The Soviet victory over the Germans at Stalingrad was decisive for the war on the Eastern Front and for the Second World War as a whole, and the story of the long, bitter battle on the banks of the Volga has fascinated historians ever since. While it has been the subject of countless histories, memoirs and eyewitness accounts, the grueling reality of the battle on the ground, in the shattered streets and buildings of the city, has rarely been recorded photographically.

The great strength of Nik Cornish's selection of unforgettable images is in its scale. He documents every aspect of...

The third volume in Nik Cornish's photographic history of the Second World War on the Eastern Front records in vivid visual detail the sequence of Red Army offensives that pushed the Wehrmacht back across Russia after the failure of Operation Citadel, the German attack at Kursk. Previously unpublished images show the epic scale of the build-up to the Kursk battle and the enormous cost in terms of lives and material of the battle itself. They also show that the military initiative was now firmly in Soviet hands, for the balance of power on the Eastern Front had shifted and the Germans were on...

Often overshadowed by D-Day Operation Bagration, the code name for the Red Army's summer offensive of 1944, broke the back of the Axis on the Eastern Front. Coincidentally beginning on the third anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Bagration demonstrated that the Red Army had learnt the lessons of mobile warfare and was capable of putting them into ruthless practice. A series of well-coordinated attacks combined with major partisan strikes struck the defence lines of Army Group Centre in Belarus. Weak in armour and air support AGC had not been the target Hitler had...