Sublime

The power of the Soviet Union and its armies was growing fast, while that of the invaders shrank. In 1942, Germany produced just 4,800 armoured vehicles, while Russia built 24,000. The new T-34 tank, better than anything the Germans then deployed save the Tiger, began to appear in quantity—Chelyabinsk, one of Stalin’s massive manufacturing centres

In the east, the Soviets launched their final winter offensive on January 12. As the Western Allies struggled to regain the initiative, the army groups of Field Marshals Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev, and Konstantin Rokossovsky, some four million men and ten thousand tanks, stormed forward along a two-hundred-mile front from the mountains of Bohemia to

The principal assault (code-named BAGRATION, for the great Czarist general killed at Borodino in 1812) was directed at Army Group Center, some 700,000 troops who held the midsection of the German front. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who coordinated the attack, committed 166 Red Army divisions—2.4 million troops, 5,300 aircraft, and 5,200 tanks—twice that

On June 22, 1944, the third anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Russia (BARBAROSSA), Stalin fulfilled the pledge he made at Teheran and launched the Red Army in what would prove to be the greatest Allied offensive of the war. From Leningrad to the Crimea, along a front of eight hundred miles, Russian forces moved against the overextended German

Eisenhower makes no mention of the great Russian offensive in Crusade in Europe, but the scope and extent of the Russian victory in less than two weeks dwarfs the narrow front on which the Western Allies were advancing. At the very least it denied Hitler the opportunity to reinforce his armies in France with veteran formations from the eastern

Finland sued for peace, Romania surrendered, the Baltic states were overrun, and the Red Army was on the Vistula, a hair’s breadth from the German frontier.

Meanwhile, the military situation continued to deteriorate.24 The British garrison in the Libyan port city of Tobruk surrendered, opening the door for Rommel to move on Alexandria, Cairo, and the Suez Canal. In Russia, the German Army had crossed the Don and was approaching Stalingrad on the Volga; the Crimean fortress of Sevastopol had fallen; and

The Eastern Front, where 90 percent of all Germans killed in combat met their fate, overwhelmingly dominated the struggle against Hitler.