The Eastern Front 1914-1917

The Eastern Front 1914-1917 PDF Author: Norman Stone
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141938854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
'Without question one of the classics of post-war historical scholarship, Stone's boldly conceived and brilliantly executed book opened the eyes of a generation of young British historians raised on tales of the Western trenches to the crucial importance of the Eastern Front in the First World War' Niall Ferguson 'Scholarly, lucid, entertaining, based on a thorough knowledge of Austrian and Russian sources, it sharply revises traditional assumptions about the First World War.' Michael Howard

The Eastern Front 1914-1917

The Eastern Front 1914-1917 PDF Author: Norman Stone
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141938854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
'Without question one of the classics of post-war historical scholarship, Stone's boldly conceived and brilliantly executed book opened the eyes of a generation of young British historians raised on tales of the Western trenches to the crucial importance of the Eastern Front in the First World War' Niall Ferguson 'Scholarly, lucid, entertaining, based on a thorough knowledge of Austrian and Russian sources, it sharply revises traditional assumptions about the First World War.' Michael Howard

Life and Death on the Eastern Front

Life and Death on the Eastern Front PDF Author: Anthony Tucker-Jones
Publisher: Greenhill Books
ISBN: 1784387266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This incredible visual record of life and death along the Eastern Front features more than 250 images from the the PIXPAST Archive, a collection of more than 32,000 original color photographs taken between 1936 and 1946. Collated into three parts and organised thematically, the book begins with images of the ground war, including Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the tanks, vehicles, weaponry and infantry on both sides. Moving into the war in the skies, the images depict aircraft in flight and on the ground, the bombers, fighters, Luftwaffe personnel and the destruction wrought from battle. And finally, the images take us behind the lines, to the prisoners of war, partisans, medics, the daily lives and leisure activities of soldiers and civilians along the front and the impact of the harsh Russian winter. Accompanied by text by renowned author and commentator Anthony Tucker-Jones, these images offer a rare, often surprising insight into the realities of the Second World War and people caught up in it, in vivid color detail.

In Deadly Combat

In Deadly Combat PDF Author: Gottlob Herbert Bidermann
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700611223
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In the hell that was World War II, the Eastern Front was its heart of fire and ice. Gottlob Herbert Bidermann served in that lethal theater from 1941 to 1945, and his memoir of those years recaptures the sights, sounds, and smells of the war as it vividly portrays an army marching on the road to ruin. A riveting and reflective account by one of the millions of anonymous soldiers who fought and died in that cruel terrain, In Deadly Combat conveys the brutality and horrors of the Eastern Front in detail never before available in English. It offers a ground soldier's perspective on life and death on the front lines, providing revealing new information concerning day-to-day operations and German army life. Wounded five times and awarded numerous decorations for valor, Bidermann saw action in the Crimea and siege of Sebastopol, participated in the vicious battles in the forests south of Leningrad, and ended the war in the Courland Pocket. He shares his impressions of countless Russian POWs seen at the outset of his service, of peasants struggling to survive the hostilities while caught between two ruthless antagonists, and of corpses littering the landscape. He recalls a Christmas gift of gingerbread from home that overcame the stench of battle, an Easter celebrated with a basket of Russian hand grenades for eggs, and his miraculous survival of machine gun fire at close range. In closing he relives the humiliation of surrender to an enemy whom the Germans had once derided and offers a sobering glimpse into life in the Soviet gulags. Bidermann's account debunks the myth of a highly mechanized German army that rolled over weaker opponents with impunity. Despite the vast expanses of territory captured by the Germans during the early months of Operation Barbarossa, the war with Russia remained tenuous and unforgiving. His story commits that living hell to the annals of World War II and broadens our understanding of its most deadly combat zone. Translator Derek Zumbro has rendered Bidermann's memoir into a compelling narrative that retains the author's powerful style. This English-language edition of Bidermann's dynamic story is based upon a privately published memoir entitled Krim-Kurland Mit Der 132 Infanterie Division.The translator has added important events derived from numerous interviews with Bidermann to provide additional context for American readers.

Life and Death on the Eastern Front: Rare Colour Photographs from World War II

Life and Death on the Eastern Front: Rare Colour Photographs from World War II PDF Author: Anthony Tucker-Jones
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781784387235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This incredible visual record of life and death along the Eastern Front features more than 250 images from the the PIXPAST Archive, a collection of more than 32,000 original color photographs taken between 1936 and 1946.Collated into three parts and organized thematically, the book begins with images of the ground war, including Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union and the tanks, vehicles, weaponry and infantry on both sides. Moving into the war in the skies, the images depict aircraft in flight and on the ground, the bombers, fighters, Luftwaffe personnel and the destruction wrought from battle. And finally, the images take us behind the lines, to the prisoners of war, partisans, medics, the daily lives and leisure activities of soldiers and civilians along the front and the impact of the harsh Russian winter.Accompanied by text by renowned author and commentator Anthony Tucker-Jones, these images offer a rare, often surprising insight into the realities of the Second World War and people caught up in it, in vivid color detail.

Death on the Don

Death on the Don PDF Author: Jonathan Trigg
Publisher: History Press
ISBN: 9780750979467
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Nazi Germany's assault on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Operation Barbarossa, was the largest invasion in history. Almost 3.5 million men smashed into Stalin's Red Army, reaching the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Sevastopol. But not all of this vast army was German; indeed by the summer of 1942 over 500,000 were Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Croatians. As part of the German offensive that year, armies advanced to the Don only to be utterly annihilated in the Red Army's Saturn and Uranus winter offensives. Hundreds of thousands were killed, wounded or captured. Poorly equipped, often badly led and totally unprepared for the war they were asked to fight, Death on the Don tells the story of one of the greatest military disasters of the Second World War.

Ivan's War

Ivan's War PDF Author: Catherine Merridale
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 9781429900706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
A powerful, groundbreaking narrative of the ordinary Russian soldier's experience of the worst war in history, based on newly revealed sources Of the thirty million who fought in the eastern front of World War II, eight million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan -- as the ordinary Russian soldier was called -- remain a mystery. We know something about hoe the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought. Drawing on previously closed military and secret police archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Catherine Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Soviet Union Army rank and file. She follows the soldiers from the shock of the German invasion to their costly triumph in Stalingrad, where life expectancy was often a mere twenty-four hours. Through the soldiers' eyes, we witness their victorious arrival in Berlin, where their rage and suffering exact an awful toll, and accompany them as they return home full of hope, only to be denied the new life they had been fighting to secure. A tour de force of original research and a gripping history, Ivan's War reveals the singular mixture of courage, patriotism, anger, and fear that made it possible for these underfed, badly led troops to defeat the Nazi army. In the process Merridale restores to history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.

Siege

Siege PDF Author: Russ Schneider
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0345475852
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Chilling and authentic historical novel.

Deathride

Deathride PDF Author: John Mosier
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9781416577027
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, began a war that lasted nearly four years and created by far the bloodiest theater in World War II. In the conventional narrative of this war, Hitler was defeated by Stalin because, like Napoleon, he underestimated the size and resources of his enemy. In fact, says historian John Mosier, Hitler came very close to winning and lost only because of the intervention of the western Allies. Stalin’s great triumph was not winning the war, but establishing the prevailing interpretation of the war. The Great Patriotic War, as it is known in Russia, would eventually prove fatal, setting in motion events that would culminate in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Deathride argues that the Soviet losses in World War II were unsustainable and would eventually have led to defeat. The Soviet Union had only twice the population of Germany at the time, but it was suffering a casualty rate more than two and a half times the German rate. Because Stalin had a notorious habit of imprisoning or killing anyone who brought him bad news (and often their families as well), Soviet battlefield reports were fantasies, and the battle plans Soviet generals developed seldom responded to actual circumstances. In this respect the Soviets waged war as they did everything else: through propaganda rather than actual achievement. What saved Stalin was the Allied decision to open the Mediterranean theater. Once the Allies threatened Italy, Hitler was forced to withdraw his best troops from the eastern front and redeploy them. In addition, the Allies provided heavy vehicles that the Soviets desperately needed and were unable to manufacture themselves. It was not the resources of the Soviet Union that defeated Hitler but the resources of the West. In this provocative revisionist analysis of the war between Hitler and Stalin, Mosier provides a dramatic, vigorous narrative of events as he shows how most previous histories accepted Stalin’s lies and distortions to produce a false sense of Soviet triumph. Deathride is the real story of the Eastern Front, fresh and different from what we thought we knew.

Through the Maelstrom

Through the Maelstrom PDF Author: Boris Gorbachevsky
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700621075
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
The monumental battles of World War II's Eastern Front--Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk--are etched into the historical record. But there is another, hidden history of that war that has too often been ignored in official accounts. Boris Gorbachevsky was a junior officer in the 31st Army who first saw front-line duty as a rifleman in the 30th Army. Through the Maelstrom recounts his three harrowing years on some of the war's grimmest but forgotten battlefields: the campaign for Rzhev, the bloody struggle to retake Belorussia, and the bitter final fighting in East Prussia. As he traces his experiences from his initial training, through the maelstrom, to final victory, he provides one of the richest and most detailed memoirs of life and warfare on the Eastern Front. Gorbachevsky's panoramic account takes us from infantry specialist school to the front lines to rear services areas and his whirlwind romances in wartime Moscow. He recalls the shriek of Katiusha rockets flying overhead toward the enemy and the unforgettable howl of Stukas divebombing Soviet tanks. And he conveys horrors of brutal fighting not recorded previously in English, including his own participation in a human wave assault that decimated his regiment at Rzhev, with piles of corpses growing the closer they got to the German trenches. Gorbachevsky also records the sufferings of the starving citizens of Leningrad, the savage execution of a Russian scout who turned in false information, the killing of an innocent German trying to welcome the Soviet troops, and a chilling campfire discussion by four Russian soldiers as they compared notes about the women they'd raped. His memoir brims with rich descriptions of daily army life, the challenges of maintaining morale, and relationships between soldiers. It also includes candid exposs of the many problems the Red Army faced: the influence of political officers, the stubbornness of senior commanders, the attrition through desertions, and the initial months of occupation in postwar Germany. Through the Maelstrom features the swiftly moving narrative and rich dialogue associated with the grand style of great Russian literature. Ultimately, it provides a fitting and final testament to soldiers who fought and died in anonymity.

Ostkrieg

Ostkrieg PDF Author: Stephen G. Fritz
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813140501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
On June 22, 1941, Germany launched the greatest land assault in history on the Soviet Union, an attack that Adolf Hitler deemed crucial to ensure German economic and political survival. As the key theater of the war for the Germans, the eastern front consumed enormous levels of resources and accounted for 75 percent of all German casualties. Despite the significance of this campaign to Germany and to the war as a whole, few English-language publications of the last thirty-five years have addressed these pivotal events. In Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East, Stephen G. Fritz bridges the gap in scholarship by incorporating historical research from the last several decades into an accessible, comprehensive, and coherent narrative. His analysis of the Russo-German War from a German perspective covers all aspects of the eastern front, demonstrating the interrelation of military events, economic policy, resource exploitation, and racial policy that first motivated the invasion. This in-depth account challenges accepted notions about World War II and promotes greater understanding of a topic that has been neglected by historians.