Dawn on Sunday 22 June 1941 saw the opening onslaughts of Operation Barbarossa as German forces stormed forward into the Soviet Union. Few of them were to survive the five long years of bitter struggle.

A posting to the Eastern Front during the Second World War was rightly regarded with dread by the German soldiers. They were faced by the unremitting hostility of the climate, the people and even, at times, their own leadership. They saw epic battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and yet it was a daily war of attrition which ultimately proved fatal for Hitlers ambition and the German military machine.

In this classic account leading military historian James Lucas examines different aspects of the fighting, from war in the trenches to a bicycle-mounted anti-tank unit fighting against the oncoming Russian hordes. Told through the experiences of the German soldiers who endured these nightmarish years of warfare, War on the Eastern Front is a unique record of this cataclysmic campaign.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction and Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘Operation Barbarossa’
• 2 The German Army
• 3 The last days of tank destruction unit DORA II in Brandenburg during April 1945
• 4 The foreignness of it all
• 5 The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front
• 6 The Red Army of Workers and Peasants
• 7 Two German views of the Red Army
• 8 The development of the Red Army
• 9 Partisans
• 10 The influence of terrain
• 11 The influence of climate
• 12 The effect of winter upon a Red Army unit at Rzhev
• 13 The German Army resolves the problems of winter warfare
• 14 The construction of an ice railway bridge across the Dneiper, winter 1941–1942
• 15 The frustrating mud and the scouring dust
• 16 To Moscow by horse
• 17 The weapons of the Eastern Front
• 18 Assault artillery in action on the central front in the early days of the war with the Soviet Union
• 19 An SP detachment in the closing stages of the encirclement battles around the Kiev pocket, autumn 1941
• 20 A platoon of SP guns in action against the Soviet thrust to capture Rzhev, autumn 1942
• 21 The 249th Assault Artillery Brigade in action during the battle for Berlin, 1945
• 22 Hugo Primozic: Germany’s most successful SP fighter in Russia
• 23 Hyazinth von Strachwitz: the German Army’s most successful tank man
• 24 Anti-tank weapons and tactics
• 25 Rocket propulsion: a new form of artillery, first used on the Eastern Front
• 26 A phenomenon of the Eastern Front: encirclement
• 27 The destruction of the encircled Soviet forces in the fighting around Kiev, autumn 1941
• 28 The Cholm pocket, winter 1941–1942
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Plates