Death on the Don

The Destruction of Germany's Allies on the Eastern Front 1941 - 1944

Jonathan Trigg

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781862277588
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

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 – Hitler's Axis allies. As part of the German offensive that year, more than four allied 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 and the German Sixth Army was left surrounded and dying in the rubble of Stalingrad. Death on the Don tells the story of one of the greatest military disasters of the Second World War.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• Notes on the Text
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The politics of the Axis
• 2. Waging war – economics and the military
• 3. Operation Barbarossa – the world holds its breath!
• 4. The death of the Ostheer – winter 1941–42
• 5. Hitler’s Case Blue
• 6. Stalingrad
• 7. Winter on the Don
• 8. Operation Uranus – the end of the Romanians
• 9. The Italians Turn – ‘Little’ Saturn ‘Phase 1’
• 10. The last of the Axis – Hungary’s 2nd Army
• 11. Counting the cost of the Don
• 12. After the Don – the Axis regroups
• 13. Aftermath
• Appendix A
• Bibliography
• Plate Section
• By the Same Author
• Copyright