Red Army into the Reich

by Simon Forty, Patrick Hook and Nik Cornish

Imprint: Casemate

256 Pages, 8.3 x 11.7 in, 500 photos and maps

Hardcover
9781636240220
September 2021
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$37.95

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9781636240237
November 2021

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

A detailed narrative of how the Red Army pushed west and into Berlin in 1945.

The last year of the war saw Russian offensives that cleared the Germans out of their final strongholds in Finland and the Baltic states, before advancing into Finnmark in Norway and the east European states that bordered Germany: Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. By spring 1945 the Red Army had reached to Vienna and the Balkans, and had thrust deep into Germany where they met American, French and British troops advancing from the west. The final days of the Third Reich were at hand. Berlin was first surrounded, then attacked and taken. Hitler’s suicide and his successors’ unconditional surrender ended the war.

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.

Red Army into the Reich combines a narrative history, 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.

Introduction
In the North
Poland
Hungary
Austria
Czechoslovakia
The Battle of Berlin
Remembrance

Simon Forty was educated in Dorset and the north of England before reading history at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He has been involved in publishing since the mid-1970s, first as editor and latterly as author. Son of author and RAC Tank Museum curator George Forty, he has continued in the family tradition writing mainly on historical and military subjects including books on the Napoleonic Wars and the two world wars. Recently he has produced a range of highly illustrated books on the Normandy battlefields, the Atlantic Wall and the liberation of the Low Countries with co-author Leo Marriott.

Nik Cornish is a former head teacher whose passionate interest in the world wars on the Eastern Front and in Russias military history in particular has led to a series of important books on the subject including Images of Kursk, Stalingrad: Victory on the Volga, Berlin: Victory in Europe, Partisan Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-1944, The Russian Revolution: World War to Civil War 1917-1921, Hitler versus Stalin: The Eastern Front 1941-1942 Barbarossa to Moscow, Hitler versus Stalin: The Eastern Front 1942-1943 Stalingrad to Kharkov and Hitler versus Stalin: The Eastern Front 1943-1944 Kursk to Bagration.

"If you have any interest in understanding the final cataclysm that overtook the Third Reich and delineated the hows and whys of the Cold War – and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union – Red Army into the Reich will give you a glimpse into a generally underreported past...a small slice of heaven for the East Front fan." ~ARMOR Magazine

"...carries the reader into the Eastern Front with clear writing, good maps, and lavish illustration. Many of the photographs are accompanied by images of how the scene they depict appears today." ~WWII History Magazine

"...a better-illustrated recent volume would be hard to find, especially one that covers the breadth of Red Army combat operations in the third period of the war." ~Journal of Slavic Military Studies

"Each chapter is lavishly illustrated with a superbly curated selection of photographs from during the war, then-and-now comparisons, as well as from modern-day war memorials." ~Globe at War

"...no better-illustrated text has yet been created to carefully, meticulously, carry us over the vast landscape of the most brutal, cruelest, total war the world had ever seen." ~Argunners