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Curated playlist

Battles of World War II involving Germany

  • Battle of Alam el Halfa9 minThe Battle of Alam el Halfa lasted just seven days, from the 30th of August to the 5th of September 1942, and yet it settled the fate of the entire Axis campaign in North Africa. Fought south of El Alamein in the Egyptian desert, it was…
  • Battle of Gazala13 minThe Battle of Gazala lasted less than four weeks, from the 26th of May to the 21st of June 1942, yet it handed Erwin Rommel the greatest victory of his career. A port city fell in a single day. An entire garrison of 33,000 men was…
  • Battle of Nuremberg (1945)5 minThe Battle of Nuremberg lasted five days in April 1945, and it cost the United States four of those days just to capture a city center that was already surrounded. Karl Holz, the Reich Defense Commissioner and Gauleiter of Franconia, had…
  • 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…
  • Second Battle of El Alamein13 minAt 21:40 on the 23rd of October 1942, a thousand guns opened fire simultaneously along a 40-mile front in the Egyptian desert near the railway halt of El Alamein. The Second Battle of El Alamein had begun. Over the next 13 days,…
  • Omaha Beach17 minCaptain Logan Scott-Bowden stood before General Omar Bradley with a warning about Omaha Beach. He and Sergeant Bruce Ogden-Smith had swum ashore from midget submarines more than thirty times. Each trip was to collect sand samples from the…
  • Operation Sonnenblume11 minOperation Sonnenblume, which translates to Operation Sunflower, began in February 1941 with a question no British commander had seriously asked: what if the Germans moved before anyone expected them to? The Italian 10th Army had just been…
  • 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…
  • First Battle of El Alamein13 minOn the 1st of July 1942, at three in the morning, German infantry advanced east across the Egyptian desert toward a railway station so unremarkable it had no strategic value of its own. That station was El Alamein. But 106 kilometres…
  • Battle of the Bulge15 minThe Battle of the Bulge began at 05:30 on the 16th of December 1944, when 1,600 German artillery pieces opened fire along an 80-mile front in the forested Ardennes region of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. For 90 minutes the…
  • German invasion of Greece15 minThe German invasion of Greece began in the early hours of the 28th of October 1940, not with German troops but with an Italian ultimatum delivered by Ambassador Emanuele Grazzi to Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas. The ultimatum demanded free…
  • 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…
  • 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.…
  • German invasion of the Netherlands14 minThe German invasion of the Netherlands began in the pre-dawn hours of the 10th of May 1940. Within five days, the main Dutch forces had surrendered. The entire country was under German occupation seven days after that. What makes that…
  • Operation Northwind (1944)4 minAdolf Hitler spoke to division commanders at his Adlerhorst command complex on the 28th of December 1944. He declared that this attack had a very clear objective, namely the destruction of enemy forces. There was no matter of prestige…
  • German invasion of Denmark (1940)10 minThe German invasion of Denmark on the 9th of April 1940 lasted approximately six hours, making it one of the shortest military campaigns of the Second World War. By the time most Danes had started their working day, their country had…
  • 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…
  • Invasion of Yugoslavia12 minThe invasion of Yugoslavia began on the 6th of April 1941. German-led Axis forces attacked the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in what became known as the April War, or Operation 25. Adolf Hitler ordered it after a Yugoslav coup d'état overthrew a…
  • Battle of Berlin14 minAt 8:30 in the morning on the 22nd of April 1945, ninety-six shells fell on the centre of Berlin in the space of a few minutes. A Soviet war correspondent watching the batteries open fire recorded what he heard the battery commander say…
  • Battle of Crete13 minThe Battle of Crete began at 08:00 on the 20th of May 1941, when dozens of Junkers Ju 52 aircraft disgorged German paratroopers into the skies above Maleme Airfield. Within hours, the invaders were being cut down before they could reach…
  • 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…
  • Capture of Hamburg3 minThe Western Front collapsed in the spring of 1945. Army Group B, led by Walter Model, fell to American forces near the Rhine River. This defeat left only scattered pockets of resistance across northern Germany. The British Second Army…
  • 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…
  • Dieppe Raid18 minThe Dieppe Raid took place on the 19th of August 1942, and within ten hours it was over. More than 6,000 men had crossed the English Channel in the night. By the time they were counted, 3,623 of the 6,086 who had landed were dead, wounded,…
  • 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…

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