Soviet Blitzkrieg

Two weeks after the Americans, British, and Canadians invaded Western Europe on D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front, its massive attempt to clear German forces from Belarus. In one of the largest military campaigns of all time, involving 2 million Soviets and 800,000 Germans, the Red Army advanced 170 miles in two weeks and destroyed German Army Group Center. Using recently declassified Soviet documents as well as German and Soviet unit histories, Dunn recounts this landmark operation of World War II.

Vividly narrates the details of a battle on the Eastern Front that was perhaps the largest of all time and certainly one of the most significant of World War II.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 sparked a guerilla resistance unparalleled in modern history in scale and ferocity. In the wake of the initial invasion, the German Army began its struggle to secure a territory encompassing one million square miles and sixty-five million people and to pacify a growing partisan resistance. The German endeavor to secure the occupied areas and suppress the partisan movement in the wake of Operation Barbarossa illustrates the nature of the problem of bridging the gap between rapid, decisive combat operations and “shaping” the post-major conflict environment-securing populations and infrastructure and persuading people to accept the transition from a defeated government to a new one. In this regard, the German experience on the Eastern Front following Operation Barbarossa seems to offer a number of similarities to the U.S. experience in Iraq in the aftermath of OIF. This study highlights what may be some of the enduring qualities about the nature of the transition between decisive battle and political end state-particularly when that end state is regime change. It elaborates on the notion of decisive battle, how the formulation of resistance movements can be explained as complex adaptive systems, the potential of indigenous security forces and the influence of doctrine, cultural appreciation and interagency cooperation on operational-level transition planning.

This Russian/American collaboration provides evidence that despite serious mistakes made by the Germans, the primary reason the Red Army was able to prevail in 1941 was due to war games conducted by the Soviet generals Zhukov and Timoshenko in 1940 and 1941. The results of these exercises convinced Stalin that a defense anchored along the Dnepr river would slow down and attrite the German forces. The authors contend that the battle for Yelnia was the turning point of the war. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A new illustrated study of the devastating, but little-known, Soviet armored blitzkrieg against the Japanese in the last weeks of World War II, and how it influenced Soviet tank doctrine as the Cold War dawned. Although long overshadowed in the West by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USSR's lightning strike into Manchuria in August 1945 was one of the most successful and unique campaigns of the era. Soviet forces, led by over 5,500 tanks and self-propelled guns, attacked across huge distances and deserts, marshes, and mountains to smash Japan's million-strong Kwantung Army in a matter of days. Japanese forces were short of training and equipment, but nevertheless fought fiercely, inflicting 32,000 casualties on the Soviets. Red Army operations were characterized by surprise, speed, and deep penetrations by tank-heavy forces born of the brutal lessons they had learned during years fighting the Wehrmacht. Lessons from the campaign directly shaped Soviet Cold War force structure and planning for mechanized operations against the West. Illustrated with contemporary artwork and rare photos from one of the best collections of Soviet military photos in the West, this fascinating book explains exactly how the last blitzkrieg of World War II was planned, fought, and won, and how it influenced the Red Army's plans for tank warfare against NATO in Europe.

An introduction to Adolf Hitler's tactic of combining air attacks with swiftly moving ground forces.