The Eastern Front

Georgy Zhukov won by mass, method, and a willingness to spend men — the only general who argued with Stalin and lived — commanding alongside the planner Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Konstantin Rokossovsky, who arrived from an NKVD prison cell to help save Moscow. At Stalingrad, Vasily Chuikov's doctrine of hugging the enemy so close the Luftwaffe couldn't bomb him ground down Friedrich Paulus, a staff officer who could not disobey an order even to save his own army. On the other side, Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian ran the panzers east and then wrote memoirs insisting the war had been clean, a myth their own chief of staff Franz Halder's diary quietly contradicts.

Further south, Erwin Rommel improvised his way across the desert against Bernard Montgomery's methodical set-pieces, a rivalry each side's propaganda inflated into legend. It was the East, though, that decided the war: three years of the largest land campaign in history, fought at a scale and a cruelty the other fronts never approached.