Intelligence

Already during the first weeks of the Germano-Soviet war first reconnaissance and subversive units were parachuted in the enemy rears or transferred across the frontlines in order to carry intelligence operations on behalf of the special cells of the General Staff, fronts and armies, as well as autonomous specialized units organized in the "Big Land". First groups started operating in Lithuania and White Russia, as well as in eastern Poland. The latter included Poles, veterans of the Polish campaign 1939 and interned in the USSR. Those recruited for the Soviet intelligence, were trained in the intelligence centre Skhodnya near Moscow. More >>>

Defence plans

Changes in the political configuration of the Soviet Union's western frontier, which occurred in 1939-1940, brought the necessity of numerous corrections in the Soviet strategic defence plans. Since the spring of 1940 those corrections had been made at the General Staff, and involved Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov (Chief of the General Staff), Gen. Nikolay Vatutin (Chief of Operations of the General Staff), Gen. Alexander Vasilevskiy (Deputy Chief of Operations of the General Staff), Gen. Kirill Meretskov (Deputy People's Commissar for Defence), Gen. Gherman Malandin (Deputy People's Commissar for Defence), Gen. Andrei Anisov (Deputy People's Commissar for Defence), Gen. Georgiy Zhukov (Commander of the Kiev Special Military District), and many lower-ranking officers of the General Staff. More >>>

Battle for the Dnieper

The defeat of the German armies in the battle of Kursk had ultimately wrestled out the strategic initiative from the hands of the German command. The collapse of the offensive plans had forced the Germans to seek different objectives in the conditions of the Soviet strategic offensive. The German front was broken in two sectors: western and south-western. Since July Soviet armies were developing their success, and in August they liberated Orel and Kharkov. A big gap emerged between the Amy Groups Centre and South. More >>>

Battles of Monte Cassino

On 12 January 1944 Algerian and Moroccan Arabs, fighting under the French banners, went to the first Cassino offensive. They struck against Monte Cassino, in the north of the town of Cassino. Arab divisions from the French Expeditionary Corps formed the right wing of the 5th Army. On the left wing British divisions moved along the coast. They entered action on 17 January, supported by two cruisers and seaborne troops. Some of those troops actually landed in the British rear, instead of behind the German lines, and caused a lot of confusion, but eventually the situation was clarified and the British gained some terrain with the town of Minturno. More >>>

Battle of Monte Cassino

Monte Cassino was one of the greatest battles of the Second World War, and the greatest one on the Italian front. It was the key point of the Gustav Line, which resisted Allied attacks for half a year, blocking their advance up the Apennine peninsula.

During the Casablanca conference (14-16 January 1943), the Allies agreed upon the operation Husky - namely landing in Sicily. It was a partial success of the British prime-minister Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, who insisted that landing in the Balkans could hasten the fall of the German Reich and liberation of East European countries. The American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted, that the offensive against the German forces in Europe had to be driven along the shortest path - across the English Channel and West Europe. More >>>

Breakneck pace

The attractive at the first glance theory of Gen. Giulio Douhet, prophesizing a total air war, did not fool the leading military brains of different countries. They understood that deploying heavy horizontal bomber planes against the enemy troops dispersed in the battleground would be ineffective: capable only of area-bombing, and on top of it - from high altitudes, they hardly would be able to destroy highly mobile armoured troops and motorized infantry. More >>>

A wolf in sheep's clothing

There came the spring of 1938, and the spectre of a new war haunted Europe again! This time the ominous clouds of the new conflict had been gathering over the mountainous massifs of the Sudetes. The Sudeten-German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei - SdP), by orders from Berlin, launched a massive propaganda offensive against the Czechoslovak Republic. More >>>

Indian Ocean raid

In the beginning of the spring of 1942 the Japanese occupied the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The British garrisons of the islands left them earlier due to menace from the north, where the Japanese took Rangoon on 8 March, and the south, where the Japanese landed on Sumatra. The enemy presence in the Andaman Sea, in the north-eastern section of the Indian Ocean, meant in the first place the menace to the main forces of the Eastern Fleet in Colombo on Ceylon. The base did not possess any adequate anti-air defence - either anti-aircraft artillery or aircraft. After all, the British air forces in the Indian Ocean was weak as far as the quantity and quality of the equipment is concerned. The forces of the Royal Navy comprised three aircraft-carriers, but the Japanese could oppose them with six ships of the same class. More >>>

Occupation

Occupation of Albania on 7 April 1939 did not crown the Italian imperial ambitions. After all, Albania was supposed to become merely the bridgehead of the Italian fascism in the Balkans, from which soon further aggressions would be launched against Greece and Yugoslavia. The invaders also had perfect knowledge that - despite of official propaganda about the Italian tutelage being received favourably in the broad circles of the Albanian society - Albanian highlanders would never reconcile with the loss of their freedom. They were actually bound to open a new chapter in the history of the Albanian struggle for independence very soon. Yet, Rome believed that resistance sooner or later would be suppressed, and the rule of the iron fist would, with time, turn the annexated country into a calm overseas province of a modern Roman empire. As the Italians issued from such assumptions, they immediately undertook the efforts to create in Albania a strong and efficient administration. More >>>

Soldiers of the Army "Poznań"

Germany commenced direct preparations for the war with Poland in the early spring of 1939. On 3 April German generals presented to Adolf Hitler the outline directive of the Wehrmacht deployment in 1939-1940. Its second part, codenamed Fall Weiß, dealt with the plan of destroying of the Polish armed forces. That plan had to be realized by surprise attack of concentric thrusts from Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia, beating the Polish armies concentrated in the west of the the rivers Vistula and Narew, and then pursuit eastwards to prevent the Poles to rebuild their defences along Narew, Vistula and San. The focal point of those thrusts was Warsaw, the capital of Poland and its major political, administrative and economical centre, which was supposed to be taken in the third, and last, phase of the war. More >>>

Burma

With the occupation of Malaya and Dutch East Indies rich in oil, rubber and other raw materials, the Japanese had achieved their primary strategic goal. Yet, in order to guard the perimeter of their conquests, they had to establish a system of advanced positions from the Indies to the Gilbert Islands. That is why they laid an eye on Burma - the country located ideally for safeguarding their conquests in the west. High, longitudinally stretched ranges of Arakan, Assam and Manipur could constitute a natural defence line, blocking the only three local roads, impassable during the rainy season. More >>>

Polish coast in war plans

Poland, brought to the independent being after 123 years of absence on the political maps of Europe, on 10 February 1920 received access to the Baltic Sea. However, it was not a reason for excessive joy, as the coast awarded to Poland by the decisions of the Treaty of Versailles constituted merely a 142km-long stretch of sandy beaches from Hel Peninsula to the outskirts of Zoppot. Danzig with adjacent area was declared a free city under the international control; although it maintained certain formal links with Poland, majority of its population was German. Poland was too weak politically to get a better deal. The narrow "corridor" of the Polish Pomerania, wedged between the German Pomerania and East Prussia in a space no bigger than 40 kilometres, was impossible to defend in case of a conflict with Germany. The whole area had barely few fishermen villages, with only one small port in Puck. The Germans made sure that no objects of economic importance was left to the Poles; the land was stripped of anything that Poland might use to build a real sea economy and a navy. In the beginning of 1920s Poland's access to the sea was an illusion rather than a reality. More >>>

Two years of peace

After the outbreak of the war in 1939, the Soviet Union undertook unprecedented measures to speed up its economical and industrial development, especially in the branches of strategic importance. Issuing from the obvious notion that the future war would affect western areas of the USSR, there was made the decision to make bigger investments into the industry of eastern regions to ensure that they would provide at least 20% of the whole industrial output. More >>>

The W-Hour

The day 1 August 1944 in Warsaw was hot and muggy like before a storm. Every now and then the sun was hiding behind the clouds, and one might expect a rain any moment. Yet, the streets were unusually crowded. Trams were running seldom and with irregular intervals; passengers crowded them to the utmost. About the noon to the streets took groups of young men walking quickly in apparent hurry. Reinforced patrols of the German police and gendarmerie were cruising throughout the whole city, but without bothering by-passers. The crowd grew by hour. More >>>

Defence of Sevastopol

In the hitlerite plan of war with the Soviet Union the Army Group Centre was assigned to make the main thrust towards Moscow, whereas the Army Group South was assigned to auxiliary tasks. From the area south to the Pripet Marshes it had to advance to Kiev, Occupy the Ukraine and Crimea, and proceed to the Caucasus. More >>>

Diplomatic initiatives

The whole system of the Soviet diplomatic initiatives in the international relations was focused on preserving peace at any cost, keeping at bay those forces, which were seeking military solutions to their political aspirations, and winning time to consolidate the defence of the Soviet Union. As the Soviet political and military leadership issued from the ideological premises, they foresaw that the most probable enemy of the socialist Soviet Union would be nazi Germany. However, they were afraid of the possibility to face an international crusade mounted by the Western democracies together with Germany. To the Kremlin such a perspective looked very probable in view of the collapse of the Anglo-Franco-Soviet talks in the spring and summer of 1939, as well as mounting anti-Soviet propaganda in the West. In such circumstances the Soviet Union accepted the German proposal to conclude the non-aggression treaty, which was signed on 23 August 1939. More >>>

Making the plans

The original plan of the war with the United States, worked out in 1930s by the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, foresaw that the navy would "wait" for approaching American fleet just like it happened with the Russian fleet in 1905. Some hopes were put in weakening the enemy force through air and submarine attacks from the outlying Japanese islands. But the fates of the campaign would be decided in a coveted general battle, in which the decisive role would be on the artillery of the Japanese battleships, and aircraft-carriers would be assigned to auxiliary tasks. More >>>

On the Yugoslav soil

For almost three and half a year peoples of Yugoslavia conducted persistent struggle with the German invaders, their satellites, and domestic fascists almost in complete isolation from the rest of the fighting Europe. But when the Army Group Southern Ukraine collapsed, and Romania and Bulgaria turned tables and declared war on the fascist "Axis", the situation in the Balkans changed cardinally. At the same time Soviet forces crossed the borders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and approached the north-eastern frontier of Yugoslavia. More >>>

Italo-Abyssinian War

Abyssinia (Ethiopia) since the ancient times has been an important link on the shortest way from Europe, along the African coast, to India and China. Building of the Suez Canal had strengthened that position of Abyssinia, and attracted attention of great colonial powers: Great Britain (which ruled in Indies), France (which ruled in Indo-China), and Italy (which sought acquisition of colonial possessions). Penetration of European powers into Abyssinia resulted in colonial partitions of her sea coasts from Suakin to the Cap Guardafui, and farther to Zanzibar. More >>>

Dramatis personae

The spring of 1940 brought the war to North Africa. Although the political borders dividing that region have survived historical turmoil, it is worth to outline the contemporaneous political situation, as the borderlines roughly coincided with the frontlines, or at least the spheres of influence and colonial possessions of the European countries. More >>>