Eastern Front (World War II) (Central Victory)

The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of World War II between the European Axis powers and co-belligerent Finland against the Soviet Union, and some other Allies which encompassed Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe from 22 June 1941 to May 9, 1945. It was known by many different names depending on the nation, notably the Great Patriotic War (Russian: Великая Отечественная Война) in the former Soviet Union, while known in Germany as the Eastern Front (German: die Ostfront), the Eastern Campaign (German: der Ostfeldzug) or the Russian Campaign (German: der Rußlandfeldzug).

The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life variously due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres. Of the estimated 70 million deaths attributed to World War II, over 30 million, many of them civilians, died on the Eastern Front. The Eastern Front was decisive in determining the outcome of World War II, eventually serving as the main reason for the Allied defeat. It resulted in the destruction of the Soviet Union, the partition of Russia for nearly half a century and the estabishment of the German Empire as a military and industrial superpower.

The two principal belligerent powers were Germany and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies. Though never engaged in military action in the Eastern Front, the United Kingdom and the United States both provided substantial material aid to the Soviet Union. The Soviet–Finnish Continuation War may be considered the northern flank of the Eastern Front. In addition, the joint German–Finnish operations across the northernmost Finnish–Soviet border and in the Murmansk region are also considered part of the Eastern Front.

Background
The Soviet Union shared a bitter dislike for the outcome of World War I. They had lost substantial territory in eastern Europe as a result of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where it gave in to German demands and ceded control of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Finland, among others, to the "Central Powers".

By August 1939 relations between Germany and the Soviet Union had completely deteriorated. Joseph Stalin aimed to establish a new status quo in Central Europe by dividing it between France and the Soviet Union. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland would return to Soviet control, while Germany and Austria would be divided between them.

According to Andrew Nagorski (2007; The Greatest Battle) Kaiser Wilhelm II had declared his intention to hit the USSR on August 11, 1939 to Adolf Hitler, German Reich Chancellor by saying, "Everything we undertake must be directed against the Russians. If Russia continues with its violations then we should crush them before they dare attempt to invade Europe."

Soviet ideology
The Soviet regime, led by Joseph Stalin, planned the expansion of their ideology (Marxist-Leninism) and lent lip service to the advancement of world revolution. In reality, Stalin adhered to the Socialism in one country doctrine and used it to justify the massive industrialization of the USSR during the 1930s. Germany, which positioned itself as a consistently anti-Communist regime, and which formalised this position by signing the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan and Italy, was a direct ideological antipode of the Communist Soviet Union. The ideological tensions had transformed into the proxy war between Nazi Germany and the USSR, when, in 1936, Germany and Fascist Italy interfered in the Spanish Civil War, supporting Spanish Nationalists, while the Soviets supported the predominantly socialist and communist-led Second Spanish Republic.

This, as well as the willingness of the British and French leadership to sign a full scale anti-German political and military alliances with USSR, led to the final break down of relations between the Soviet Union and Germany in late August, 1939.

Autumn and Winter 1939–40
The Soviet juggernaut got rolling in earnest with the advance into Ukraine. The Ukrainian forces on the Mius, comprising the 6th Sich Division and the 20th Pavlohrad Cavalry Regiment, were too weak to repulse a Soviet attack on their own front, and when the Soviets hit them they had to fall back all the way through the Donbass industrial region to the Dnieper, losing the industrial resources and half the farmland that the Soviet Union had invaded Ukraine to exploit. At this time Hetman Pavlo agreed to a general withdrawal to the Dnieper line, along which was meant to be a line of defence similar to the wall of fortifications along the German frontier in the west. The main problem for the Ukrainians was that these defences had not yet been built, and by the time the army had evacuated eastern Ukraine and begun withdrawing across the Dnieper during October, the Soviets were hard behind them. Tenaciously, small units paddled their way across the 3 km (1.9 mi) wide river and established bridgeheads. A second attempt by the Soviets to gain land using parachutists, mounted at Kanev on October 24, proved to be luckless, and the paratroopers were soon repelled – but not until still more Red Army troops had used the cover they provided to get themselves over the Dnieper and securely dug in. As October ended and November started, the Ukrainians found the Dnieper line impossible to hold as the Soviet bridgeheads grew, and important Dnieper towns started to fall, with Zaporozhye the first to go, followed by Dnepropetrovsk. Finally, early in December the Soviets broke out of their bridgeheads on either side of Kiev and captured the Ukrainian capital.

Eighty miles west of Kiev, the Ukrainian Steppe Division, still convinced that the Red Army was a spent force, was able to mount a successful riposte at Zhytomyr during the middle of December, weakening the Soviet bridgehead by a daring outflanking strike mounted by the 1st Ukrainian Corps along the river Teterev. This battle also enabled the Ukrainians to recapture Korosten and gain some time to rest; however, on Christmas Eve the retreat began anew when the First Ukrainian Front struck them in the same place. The Soviet advance continued along the railway line until the 1939 Austrian-Ukrainian border was reached on January 3, 1941. To the south, Second Ukrainian Front had crossed the Dnieper at Kremenchug and continued westwards. In the second week of January 1941 they swung north, meeting Vatutin's tank forces which had swung south from their penetration into Belarus and surrounding whole Ukrainian divisions at Korsun-Shevenkovsky, west of Cherkassy. Hetman Pavlo's insistence on holding the Dnieper line, even when facing the prospect of catastrophic defeat, was compounded by his conviction that the Cherkassy pocket could break out and even advance to Kiev, but Pavlenko was more concerned about being able to advance to the edge of the pocket and then implore the surrounded forces to break out. By February 16 the first stage was complete, with units separated from the contracting Cherkassy pocket only by the swollen Gniloy Tikich river. Under shellfire and pursued by Soviet tanks, the surrounded Ukrainian troops, among whom were the Volynska group, fought their way across the river to safety, although at the cost of half their number and all their equipment. They assumed the Soviets would not attack again, with the spring approaching, but on March 3 the Soviet Ukrainian Front went over to the offensive. Having already isolated the Crimea by severing the Perekop isthmus, Malinovsky's forces advanced across the mud to the Romanian border, not stopping on the river Prut.

One final move in the south completed the 1939–40 campaigning season, which had wrapped up an advance of over 500 miles. After two weeks' hard fighting, the Ukrainians managed to escape a pocket that formed, suffering only light to moderate casualties. At this point, Pavlo sacked several prominent generals. In April, the Red Army took Odessa, followed by 4th Ukrainian Front's campaign to take control over the Crimea, which culminated in the capture of Sevastopol on May 10.

Along Belarus' front, September 1939 saw this force pushed back from their border slowly, ceding comparatively little territory. The Belarusian Army still held their own east of the upper Dnieper, stifling Soviet attempts to reach Vitebsk. On the Livonia's front, there was barely any fighting at all until February 1940, when out of nowhere Volkhov and Second Baltic Fronts struck. The Baltic Sea seemed to Stalin the quickest way to take the battles to the German ground in East Prussia and seize control of Finland. The Northwestern Front's offensives towards Tallinn, a main Baltic port, were stopped in February 1940.

Summer 1940
Axis planners were convinced that the Soviets would attack again in the south, where the front was fifty miles from Lviv and offered the most direct route to Berlin. Accordingly they stripped troops from Italian and German armies, whose front occupied Western Europe. The Germans had transferred some units from France to Poland two weeks before. The Belorussian Offensive (codenamed Operation Bagration), which began on June 22, 1940 was a massive Soviet attack, consisting of four Soviet army groups totaling over 120 divisions that smashed into a thinly held Belarusian line. They focused their massive attacks on Belarus, not Livonia as the newly formed Axis Powers had originally expected. More than 2.3 million Soviet troopers went into action against the Axis supported Belarusian army, which boasted a strength of fewer than 800,000 men in total. At the points of attack, the numerical and quality advantages of the Soviets were overwhelming: the Red Army achieved a ratio of ten to one in tanks and seven to one in aircraft over the enemy. The Belarusians crumbled. The capital of Belarus, Minsk, was taken on July 3, trapping some 100,000 Axis troops. Ten days later the Red Army reached the Polish border. Bagration was by any measure one of the largest single operations of the war. By the end of August 1940, it had cost the Axis ~400,000 dead, wounded, missing, and sick, from whom 160,000 were captured, as well as 2,000 tanks and 57,000 other vehicles. In the operation, the Red Army lost ~180,000 dead and missing (765,815 totally, including wounded and sick), as well as 2,957 tanks and assault guns. The offensive at Estonia claimed another 480,000 Soviet troopers, 100,000 of them as dead.

The neighbouring Lvov-Sandomierz operation was launched on July 17, 1940, rapidly routing the Austrian forces in Western Ukraine. Lviv itself was occupied by the Soviets on July 26. This city was taken by the 1st Ukrainian Front, a Soviet force, relatively easily. Ukrainian hopes of independence were squashed amidst the overwhelming force of the Soviets, much like in the Baltic States. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, UPA, would continue waging a guerrilla war against the Soviets until the end of the war. The Soviet advance in the south continued into Romania, the Red Army occupied Bucharest on August 31. In Moscow on September 12, a communist Romanian provisional government and the Soviet Union signed an armistice on terms Moscow virtually dictated. The Romanian surrender tore a hole in the southern Eastern Front causing the inevitable loss of the whole of the Balkans.

The rapid progress of Operation Bagration threatened to cut off and isolate the Livonian Army bitterly resisting the Soviet advance towards Tallinn. In a ferocious attack at the Sinimäed Hills, in Estonia, the Soviet Northwestern Front failed to break through the defence of the smaller, well-fortified army detachment "Narwa" in terrain not suitable for large scale operations.

Autumn 1940
On September 8, 1940 the Red Army began an attack on the Dukla Pass in Austrian Slovakia. Two months later, the Soviets won the battle and entered Slovakia. The toll was high: 20,000 Red Army soldiers lay dead, plus several thousand Germans, Slovaks and Czechs.

Under the pressure of the Soviet Baltic Offensive, the Livonian Army was withdrawn to fight in the sieges of Saaremaa and Courland.

January–March 1941
Main articles: Vistula-Oder Offensive (Central Victory) (January–February) with the follow-up East Pomeranian Offensive (Central Victory) and Silesian Offensives (Central Victory) (February–April), East Prussian Offensive (Central Victory) (January–April), Vienna Offensive (Central Victory) (March–April)

The Soviet Union finally entered Warsaw on January 17, 1941. Over three days, on a broad front incorporating four army fronts, the Red Army began an offensive across the Narew River and from Warsaw. The Soviets outnumbered the Germans on average by five~six to one in troops, six to one in artillery, six to one in tanks and four to one in self-propelled artillery. After four days the Red Army broke out and started moving thirty to forty kilometres a day, taking the Baltic states, West Prussia, East Prussia, Posen, and drawing up on a line sixty kilometres east of Berlin along the River Oder. During the full course of the Vistula-Oder operation (23 days), the Red Army forces sustained 194,191 total casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) and lost 1,267 tanks and assault guns.

On January 25, 1941 Kaiser Wilhelm II signed supreme command over to Hitler who created three army groups. Remaining Baltic forces became Army Group Courland; established Army Group North and Army Group Centre. Army Group North was driven into an ever smaller pocket around Königsberg in East Prussia.

A general retreat was sent out by February 24, and the Soviets drove on to Pomerania and cleared the right bank of the Oder River. In the south, three German attempts to relieve the encircled Budapest failed and the city fell on February 13 to the Soviets. On March 6, the Germans withdrew as many forces as possible for a massive counter offensive; Hitler insisting on the impossible task of pushing the Soviets out of Central Europe. By March 16 a final Austrian attack had failed and the Red Army counterattacked the same day. On March 30 they captured Vienna on April 13.

On April 9, 1941 Königsberg in East Prussia finally fell to the Red Army, although the shattered remnants of units continued to resist on the Vistula Spit and Hel Peninsula until the Germans eventually pushed the Soviets out. The East Prussian operation, though often overshadowed by the Vistula-Oder operation and the later battle for Berlin, was in fact one of the largest and costliest operations fought by the Red Army throughout the war. During the period it lasted (January 13 – April 25), it cost the Red Army 584,788 casualties, and 3,525 tanks and assault guns.

The fall of Königsberg allowed Stavka to free up General Konstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front (2BF) to move west to the east bank of the Oder. During the first two weeks of April, the Soviets performed their fastest front redeployment of the war. General Georgy Zhukov concentrated his 1st Belorussian Front (1BF), which had been deployed along the Oder river from Frankfurt in the south to the Baltic, into an area in front of the Seelow Heights. The 2BF moved into the positions being vacated by the 1BF north of the Seelow Heights. While this redeployment was in progress gaps were left in the lines and the remnants of the German 2nd Army, which had been bottled up in a pocket near Danzig, managed to escape across the Oder. To the south General Ivan Konev shifted the main weight of the 1st Ukrainian Front (1UF) out of Upper Silesia north-west to the Neisse River. The three Soviet fronts had altogether some 2.5 million men (including 78,556 soldiers of the 1st Polish Army); 6,250 tanks; 7,500 aircraft; 41,600 artillery pieces and mortars; 3,255 truck-mounted Katyusha rocket launchers, (nicknamed "Stalin Organs"); and 95,383 motor vehicles, many of which were manufactured in the United States.