The Eastern Front.

The Eastern Front

Steve Crawford

Potomac Books, Inc.

22841 Quicksilver Drive, Dulles, VA 20166-2012

1597970105, $19.95 www.potomacbooksinc.com 1-800-775-2518

On June 22, 1941, preceded by a massive artillery and aerial bombardment along the entire 2,000-mile border, three million German troops and their allies, along with 3,330 tanks, smashed into the Soviet Union in a military campaign that Adolph Hitler thought would be over in just four months. Four years later, thirty-five million Soviets and five million Germans had been killed in a campaign left the western USSR, Eastern Europe, and German itself, with a gutted landscape, and millions of civilians homeless. "The Eastern Front Day By Day, 1941-45" is a photographic chronology that includes key battles on land, at sea, and in the air, including the great encirclement engagements of 1941 at Minsk, Smolensk, Kieve, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Operation Bagration. Featuring sidebars on all the principle commanders who led the German and Soviet forces on the Eastern Front, as well as the pitcal events that occurred on both sides and influenced the war (including the SS and Einsatztgruppen murder squads), the technological advances in planes, tanks, rocket launchers, and more, "The Eastern Front" is a succinct, profusely illustrated, month-by-month historical overview that is as informed and informative, as it is engaging and recommended for personal, academic, and community library Military History reference collections in general, and World War II Eastern Front supplemental reading lists in particular.