Death on the Don

Book excerpt: Nazi Germany's assault on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Operation Barbarossa, was the largest invasion in history. Almost 3.5 million men smashed into Stalin's Red Army, reaching the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Sevastopol. But not all of this vast army was German; indeed by the summer of 1942 over 500,000 were Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Croatians. As part of the German offensive that year, armies advanced to the Don only to be utterly annihilated in the Red Army's Saturn and Uranus winter offensives. Hundreds of thousands were killed, wounded or captured. Poorly equipped, often badly led and totally unprepared for the war they were asked to fight, Death on the Don tells the story of one of the greatest military disasters of the Second World War.