RED ARMY INTO THE REICH

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A detailed narrative of how the Red Army pushed west and into Berlin in 1945. Combines campaign recaps, and contemporary photographs and maps with images of memorials, battlefield survivors, and then & now views. It may come as a surprise to the western reader to see how many memorials there are to Russia's Great Patriotic War and those to the losses suffered by the countries who spent so long under the murderous Nazi regime.

For writers and historians who concentrate on the Western Allies and the battles in France and the Low Countries, the Eastern Front comes as a shock. The sheer size of both the territories and the forces involved; the savagery of both weather and the fighting; the appalling suffering of the civilian populations of all countries and the wreckage of towns and cities-it's no wonder that words like Armageddon are used to describe the annihilation.