Soviet
BLOCKING DETACHMENTS “zagraditelnyi otriad.”
Zagradotryady were Red Army troops positioned in the immediate rear of frontline combat troops to block mass desertion and to shoot stragglers, or anyone else who could not explain why he was there and not at the front killing Germans. Sharpshooters and machine gun crews picked off would-be mass deserters, while firing squads dealt with individual stragglers. Discipline was enforced…
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Germany Army in the East, Late 1942-Mid 1943 Part II
The Soviet victory at Moscow made a prolonged war inevitable, hence even more straining Finland’s limited resources, and this was further intensified after Stalingrad. On 3 February, the day after the last German units there surrendered, and four days after the end of Operation ‘Iskra’ at Leningrad, President Ryti took…
Germany Army in the East, Late 1942-Mid 1943 Part III
Another ground for suspicion of Lucy is that not one of Roessler’s alleged sources surfaced after the war ended. If they were really members of OKW or OKH, both defined by the victors as criminal organisations, their careers, incomes and prospects had been terminated by the Wehrmacht’s defeat and disbandment,…
Germany Army in the East, Late 1942-Mid 1943 Part IV
The Soviet position was further eroded by the fact that only their commanders’ tanks had radio transmitters. The rest had only receivers or nothing at all, so that if a commander’s tank was knocked out, his entire unit became leaderless. Their German counterparts mostly operated from ‘command tanks’ equipped with…
Lend-Lease Soviet P-47
While it is commonly known among war bird enthusiasts that the Soviet Union received large numbers of P-39 Airacobras and P-40 Warhawks, planes that many American pilots deemed to be inferior to the P-38 Lightnings and P-51 Mustangs that were flown over the Western Front, the VVS also received approximately…
Revised Look at the Battle of Moscow 1941-2
Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 has commonly been seen as the “first defeat” of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. Indeed, two of the most recent books about the fighting near Moscow by Robert Forczyk (2006) and Michael Jones (2009) both share the subtitle Hitler’s First Defeat. The most…
Battle of Wołomin
Tiger I of SS-Division “Totenkopf”, stands ready in a forest assembly area to move up to the front to neutralize a Soviet armoured incursion near Warsaw. After the Soviet reconnaissance units reached Warsaw in late July, on 1 August 1944 the Warsaw Uprising started. Starting from an area south of…