Publisher's Synopsis
Sixteen Seasons in Hell is a comprehensive account of the WWII military campaign on the Eastern Front with a particular emphasis on the operational aspects of the fighting in Russia and Eastern Europe as well as the Geo-political realities inherent in the formation of the Western Allied alliance. Perspectives in the military sphere on the savage fighting in Eastern Europe are interspersed with vividly accurate accounts of the evolution of the anti-Axis coalition and the residual effects the war in the east had on the Western World. World War II in Europe is seen from the standpoint of its four main protagonists, Nazi Germany, Great Britain, the USA, USSR and their politically conflicting major wartime leaders who bartered, negotiated and fought over the post-war peace of the continent. The war is divided into sixteen separate segments corresponding with the extreme seasonal changes embracing the epic four year struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Each season saw its own separate developments progress in the military, political and social spheres which impacted not only the main belligerents on the Eastern Front but encompassed and encouraged rapid and wholesale changes to the demographics of Europe as a whole and portended the basic change in the balance of power on the continent and in the world. But more than anything else and still largely unfamiliar to the western reader; the military campaign on the Eastern Front, as a result of the preeminent clash of opposing totalitarian systems in Moscow and Berlin; the intrinsic ethnic animosities prevalent in Eastern Europe and the subversive racial creeds fostered by all its military participants; would give rise to a form of warfare so brutally violent and extreme in its conception that it would purposefully manifest itself in the indiscriminate slaughter of more than 20 million innocent civilians and be the primary testing grounds for Adolf Hitler's genocidal policies that culminated with the Nazi instigation of the Jewish Holocaust.
