Battle of Berlin

Battle of Berlin

The Battle of Berlin was one of the final battles of World War 2, fought between the Red Army of the Soviet Union and Germany for the control of the German Capital, Berlin.
This essay will discuss three main parts, the first stage of the battle which was on the outskirts, the second stage which took place in the city itself, and the results and consequences of the battle’s outcome.

On April 16 1945 the Soviets began the first stage of the battle, where they attacked the German defenses on the eastern outskirts of Berlin. The Germans had set up their defenses in the form of three trench lines behind the Oder and Neisse Rivers, east of Berlin. The Soviets goal was to cross these rivers and continue east to Berlin. They assaulted them with three separate forces, from the north with the 2nd Belorussian Front, from the east with the 1st Belorussian front, and from the south with the 1st Ukrainian Front. Together the three fronts had over two and a half million soldiers.
The main bulk of the fighting took place at Kustrin and Seelow Heights, directly east of Berlin, where the 1st Belorussian Front, commanded by General Zhukov, would attempt to cross the river. Zhukov’s plan was that as night began to fall he would begin the attack with a massive artillery bombardment on the first trench line. After this, he would turn on hundreds of bright searchlights directed at the trench, in the hopes of blinding the German defenders as his infantry charged at them to take the first trench.
However, the plan went horribly wrong. The Germans had already predicted the artillery bombardment and retreated to the second trench before the artillery fired on the first. Zhukov, believing that the barrage had hit, turned on the searchlights and sent in his infantry. The night however had turned out to be thick with fog, causing the searchlights to prove to be ineffective against the Germans and simply caused to create silhouettes of the approaching Soviet infantry, making them...

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