The bridge that saved a city: The Iron Curtain fall – Part 5: the Berlin Airlift
Continuing our series on the coming of the Cold War, Taylor Downing examines the first major confrontation with the Soviets.
Soviet Union
Under the heel: The Iron Curtain falls – Part 3: the crushing of Eastern Europe
In the third part of our series on the coming of the Cold War, Taylor Downing reveals how Stalin consolidated military and political control over a new Soviet bloc.
Soviet Secret Police Chiefs, 1917-1953: commissars of fear
REVIEW BY ANDRÉ VAN LOON To get straight to the point: the strength of Soviet Secret Police Chiefs lies in its weakness. It is an engrossing read and yet a partial historical account, which leaves the deepest questions about the…
Into the Reich: The Red Army’s Advance to the Oder in 1945
REVIEW BY DAVID PORTER In January 1945, the Red Army launched a powerful operation that was intended to go all the way to Berlin. The Vistula–Oder Offensive, as it was known, is the subject of this new book by Prit…
New pictures show remains of rare WWII Hurricanes found in Ukraine
New photographs have been released of the remains of the eight Hawker Hurricane fighter planes that were found buried in Ukraine earlier this summer. The remnants of the British WWII aircraft were discovered in a forest south of the capital…
MHM 135 Competition and Crossword
This issue, we’re giving away three signed copies of The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: the hidden truth at the centre of WWII’s greatest battle by Iain MacGregor The foundation of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II…
The USSR at 100
There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. In March, tens of thousands of striking workers, peasants, and soldiers — exhausted by the privations of the First World War — took to the streets of Petrograd (St Petersburg) in protest.…
The Story of Russia
REVIEW BY ANDRÉ VAN LOON. The Story of Russia is a thorough work of historical writing that unfortunately leaves aside its most interesting ideas after the book’s introduction. Figes starts with a fascinating series of hypotheses: that Russia has been…
WAR CLASSICS – Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45
MHM Editor Neil Faulkner recalls one of the great works of military history.
Stalin’s War
This book convincingly argues that Stalin’s war began long before the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, and can really be said to have begun in the late 1920s. Initially, this was a war of suppression at home, combined…
Hitler and Stalin: the tyrants and the Second World War
In the autumn of 1939, after they signed a pact agreeing to carve up Poland, Hitler and Stalin were depicted in a cartoon as a newly wed couple walking down the aisle. Hand in hand, with Stalin the bride and…
War Classics – The Second World War: An Illustrated History
MHM Editor Neil Faulkner recalls one of the great works of military history.
Barbarossa Through German Eyes
Hitler’s invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 – Operation Barbarossa – initiated a campaign of epic proportions. While the format of recounting a campaign through the recollections of individual participants is well established, the author does an exceptionally good…
ISU-152 self-propelled gun, Chernobyl, Ukraine
It was designed by the Soviet Union during the Second World War to take on the German Tigers and Panthers.
Back to the Drawing Board: T-35 Heavy Tank
David Porter on Military History's doomed inventions.
This week: Operation Barbarossa
Eighty years ago next month, on 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler unleashed the largest military invasion force in history, when he ordered almost 3,700,000 Axis troops with 3,000 tanks, 7,000 guns and 2,300 aircraft to advance into the Soviet Union along a front that extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Less than six months later, following startling early successes, leading German units would reach almost to the gates of Moscow, before plummeting temperatures and the onset of the Russian winter finally brought their advance to a halt.
Barbarossa – the biggest invasion in history
David Porter analyses the tense relationship between the two most powerful dictators in Europe during the countdown to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
The German invasion of Russia
David Porter analyses the largest military invasion in history.
Nuclear Folly: a new history of the Cuban Missile Crisis
A crisis over a small island south of the mainland United States in the autumn of 1962 was the closest the world ever came to a devastating nuclear war. Award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy, who recently chronicled the 1986 Chernobyl disaster,…
Why We Fight – The Battle of Russia
Like all the Why We Fight films, it is a highly charged, emotional account, always looking to create maximum impact.
Stalin’s War
‘I trust no one, not even myself.’ So the merciless dictator of the Soviet Union reportedly once said. In this new book, Sean McMeekin explores the Second World War from Joseph Stalin’s perspective. From his complex relations with both Winston…
Barbarossa and the Bloodiest War in History
On a fateful Sunday in late June 1941, millions of German soldiers poured into the Soviet Union, beginning Operation Barbarossa: the Nazis’ war of annihilation in the East. Stewart Binns here explores the struggle of the Russian army to defend…
The Battle of Berlin: aircraft and infantry
David Porter analyses the balance of forces in the Third Reich’s final battle.