In this magisterial work, the fruit of more than a decade`s research, Chris Bellamy provides, in one volume, a modern history of the greatest and most hideous land-air conflict in history. It was a war fought by all elements of society, absolute because both sides aimed to exterminate their opponent, to destroy their political existence and each shed almost all of the customary restraints that had traditionally applied in conflicts between `civilized` nations. Between 1941 and 1945, on the Eastern Front, the greater part of the land and associated air forces of Nazi Germany and its allies were ultimately destroyed by the Soviet Union in what its people, and those of its fifteen successor states, called, and still call, the Great Patriotic War. It was arguably the single most decisive component of the Second World War and Bellamy`s meticulous account tells the story from both the Soviet and the German side, including the long period from August 1939 until June 1941,