Military history of the Soviet Union
The military history of the
Following the
The Soviet military consisted of five armed services - in their official order of importance[citation needed]:
- the Strategic Rocket Forces (service established in 1959)
- Ground Forces
- Air Forces
- Airborne Forces
- Air Defense Forces(separate service from 1949)
- Naval Forces
- Spetsnaz
Two other Soviet militarized forces existed: the Internal Troops (
Tsarist and revolutionary background
History of Russia |
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Russia portal |
The
Even though
On January 28, 1918 the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin decreed the establishment of the Red Army, officially merging the 20,000 Red Guards, 60,000 Latvian red riflemen with 200,000 Baltic Fleet sailors and a handful of sympathetic Petrograd garrison soldiers. Leon Trotsky served as their first commissar for war.
The early Red Army was
During the civil war, the Bolsheviks fought
The overwhelming majority of professional officers in the Russian army were of nobility (
Polish forces managed to break a long streak of Bolshevik victories by launching a bold counteroffensive at the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. At Warsaw the Red Army suffered a defeat so great and so unexpected that it turned the course of the entire war and eventually forced the Soviets to accept the unfavorable conditions offered by the Treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921. It was the biggest defeat of the Red Army in history.
After the civil war, the Red Army became an increasingly professional military organization. With most of its five million soldiers demobilized, the Red Army was transformed into a small regular force, and territorial militias were created for wartime mobilization. Soviet military schools, established during the civil war, began to graduate large numbers of trained officers loyal to the Soviet power. In an effort to increase the prestige of the military profession, the party reestablished formal military ranks, downgraded political commissars, and eventually established the principle of one-man command.
Development of the structure, ideology, and doctrine of the Soviet military
Soviet Armed Forces |
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Components |
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Ranks of the Soviet Military |
History of the Soviet Military |
Military counterintelligence
Throughout the history of the Soviet Army, the Soviet
Political doctrine
Under the direction of Lenin and Trotsky, the Red Army claimed to adhere to
In keeping with the Comintern philosophy, the Red Army forcibly suppressed the anti-Soviet
Military-party relations
During the 1930s,
In 1937, however, Stalin purged the Red Army of its best military leaders. Fearing that the military posed a threat to his rule, Stalin jailed or executed many Red Army officers, estimated in thousands, including three of five marshals. These actions were to severely impair the Red Army's capabilities in the Soviet–Finnish War (Winter War) of 1939–40 and in World War II.
Fearing the immense popularity of the armed forces after World War II, Stalin demoted war hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov and took personal credit for having saved the country. After Stalin's death in 1953, Zhukov reemerged as a strong supporter of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev rewarded Zhukov by making him minister of defense and a full Politburo member. Concern that the Soviet army might become too powerful in politics, however, led to Zhukov's abrupt dismissal in the autumn of 1957. Khrushchev later alienated the armed forces by cutting defense expenditures on conventional forces in order to carry out his plans for economic reform.
Leonid Brezhnev's years in power marked the height of party-military cooperation as he provided ample resources to the armed forces. In 1973 the minister of defense became a full Politburo member for the first time since 1957. Yet Brezhnev evidently felt threatened by the professional military, and he sought to create an aura of military leadership around himself in an effort to establish his authority over the armed forces.
In the early 1980s, party-military relations became strained over the issue of resource allocations to the armed forces. Despite a downturn in economic growth, the armed forces argued, often to no avail, for more resources to develop advanced conventional weapons.
Mikhail Gorbachev downgraded the role of the military in state ceremonies, including moving military representatives to the end of the leadership line-up atop Lenin's Mausoleum during the annual Red Square military parade commemorating the October Revolution. Instead, Gorbachev emphasized civilian economic priorities and reasonable sufficiency in defense over the professional military's perceived requirements.
Military doctrine
The Russian army was defeated in the First World War, a fact which strongly shaped the early stages of Red Army development. While the armies of Britain and France were content to retain strategies which had made them victorious, the Red Army proceeded to experiment and develop new tactics and concepts, developing parallel to the reborn German armed forces. The Soviets viewed themselves as a nation unique to human history and thus felt no loyalty to previous military tradition, an ideology which allowed for and prioritized innovation.
From its conception, the Red Army committed itself to emphasizing highly mobile warfare. This decision was influenced by the formative wars of its history, namely the Russian Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War. Both of these conflicts had little in common with the static trench warfare of the First World War. Instead, they featured long range mobile operations, often by small but highly motivated forces, as well as rapid advances of hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days.
Under Lenin's New Economic Policy, the Soviet Union had few resources to devote to the Red Army during its formative years in the 1920s. This changed only when Stalin began the industrialisation drive in 1929, a policy created in part to allow for unprecedented funds to be dedicated to the military.
Using these new resources, the Red Army of the 1930s developed a highly sophisticated concept of mobile warfare which relied on huge formations of
The Soviets developed their armament factories under the assumption that during the war they would have to rebuild the whole equipment of the ground and air forces many times over. This assumption was indeed proven correct during the four-year-long war.
The Red Army's focus on mobile operations in the early 1930s was gravely disrupted by Stalin's purge of the military's leadership. Since the new doctrines were associated with officers who had been declared enemies of the state, the support for them declined. Many large mechanised formations were disbanded, with the tanks distributed to support the infantry. After the German blitzkrieg proved its potency in Poland and France, the Red Army started a frantic effort to rebuild the large mechanised corps, but the task was only partly finished when the Wehrmacht attacked in 1941. The huge tank forces, powerful only on paper, were mostly annihilated by the Germans in the first months of Operation Barbarossa. Another factor contributing to the initial defeat was that the Soviet post-World War I rearmament effort was started too early, and in 1941 the majority of Soviet equipment was obsolete and inferior to that of the Wehrmacht.
In the initial period of the war, in the face of catastrophic losses, the Red Army drastically scaled down its armored formations, with the tank brigade becoming the largest commonly deployed armored unit, and reverted to a simpler mode of operations. Nevertheless, the revolutionary doctrines of the 1930s, modified by combat experience, were eventually successfully used at the front starting in 1943 after the Red Army regained the initiative.
Practical deployment of the Soviet military
Interwar period
Following the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union was enmeshed in a struggle for succession that pitted Trotsky and his policy of "world revolution" against Stalin and his policy of "socialism in one country." Thanks to his control over and support from the Party and state bureaucracy, Stalin prevailed and Trotsky was removed as war commissar in 1925, resulting in a turn away from the policy of spreading the revolution abroad in favour of focusing on domestic issues and defending the country against the possibility of foreign invasion.
Eager to dispose of Trotsky's political and military supporters, Stalin directed the execution of eight high-ranking generals between 1935 and 1938. Primary among these was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, leader of the Soviet invasion of Poland.
Despite Stalin's isolationist policies, and even though the
Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War was greatly influenced by the growing tension between Stalin and
The Soviet Union sold arms to the Governor of
In late 1930s, Soviet Union was no longer satisfied with the
Next, Soviet Union sent
On January 29, 1940, the Soviets put an end to their Finnish Democratic Republic puppet government and recognized the sitting government in Helsinki as the legal government of Finland, informing it that they were willing to negotiate peace.[20][21] The Soviets reorganized their forces and launched a new offensive along the Karelian Isthmus in February 1940. Soviet forces broke through the Mannerheim Line and began progressing westward as Soviet peace proposals were given to the Finnish government. As fighting in Viipuri raged and the hope of foreign intervention faded, the Finns accepted peace terms on March 12, 1940 with the signing of the Moscow Peace Treaty. Fighting ended the following day. The Finns had retained their independence, but ceded 9% of Finnish territory to the Soviet Union.
World War II
The
The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies before Nazi Germany and other Axis countries allied with it swept across the newly relocated Soviet border on June 22, 1941, in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa. The poor Soviet performance in the Winter War against Finland encouraged Hitler to ignore the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and take the Red Army by surprise. During the initial stages of the war, Soviet forces were often ordered to stand their ground despite limited defensive capabilities, resulting in numerous encirclements and correspondingly high numbers of casualties.
The United States program of
In the summer of 1943, following the
The defeat of the Wehrmacht had come, however, at the cost of over eight million soldiers and as much as fifteen million civilians dead, by far the highest losses
The Cold War and conventional forces
By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had a standing army of 10 to 13 million men. During and right after the war, the Red Army was by far the most powerful land army in the world. Immediately following Germany's surrender, this number was reduced to five million; this decline was indicative not of diminishing interest in the Soviet military but rather of a growing interest in establishing more modern and mobile armed forces.[citation needed] This policy resulted in the 1949 introduction of the AK-47, designed two years earlier as an improvement on the submachine gun which supplied Soviet infantry with a rugged and reliable source of short-range firepower. Also important was the 1967 introduction of the BMP-1, the first mass-used infantry fighting vehicles commissioned by any armed force in the world. These innovations would help direct the course of Soviet military operations throughout the Cold War.
The Soviet military assisted the Second East Turkestan Republic during the Ili Rebellion.
The
Many of the Soviet forces who fought to liberate the countries of Eastern Europe from Nazi control remained in the region even after Germany's surrender in 1945. Stalin used this military occupation to establish satellite states, creating a buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets quickly became an enormous political and economic influence in the region and the Soviet Union actively assisted local communist parties in coming to power. By 1948, seven eastern European countries had communist governments.
In this setting, the Cold War emerged from a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry S. Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the agreement made at the Yalta Conference. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, the Soviet Union remained adamant in the face of Truman's attempt to stop Communist expansion, and in 1955 Moscow introduced the Warsaw Pact to counterbalance the Western NATO alliance.
Conventional military power showed its continued influence when the Soviet Union used its troops to
Under Khrushchev's leadership, Soviet relations with
Tension between the political forces in Moscow and Beijing would greatly influence Asian politics during the 1960s and 1970s, and a microcosm of the Sino-Soviet split emerged when the by-then late-
Also significant was the 1968 declaration of the
The Cold War and nuclear weapons
The Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb codenamed "
Though the Soviet Union had proposed various nuclear disarmament plans after the U.S. development of atomic weapons in the Second World War, the Cold War saw the Soviets in the process of developing and deploying nuclear weapons in full force. It would not be until the 1960s that the United States and the Soviet Union finally agreed to ban weapon buildups in
By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had reached a rough parity with the United States in some categories of strategic weaponry, and at that time offered to negotiate limits on strategic nuclear weapons deployments. The Soviet Union wished to constrain U.S. deployment of an antiballistic missile (
The
The SALT agreements were generally considered in the West as having codified the concept of
At one time, the Soviet Union maintained the world's largest nuclear arsenal in history. According to estimates by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the peak of approximately 45,000 warheads was reached in 1986.[26] Roughly 20,000 of these were believed to be tactical nuclear weapons, reflecting the Red Army doctrine that favored the use of these weapons if war came in Europe. The remainder (approximately 25,000) were strategic ICBMs. These weapons were considered both offensive and defensive in nature. The production of these weapons is one of the factors that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Military-industrial complex and the economy
With the notable exception of Khrushchev and possibly Gorbachev, Soviet
The integration of the party, government, and military in the Soviet Union became most evident in the area of defense-related industrial production.[27]
In the late 1980s the Soviet Union devoted a quarter of its gross economic output to the defense sector (at the time most Western analysts put the figure at 15%).[28] At the time, the military–industrial complex employed at least one of every five adults in the Soviet Union.[citation needed] In some regions of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, at least half of the workforce was employed in defense plants. (The comparable U.S. figures were roughly one-sixteenth of gross national product and about one of every sixteen in the workforce.) In 1989, one-fourth of the entire Soviet population was engaged in military activities, whether active duty, military production, or civilian military training.
Collapse of the Soviet Union and the military
The political and economic chaos of the late 1980s and early 1990s soon erupted into the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the
The first contribution to this was a large unilateral reduction which began with an announcement by Gorbachev in December 1988; these reductions continued as a result of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and in accordance with Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaties. The second reason for the decline was the widespread resistance to conscription which developed as the policy of glasnost revealed to the public the true conditions inside the Soviet army and the widespread abuse of conscript soldiers.
As the Soviet Union moved towards disintegration in 1991, the huge Soviet military played a surprisingly feeble and ineffective role in propping up the dying Soviet system. The military got involved in trying to suppress conflicts and unrest in
At the crucial moments of the
As the Soviet Union officially dissolved on December 31, 1991, the Soviet military was left in limbo. For the next year and a half various attempts to keep its unity and transform it into the military of the
In the next few years, Russian forces withdrew from central and eastern Europe, as well as from some newly independent post-Soviet republics. While in most places the withdrawal took place without any problems, the Russian army remained in some disputed areas such as the Sevastopol naval base in the Crimea as well as in Abkhazia and Transnistria.
The loss of recruits and industrial capacity in breakaway republics, as well as the breakdown of the Russian economy, caused a devastating decline in the capacity of post-Soviet Russian armed forces in the decade following 1992.
Most of the nuclear stockpile was inherited by Russia. Additional weapons were acquired by Ukraine,
Timeline
Date | Conflict | Location | Outcome |
---|---|---|---|
1918–20 | Russian Civil War | Russian SFSR
|
The newly founded Red Army defeated the White movement and their foreign allies. |
1919–21 | Polish–Soviet War | Belarus, Second Polish Republic, Ukraine | The Soviets were defeated after preliminary successes and conceded Western Ukraine and Western Belarus to Poland, while retaining Eastern Ukraine and Eastern Belarus. |
1921 | Red Army invasion of Georgia | Democratic Republic of Georgia | Soviet rule was established in Georgia |
1924 | August Uprising in Georgia
|
Georgian SSR
|
Last major rebellion against Bolsheviks in Georgia was put down by the Red Army. |
1929 | Sino-Soviet conflict (1929) | Manchuria | Minor armed conflict between the Soviet Union and Chinese warlord Manchurian Chinese Eastern Railway . The Red Army defeated the Chinese and compelled them to uphold the provisions of the Agreement of 1924.
|
1934 | Soviet Invasion of Xinjiang
|
Xinjiang | Red Army and GPU troops attacked the Chinese Muslim 36th Division (National Revolutionary Army) and Han chinese Ili troops led by Generals Ma Zhongying and Zhang Peiyuan. Military stalemate. |
1937 | Xinjiang War (1937)
|
Xinjiang | Red Army troops assisted the provincial government of Xinjiang led by Sheng Shicai in fighting Uyghur rebels. |
1938 | Battle of Lake Khasan | Korea–USSR Border | The Soviets repelled the Japanese incursion. |
1939 | Battles of Khalkhin Gol | Manchuria–Mongolia Border | The Soviets defeated the Japanese Kwantung Army and retained their existing border with Manchukuo. |
1939 | Invasion of Poland and Bessarabia (World War II)
|
Poland, Belarus, Romania | Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided Eastern Europe according to the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. |
1939–40 | Winter War (World War II) | Finland | The Soviets failed to conquer Finland and suffered heavy casualties and material losses, but annexed 9% of Finnish territory in the ensuing peace treaty. The USSR was expelled from the League of Nations as a result of the war.
|
1941–45 | Eastern Front (WWII) (World War II)
|
Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Eastern Europe | In a titanic struggle against Nazi Germany, the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht and occupied most of Eastern and Central Europe. |
1941–44 | Continuation War (World War II) | Finland | Soviet forces defeated Finland, procuring additional territory and Finland withdrew from World War II. |
1944–49 | Ili Rebellion | Xinjiang, Republic of China | Red Army troops and Republic of China troops clashed in Xinjiang over Soviet support for the Second East Turkestan Republic. A Chinese Muslim unit loyal to the Chinese government, the 14th Tungan Cavalry regiment fought against Soviet forces on the Mongolian border. |
1945–74 | Forest Brothers
|
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania | Thousands of Baltic "forest brothers" waged a war of resistance against Soviet administration. Major fighting ended in late 1940s and early 1950s, with the defeat and disintegration of the 'forest brothers'. The last partisan, an Estonian, was killed in 1974. |
1945 | Soviet invasion of Manchuria (World War II) | Manchuria | The Red Army launched a short and successful campaign to evict the Japanese from mainland Asia. The Soviets occupied Manchuria, North Korea and the Kuril Islands. |
1947–91 | Cold War | Worldwide, opposing the United States and the NATO | Nuclear war was frequently threatened, but never realized. In 1955, the Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact in response to the creation of NATO in 1948.
|
1948–49 | Berlin Blockade | Berlin | The first of many Cold War standoffs as the Soviet Union sealed Berlin from outside access. The US responded with the Berlin Airlift and the blockade was eventually called off.
|
1956 | 1956 Hungarian Revolution
|
Hungary | The Red Army suppressed a Hungarian anti-Soviet revolt. |
1962 | Cuban Missile Crisis | Cuba | Another Cold War standoff over US deployment of . |
1968 | Prague Spring | Czechoslovakia | An invasion by the Warsaw Pact quietened a national movement for a more liberal Czech government. |
1969 | Sino-Soviet border conflict | Sino-Soviet border | A long-standing ideological feud between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China erupted into several occasions of inconclusive armed conflicts. The Soviets repelled the Chinese incursion into the Zhenbao/Damansky island. |
1979–89 | Soviet intervention in the Afghan Civil War | Afghanistan | Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan quickly devolved into a quagmire. Troops were withdrawn after ten years of an indecisive "shooting war", in which the U.S., China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia funded and armed the Afghan Mujahideen. |
Foreign military aid
In addition to explicit wars, the Soviet military took part in a number of internal conflicts in various countries, as well as proxy wars between third countries as a means of advancing their strategic interests while avoiding direct conflict between the superpowers in the nuclear age (or, in the case of the Spanish Civil War, avoiding a direct conflict with Nazi Germany at a time when neither side was prepared for such a war). In many cases, involvement was in the form of military advisors[29] as well as the sale or provision of weapons.
Date | Benefactor |
---|---|
1936–39 | Spain |
1933–34, 1937–39 | Republic of China |
1939 | Mongolia |
1945–49, 1950–53 | People's Republic of China |
1950–53 | North Korea |
1961–74 | North Vietnam |
1962–64 | Algeria |
1962–63, 1967–75 | Egypt |
1962–63, 1969–76 | Yemen |
1967, 1970, 1972–73, 1982 | Syria |
1971 | India |
1975–79 | Angola |
1967–69, 1975–79 | Mozambique |
1977–79 | Ethiopia |
1960–70 | Laos |
1980–91 | Iraq |
1982 | Lebanon |
See also
- Military history of Russia
- List of military aircraft of the Soviet Union and the CIS
- Missiles of Russia and the USSR
- List of Soviet tanks
- Russia involvement in regime change
- Timeline of Russian inventions and technology records
Notes
- ^ I. N. Grebenkin, "The Disintegration of the Russian Army in 1917: Factors and Actors in the Process." Russian Studies in History 56.3 (2017): 172-187.
- ISBN 9780804605151. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ISBN 0-8101-6071-4.
- ISBN 0-8101-6071-4.
- ISBN 0-521-25514-7. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ISBN 0-8135-3533-6. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ISBN 0-7656-1318-2. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ^ Hedin, Sven; Lyon, Francis Hamilton (1936). The flight of "Big Horse": the trail of war in Central Asia. E. P. Dutton and co., inc. p. 12. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ^ Georg Vasel, Gerald Griffin (1937). My Russian jailers in China. Hurst & Blackett. p. 52. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ISBN 0-521-25514-7. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ISBN 0-8135-3533-6. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ^ Edwards 2006, pp. 28–29
- ^ Manninen (2008), pp. 37, 42, 43, 46, 49
- ^ Rentola (2003) pp. 188–217
- ^ Ravasz (2003) p. 3
- ^ Clemmesen and Faulkner (2013) p. 76
- ^ Zeiler and DuBois (2012) p. 210
- ^ Reiter (2009), p. 124
- ^ Chubaryan; Shukman 2002, p. xxi
- ^ Trotter (2002), pp. 234–235
- ^ Enkenberg (2020), p.215
- ISBN 1-880881-09-8, verified 2005-04-02.
- ^ Matthew White (February 2011). "Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm". Necrometrics.com. Retrieved December 6, 2017.
- ISBN 0-521-25514-7. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ^ Grau, Lester W and Gress, Michael A.: The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost: the Russian General Staff. University Press of Kansas, 2002
- Monterey Institute of International Studies for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, verified 2005-04-02
- ^
Military Industries and Production, Library of Congress Country StudySoviet Union, 1989
- ^ Anders Åslund, "How small is the Soviet National Income?" in Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., eds., The Impoverished Superpower: Perestroika and the Soviet Military Burden (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990), p. 49.
- ^ Some information is taken from the appendix "States, Cities, Territories and Periods of Warfare with Participation of Citizens of the Russian Federation." of the Russian Military Pension Law of 2003.
References
- This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Country Studies. Federal Research Division. – Soviet Union
- Chubaryan, Alexander O.; Shukman, Harold (2002). Stalin and the Soviet–Finnish War 1939–40. London: Frank Cass. ISBN 0-7146-5203-2.
- Clemmesen, Michael H.; Faulkner, Marcus, eds. (2013). Northern European Overture to War, 1939–1941: From Memel to Barbarossa. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-24908-0.
- Crozier, Brian: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. Forum, 1999.
- Edwards, Robert (2006). White Death: Russia's War on Finland 1939–40. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-84630-7.
- Enkenberg, Ilkka (2020). Talvisota Väreissä (in Finnish). Readme.fi. ISBN 978-952-373-053-3.
- Koenig, William and Schofield, Peter: Soviet Military Power. Hong Kong: Bison Books, 1983.
- Odom, William E.: The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven & London:Yale University Press, 1998.
- Stone, David R.: A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya. Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006.
- Malone, Richard: The Russian Revolution. Cambridge Press 2004
- ISBN 978-951-37-5278-1.
- Blackett, P.M.S.: Fear, War, and the Bomb, Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy New York: Whittlesey House 1949.
- Alperovitz, Gar: Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, New York, Simon and Shus
- Choudhury, Soumen Dhar, Strategic doctrine from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, (unpublished PhD thesis, JNU,1996)
- Rentola, Kimmo (2003). Holtsmark, Sven G.; Pharo, Helge Ø.; Tamnes, Rolf (eds.). Motstrøms: Olav Riste og norsk internasjonal historieskrivning [Counter Currents: Olav Riste and Norwegian international historiography.] (in Norwegian). Cappelen Akademisk Forlag. ISBN 8202218284.
- ISBN 1-85410-881-6.
- Ravasz, István (2003). Finnország függetlenségi harca 1917–1945, Magyar önkéntesek Finnországban [Finland's struggle for independence from 1917 to 1945, Hungarian volunteers in Finland] (PDF) (in Hungarian). Wysocki Légió Hagyományőrző Egyesületnek. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 October 2017. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
- Reiter, Dan (2009). How Wars End (Illustrated ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691140605. Retrieved 29 October 2010.
- Zeiler, Thomas W.; DuBois, Daniel M., eds. (2012). A Companion to World War II. Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History. Vol. 11. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-9681-9.
Further reading
- Various. William Reger, David Jones (ed.). The Military Encyclopedia of Russia and Eurasia. Academic International Press.
- Robin Higham and ISBN 0-312-29398-4