The war on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945 was the largest sustained air-ground conflict in military history and played a decisive role in the defeat of the Third Reich. The scale of the conflict was immense. Lasting more than 46 months, it involved in excess of 10 million combatants at its peak, and resulted in roughly 15 million military deaths, as well as about 20 million civilian deaths. More than 50 percent of all German military fatalities in 1941–45 occurred there, and by the time the Western Allies invaded France in June 1944, the Wehrmacht was already decimated.
But who were the generals who led these campaigns on the Eastern Front? The standard historiography of the Second World War tends to focus on a few prominent leaders while ignoring the mass of commanders and operational-level military staffs who actually fought most of the war.
This new study by renowned Eastern Front historian Robert Forczyk seeks to redress the balance through an objective analysis of those senior German and Soviet commanders, providing a new history of the war on the Eastern Front through the lens of generalship and battle command.