Sun, Jan 1, 1978
On October 8, 1941, Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, broadcast from Berlin that Moscow had fallen. Hitler's troops, he said, could see the Kremlin towers from their front lines; another four or five days and the Nazi flag would fly over the Kremlin. The Germans believed these reports, and so did many others -- after all, Hitler had conquered western Europe, he had blitzed London. But in an area some 60 miles from the Kremlin, the Nazi blitzkrieg came to an end. In the Moscow suburbs, the Red Army and hundreds of thousands of ordinary men, women and children threw up barriers that the Nazi tanks could not crack. In early December the Red Army counterattacked. They pushed Hitler's armies as far back as 125 miles from Moscow. It was the first time in the Second World War that the mighty Nazi Wehrmacht was halted.
Sun, Jan 1, 1978
In the history of the Unknown War, Leningrad stands out as a symbol of the courage and persistence of the Russian people. For years Leningrad resisted capture by Hitler's forces. In the aching cold of winter, with nothing to eat, hundreds of thousands of Leningraders perished from starvation or simply froze to death. Still they fought on. During the terrifying siege, which the Russians call "The 900 Days," Nazi troops encircled the city and cut off all communications -- but Leningrad would not surrender.
Sun, Jan 1, 1978
The Second World War ended in Europe in May of 1945, but the war in the Far East raged on. At the conference in Yalta in February of 1945, the Big Three signed a secret document regarding the protocol of Japan which said, among other things, that the Soviets would enter the war against Japan two to three months after the fighting ended in Europe -- and so they did. In the 27 days between the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and the formal capitulation of Japan to the Allied Powers, the Russians succeeded in destroying the mighty Japanese Kwantung army in Manchuria. They also reclaimed for the Soviet Union the Kuril Islands and southern Sakhalin, which had been lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905. These battles were the last in World War II.
Sun, Jan 1, 1978
This is the story of ordinary Russian civilians who worked to supply the military with tanks, planes, guns -- whatever was necessary to win the war against the Nazis. Little is known about the planned evacuation of more than 1,500 Russian factories from out of the path of Hitler's armies. Onto flat cars, freight cars and trucks went components of factory after factory. Far to the east, beyond the Urals in Siberia and Central Asia, the factories were reassembled. There vital war materials were produced for the fighting at the front.
Thu, Jun 22, 1978
On a pleasant June morning in 1941, nothing seemed more peaceful than Red Square and Moscow itself. It was early summer, and people were strolling along the broad streets, shopping in the big department stores or going to the country for the day. They did not know that Hitler's legions, five million strong, had crashed through a frontier 1,800 miles long at 4 a.m. that very morning. Nor did they know, until a government broadcast alerted them at noon, that the Soviet Union was at war. The Unknown War. The war that broke Hitler's back and ended his dream of a new order.
Sun, Jan 1, 1978
In 1942 some of the fiercest combat ever took place in the monumental battle between the German and Russian armies. The ground was covered with bombs and artillery shells; almost all of Stalingrad was reduced to rubble. Of some 46,000 affected homes and villages, 41,000 were totally destroyed. In Stalingrad two million soldiers fought for 200 days and nights. Many people in the West doubted that the Soviets could win against the mighty Wehrmacht, but the Red Army fought the Nazis to a standstill. From street to street, house to house, room to room, the Russians repelled attack after attack, causing Hitler's army to suffer its greatest losses to date. So much was at stake that the victory or defeat of either side might well determine the outcome of World War II.
Sun, Jan 1, 1978
In the late summer of 1941 the Soviet army was forced to retreat from Kiev in the Soviet Ukraine. For more than two years, the Nazis occupied the city and virtually destroyed it. In 1943, after victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, the Soviet army line moved westward as the Russians liberated the occupied territories of the Ukraine that had been under the Nazi yoke. Hitler was determined to stop the Soviet army on the German line of fortifications that extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and which he called the "Eastern Bastion." The Germans considered the Dnieper River a key point in the line, and Hitler himself boasted the Dnieper would reverse its course before the Russians would ever cross it.
Sun, Jan 1, 1978
To the Soviet army, the capture of Berlin was the culmination of their drive to avenge the ravaging of their homeland. As the Soviets were fighting their way into the heart of the city, Hitler mobilized his last reserves. Children as young as 14 and 15 years of age were called upon to fight veteran Red Army soldiers. Hitler and the other top leaders of the Third Reich had retreated to a bunker. In that underground shelter, Hitler took his own life. The war against Hitler was over; the Germans had lost. The last major battle of the Unknown War had been fought, and peace had come to Europe.
Sun, Jan 1, 1978
During the fighting for Stalingrad, the defenders of the city took an oath: "There is no land for us beyond the Volga." When the Nazis surrendered to the Soviet army on January 31, 1943, in the largest military action in history, Stalingrad became a source of inspiration to the Allies in their mutual struggle against Hitler. In the course of the Battle of the Volga, the Soviet armed forces destroyed five armies of Germans and their fascist allies -- one-fourth of all Wehrmacht troops on the eastern front. This victory strengthened the morale of the anti-Hitler coalition at a crucial time in the war.
Sun, Jan 1, 1978
When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, he captured Moscow; but Russia's men and women, banding together behind his lines, turned the French invaders' lives into a living hell. The same thing happened in 1941 when Hitler's legions smashed into the Soviet Union and vast areas of Russian land fell into their hands. Like mushrooms after a rain, a people's underground sprang up to attack Nazi formations, to blow up their ammunition dumps and to wreck their trains. The partisans operated everywhere -- in the marshes and deep forests of Belorussia, in Odessa, where they set up an underground command post in the city's catacombs. On the shores of the Black Sea, a group of young people carried out operations against the Nazi invaders until the last member of the partisan band had been captured or shot. Nowhere were the Germans safe from the attacks of the Soviet partisans.