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Why The War On The Eastern Front Matters

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During the Second World War it can be said that the War on the Eastern Front was one of the largest and deadliest conflict in history. This statement is made in relation to the number of casualties, both civilian and militant. Research suggests that there were 27 million Soviet deaths alone – military and civilian.[1]
Why the War on the Eastern Front Matters
Over Seventy-five percent of German casualties during World War II are attributed to the War on the Eastern Front.[2] The war in Europe was not won as a result of ‘D-Day’, or the heroic Allied efforts at Bastogne, as our biased American popular culture would have us believe: “Despite the widespread perception in the West that the Normandy invasion was the event that defeated Nazi Germany, …show more content…

The other countries and theaters of war which Germany sought to overpower were each ultimately affected by the impractical invasion of the Soviet Union: ‘Operation Barbarossa’, on the 22nd of June 1941. Nazi Germany’s mismanagement of its aggression, beginning with the North African Campaign (1940 -1943), the Italian Campaign (1943 -1945), and finally the war in Western Europe (1944 – 1945), enabled the Allied forces to gain victories in each of these theaters of war. As Gerhard L. Weinberg offers in A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, the campaign during the summer of 1941 was meant to be a brief one.[4] It turned out anything but brief. The failures in the other theaters can all be attributed to Germany’s sustained focus on the Eastern Front, an effort whose sheer enormity left themselves spread too thin and unable to be operational elsewhere. Michael Burleigh agrees in his comprehensive book of 2000, The Third Reich: A New History: “The fortunes of war turned against Hitler, not just in Russia, where Stalingrad was an unmitigated disaster, impacting badly on domestic morale, but in North Africa, where Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein broke Eighth Army’s poor record against Rommel’s Afrika Korps.”[5] Stephen G. Fritz in 2011’s Ostkreig: Hitler’s War of

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