World War II Battles: The Soviet Takeover of Vienna Was Brutally Efficient nationalinterest.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nationalinterest.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Nazis’ ferocious final strike in WWII (PHOTOS) Getty Images Despite Soviet troops in the spring of 1945 being just a few dozen miles from Berlin, Hitler decided to concentrate his main strike force somewhere else entirely.
On the morning of March 6, 1945, after a massive artillery bombardment, an avalanche of German tanks and infantry came crashing down on the Soviet positions in the region of Lakes Balaton and Velence and the Drava River in Hungary. This was the start of Operation Spring Awakening, which turned out to be the last major German offensive of WWII. Getty Images
By the spring of 1945, the situation for Germany on the Eastern Front was close to catastrophic: the Red Army was on the approach to Berlin, just 70 km from the city. While the Soviet troops were taking a breather in preparation for a decisive offensive on the capital of the Third Reich, the Germans themselves went on the charge, and much further south too in Hungary. Th
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Hitler thought he knew better than the generals.
Here s What You Need to Remember: In the final analysis, Hitler would have done well to heed Guderian’s advice to commit the Sixth Panzer Army to the defense of the Oder line to slow the Russian advance on Berlin. Georg Maier, deputy chief of staff for operations for the Sixth Panzer Army, offered a fitting summation of the failed offensive. “Time, pressure, poor weather, extremely difficult terrain conditions, [and] Hitler’s impatience joined forces with the well-prepared enemy defense to form a combined front,” he wrote.
Even in the dark days of March 1945, when the Third Reich was on the brink of collapse, its troops managed to exhibit that grim humor that enables frontline soldiers to endure the horrors of battle. As the panzer crews of mighty Tiger II tanks rumbled forward in the last German offensive of World War II in eastern Hungary, they joked about the difficulties they were having coming to grips with the enemy. A