Quotes About Eastern Front

Allied supplies of arms to Russia, and the manpower reserves of Russia have been sufficient to bring continuous counter-attacks against our Eastern Front.

In the east in the summer of 1942, the Germans embarked on a strategy to break the back of the Soviet Union by conquering the Caucasus and large portions of southern Russia. The resources available for such wide-ranging aims were completely inadequate.

A permanent state of war on the Eastern front will help to form a sound race of men,' the Führer had once said, 'and will prevent us relapsing into the softness of a Europe thrown back upon itself.' But

It was the Russians who provided the oceans of blood necessary to defeat Germany, and it cannot be reiterated enough that out of every five Germans killed in combat – that is, on the battlefield rather than in aerial bombing or through other means – four died on the Eastern Front.

Or until one side or another found some weapon so vile, so destructive, that it would sweep from the Western Front to the Eastern Front in a path of lunatic carnage, leaving nothing alive on the entire continent . . . and he no longer had the illusion that such a weapon, if found, would not be used.

General Groves came for dinner at the Chadwicks' and in the course of casual banter over the dinner table, he said, "You realize of course that the main purpose of this project is to subdue the Russians." Rotblat was shocked. He had no illusions about Stalin—the Soviet dictator had, after all, invaded his beloved Poland. But thousands of Russians were dying every day on the Eastern Front and Rotblat felt a sense of betrayal.

More than 80 per cent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front.

Some sense of the death toll can be gleaned from the fact that SS spokesmen at the Wannsee conference contended that construction labor on the Eastern Front should become one of the main vehicles for wiping out every living Jew in Europe.

The great American contribution to the Red Army was not just food stocks and strategic materials but nearly four hundred thousand heavy transport trucks, which eventually allowed Stalin a mobility and rapidity lacking among his Nazi enemies on the eastern front.

In equipment, Allied superiority was stifling. In guns it was 2½ to 1, in tanks 20 to 1. The Allies had some 14,000 planes, against which the Germans could pit only 573 serviceable aircraft. The entire Luftwaffe was down to 4,507 planes, and none of those in Germany and the Eastern Front could be spared for the west.

In referring to the Führer's military acumen, he referred to him as a "dilettante" and quipped that Germany's defeat on the eastern front was due to too many Russians and one German too many.

Really, it was incredible that they had achieved any successes at all. As if to underline the disintegration of the entire German war strategy, on the night of 4/5 December temperatures along the Eastern Front plummeted to minus 35 degrees.

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR was extraordinarily diverse. The Eastern Front, where 90 percent of all Germans killed in combat met their fate, overwhelmingly dominated the struggle against Hitler. Between 1941 and 1944, British and American sailors and airmen fought at sea and in the sky, but relatively small numbers of Western Allied ground troops engaged the Axis in North Africa, Italy, Asia and the Pacific.

Meanwhile in the East, within weeks of abandoning their harvest fields, shops and lathes, newly mobilised Russian, Austrian and German soldiers met in huge clashes; tiny Serbia inflicted a succession of defeats on the Austrians which left the Hapsburg Empire reeling, having by Christmas suffered 1.27 million casualties at Serb and Russian hands, amounting to one in three of its soldiers mobilised.