Soviet Storm: WWII in the East

Conditions of Army Group Center in Byelorussia seemed to be stable. Soviet attempts to go on the offensive near Vitebsk and Orsha failed. Waiting for the attacks of the Red Army in Ukraine, the main German forces, primarily tanks and aircraft, were transferred to the southern territories. As a response, the Soviet Command decided to strike the enemy in Byelorussia. Operation Bagration provided for the encirclement and annihilation of the enemy on the Soviet flanks near Vitebsk and Bobruysk and thus intercepting the retreat of the entire German grouping to Minsk.

Troops from five fronts began a coordinated offensive from Smolensk to the Sea of Azov on a broad new front 1400 km in length. In an attempt to slow down the advance of the Soviet troops, the German Command blew up bridges over big and small rivers and carried out a scorched earth policy in the occupied territories. General Vatutin, commander of the Voronezh Front, was unsuccessfully trying to break through from the Liutezh and Burkin bridgeheads. The winter was coming and the frontline looked frozen along the Dnepr.

On the 31st of January 1945 the tankers of the 1st Byelorussian Front reached the Oder river near Kostrin and Frankfurt. Berlin, the fascist beast’s lair, was in some 100 km aside. But the Soviet Command took the decision to suspend the attack on the German capital. The units needed resupply and replacement of troops, as well as time to move up the reserves. It was not until Pomerania and Silesia had been cleared of German troops that the Red Army continued its offensive.

The Soviet Air Force was nearly wiped out in the first days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. But thanks to the courage of its aircrews and brilliant new aircraft designs, it began to fight back, and by 1944 dominated the skies over the Eastern Front

The Soviet navy fought many different types of war, from coastal raids in the Black Sea, to convoy escorts in the Arctic Ocean and submarine patrols in the Baltic Sea. Their submarines would prove a particularly lethal force, and in 1945 were responsible for massive and controversial losses of life at sea.

In 1941 German armed forces overran vast swathes of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine. But it was not long before the local population, encouraged by Nazi brutality, took up arms against the invader. Soviet partisans, operating under the command of a Central Headquarters in Moscow, created huge ‘no-go’ areas for German troops, and conducted a systematic campaign of sabotage against the enemy rail network.

Stalin’s USSR was a nation obsessed with secrecy and highly experienced in the skills of espionage. But despite establishing networks of agents across Europe and the Far East in the 1930s, the Soviets were still caught off-guard by Hitler’s invasion in 1941. But thereafter, the GRU (army intelligence) and NKVD (KGB forerunner) went on to score some amazing intelligence coups in Tokyo, Washington, and even from the heart of Berlin.

In January 1945, across the snow-covered plains of Poland, the Red Army launched an overwhelming assault against the enemy that would take it to the gates of Berlin. These final months of the war in Europe were some of its darkest, as Soviet soldiers stormed German fortresses, uncovered evidence of Nazi death camps that shocked the world, and carried out their own terrible retribution against the German people.

In August 1945 the Red Army launched an overwhelming assault against Japanese-occupied Manchuria. It came on the same day that Japan suffered its second devastating nuclear attack, and proved instrumental in forcing the Japanese leadership to recognise that the war was lost. This is the fascinating untold story of the Red Army’s last campaign of World War Two, which included the last battle of the war - a bloody amphibious landing on the remote Kurile Islands almost a week after Japan’s surrender.