Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen Behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance
- ISBN-10
- 0190061014
- ISBN-13
- 9780190061012
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 360
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2019
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press, USA
- Author
- Serhii Plokhy
Description
The full story of the first and only time American and Soviets fought side-by-side in World War IIAt the conference held in Tehran November 1943, American officials proposed to their Soviet allies a new operation in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany. The Normandy Invasion was already in the works; what American officials were suggesting until then was a second air front: the US Air Force wouldestablish bases in Soviet-controlled territory. Though pushing relentlessly for the United States and Great Britain to do more to help the war effort - the Soviet body count was staggering - Stalin, recalling the presence of foreign troops during the Russian Revolution, balked. His concern was thatthe American presence would inflame regional and ideological differences. Eventually in early 1944, Stalin was persuaded to give in, and Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated. B-17 Superfortresses were flown from bases in Italy to the Poltova region (in what is today Ukraine).As Plokhy's fascinating and utterly original book shows, what happened on these airbases mirrors the fate of the Grand Alliance itself. While both sides were fighting for Germany's unconditional surrender, differences arose that no common purpose could overcome. Soviet secret policeman watched overthe Americans, shadowing every move, and eventually trying to prevent fraternization between American airmen and local women. A catastrophic air raid by the Germans revealed the limitations of Soviet air defenses. Relations soured and the operations went south. Based on previously inaccessiblearchives, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front offers a bottom-up history of the Grand Alliance itself, showing how it first began to collapse on the airfields of World War II.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2020-08-06
- - pages
- Paperback
- Penguin Group
-
- 2019-09-02
- 480 pages
- Ebook
- Oxford University Press
Similar books
-
Yalta: The Price of Peace
By S. M. PlokhyIn this landmark book, a gifted Harvard historian puts you in the room with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt as they meet at a climactic turning point in the war to hash out the terms of the peace.
-
Hitler's War
By Harry TurtledovePortrays an alternate universe in which the outcome of World War II is profoundly changed by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's refusal to allow Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland.
-
Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
By Serhii PlokhyDrawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with ...
-
Stalin's War: A New History of World War II
By Sean McMeekinThe Associated Press correspondent, Henry Cassidy, though not allowed near the front, filed an effusive dispatch in June 1943, noting that he saw “Airacobra, Kittyhawk and Tomahawk fighters in service at an airport outside Moscow.
-
The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story
By Serhii PlokhyA thrilling tale of Soviet spy craft, complete with exploding parcels, elaborately staged coverups, double agents, and double crosses, The Man with the Poison Gun offers unparalleled insight into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage.
-
The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance
By Anders RydellFor those who lost relatives in the Holocaust, these books are often the only remaining possession of their relatives they have ever held.
-
The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union
By Serhii PlokhyAs prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States.
-
Hitler's Bastard: Through Hell and Back in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia
By Eric PleasantsOf all the extraordinary individual accounts that have come out of the Second World War and its aftermath, few can compare with that of Eric Pleasants, a member of the 'bastard' British wing of Hitler's SS - the British Free Corps.
-
Surviving Katyn: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth
By Jane RogoyskaSurviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake – the few survivors of the massacre and the Polish wartime forensic investigators – whose quest for the ...
-
Tin Can Titans: The Heroic Men and Ships of World War II's Most Decorated Navy Destroyer Squadron
By John Wukovits... R. Thompson to his parents at the time.1 Their sister ship Howorth had experienced the fury of kamikazes off Okinawa, and most military commanders expected that to be a pale preview of what Japan would unleash to protect the ...