Soviet World War Ii

Roza Shanina was an exceptional, legendary sniper during World War II, a brave female-soldier known for her beauty, high moral qualities and shooting accuracy. She was credited with fifty-nine confirmed kills, including twelve soldiers during the Battle of Vilnius. And she also kept a diary – a document unique in its content, which reveals to the world the unknown side of war. Translated for the first time into the English language by a professional translator, the war diary of Roza Shanina is a unique piece of history, since diaries were strictly prohibited in the Soviet military in an ...

A lone squadron. A frozen front. And the might of the Soviet Union overhead. When Stalin’s bombers strike without warning, Finnish pilot Veikko Niemi leads his understrength squadron into the teeth of the Soviet onslaught. With nothing but outdated Fokker D.XXIs and frozen courage, Niemi launches daring intercepts against overwhelming odds. But a new threat emerges, Colonel Kozlov, a methodical Soviet commander who turns the air war into a calculated game of attrition. As the temperature plummets and tensions rise, Veikko must adapt or watch his men vanish into the frost and fire. Blood ...

No nation suffered more losses during the Second World War than the Soviet Union. The figure most historians recognize as roughly accurate is 20 million. The exact figure is impossible to tally for a number of reasons: destroyed records, inexact pre-war records, Soviet politicization of the population figures before and after the war, and much more. No matter what the exact total was, what is known is that the Soviet population only recovered its losses from the war in the late 1950s.

Flying combat missions in wartime is always dangerous. But imagine doing so in a slow, rickety biplane, at night, with no lights or navigational equipment of any kind. Sound impossible? It wasn't for the Soviet Night Witches. This unit of incredibly brave women flew hundreds of missions to attack German forces on the front lines during World War II. Learn all about these brave women and how their skill and courage in battle helped defeat the Nazis to win the war.

Bloomsbury presents Generalship on the Eastern Front, 1941–45: A Study in Command by Robert Forczyk, read by Elliot Chapman A comprehensive evaluation of generalship on the most important front in World War II. The war on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945 was the largest sustained air-ground...

He ruled through terror and myth, shaping the twentieth century with brutality and ambition. From his rise as a revolutionary outsider to his domination of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin forged an empire of fear that scarred generations. Stalin: The Red Tsar and His Terror is a definitive biography that traces Stalin’s life from obscurity in Georgia to absolute power in Moscow, from his role in defeating Hitler to the machinery of purges, famine, and the Gulag. Drawing on survivor testimonies, archival evidence, and modern scholarship, this book reveals not only how Stalin ruled, but how...

Vasiliy Chuikov offers a detailed history of the Battle of Stalingrad. He was there. Chuikov's account of the battle was first published in 1962. That book was translated into English and published as The Battle for Stalingrad in 1965. This book, Stalingrad: Battle of the Century, is a translation of Chuikov's 1975 edition, a very different work. I have now re-edited my translation and eliminated some mistakes. No translation is ever perfect. There is no doubt that Stalingrad was a turning point in World War II. It was, perhaps, a turning point in human history. Adolf Hitler's psychopathic ...

Stalingrad, November 1942. A German sniper has killed nineteen Soviet officers in sixteen days. No one on the Soviet side knows where he is. He already knows someone is coming to find him. Sergeant Aleksei Nort is a Soviet reconnaissance specialist — Finnish by blood, shaped by two winters on the Leningrad front — assigned to locate and eliminate the German marksman paralyzing the 115th Rifle Brigade's assault corridor through the Tractor Factory ruins. He arrives in the factory district with a political officer who has never been cold, a radio operator who is secretly building the most...

Germany's winter campaign of 1941-1942 has commonly been seen as its "first defeat". In Retreat from Moscow, David Stahel argues that, in fact, it was its first strategic success in the east. Though the Red Army managed to push the Wehrmacht back from Moscow, the Germans lost far fewer men (one to six), frustrated their enemy's strategic plan, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative.

Fair warning. This is not a page-turning memoir. Marshal Rokossovskiy (who is editor, not author) and the gang of military men who helped him produce this tome did not set out to write a novel. This is a compendium of military reports, and analysis of those reports, dealing with the entire campaign of which Stalingrad was the centerpiece. It is an exhaustive detailing of events taking place between July 1942 and February 1943 as far north as Voronezh Oblast', as far west as Ukraine and as far south as Dagestan. In translating other books dealing with Stalingrad, I was left wondering why I ...

Bloomsbury presents To Besiege a City by Prit Buttar, read by Leighton Pugh. '[An] excellent account.' - Richard Overy, The Telegraph Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award 2024 A ground-breaking history of the siege of Leningrad, masterfully brought to life by a...

A powerful, unsparing new history of World War II, recasting the conflict as a brutal struggle for survival among declining and ascendant imperial powers In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires...

Hitler vs Stalin: The Clash of Two Tyrants and the Battle for Europe Hitler vs Stalin dives deep into the brutal and complex rivalry between two of history’s most infamous dictators, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. This gripping narrative explores their rise to power, contrasting ideologies, and the devastating impact their regimes had on the 20th century. From the shadowy halls of Berlin and Moscow to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Eastern Front, this book reveals how their personal ambitions, political strategies, and ruthless decisions shaped the fate of millions and changed the ...

From the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes the spellbinding, fiercely told story of the deadly Arctic campaign of World War II. Battle of the Arctic is a wonderfully evocative history and largely unknown saga of World War II. As the Soviet Union played its role in the conflict, Ally...

The future has entered World War II—and the enemy is learning how to fight it. After the USS Gerald R. Ford was thrown back into 1942, Rear Admiral Diane Kessler used the most powerful carrier strike group on Earth to change the course of the war. But every victory has revealed something. Germany is no longer reacting blindly. A secret intelligence staff is studying American radio traffic, recovered technology, captured equipment, and every weapon the Ford has fired. New traps are being designed for aircraft that should not exist. The enemy now understands that the carrier’s missiles ...

"The Last Days of Budapest is a masterpiece. Immaculately researched, it is packed with large-than-life characters and revelations about the unknown espionage history of the Second World War…. This is history as it should be written: utterly engrossing." -Malcolm Brabant, author of the New...

“A masterpiece” (The Guardian) from the Nobel Prize–winning writer, an oral history of children’s experiences in World War II across Russia NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience...

Of the 30 million who fought in the eastern front of World War II, 8 million died, driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan - as the ordinary Russian soldier was called-remain a mystery. We know something about how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought. 

The romanticized image of the suave gentleman agent is a lethal fiction. The authentic narrative of global espionage is buried in the soot-stained corners of 1940s London slums. In this groundbreaking examination of clandestine spy networks, Laurence Blake exhumes the horrifying, claustrophobic reality experienced by foreign agents embedded within the British Isles during the Second World War. Far removed from glittering casinos, these Soviet spies in Britain fought their shadow war from damp, freezing bedsits, suffocating beneath the weight of profound paranoia and physical deprivation. ...

Revised and updated to reflect recent Russian and Western scholarship on the subject, this new edition maintains the 1995 original's distinction as a crucial volume in the history of World War II and of the Soviet Union and the most informed and compelling perspective on one of the greatest military confrontations of all time.