This pictorial WWII history chronicles the epic drama of the Eastern Front, from Operation Barbarossa to the Battle of Moscow. The world was not prepared for the massive onslaught launched by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union on June, 22nd, 1941. The scale of the invasion and the speed of the German advance forced the Red Army into a chaotic retreat toward Leningrad and Moscow as hundreds of thousands of soldiers were taken prisoner. But then came the Soviet’s equally astonishing response. Despite all the predictions, the Red Army stemmed the Wehrmacht’s advance, held the lines before Leningrad and Moscow, and mounted a counter-offensive that changed the course of the campaign and the outcome of the Second World War. These are the historic events that Nik Cornish portrays in this volume of rare wartime images portraying the war on the Eastern Front.

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.

The third volume in Nik Cornishs photographic history of the Second World War on the Eastern Front records in vivid visual detail the sequence of Red Army offensives that pushed the Wehrmacht back across Russia after the failure of Operation Citadel, the German attack at Kursk. Previously unpublished images show the epic scale of the build-up to the Kursk battle and the enormous cost in terms of lives and material of the battle itself. They also show that the military initiative was now firmly in Soviet hands, for the balance of power on the Eastern Front had shifted and the Germans were on the defensive and in retreat. Subsequent chapters chronicle the hard-fought and bloody German withdrawal across western Russia and the Ukraine, recording the Red Armys liberation of occupied Soviet territory, the recovery of key cities like Orel, Kharkov and Kiev, the raising of the siege of Leningrad and the advance to the borders of the Baltic states. Not only do the photographs track the sequence of events on the ground, they also show the equipment and weapons used by both sides, the living conditions experienced by the troops, the actions of the Soviet partisans, the fight against the Finns in the north, the massive logistical organization behind the front lines, and the devastation the war left in its wake.

* The second volume in a four-volume photographic history of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union * Rare photographs of all the key episodes in the campaign, including the battles at Stalingrad, Voronezh, Rzhev and Kharkov * Photographs of the German and Soviet troops and the civilians caught up in the fighting * A graphic introductio

In the fourth and final volume of Nik Cornish's photographic history of the Second World War on the Eastern Front the defeat of the German army, the destruction and occupation of the cities in eastern Germany and the humiliation of the German people are shown in over 150 mostly unpublished wartime photographs. The extent of the fighting, from the Baltic in the north to the Balkans in the south, is recorded in a selection of graphic images, as is the tenacity and desperation of the German resistance and the unstoppable force of the Red Army as offensive after offensive crushed the Third Reich. While most of the photographs show the Red Army, its troops, equipment and the conditions in which it fought, the shattered cities of Germany and eastern Europe and the suffering and destitution of the civilians are recorded in graphic detail.

Argues that, if it were not for the Western Allies, Germany would have been victorious over Russia during World War II, comparing military statistics between Germany and Russia, examining the pivotal role the Allies played to assist Russia, and exploring the propaganda that spurred the Soviets towards victory.