Bolt Action: Ostfront Barbarossa to Berlin

This is a supplement to the tabletop wargame Bolt Action. It deals with the sprawling Eastern Front conflicts between the Soviet Union and its neighbours between 1939 and 1945. We begin with two conflicts, Khalkyn Gol and the Winter War, which did much to shape military and political thinking prior to the outbreak of The Great Patriotic War in 1941 when Nazi Germany and its Axis satellites invaded Soviet territory.

Winston Churchill, in his masterful The Second World War, bemoans the fact that the 'battles' of his period are no longer the clear-cut, single-day affairs of his illustrious forebears, but complex operations extending over broad swathes of territory for weeks or months. Nowhere is this more true than on the Eastern Front. The scale and intensity of the battles fought in that conflict – Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and a thousand others – almost beggar belief in Western eyes. Tens of millions died in fighting that raged virtually without pause for four years across thousands of miles of territory.