Alexander Hill - The War on the Eastern Front: The Soviet Union, 1941-1945 - A Photographic History

Defending Moscow in the summer of 1941.

The Soviet Union 19411945 A Photographic History

Alexander Hill

Foreword by David Stahel

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright f Alexander Hill, 2021

ISBN 978-1-52678-610-4

eISBN 978-1-52678-611-1

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Although the acknowledgements for this book are shorter than for some of my other works, I would like to take the opportunity to thank a few key individuals, without whom this project would not have come to fruition. First of all, I would certainly like to thank Ralph Gibson of RIA-Novosti (branded as Sputnik in the West) for making this project possible at all by making the selection of photographs presented here available to me at a viable cost. Having drawn on Sputniks excellent photo archive for a number of other projects, I was keen to see more of the photos I had come across be published in the West as part of a publication such as this one. Ralphs enthusiasm for and commitment to the project when I proposed it to him has certainly been a valuable asset.

Having obtained the photographs for this book, I then sought out a publisher. Rupert Harding of Pen & Sword had asked me on a number of occasions over the years whether Id like to write a book for them, and in this instance I was happy to oblige. Rupert successfully made the case for the book with his colleagues, and has been supportive of the whole endeavour from start to finish.

I would also like to thank Sarah Cook for her competent editing of my manuscript for the publisher, and the typesetter Noel Sadler for doing such a great job at showing off the photos in this book. Also to be thanked is Aaron Bates for his willingness to take a look at the proofs to look for any errors that might have made their way into the text. David Stahel kindly agreed to write a foreword for the book, and I very much appreciate the time and effort both Aaron and David have put in.

As is the convention with such books, I am pointing out that any errors or omissions are of course my responsibility. To close, I hope that you appreciate reading and browsing this book as much as I have selecting the photos and writing the captions!

Alexander Hill

Okotoks, Alberta

February 2021

As an 18-year-old first-year history undergraduate I discovered the Nazi-Soviet War on the shelves of my university library. From the beginning I was gripped by the impossible scale, the frightful brutality and the mysterious absence of this unknown war in my decidedly Anglo-American education of the Second World War. I waded through the dense histories of Albert Seaton ( The Russo-German War ) and John Erickson ( The Road to Stalingrad ) without always understanding what I was reading. The military ranks, units and structures were assumed knowledge that I didnt possess. Id never heard of most of the place-names and even major cities like Stalingrad were nowhere to be found in the family atlas. The cast of German and Soviet generals was too great to make sense of I could never remember who was where or what they commanded.