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Battles and operations of the Soviet–German War

  • Battle of Uman9 minThe Battle of Uman began on the 15th of July 1941 and lasted just over three weeks, yet in that time the Wehrmacht encircled and destroyed two entire Soviet armies. The 6th and 12th Soviet Armies, caught in a pocket near the Ukrainian city…
  • Budapest offensive4 minThe Budapest offensive began on the 29th of October 1944, as Soviet and Romanian armies launched a sustained assault against Hungary and its Axis partners. By the 13th of February 1945, the Hungarian capital had fallen after four months of…
  • Operation Kutuzov10 minOperation Kutuzov opened on the 12th of July 1943, named after General Mikhail Kutuzov, the commander credited with driving Napoleon's army out of Russia in 1812. The Soviet high command borrowed his name for a very different campaign, a…
  • Leningrad–Novgorod offensive8 minThe Leningrad-Novgorod strategic offensive began on the 14th of January 1944 with a thunderclap of artillery: 220,000 shells poured onto German lines along a stretch of the front measured not in miles but in meters of cost per life.…
  • Vyborg–Petrozavodsk offensive1 minSoviet propaganda listed the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk offensive as one of Stalin's ten blows, the string of major offensives that reshaped the Eastern Front in 1944. The offensive struck Finland during the Continuation War, itself fought on the…
  • East Prussian offensive7 minThe East Prussian offensive officially ended on the 25th of April 1945. Yet some German units under Wehrmacht command refused to surrender until the entire country did, on the 9th of May. This campaign set the Red Army against German…
  • First Jassy–Kishinev offensive7 minThe First Jassy-Kishinev offensive is one of the least-documented major operations of the entire Soviet-German War. Named after two cities in the region, Iași and Chișinău, this was a series of military engagements fought in April and May…
  • East Pomeranian offensive8 minThe East Pomeranian offensive was a Soviet Red Army campaign that changed the final shape of World War Two in Europe. From the 10th of February to the 4th of April 1945, Soviet forces fought through Pomerania and West Prussia against the…
  • Silesian offensives3 minThe Silesian offensives were not the main event. They were the protection racket for it. In the winter of 1945, the Soviet Red Army had its eyes fixed on Berlin, but before any push toward the German capital could succeed, the flanks had…
  • Smolensk operation12 minThe Smolensk operation, codenamed Suvorov, began at 04:40 on the 7th of August 1943, when Soviet artillery opened a preliminary bombardment along the wooded approaches to the city. Two hours later, infantry went forward. On the first day…
  • Battle of Smolensk (1941)11 minThe Battle of Smolensk began on the 10th of July 1941, roughly 400 kilometers west of Moscow, and what unfolded over the next two months would alter the course of the entire Eastern Front. The German Army had already driven 500 kilometers…
  • Crimean offensive9 minThe Crimean offensive began on the 8th of April 1944 and ended on the 12th of May. In just over a month, the Red Army's 4th Ukrainian Front drove the German 17th Army and its Romanian allies from a peninsula they had held for two years.…
  • Battle of Narva (1944)12 minThe Battle of Narva lasted from the 2nd of February to the 10th of August 1944, and it ran far deeper than a contest over a single Estonian city. At stake was the entire northern shore of the Baltic, Finland's survival as an independent…
  • Battle of Białystok–Minsk9 minThe Battle of Białystok-Minsk began on the 22nd of June 1941, the moment Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Within eighteen days, the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center had torn apart the Red Army's entire Western…
  • Battle of the Dnieper10 minThe Battle of the Dnieper began on the 26th of August 1943, when Red Army divisions started moving along a 1,400 kilometer front. That front stretched from Smolensk to the Sea of Azov. At one point almost four million troops were engaged,…
  • First Battle of Kharkov6 minIn the fall of 1941, Kharkov stood as a vital rail and air link connecting Ukraine to Crimea, the Caucasus, the Dnieper region, and the Donbass. The city housed the Kharkov Tractor Plant, which designed and developed the Soviet T-34 tank.…
  • Operation Uranus13 minOperation Uranus began at 07:20 Moscow time on the 19th of November 1942, when Soviet artillery commanders received a single codeword: "Siren". What followed was an 80-minute bombardment from 3,500 guns and mortars, directed almost…
  • Vienna offensive6 minJoseph Stalin reached an agreement with the Western Allies prior to April 1945 concerning the relative postwar political influence of each party in much of Eastern and Central Europe. These agreements said virtually nothing about the fate…
  • Battle of Stalingrad12 minThe Battle of Stalingrad was a fight that consumed an entire city and changed the course of the Second World War. By the time it ended on the 2nd of February 1943, the German 6th Army had surrendered - the first of Hitler's field armies to…
  • Case Blue15 minCase Blue, known in German as Fall Blau, was the Wehrmacht's grand plan for the summer of 1942 on the Eastern Front. It ran from the 28th of June to the 24th of November 1942. At its heart was a single, staggering ambition: seize the…
  • Operation Mars8 minOperation Mars consumed tens of thousands of Soviet lives in under four weeks, then disappeared from official Soviet history for decades. The offensive ran from the 25th of November to the 20th of December 1942, fought around the Rzhev…
  • Siege of Sevastopol (1941–1942)12 minOn the 4th of July 1942, the last organized defenses of Sevastopol collapsed after 250 days of siege. When German and Romanian forces finally raised their flags over the port city that day, they had fired nearly 50,000 tons of artillery…
  • Battle of Kursk13 minThe Battle of Kursk holds a distinction no other engagement in all of recorded warfare can claim: it is the single largest battle in human history. It unfolded across the flat, mined plains of southwestern Russia in the summer of 1943, as…
  • Battle of Kiev (1941)12 minThe Battle of Kiev produced what historians have called the largest encirclement in the history of warfare by number of troops. In the summer and autumn of 1941, a vast ring of German steel closed around the Soviet Southwestern Front in…
  • Battle of Königsberg12 minThe Battle of Königsberg took four days, but a siege had gripped the city since late January 1945 long before that. Soviet forces of the 3rd Belorussian Front had already pushed almost 1,500,000 troops into East Prussia by the 13th of…
  • Prague offensive10 minThe Prague offensive was the last major military operation of World War II in Europe, fought between the 6th and the 11th of May 1945. By that point, Berlin had already fallen. Germany's unconditional capitulation was just days away. And…
  • Operation Bagration10 minOperation Bagration began on the 22nd of June 1944, exactly three years to the day after Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union. That symmetry was no accident. What followed across the forests and marshes of Soviet Byelorussia…
  • Siege of Leningrad11 minThe Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. From September 1941 to January 1944, the Soviet Union's second largest city was encircled by German and Finnish forces, cut off from food, fuel, and rescue. A prewar population of 3.2 million people…
  • Battle of the Kerch Peninsula16 minThree Soviet armies ceased to exist as fighting forces in the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula. The campaign ran from the 26th of December 1941 to the 20th of May 1942, across the eastern tip of the Crimean Peninsula. Erich von Manstein's…
  • Belgrade offensive11 minThe Belgrade offensive, fought from the 15th of September to the 24th of November 1944, was one of the most complex joint military operations of the Second World War in Europe. Three separate armies, speaking three different languages and…
  • Crimean campaign4 minThe Crimean campaign began on the 26th of September 1941, when German and Romanian forces swept onto the Crimean Peninsula as part of Operation Barbarossa. What followed was not a swift conquest. It was a grinding, multi-year struggle that…
  • Dnieper–Carpathian offensive12 minThe Dnieper-Carpathian offensive, fought from late December 1943 to early May 1944, was one of the largest military operations in the history of the Second World War. It stretched across a front of 1,200 kilometers and drew nearly…
  • Second Battle of Kharkov13 minThe Second Battle of Kharkov began at 6:30 in the morning on the 12th of May 1942, with a concentrated hour-long artillery bombardment crashing into German positions east of the Ukrainian city. What followed was one of the most…
  • Second Jassy–Kishinev offensive13 minThe Jassy-Kishinev offensive began on the 20th of August 1944, and within two days the entire German-Romanian front line had collapsed. Named after the two major cities in the staging area, this Soviet assault on Eastern Romania would last…
  • Vistula–Oder offensive9 minThe Vistula-Oder offensive of January 1945 was the fastest large-scale advance in the history of the Eastern Front. In just over two weeks, the Red Army covered 300 miles of contested ground, pushing from the Vistula River all the way to…
  • Siege of Budapest13 minThe Siege of Budapest lasted exactly fifty days. When it ended on the 13th of February 1945, more than eighty percent of the city's buildings had been destroyed or damaged, all seven bridges spanning the Danube had been blown apart, and…
  • Third Battle of Kharkov9 minThe Third Battle of Kharkov began on the 19th of February 1943, when Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched a counterstrike that few in the Red Army expected. Soviet forces had swept through German lines for weeks. They had retaken…
  • Winter campaign of 1941–19424 minThe winter campaign of 1941-1942 began on the 5th of December 1941, and the Soviet Union was fighting for its life. Nazi Germany had launched Operation Barbarossa months earlier, driving deep into Soviet territory. Now, as temperatures…

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