Battle of the cities : urban warfare on the Eastern Front

The Stalingrad battle and the Leningrad siege were just two of the brutal, devastating urban conflicts that marked the awful struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War.

The cities were strategic fixed points in the sweeping advances and retreats of the opposing armies across eastern Europe.

Yet no one has concentrated on these city battles before or has sought to tell the story of the campaigns through the fighting that took place in and around them.

That is Anthony Tucker-Jones's purpose in this concise and vivid history of the urban war on the Eastern Front. Early in the war, during the Wehrmacht's crushing offensives of 1941 and 1942, the Red Army was forced out of a series of key cities.

Moscow was threatened, Leningrad surrounded. Then, after the climactic battle at Stalingrad, the Red Army with increasing confidence, speed and power drove the Germans from the Soviet and East European capitals they had occupied.

The final urban battles were fought in Germany's cities, culminating in Berlin. As he traces the course of the fighting for each city, Anthony Tucker-Jones looks at the local circumstances, the opposing forces, the strategic significance and the tactics employed.

He focuses not only on the destruction and cruelty of such warfare, but on the heroism displayed on both sides and on the fate of the civilians who found themselves on the front line.