBN: 1912174626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
A study of the Red Army’s penultimate offensive operation in the war in Europe. The forces of three fronts—Second and First Belorussian and First Ukrainian—reached the Oder River and surrounded the defenders of the German capital, reduced the city and drove westward to link up with the Western allies in central Germany. This is another in a series of studies compiled by the Soviet Army General Staff, which during the postwar years gave itself the task of gathering and generalizing the experience of the war for the purpose of training the armed forces’ higher staffs in the conduct of large-scale offensive operations. The study is divided into three parts. The first contains a brief strategic overview of the situation, as it existed by the spring of 1945, with special emphasis on German preparations to meet the inevitable Soviet attack. This section also includes an examination of the decisions by the Stavka of the Supreme High Command on the conduct of the operation. As usual, materiel-technical and other preparations for the offensive are covered in great detail. These include plans for artillery and engineer support, as well as the work of the rear services and political organs and the strengths, capabilities, and tasks of the individual armies. Part two deals with the Red Army’s breakthrough of the Germans’ Oder defensive position up to the encirclement of the Berlin garrison. This covers the First Belorussian Front’s difficulty in overcoming the defensive along the Seelow Heights, which has a direct path to Berlin, as well as the First Ukrainian Front’s easier passage over the Oder and its secondary attack along the Dresden axis. The Second Belorussian Front’s breakthrough and its sweep through the Baltic littoral is also covered. Part three recounts the intense fighting to reduce the city’s defenders from late April until the garrison’s surrender on May 2, as well as operations in the area up to the formal German capitulation. This section contains a number of detailed descriptions of urban fighting at the battalion and regimental level, closing with conclusions about the role of the various combat arms in the operation.
Author: David M. Glantz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
The leading expert on Soviet military history resurrects a failed World War II campaign that the official Russian history seeks to erase from memory. Reconstructing the Red Army's first invasion of Romania in the spring of 1944, Glantz shows that despite the campaign's abysmal failure, it provided a clear indication of Stalin's strong interest in the Balkans and further damaged the German army's ability to stop the Soviet war machine in its drive toward Berlin.
Author: Alex Buchner
Publisher: Schiffer Military History
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
OSTFRONT 1944: The German Defensive Battles on the Russian Front in 1944 Alex Buchner. In 1944, when the entire Russo-German front was "ablaze" under continual Soviet attacks, wrong estimations by the highest German command led to critical decisions with grave consequences. The Red Army was growing increasingly stronger, and launched a major offensive. They engaged the Germans in a series of battles - Cherkassy, Tarnopol, Crimea, Vetebsk, Brody, Jassy - That ended in the collapse of Army Group Center, and catastrophic German losses. These battles cost the German army in the east well over a half-million casualties. The entire story is set forth in this new book by Alex Buchner. This in-depth study uses presently available sources and the reports of still-living participants, to document the events on the Eastern Front of 1944. It tells the story from the German point of view, reflecting on what is considered the most barbarous fighting of World War II. Alex Buchner is the author of several World War II studies, including The German Infantry Handbook 1939-1945, available from Schiffer Military History.
Author: Alexander Hill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 757
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Book Description
In a definitive new account of the Soviet Union at war, Alexander Hill charts the development, successes and failures of the Red Army from the industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s through to the end of the Great Patriotic War in May 1945. Setting military strategy and operations within a broader context that includes national mobilisation on a staggering scale, the book presents a comprehensive account of the origins and course of the war from the perspective of this key Allied power. Drawing on the latest archival research and a wealth of eyewitness testimony, Hill portrays the Red Army at war from the perspective of senior leaders and men and women at the front line to reveal how the Red Army triumphed over the forces of Nazi Germany and her allies on the Eastern Front, and why it did so at such great cost.
Author: Soviet Union. Raboche-Krestʹi︠a︡nskai︠a︡ Krasnai︠a︡ Armii︠a︡. Generalʹnyĭ shtab
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781911512431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The Iasi--Kishinev Operation, 20-29 August 1944: The Red Army's Summer Offensive into the Balkans details the Soviet preparation and conduct of the Red Army's massive offensive into Romania in the summer of 1944. The seventh of the ten strategic operations conducted by the Soviet armed forces that year, the operation successfully carried out the task of destroying German forces in northern Romania and taking Germany's Romanian satellite out of the war, and was the first step in Stalin's consolidation of a Balkan empire. The study, unlike many others in this series, is based only in part on materials published by the Soviet General Staff's historical section. Nonetheless, this and other material was written and published for the purpose of generalizing the experience of the war's experience for training commanders and staffs in the preparation and conduct of multi-front offensive operations. The study is divided into two parts. The first deals with the operation as a whole. This includes the preparations by the Second and Third Ukrainian fronts for launching the operation. This includes an overall strategic appreciation of the situation as it obtained by the summer of 1944 and the Stavka's instructions for carrying out an operation along the southern strategic direction. This is followed by a minute examination of the two fronts' plans for organizing and exploiting a breakthrough of the enemy front, as well as the individual army commanders' plans for their own sectors. The study concentrates on such standard operational indices as the length of the attack front, the density of forces along the breakthrough front, the echeloning of forces for the attack, and cooperation among the combat arms. Whereas the first part offers an operational-strategic overview of the operation, the second is firmly focused at the tactical-operational level. This study is actually a doctoral dissertation dealing with the Third Ukrainian Front's 37th Army, which played the leading role in the front's offensive across the Dnestr River, from where it subsequently linked up with the Second Ukrainian Front's forces to encircle the German Sixth Army. Many of the operational indices highlighted in the first part are repeated here in even greater detail. The successful conclusion of the Iasi--Kishinev operation destroyed the German position in the Balkans and laid the groundwork for the Red Army's subsequent advance into Hungary and Central Europe. As one of the army's more successful offensive operations, it is worthy of study by history buffs and professional officers alike.
Author: Boris Sokolov
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1399050966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
An analysis of Operation Bagration, the 1944 Russian offensive in Belorussia, highlighting key tactical errors and its connection to Operation Overlord. Operation Bagration analyses the great Russian offensive in Belorussia in the summer of 1944 covering the planning of the operation as well as the German plans of the summer campaign of 1944. In depth research sets out to determine the real ratio of the Soviet and German forces as well as their actual losses during the operation. As well as some good decisions, command on both sides made some crucial mistakes as well as main tactical errors all of which are studied in this book to produce a fully rounded view of the campaign and highlights a connection to Operation Overlord by proving that it was only due to the landing at Normandy that the Soviet forces were able to destroy the German Army Group Centre while the elite mobile forces were concentrated in France.
Author:
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428915745
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 98
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Book Description
Author: Włodzimierz Borodziej
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108944884
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny set out to salvage the historical memory of the experience of war in the lands between Riga and Skopje, beginning with the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 and ending with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916. The First World War in the East and South-East of Europe was fought by people from a multitude of different nationalities, most of them dressed in the uniforms of three imperial armies: Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian. In this first volume of Forgotten Wars, the authors chart the origins and outbreak of the First World War, the early battles, and the war's impact on ordinary soldiers and civilians through to the end of the Romanian campaign in December 1916, by which point the Central Powers controlled all of the Balkans except for the Peloponnese. Combining military and social history, the authors make extensive use of eyewitness accounts to describe the traumatic experience that established a region stretching between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas.
