Curated playlist
Tank battles of World War II
- Battle of Alam el HalfaThe 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 GazalaThe 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…
- Operation CrusaderOperation Crusader began on the 18th of November 1941, and its target did not even know it was happening. Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel, commanding the Axis forces in North Africa, was away from the front when the British Eighth Army…
- Operation QueenOperation Queen began on the 16th of November 1944 with one of the heaviest Allied tactical bombing raids of the entire war. More than 4,500 aircraft filled the skies over the German Siegfried Line, and yet the ground soldiers below barely…
- Second Battle of El AlameinAt 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,…
- Operation SonnenblumeOperation 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…
- First Battle of El AlameinOn 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 BulgeThe 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…
- Falaise pocketAt the Falaise pocket, forty-eight hours after the guns fell silent, General Dwight D. Eisenhower walked the ground on foot. He later recorded encountering scenes that could only be described by Dante. Pilots flying overhead reported…
- Battle of ImphalThe Battle of Imphal began in March 1944 with a Japanese army crossing the Chindwin River, convinced it could destroy the Allied forces in northeast India and reshape the entire war. The city of Imphal, capital of Manipur, sat at the heart…
- Battle of KurskThe 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)The 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…
- Operation BagrationOperation 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…
- Battle of the Kerch PeninsulaThree 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…
- Battles of Khalkhin GolThe Battles of Khalkhin Gol began on the 11th of May 1939, with a patrol of Mongolian cavalry, somewhere between 70 and 90 men, riding into disputed grassland to find grazing for their horses. Within days, what started as a skirmish over…
- Second Battle of KharkovThe 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…
- Third Battle of KharkovThe 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…