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In the early years of World War II, Adolf Hitler's forces had nothing to stop them. He put his innovative, blitzkrieg attack to his unsuspecting enemies. The blitzkrieg incorporated fast-marching infantry, Panzer tank squads and the Luftawaffe Air Force. He used the weather at his advantage. He attacked Poland in September 1939. The outmanned, Polish army was outflanked and hit from its rear. Hitler split his enemy in two and soundly defeated them on the battlefield. His forces occupied Poland and followed their devestating pattern through France and almost defeated Great Britain. Nazi and German armies conquered North Africa. Their ally, Italy overcame natives in Ethiopia. With these successes, he poised to overrun Soviet Russia in 1941.

Two years before, Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Russia. This con job allowed Germany's war machine time to train and arm a force of three million Germans, Hungarians and Italians to invade. Operations Barbarosa and Typhoon were implemented in the summers of 1941 and 1943. SS death squads permeated the countryside along with Russian turncoats. Whole towns were burned. Residents were massacred. Ukraine's oil fields got put to torch. Entire regions were wiped out of human life. Hitler encircled several, Russian armies. His forces killed or captured six million men. Millions more Russians and Jews were publicly executed, murdered or shipped off into concentration camps. He faced little resistance from the communists' armies. And then, winter came.

The Russian winter proved cruel to Hitler's ill-equipped, summer army. He hoped to have forced the communist nation to surrender by late fall in 1943. However, his prized Sixth Army got encircled in a counterattack. Marshal Zhukov cut off three hundred thousand Germans and punished a relief force sent to break them out. After this annhilation, Hitler's contingent, Army Group North, Army Group Center and Army Group South began a retreat under bone-chilling Arctic wind and blinding snowstorms. The Germans wore lightly-fitted, summer clothing in their campaign against Joseph Stalin's troops. This clothing never stopped the harsh temperatures that dropped to -40 degrees below zero. Thousands of men suffered, and then died from frostbite. Diseases like typhoid, dirrahea, polio, measles and dysentery ravaged the retreating Germans too. In addition, Jewish guerrillas and Cossack horsemen brutally harassed their invading enemy en masse. The SS rear guard suffered severe casualties from constant hit and run attacks. Soldiers deserted to face the weather and a determined enemy alone. In the end, only a million soldiers escaped from Russia. Two million were lost as dead, missing or prisoner.

A similar fate occurred in North Africa. General Rommel's Afrikan Korps charged through Tunisia, Algeria and stopped in Egypt. But, the Allied armies under General Montgomery unleased Operation Torch and overrun Nazi outposts and waylaid armies on their offensive. At El Alamein, Rommel's forces were smashed. His Panzer tanks got annhilated with German and Italian forces hurled into a disorganized retreat. Unfortunately, their withdrawal was hampered by deadly sandstorm that swallowed up and suffocated thousands of their soldiers. The British and American air forces punished the fleeing Nazis with bombing runs and strafing attacks. Bodies, burnt vehicles and material were littered along the Sahara Desert. Another Nazi campaign was quashed by Allied resolve and Mother Nature.

Learn more about this author, Marcus Brooks.
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