Featuring full-color artwork, specially drawn maps and archivephotographs, this study offers key insights into the tactics,leadership, combat performance and subsequent reputations of sixrepresentative German and Soviet infantry battalions pitched into threepivotal actions that determined the course of the Barbarossa campaign atthe height of World War II.The Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 pitted NaziGermany and her allies against Stalin's forces in a mighty struggle forsurvival. Three German army groups - North, Center and South - advancedinto Soviet-held territory; Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock's ArmyGroup Center, the largest of these three, was tasked with defeatingGeneral of the Army Dmitry Pavlov's Western Front in Belarus, and wasassigned two Panzer Groups to achieve this. Bock's command wouldcomplete the encirclement and destruction of vast numbers of Sovietpersonnel and matériel at battles such as Bialystok-Minsk in June-Julyand Smolensk in July-August before being halted as German effortscentered on the conquest of the Ukraine, only to resume the offensive atthe end of September. As the dust of summer gave way to the mud ofautumn, the ensuing German drive on Moscow was slowed and then halted bya Soviet counteroffensive mounted by Konev's Kalinin and Timoshenko'sSouthwestern Fronts in December amid unusually harsh winter conditions,marking the failure of the German Blitzkrieg; Army Group Centre wasforced back and Moscow remained in Soviet hands.At the forefront of the German advance, fighting alongside the spearheadPanzer divisions, were the lorry-borne infantrymen of the motorizedinfantry divisions. Unlike the Schützen, the specialist armored infantryintegral to the Panzer divisions, these highly trained motorizedformations were organized, armed and equipped as per their footsloggingcounterparts in the standard infantry divisions; together, these twotroop types were the…