Games - Bolt Action: Campaign: The Road to Berlin

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This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Warlord Games

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First published in Great Britain in 2017

2017 Osprey Publishing Ltd and Warlord Games

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ISBN: 978-1-4728-1792-1 (PB)
ISBN: 978-1-4728-1794-5 (eBook)
ISBN: 978-1-4728-1793-8 (ePDF)
ISBN: 978-1-4728-2384-7 (XML)

Editors Note

For ease of comparison please refer to the following conversion table:

1 mile = 1.6km

1yd = 0.9m

1ft = 0.3m

1in = 2.54cm/25.4mm

1 gallon (Imperial) = 4.5 litres

1lb = 0.45kg

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CONTENTS

In June 1944 the Axis powers in Europe were about to be subjected to two major hammer blows. In the West, the final preparations were being made for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Western Europe. In the East, the Red Army was planning a massive offensive, with bold objectives to critically damage the German Army and eject it entirely from the Soviet Union and, by pushing deep into Poland, providing the springboard for later offensives that would eventually find the Red Army in the streets of Berlin ushering in the final collapse of Hitlers Third Reich. The war in the East was now in its third year and the writing was on the wall for Germany. To a large extent, the course of the war on the Eastern Front in its first year and a half had been a catalogue of crushing German victories over their Red Army foes. Since the opening of Operation Barbarossa in May 1941, the Wehrmacht had advanced deep into the territory of the Soviet Union, had briefly been at the gates of Moscow, and at the end of 1942 was besieging the two major city bastions of the Soviet north and south, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Despite the rebuttal at the gates of Moscow (due as much to the harsh winter conditions as the brave and solid defence of the Red Army) it seemed to many neutral observers that the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable. Yet, within six months, conditions had decisively and irrevocably changed.

In February 1943, the shattering defeat at Stalingrad and the virtual annihilation of the 6th Army, which at that point had been the largest organised formation in the Wehrmacht, had enormous impacts on the armies of both sides. For the Germans a sense of fatalism began to grow, whilst amongst the Soviets spirits rose. After the months of crushing defeats, encirclements and mass capitulations, the Germans were finally revealed to be beatable and their aura of invincibility had finally been ripped aside. This is well illustrated by a common story from the end of the Stalingrad operations where Soviet troops harassing sullen German prisoners, pointed at the remains of the devastated city and screamed that it would only be a matter of time before Berlin resembled the ruins of Stalingrad.