'Fortresses must carry out the same tasks as the fortresses of old....They must allow themselves to be surrounded and thus tie down as many enemy forces as possible.' So Hitler directed in March 1944 and, in so doing, sealed the fate of Ternopol', Kovel', Poznan and Breslau, cities in the Ukraine and Poland that were in the path of the Red Army's advance towards Nazi Germany. German forces, under orders to resist at all costs, adopted all-round defence and struggled to hold out while waiting for relief - which never came. In this gripping and original book, Alexey Isaev describes, in vivid detail, what happened next -intense and ruthless fighting, horrendous casualties among soldiers and civilians, the fabric of these historic cities torn apart. His account is based on pioneering archival research which offers us an unrivalled insight into the tactics on both sides, the experience of the close-quarter fighting in the streets and houses, and the dreadful aftermath. At the same time he shows why these cities were chosen and how the wider war passed them by as the Wehrmacht retreated and the battlefront moved westward. Each of these cities suffered a similar fate to Stalingrad but their story has never been told before in such graphic and circumstantial detail. AUTHOR: Alexey Isaev is one of the leading Russian military historians of the conflict on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. 60 b/w illustrations

Alexey Isaev is one of the leading Russian military historians of the conflict on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Several of his ground-breaking books have been translated into English including Barbarossa through Soviet Eyes: The First Twenty-Four Hours (with Artem Drabkin), The End of the Gallop: The Battle for Kharkov February-March 1943, Dubno 1941: The Greatest Tank Battle of the Second World War, Tomb of the Panzerwaffe: The Defeat of the Sixth SS Panzer Army in Hungary 1945 (with Maksim Kolomiets) and Stalingrad: City on Fire.