From Retreat to Defeat is a unique insight into the last desperate years of the German Army at war on the Eastern Front 1943-45. On the vast steppes of the Soviet Union, it describes how the German Army together with the elite mountain troops and Luftwaffe field divisions played a decisive role in trying to stem the rout along the disintegrating front lines. Drawing on previously rare and unpublished photographs with in-depth captions, the book provides an absorbing analysis of this traumatic period of the war. It reveals in detail how the beginning of the end began at the battle of Kursk, and how this massive operation led to the Red Army recapturing huge areas of the Soviet Union and bleeding white the German armies it struck. Despite the adverse situation in which the German Army was placed, soldiers were still infused to fight to the bitter end and attempt to build new lines of defense. But as the Red Army launched its long-awaited summer offensive in 1944, code-named `Operation Bagration`, the book reveals how the German Army were forced to withdraw under the constant hammer blows of ground and air bombardments. Those German forces that survived the artillery barrages, the onslaught of the tank armadas, and mass infantry assaults, streamed back from the battlefield and fought vicious battles through the Baltic states, Byelorussia, and built up new defenses along the Vistula in Poland. As the final months of the war were played out on the Eastern Front it depicts how the German Army, with diminishing resources, withdrew across a devastated Reich and fought out the last battles with party militia forces around a bombed and blasted Berlin.