In honour of Remembrance Day, also called Veterans’ Day and Armistice Day, here is an excerpt, part of a World War II soldier’s account of the reality of being a prisoner of the nazis.
The Third Crushing Blow: Odesa and Crimea offensives – Beyond Barbarossa: The Eastern Front of World War 2
In 1944, the Red Army delivers its third crushing blow on the Axis forces in eastern Europe: two major offensives to recapture the rest of Ukraine, and the Crimean peninsula.
Map 1: Northern Black Sea coast and southern Ukraine
The range where the two mighty blows were delivered. Ploesti, Romania is to the far left of the map, just north of Bucharest.
Map 2:
Map by Scott Bury
Map 3: The Red Army’s Crimean offensive, 1944
Image 1: Issa Pliyev, Commander, Cavalry-Mechanized Group
The Red Army, 4th Guards Cavalry Corps advancing across southern Ukraine, 1944
Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, with Adolf Hitler in Budapest, 1938
The Red Army marches into “liberated” Odesa, 1944
Note the women soldiers in the ranks.
Sources:
Prit Buttar, The Reckoning: The Defeat of Army Group South, 1944. Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2020.
Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Anthony Tucker-Jones, Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin’s War 1941–1945. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK, The History Press, 2017.
Wikipedia: The Crimean Offensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_offensive
— The Odesa Offensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odessa_Offensive
- The Third Crushing Blow: Odesa and Crimea offensives
- World War 2 links to Ukraine: The Latest: A conversation with Francis Dearnley—Episode 71
- The curtain falls on Germany in 1943: Episode 63
- Europe at War: Episode 70 of Beyond Barbarossa, the podcast about the Eastern Front of World War II
- The reality of occupation: Episode 69
This excerpt came from Army of Worn Soles: Volume 1 of the Eastern Front Trilogy, the true story of a Canadian drafted into the Soviet Red Army, 1941–1945.
Learn more about Army of Worn Soles.