Stalins Folly The Tragic First Ten days of WWII on the Eastern Front

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Название:Stalins Folly The Tragic First Ten days of WWII on the Eastern Front

Автор: Pleshakov

Издательство: Houghton mifflin company

Год издания: 2005

Язык: английский

Страниц: 344

Формат: PDF

Размер: 290 Mb

Изображения: черно-белые фото

The end of 1940 was grim. Two armies, one clad in gray, the other in khaki, were destroying the Old World. They had thrown themselves at Europe abruptly and ferociously, like ants attacking a cake left on a garden table. And like ants, they arrived in geometrically impeccable columns, never questioning their right to devour the trophy. The ants were of two different species. The grays took orders from the German Führer, Adolf Hitler; the khakis closed ranks around the Soviet leader, or vozhd, Joseph Stalin. Having been dismissed by cultured European politicians, cartoonists, and sketch writers as pests that could be stamped out by the civilized world in a flash, the ants had proved their worth by 1940. France crumbled under the wheels of German tanks in less than three weeks. The British force on the continent, expected to save the day, was decimated at Dunkirk. As headlines shouted about the impending demise of these two great powers, pillars of the West since the days of the Crusades, smaller European nations such as Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Norway wriggled under German occupation, their cries unheard by the panicking world.