This short essay provides a concise top-down picture of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945. It looks at not only its leadership and command (including the State Defence Committee, Stavka, and General Staff) but also size and structure, political supervision, mobilisation and training, and military equipment. When looking at mobilisation and training, it briefly considers not only wider issues but also the mobilisation of specific national groups and women. When considering equipment it identifies some key pieces of equipment that the Soviet Union was able to produce in large numbers, and that proved to be not only relatively easy to manufacture but also rugged and effective.

The relationship between the crown and the gentry was multifaceted. It encompassed both military needs and civilian offices. It could be both direct and indirect, involving personal service – in the royal household for example – on the one hand or indirect in helping to maintain royal rule across the realm. It involved central organs of government – attendance at parliament most particularly – and, crucially, power and influence in the provinces. The relationship was by no means a static one. It evolved and shifted focus over time.

The German army invaded the Soviet Union in hopes of destroying it in a blitz campaign in 1941. Its professional and experienced officer corps utilized Auftragstaktik to achieve early victories on the battlefield. The men they led were well-motivated, generally well-trained, loyal to the Nazi regime, and confident in victory. The emphasis on tactical flexibility and independence helped balance out the army’s numerical inferiority in weapons and equipment. The enormous casualties suffered in 1941 and early 1942, however, ensured that the army’s qualitative edge soon dulled, leading to complete defeat.

In a political system based on monarchy it is misleading to equate governance (the active and legitimate exercise of social control) with politics (the public debate surrounding that practice), for the basis of power and authority in late medieval England lay overwhelmingly in the personal rule of the king, and ‘public debate’ over how he did so was very rarely conducted in the open, though, as we shall see, it certainly could – and did – occur. For most of the time, however, there was very little ‘politics’ but an awful lot of ‘governance’. The basis of a king’s right to exercise governance over his subjects lay in the theoretically unimpeachable notion that he had been appointed by God to protect and advance the common interest of the kingdom.

Chronicles and other forms of medieval historical writing have persistently shaped how English kings and their legacies are represented and remembered. Ever since insular monks like Gildas and Bede began recording royal deeds in the fifth to eighth centuries, medieval historiography has been an invaluable repository of information, anecdotes and observations, illuminating the triumphs and tribulations of individual reigns. From glowing endorsements to virulent attacks on sovereign power, how historiographers captured or elided the most impactful events of a reign affected how a king’s legacy was transmitted and preserved. In some cases, kings directly influenced what was written about their reign; in others, their reputation was determined by other men of authority, including their successors.

This chapter documents the development of the wartime Grand Alliance between Britian, the Soviet Union, and the United States, with particular reference to the personal roles, outlooks, and interactions of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. Without the deep personal bonds of the ‘Big Three’, the Grand Alliance may have been stillborn or collapsed under the pressures, contradictions, and challenges of war.

Chivalry, the martial ethos of knighthood, with its emphasis on honour and prowess, shaped contemporary perceptions of the proper conduct of war; and war – properly conducted – was a key component of medieval kingship. Writing during Edward II’s reign, the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi quoted a letter sent to the king’s confessor: ‘a king is so styled from the fact of ruling, as one who should rule his people with laws and defend them with his sword from their enemies’. This summed up a commonplace view of kingship, a duality reflected in the iconography of the kings of England: since the reign of William the Conqueror, the Great Seal had depicted the king enthroned in majesty on the front; and on the reverse, armed, mounted on a charging warhorse, wielding a sword – the very image of chivalric knighthood.

The clergy were important to the crown because they were (compared with today) very numerous – historians have described the country as ‘swarming with clerics’ and their ‘vast numbers’ as ‘one of the surprises of medieval history’; collectively they were very rich, owning perhaps 20–30 per cent of England’s landed wealth; many had skills which few laymen possessed; and, most importantly, they could, through their performance of religious ritual, send souls to paradise or perdition – hell – in the everlasting world to come. Religion was the way that medieval people made sense of the world; it was not an optional extra in life but affected all aspects of society. Everyone was a church member.

On 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to a treaty of non-aggression, paving the way for the outbreak of war in Europe. Though this Nazi-Soviet Pact stunned contemporary observers, this chapter argues that the decision for partnership – and the military, economic, and intelligence cooperation it portended – had a long prehistory. Here, the Soviet-German relationship is traced from its inception in 1917 through Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941. It focuses on four distinct periods: early contacts during and immediately following the First World War, the Rapallo era of extensive cooperation between 1921 to 1933, the collapse of the Soviet-German relationship after 1933, and the resumption of partnership in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This chapter concludes that the two periods of Soviet-German cooperation were ultimately decisive factors in the breakdown of the post-war European status quo.

If Edward I had died in the course of his conquest of Wales in the early 1280s, his successor would not have been the notorious Edward II, but King Alfonso I, born at Bayonne in 1273, and named after his godfather, the queen’s brother and king of Castile. In fact, Alfonso was to die a child in 1284, just as Edward’s first two sons had done, but the details of his life are a reminder that English kingship was not just – or even, at times, very – English. The kings of England, descended from Normans and Angevins in the male line, wished to be leading figures on the European stage, and they jealously defended lands, rights and connections across the continent, as well as in these islands.

The current chapter investigates the relationship dynamics between Germany and the Axis bloc countries. The chapter concludes that the Axis coalition-building efforts were poorly organized, haphazardly coordinated, and dreadfully led, suffering from German racism, mutual mistrust, and systematic lack of resources. Finnish participation in Operation Barbarossa was motivated by two things: the country’s exposed geographical position next to Russia and the unfinished Soviet attempt to occupy it during the Winter War in 1939–1940. Finland was not occupied by the Red Army and thus maintained its liberal democracy.

While most histories describe the Romanian Army as a reluctant ally of the German Army on the Easten Front, this chapter argues that Romania had embraced a far-right ideology that made the country Nazi Germany’s most important partner in the campaign against the Soviet Union. The Italian Royal Army fought an unplanned campaign, under German command, against the Red Army between August 1941 and January 1943. Despite severe limitations, the combatants of the CSIR and the ARMIR fought bravely until German defeat at Stalingrad led to the deadly disaster on the Don River.

This chapter recounts the major events from Operation Barbarossa, the codename for the invasion of the Soviet Union beginning on 22 June 1941. It looks briefly at the German operational planning and then the invasion itself. It considers how German operations sought to implement the strategic plan to defeat the Soviet Union in a summer campaign. Much of the discussion focuses on the panzer groups in the battles of Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, and Moscow. It looks at the problems they encountered as well as the strategic disagreements in the German High Command. Key personalities like Franz Halder, Heinz Guderian, Hermann Hoth, Fedor von Bock, as well as Adolf Hitler are discussed. The final section discusses the Soviet winter offensive, which began in December 1941, and the subsequent German retreat from Moscow.

This chapter argues that Soviet crimes at times of war were both widespread and complex in their origin, goals, logic, and trajectory. It distinguishes and explains several forms of Soviet criminality during its defensive war against Germany in 1941–1945: crimes against humanity and war crimes, both perpetrated by agents of the state and often in accordance with explicitly formulated state policy; troop crimes, not guided by state policy but often understood to be in its fulfilment by the perpetrators; and a variety of violent and criminal behaviour emanating from small group bonding, both within the military and outside of it. The chapter explains their origins and charts the reasons why there was so much silence about the criminality of the Soviet war effort after victory.