In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler had stated trying to wage a war on two fronts was the gravest strategic blunder a head of state could commit. While Stalin wasn’t in the habit of taking military advice from his ideological foes-- even dead ones --he might have done well to heed this maxim. A great many lives might have been saved and his own regime might have survived longer than it actually did. By going to war with Great Britain while there was still a fierce anti-Soviet rebellion going on Poland, the CPSU dictator all but guaranteed his regime’s ultimate demise. Almost from the minute British and French troops reached Berlin in June of 1940 Churchill had been mapping out contingency plans for defending Germany against Soviet attack should the Red Army try to cross the German-Polish border; after the Third Reich was vanquished, Churchill had worked vigorously to strengthen Allied defenses on the German frontier against Soviet attack. When the Soviet Union eventually did go to war with Britain in August of 1942 British ground forces were ready to fight the Red Army head-on for every square inch of German land Stalin might covet. And even in the aftermath of the devastating losses the RAF had sustained during the surprise bombing raid on Frankfurt-an-den-Oder, British fighter squadrons still posed a formidable challenge to any Soviet air force pilots venturing into German airspace. Bernard Montgomery, now the commander-in-chief of all Allied ground forces in Germany, set the tone for the British war effort against Moscow when he gave a radio address to his troops pledging to sacrifice his own life if that was what it would take to keep the Soviets from occupying German soil.

When Soviet tanks and artillery started bombarding Allied ground bases on the German frontier shortly after the Frankfurt-an-den-Oder air raid, Montgomery’s forces didn’t hesitate to do the same to Red Army installations along the Polish border. Indeed one of his fellow generals, Charles de Gaulle, wanted to go the Soviets one better and send an armored thrust into Soviet-occupied Poland. But as it turned out, it would be at least three weeks after the joint Anglo-French declaration of war on the Soviet Union before the British and French ground in Germany would make their first try at entering Soviet-held Polish territory.

But if Allied ground forces were staying put for the time being, their air force brethren were venturing into Soviet-held territory at every opportunity. Just 24 hours after the bombing of Frankfurt- an-den-Oder and the British declaration of war on the U.S.S.R., RAF bombers struck the main Soviet airfields in Warsaw and Krakow; there were also air strikes against Soviet naval bases on Poland’s Baltic coast and an NKVD armory near the town of Oswiecim. Oswiecim, which was also known as Auschwitz, had particular significance not only to the Allies but also to the Polish anti-Soviet resistance: the armory was part of a larger NKVD complex that also housed a prison camp in which inmates were more often than not tortured to death merely for being opposed to the Soviet occupation of Poland.

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On August 30th, 1942 the Red Army finally crossed the German border to take on the British and French ground forces in Germany. Under the command of General Georgi Zhukov, a former Czarist cavalry officer who had previously waged a successful border war against the Japanese in 1939, Soviet infantry and armored divisions invaded the eastern half of Germany along three main axes. The most powerful of these, the northern axis, was directed at capturing Berlin and the neighboring suburb of Potsdam; besides neutralizing the provisional German government, Zhukov also sought to capture the headquarters of the Allied occupation forces in Germany. It was Zhukov’s hope that by cutting the heart out of the Allied defense network in Germany he could clear the way for Soviet forces to take control of the rest of the country.

But Montgomery’s troops weren’t going to simply roll over and play dead for the Russian bear-- if anything, they fought the Soviet invaders tooth and nail, inflicting massive losses on the first wave of the invasion force. They were aided in their defense by irregular bands of anti-Communist Germans modestly called “auxiliary units” by the Allied front-line command; this was a very humble description of what were in fact highly trained cells of partisans schooled to use guerrilla tactics against Soviet forces in wartime. The decision in May of 1941 to establish and equip such cells had been-- to say the least --a highly controversial one, as it ran the risk of providing weapons to potential neo-fascist insurrection plotters. But the Red Army’s invasion of Germany vindicated the Allies’ decision to create the auxiliaries; as it turned out, they would actually function as a safeguard against the revival of Naziism in Germany.

At sea, the Royal Navy and France’s Marine Nationale fought against the Soviet Red Banner Northern Fleet with a ferocity equal to that of the resistance being put up British and French ground forces against the Red Army. The first encounters between Soviet and Allied warships following the invasion of Germany exposed a number of serious deficiencies in Stalin’s maritime defense policy. One of those was the lack of an adequate submarine force: in their first venture into Allied waters following the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and the Anglo-French alliance, the Red Banner Northern Fleet had only brought a handful of subs to the fight, and all but one of those subs were sunk by Allied warships within a matter of minutes. And since Stalin, in a glaring strategic error, hadn’t seen fit to sanction the development of aircraft carriers for the Soviet navy, the Northern Fleet had virtually no naval aviation element to speak of, whereas their Anglo-French adversaries boasted substantial naval air arms which inflicted heavy losses on the Northern Fleet’s surface ships.

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Stalin had never been one to accept defeat gracefully, and sure enough when he was informed about the disastrous setbacks his naval forces had endured in the first hours of the invasion of Germany he erupted into a tirade those who witnessed it called violent even by the Soviet dictator’s own notorious standards. He ordered the arrest of every Northern Fleet senior admiral; many of those detained were soon executed on what were usually dubious charges, scapegoats for their ruler’s gross mismanagement of one of the most critical parts of the Soviet war machine. Nor did the lower ranks emerge unscathed from Stalin’s fury; several of the fleet’s surviving surface vessel captains were also arrested, with the luckier ones merely suffering court-martial and demotion. Dozens of junior officers joined their former superiors either in the brig or in front of a firing squad, depriving the Soviet Union of experienced naval cadres precisely at the time when such cadres were urgently needed.

The Red Air Force had problems of its own in the first phase of the invasion of Germany; while its bomber force was formidable, its fighters left a great deal to be desired. The Russo-Finnish War had exposed a number of deficiencies in the Soviet air force fighter corps, and those deficiencies were thrown into sharp relief by the first encounters between Soviet and British fighter squadrons after the invasion. For every British fighter the Soviets managed to shoot down they lost three of their own; a confidential report by the Red Air Force’s inspector general sent to Stalin in late September of 1942 grimly warned that unless fighter pilot training methods were substantially improved this rate of losses would likely increase as the war went on.

The RAF had a different problem; while its fighter force was for the most part in good shape, its heavy bomber wings were taking a beating from Soviet air defenses in occupied Poland. One out of every four RAF heavy bombers sent to attack Soviet targets on Polish soil were lost to enemy action, chiefly anti-aircraft fire from Red Army AA gunners. The stories of heroic Soviet flyers blasting Short Stirlings and Avro Lancasters out of the sky in droves are largely Kremlin-inspired propaganda myth-- more often than not Red Air Force fighters tended to come out on the losing end of their encounters with RAF bombers. So it was the flak gunners that did most of the work in guarding Soviet military and industrial facilities in Poland against Allied bombing.

One of the proposed solutions to the high rate of bomber losses was to switch to night area bombing; the logic behind this idea was that since the Soviets lacked all-weather fighters at the time, they would be unable to intercept the bombers before those bombers got to their assigned targets and casualties would decline accordingly. The chief drawback to this strategy was that the RAF’s own night flying capabilities were still somewhat shaky; at least one Bomber Command senior officer expressed worries that the bombers might collide with each other en route to their targets.

An alternative idea for resolving the bomber casualty problem was to take twin-engined planes like the Bristol Beaufighter or the de Haviland Mosquito and adapt them for service as long-range escort fighters. The Beaufighter in particular showed considerable promise as an escort plane; tough, fast, versatile, and made to carry nearly any kind of weapon imaginable, the Beau had a range of over fifteen hundred miles-- enough to take it deep into Soviet-occupied Poland. To extend that range even further, Beaufighters could be fitted with drop tanks to supply extra fuel to their twin 1770-hp engines. And last but least, with its substantial firepower the Beau could when necessary go after and destroy Soviet AA batteries with rockets or HE bombs. (Later in the war, as Allied troops advanced into Poland, the Beaufighter would gain additional laurels as a tank-killer.)

Ultimately it was decided to adopt the fighter escort option. For long range missions Beaus and Mosquitos would shepherd the RAF bombers to and from their assigned targets; for shorter-range raids new and improved models of the venerable Supermarine Spitfire would carry out this task. The first RAF bombing raid to be accompanied by escort fighters was flown on October 3rd, 1942 when a detachment of Lancasters accompanied by two squadrons of Beaufighters attacked a Soviet-owned munitions factory near Krakow; ninety-eight percent of the bombers involved in the raid returned safely to their home bases thanks in large part to the Beaus.

But not every Beau or Mosquito squadron stationed in Germany at the time could be spared for bomber escort duty; some of them were urgently needed to provide close air support for Allied ground units fighting to keep the Red Army from seizing any more German territory and eject it from those parts of Germany where it had already gained a foothold. One example of this was the Battle of Leipzig, which ran from October 8th to October 13th, 1942 and saw both Allied and Soviet troops sustain some of the heaviest casualties of the war. Over the course of the five days that British, French, and Canadian soldiers struggled to keep Leipzig out of Red Army hands, Beaufighter crews alone flew an average of 1300 sorties a day; one Beau squadron made attacks on Soviet targets every thirty minutes at the height of the battle. By the time British armored units overran the last pocket of Soviet resistance outside Leipzig on the afternoon of October 13th, Beaufighter groups had carried out a total of 40,000 hours’ worth of close air support missions.

Once the Battle of Leipzig was over both sides were uncertain as to how the campaign in Germany would end. But they were sure of one thing beyond any reasonable doubt: that end was nowhere in sight yet...