Red Army

The Red Army Offensive in the spring of 1944 reached Warsaw by the late summer. Poland had suffered for five years under Nazi occupation, and the Government-in-Exile in London kept the focus of the Polish cause.

In 1938 and 1939, the Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria was severely defeated by the Red Army over a border dispute. Eager to score a victory, the Imperial Japanese Army was engaged in the border dispute near Khasan, where the borders of Manchuria, Korea and Siberia meet.

At the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviets held a salient near the town of Kursk, 125 miles north of Kharkov. If this bulge could be eliminated, a great encirclement could be accomplished on the scale of the 1941 battles. Adolf Hitler in the spring of 1943 realized that he had to crush the Red Army before it completely surpassed the Wehrmacht in size and quantity.

After the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, the Germans took up defensive positions and fell back in an orderly retreat.The Red Army, now with aggressive, confident commanders like Georgi Zhukov and Vasily Chuikov backed by increasing quantities of tanks, aircraft, planes and men, supplemented by deliveries from the United States and the U

The Eastern Front had been relatively stable since the end of Operation Bagration in late 1944. The Germans had lost Budapest and most of Hungary. Romania and Hungary were forced to surrender and declare war on Germany. The Polish plain was open to the Soviet Red Army.

Adolf Hitler had convinced himself by December 1940 that England lay prostrate before German air power. November had seen the worst of the air attacks; acres of England’s cities were reduced to rubble. Hitler believed she would never rise again to threaten Germany.

Before World War I Finland was part of Imperial Russia. As part of realm of the Czars, Finland chafed under its rule. After the war Finland, along with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, were carved out of the old empire and made into autonomous nations.