'Fortresses must carry out the same tasks as the fortresses of old....They must allow themselves to be surrounded and thus tie down as many enemy forces as possible.' So Hitler directed in March 1944 and, in so doing, sealed the fate of Ternopol', Kovel', Poznan and Breslau, cities in the Ukraine and Poland that were in the path of the Red Army's advance towards Nazi Germany. German forces, under orders to resist at all costs, adopted all-round defence and struggled to hold out while waiting for relief - which never came. In this gripping and original book, Alexey Isaev describes, in vivid detail, what happened next -intense and ruthless fighting, horrendous casualties among soldiers and civilians, the fabric of these historic cities torn apart. His account is based on pioneering archival research which offers us an unrivalled insight into the tactics on both sides, the experience of the close-quarter fighting in the streets and houses, and the dreadful aftermath. At the same time he shows why these cities were chosen and how the wider war passed them by as the Wehrmacht retreated and the battlefront moved westward. Each of these cities suffered a similar fate to Stalingrad but their story has never been told before in such graphic and circumstantial detail.

So much has been written about the Battle of Stalingrad - the Soviet victory that turned the tide of the Second World War - that we should know everything about it. But the history of the war, and the battle, is evolving and is being written anew, and Alexey Isaev's engrossing account is a striking example of this fresh approach. By bringing together previously unpublished Russian archive material - strategic directives and orders, after-action reports and official records of all kinds - with the vivid recollections of soldiers who were there, in the front lines, he reconstructs what happened in extraordinary detail. The evidence leads him to question common assumptions about the conduct of the battle - about the use of tanks and mechanized forces, for instance, and the combat capability, and tenacity, of the defeated and surrounded German Sixth Army in the last weeks before it surrendered. His gripping narrative carries the reader through the course of the entire battle from the first small-scale encounters on the approaches to Stalingrad in July 1942, through the intense continuous fighting through the city, to the encirclement, the beating back of the relieving force and the capitulation of the Sixth Army in February 1943. Alexey Isaev's latest book is an important contribution to the literature on this decisive battle. It offers a thought-provoking revised view of events for readers who are already familiar with the story, and it is a fascinating introduction for those who are coming to it for the first time.

In June 1941 - during the first week of the Nazi invasion in the Soviet Union - the quiet cornfields and towns of Western Ukraine were awakened by the clanking of steel and thunder of explosions; this was the greatest tank battle of the Second World War. About 3,000 tanks from the Red Army Kiev Special Military District clashed with about 800 German tanks of Heeresgruppe South. Why did the numerically superior Soviets fail? Hundreds of heavy KV-1 and KV-2 tanks, the five-turret giant T-35 and famous T-34 failed to stop the Germans. Based on recently available archival sources, A. Isaev describes the battle from a new point of view: that in fact it's not the tanks, but armoured units, which win or lose battles. The Germans during the Blitzkrieg era had superior tactics and organisations for their tank forces. The German Panzer Division could defeat their opponents not by using tanks, but by using artillery, which included heavy artillery, and motorized infantry and engineers. The Red Army's armoured units - the Mechanized Corps - had a lot of teething troubles, as all of them lacked accompanying infantry and artillery. In 1941 the Soviet Armoured Forces had to learn the difficult science - and mostly 'art' - of combined warfare. Isaev traces the role of these factors in a huge battle around the small Ukrainian town of Dubno. Popular myths about impregnable KV and T-34 tanks are laid to rest. In reality, the Germans in 1941 had the necessary tools to combat them. The author also defines the real achievements on the Soviet side: the blitzkrieg in the Ukraine had been slowed down. For the Soviet Union, the military situation in June 1941 was much worse than it was for France and Britain during the Western Campaign in 1940. The Red Army wasn't ready to fight as a whole and the border district's armies lacked infantry units, as they were just arriving from the internal regions of the USSR. In this case, the Red Army tanks became the 'Iron Shield' of the Soviet Union; they even operated as fire brigades. In many cases, the German infantry - not tanks - became the main enemy of Soviet armoured units in the Dubno battle. Poorly organized, but fierce, tank-based counter-attacks slowed down the German infantry - and while the Soviet tanks lost the battle, they won the war.