Free Republic

The top commander of the Ukrainian armed forces has admitted that the situation along the eastern front with Russia has “significantly worsened” amid a renewed push from Moscow’s forces. Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi — who took over the top post in February following the ousting of Valerii Zaluzhnyi after calling the war a “stalemate” — wrote on Telegram on Saturday that his forces are struggling to cope with escalating assaults being waged by Russia, which he claimed have intensified amid improving weather conditions and the recent “election” in Russia which cemented Vladimir Putin’s hold on power for at least another...

If you are interested in the Eastern Front of WW II, the most brutal war in human history, it appears Amazon has several title in the Kindle format at rock bottom prices. The David Glantz two volume history of the Battle of Smolensk is available in Kindle for $2.99 each. Mr. Glantz has taken advantage of the opening of the Red Army archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These are documentary style works filled with orders from the Soviet High Command, Stavka, and below to construct the history of this forgotten battle. He goes into detail about the...

By the first week of March 1915, food supplies inside the besieged fortress of Przemyśl were almost exhausted. Most of the horses that could be spared had been eaten. Bran, sawdust and bone meal were used to eke out the dwindling stock of flour. Cats were nowhere to be seen – they too had been eaten. A middle-sized dog fetched 20 crowns, if its owner could be persuaded to part with it. Even mice were being traded. The hospital was filled to overflowing with collapsing people. As one of the doctors tending them observed, the most shocking thing about the...

Private and military archive fotos of a German officer during WWI. A lot of them unpublished yet. some background information from Cambridge Catalogue, one of the few books describing: War Land on the Eastern Front is a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of their encounter with Eastern Europe. It presents an ‘anatomy of an occupation’, charting the ambitions and realities of the new German military state there. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it...

KIRKUCH, Iraq –– US soldiers turned over a base in eastern Iraq on Saturday to the Iraqi army's 5th Division in a ceremony designed to underscore the country's growing capability to ensure its own security. "US armed forces are leaving the base, and turning it over to Iraqi troops," said General Abdel Kader Mohammad Kassem, commander of Iraq's ground forces. The US army had announced the handover on Wednesday, saying that "more than 3,000 soldiers from Task Force Liberty and the 278th Regimental Combat Team will conclude their mission in eastern Diyala Province with a departure ceremony on Forward Operating...

MOSCOW, April 13 (RIA Novosti commentator Tatiana Sinitsyna) - "We shall not revise history of the Great Patriotic War, whomever such revision might please. However, historians have stocked up enough facts to offer an updated argumentation to the events of that time. Mind you, I don't mean their new treatment or evaluation," said Nikolai Nikiforov, Deputy Director of the Institute of Military History under Russia's Defense Ministry. He was addressing a Novosti news conference on the upcoming 60th V-E Day anniversary. Victory in World War II was "among principal symbolic landmarks of the 20th century", he stressed-no matter that people...

ZOWER CHUM, on the Iran-Iraq Border - With a Kalashnikov rifle slung over one shoulder, Kadhum Mahmoud took a few brisk steps on the snow-packed earth and crossed from Iraq into Iran. The mountain trail snaked through clusters of denuded pomegranate trees and fields of land mines to a hamlet of mud homes clinging to a hillside. The Iranian guards had left their concrete watchtower for lunch. Mr. Mahmoud, a wiry Kurdish border guard dressed in American desert fatigues, said it was near this valley that he recently arrested a man headed into Iran with 60 pieces of antiquities -...

Waved on by Iraqi children in places, a huge armoured column of U.S. Marines closed in on Baghdad closed in on Baghdad Friday, the eastern flank of a pincer thrust that has already taken the airport to the east.