On The Eastern Front At Seventeen

This is the true story of a young Red Army soldier during the Second World War, told in his own words. Recruited into the army aged just seventeen, Sergei Drobyazko’s introduction to battle is a violent one: forced to retreat from his home city of Krasnodar after it is set ablaze by German forces. Later, Drobyazko is captured by the Germans and placed in a concentration camp, where prisoners are reduced to eating scavenged rubbish and bathing battle wounds in urine. After a daring escape from the camp, he enters service once more, rising to the rank of sergeant in an infantry regiment. During this time, he witnesses the execution of deserters and the routine ill-treatment of German prisoners of war by vengeful Soviet troops. After surviving an attack that decimates his detachment, Drobyazko is almost court-martialled. Seriously wounded in 1944, he retrains as a radio operator, but he never returns to the war front. In this gripping memoir, Drobyazko sets down his experience of the war as it unfolded around him. He claims to have consulted no historical sources and to have simply relied on his own memory, making this a deeply personal account. Translated into English for the first time, this unique account will be enjoyed by readers with an interest in military history.

This is the true story of a young Red Army soldier during the Second World War, told in his own words. Recruited into the army aged just seventeen, Sergei Drobyazko's introduction to battle is a violent one: forced to retreat from his home city of Krasnodar after it is set ablaze by German forces. Later, Drobyazko is captured by the Germans and placed in a concentration camp, where prisoners are reduced to eating scavenged rubbish and bathing battle wounds in urine.After a daring escape from the camp, he enters service once more, rising to the rank of sergeant in an infantry regiment. During this time, he witnesses the execution of deserters and the routine ill-treatment of German prisoners of war by vengeful Soviet troops. After surviving an attack that decimates his detachment, Drobyazko is almost court-martialled. Seriously wounded in 1944, he retrains as a radio operator, but he never returns to the war front.In this gripping memoir, Drobyazko sets down his experience of the war as it unfolded around him. He claims to have consulted no historical sources and to have simply relied on his own memory, making this a deeply personal account. Translated into English for the first time, this unique account will be enjoyed by readers with an interest in military history.

A fully illustrated survey of the Soviet infantryman on the Eastern Front in World War II. The Soviet Army was ill-prepared for its ally’s treacherous onslaught in 1941. Its officer corps decimated by Stalin’s purges and its men less well-trained than the Germans, the Red Army was poorly led, hampered by the power of the political officers and only partly mobilized. But, in spite of the huge German victories and the speed of the Nazi attack, the Soviets proved fantastically capable of rolling with the punches. The vast territory of the Soviet Union and huge population were significant, as was substantial assistance from the West—the United States and Britain in particular—which was in evidence when the German columns got to within a few miles short of Moscow and were held and then forced back. The tide turned thanks to help from outside and the efforts of the Soviet soldiers, who proved hardy and durable. And just like its soldiers, Russian infantry equipment was rugged and effective. While Soviet infantrymen may not have had the flexibility or tactical nous of the Germans, they did not lack cunning: deception, camouflage skills and endurance made Russian snipers, as an example, more than the equal of the Germans. Most of the views of the Soviet soldier and campaign are influenced by self-serving German postwar accounts designed to excuse their loss by suggesting that Adolf Hitler’s meddling and Soviet numbers were the main reasons for victory: this denigrates the Russian infantryman whose toughness and ingenuity helped destroy the Third Reich in spite of the faults of its own regime. Fully illustrated with over 150 contemporary photographs and illustrations, Soviet Infantryman on the Eastern Front in the Casemate Illustrated series provides an insight into the Soviets’ main theater of operations in World War II.

The German panzer armies that stormed the Soviet Union in 1941 were an undefeated force that had honed its tactics to a fine edge. The panzers defeated the Red Army's tanks again and again and combined with German infantry and aircraft to envelop millions of Soviet soldiers. But the Red Army's armored forces regrouped and turned the tables in 1942.

The German panzer armies that swept into the Soviet Union in 1941 were an undefeated force that had honed their skill in combined arms warfare to a fine edge. The Germans focused their panzers and tactical air support at points on the battlefield defined as Schwerpunkt - main effort - to smash through any defensive line and then advance to envelope their adversaries. ??Initially, these methods worked well in the early days of Operation Barbarossa and the tank forces of the Red Army suffered defeat after defeat. Although badly mauled in the opening battles, the Red Army's tank forces did not succumb to the German armoured onslaught and German planning and logistical deficiencies led to over-extension and failure in 1941. In the second year of the invasion, the Germans directed their Schwerpunkt toward the Volga and the Caucasus and again achieved some degree of success, but the Red Army had grown much stronger and by November 1942, the Soviets were able to turn the tables at Stalingrad. ??Robert Forczyk's incisive study offers fresh insight into how the two most powerful mechanized armies of the Second World War developed their tactics and weaponry during the critical early years of the Russo-German War. He uses German, Russian and English sources to provide the first comprehensive overview and analysis of armored warfare from the German and Soviet perspectives. His analysis of the greatest tank war in history is compelling reading.

A shocking personal memoir and new perspective on World War II, following Helene Munson’s journey in her father’s footsteps through the years when he was one of Hitler’s child soldiers When Helene Munson finally reads her father, Hans Dunker’s, wartime journal, she discovers secrets he kept buried for seven decades. This is no ordinary historical document but a personal account of devastating trauma. During World War II, the Nazis trained some three hundred thousand German children to fight for Hitler. Hans was just one of those boy soldiers. Sent to the elite Feldafing school at nine years old, he found himself in the grip of a system that substituted dummy grenades for Frisbees. By age seventeen, Hans had shot down Allied pilots with antiaircraft artillery. In the desperate, final stage of Hitler’s war, he was sent on a suicide mission to Závada on the Sudetenland front, where he witnessed the death of his schoolmates—and where Helene begins to retrace her father’s footsteps after his death. As Helene translates Hans’s journal and walks his path of suffering and redemption, she uncovers the lost history of an entire generation brainwashed by the Third Reich’s school system and funneled into the Hitler Youth. A startling new account of this dark era, The Feldafing Boys grapples with inherited trauma, the burden of guilt, and the blurred line between “perpetrator” and “victim.” It is also a poignant tale of forgiveness, as Helene comes to see her late father as not just a soldier but as one boy in a sea of three hundred thousand forced onto the wrong side of history—and left to answer for it. Previously published in hardcover as Hitler’s Boy Soldiers

A German soldier deployed to Russia recounts his harrowing experience as both victim and perpetrator of Nazi atrocities in this WWII memoir. Serving his country on the Eastern Front, Luis Raffeiner witnessed devastating acts committed by the German army that couldn’t be reconciled with the heroic propaganda back home. Caught up in the turmoil of the vast conflict, he struggled to make sense of the ruthlessness he witnessed—and the part he himself played in it. In this bracingly candid memoir, Raffeiner offers a detailed firsthand account of the Nazi war of annihilation in the Soviet Union. Raffeiner chronicles his family life in a remote village in the Tyrol in the 1930s, his military service in Italy, his transfer to the Wehrmacht and his training as a mechanic on assault guns. He then proceeds to his march into the Soviet Union in 1941. There he experienced, as he says, ‘war in its brutal and cruel reality’. Captured by the Red Army, Raffeiner barely survived as a prisoner of war. His dramatic and honest recollections shatter the myth of the clean conduct of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. He testifies to vicious actions, including some in which he himself was involved. His memoir is not a heroic tale – it shows how a man from an ordinary background can come to participate in the horrors of war.

In the summer of 1941, a collective madness overtook Adolf Hitler and his senior generals. They convinced themselves that they could take on and defeat a superpower in the making – the Soviet Union. Foolishly, they thought in a swift campaign they could smash the Red Army and force Stalin to sue for peace, despite dire warnings that Stalin was amassing a reserve army of more than 1 million men on the Volga. The end result would be such carnage that it would tear the German forces apart.In his major reassessment of the war on the Eastern Front, Anthony Tucker-Jones casts new light on the brutal fighting, including such astounding German defeats as at Stalingrad, Kursk, Minsk and, finally, Berlin. He controversially contends that from the very start intelligence officers on both sides failed to influence their leadership resulting in untold slaughter. He also reveals the shocking blunders by Hitler, Stalin and even Churchill that led to the appalling, needless destruction of Hitler’s armed forces as early as the winter of 1941–42. Step by step, Tucker-Jones describes how the German war machine fought to its very last against a relentless enemy, fully aware that defeat was inevitable.