The Unknown War

On a pleasant June morning in 1941, nothing seemed more peaceful than Red Square and Moscow itself. It was early summer, and people were strolling along the broad streets, shopping in the big department stores or going to the country for the day. They did not know that Hitler's legions, five million strong, had crashed through a frontier 1,800 miles long at 4 a.m. that very morning. Nor did they know, until a government broadcast alerted them at noon, that the Soviet Union was at war. The Unknown War. The war that broke Hitler's back and ended his dream of a new order.

On October 8, 1941, Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, broadcast from Berlin that Moscow had fallen. Hitler's troops, he said, could see the Kremlin towers from their front lines; another four or five days and the Nazi flag would fly over the Kremlin. The Germans believed these reports, and so did many others - after all, Hitler had conquered western Europe, he had blitzed London. But in an area some 60 miles from the Kremlin, the Nazi blitzkrieg came to an end. In the Moscow suburbs, the Red Army and hundreds of thousands of ordinary men, women and children threw up barriers that the Nazi tanks could not crack. In early December, the Red Army counterattacked. They pushed Hitler's armies as far back as 125 miles from Moscow. It was the first time in the Second World War that the mighty Nazi Wehrmacht was halted.

In the history of the Unknown War, Leningrad stands out as a symbol of the courage and persistence of the Russian people. For years Leningrad resisted capture by Hitler's forces. In the aching cold of winter, with nothing to eat, hundreds of thousands of Leningraders perished from starvation or simply froze to death. Still they fought on. During the terrifying siege, which the Russians call "The 900 Days", Nazi troops encircled the city and cut off all communications - but Leningrad would not surrender.

This is the story of ordinary Russian civilians who worked to supply the military with tanks, planes, guns - whatever was necessary to win the war against the Nazis. Little is known about the planned evacuation of more than 1,500 Russian factories from out of the path of Hitler's armies. Onto flat cars, freight cars and trucks went components of factory after factory. Far to the east, beyond the Urals in Siberia and Central Asia, the factories were reassembled. There vital war materials were produced for the fighting at the front.

In 1942 some of the fiercest combat that ever took place was in the monumental battle between the German and Russian armies. The ground was covered with bombs and artillery shells; almost all of Stalingrad was reduced to rubble. Of some 46,000 affected homes and villages, 41,000 were totally destroyed. In Stalingrad two million soldiers fought for 200 days and nights. Many people in the West doubted that the Soviets could win against the mighty Wehrmacht, but the Red Army fought the Nazis to a standstill. From street to street, house to house, room to room, the Russians repelled attack after attack, causing Hitler's army to suffer its greatest losses to date. So much was at stake that the victory or defeat of either side might well determine the outcome of World War II.

During the fighting for Stalingrad, the defenders of the city took an oath: "There is no land for us beyond the Volga". When the Nazis surrendered to the Soviet army on January 31, 1943, in the largest military action in history, Stalingrad became a source of inspiration to the Allies in their mutual struggle against Hitler. In the course of the Battle of the Volga, the Soviet armed forces destroyed five armies of Germans and their fascist allies - one-fourth of all Wehrmacht troops on the eastern front. This victory strengthened the morale of the anti-Hitler coalition at a crucial time in the war.