There are many striking parallels in history, and after 40 months, the Soviet Union's torrent of steel has once again arrived in the Vistula Oder valley on the German-Polish border. At the beginning of 1945, the brave and fearless Soviet soldiers smashed the stubborn resistance of the German army in this area with a battle that lasted for 20 days, and took an important step for the Soviet army to advance into Berlin and win the war. At the end of the first year, one of the parties involved in the war began to build a new military defense line on the west bank of the Vistula Oder River, which relied on the advantages of the terrain to defend the German hinterland and even the road to Western Europe with complete and strong fortifications. However, it is no longer the tired and sleepy German army in the past that guards this defensive line, but 170 allied divisions with elite equipment and battlefield air supremacy, strategic sea supremacy, and superior logistics auxiliary forces. In contrast, the Soviet forces that entered Poland in a victorious posture appeared more calm and confident, and they were able to transport more than 300 army divisions and large quantities of combat equipment to the front line despite Allied air raids, and the most fearsome of them were the large-scale tank clusters, Katyusha rocket launchers, and heavy howitzers.

The heavyweight duel has not yet begun, and public opinion in the Western world has long been mournful because Germany, an ally that should have made an important contribution to military power, is mired in internal strife. It was widely believed that this was an untenable line of defense, that the Red Tide would inevitably spread through Central Europe, and that the ultimate fate of Europe would be determined by the united borders of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands - either the Allies would cling to Western Europe and confront the Soviet Union, or the Soviet Union would conquer Western Europe and become the real masters of Europe.

The inevitable battle finally began on the last Wednesday of June, when the Soviets bombarded the Allied positions in the Vistulla-Oder valley with overwhelming artillery fire and carried out major strikes on several sections of the Allied defensive line that were relatively weak. The continuous heavy shelling shook the fortifications of the defensive line, and even more deprived the defenders behind the fortifications. Of the 170 divisions deployed by the Allies, 22 Polish divisions were already overwhelmed by morale, but the moderation of the Polish government-in-exile barely remained in the Allied camp; Of the 33 British divisions, more than half have been fighting fiercely on the European battlefield for more than two years, and are familiar with and fearful of the fierce and tenacious combat methods of the Soviet army, while the rest are the troops that have been transferred from the mainland, federal countries, and colonies in the past six months, and the quality and morale of the troops participating in the war are worrying. In view of the importance of the defense line in Western Europe, most of the French troops were transferred back home to consolidate the "New Maginot Line", and by the way, the troops were rested, and the French troops remaining on the eastern defense line of Germany had only 20 divisions, and the real backbone of the defense line was more than 80 American divisions that had been reorganized into nine army groups. In order to better resist the Soviet attack, the combat units of these US divisions have generally increased by 50 percent, that is to say, the strength of an infantry division exceeds 20,000, and the number of light and heavy equipment has also increased, and most of the division-level units have increased independent anti-tank regiments, equipped with the latest tank destroyers, jeeps + recoilless guns + special armor-piercing shells The new combination has also been installed in batches with grassroots infantry units. The reorganized U.S. forces were significantly more effective on paper than other Allied units, and MacArthur, the top commander of the Allied Command in Europe, was able to put 50 of the best U.S. divisions in the operational reserve, nominally so that they could reinforce the danger zone at any time. After the battle began, seeing that the Soviet army had successfully crossed the Vistula River in many places in just a few hours, but the Allied counterattack order was not effectively implemented, MacArthur decisively gave up the idea of letting the American soldiers brave the Soviet artillery fire to recapture the beachhead on the west bank. However, the direction of these columns was not the eastern front, which was full of urgent reports, but the defense line of Western Europe, which the Franco-Belgian-Dutch countries spent more time and effort building. Only those American units that were originally deployed in the deep area of the defense line rushed to the front line to reinforce and relatively contained the Soviet offensive in several sections. At this time, the German eastern defense line was like the bottom of a river with a large swarm of termites nesting, and under the impact of the Soviet offensive wave, it was full of holes, and there were constantly Polish troops giving up resistance under the double offensive of Soviet guns and leaflets, and there were constantly routs of British non-native troops. …,

At the end of the day, although the attacking Soviet troops suffered heavy casualties due to the inherent defensive measures of the Allied front, the heroic assault of the Soviet fighter group did not cause the Soviet ground forces to suffer extremely heavy losses due to the lack of air supremacy as previously predicted. The momentum of the offensive came up, and after breaking through the Allied defense line along the river in Koszen, Guben, Foster and other areas, the Soviet army won key victories in the deep area one after another, directly threatening the rear of dozens of Allied divisions. As a last resort, the Allied Command in Europe activated the retreat plan, requiring the front-line troops to retreat in turn according to the plan, which required the Allied forces to show iron will and discipline in the unfavorable situation of the war, and still respond to each other, resist step by step on the way to retreat, and give the Soviet troops in those predetermined ambush areas to meet the head-on attack, and even wait for the opportunity to engage in tactical counterattacks, but MacArthur and his allies did not have sufficient consideration and the prestige to deter the overall situation.

As soon as the retreat order was given, more than 3 million Allied officers and soldiers were like a flood that broke the dam, rushing down without any restraint. As a result, it took only four days for the Soviets to advance from the banks of the Oder River to Berlin, and the German government declared its capital an "undefended city" one step earlier.

In the case that the main forces of the German army have long collapsed, the capture of Berlin is no longer of much significance for the demoralization of the Allied forces, the Soviet army did not spend much energy on this issue, they only sent a small number of troops to Berlin, and did not even hold a decent ceremony to enter the city, and the armies of all sides, under the leadership of the Panzer Group, cut off the retreat of the British 3rd Army and the American Army in the Brandenburg area, and blocked the retreat of the US 7th Army and the French 4th Army in Mecklenburg, These two dumplings alone trapped more than 400,000 Allied troops, and countless small Allied troops and stragglers were annihilated by the Soviets on the way.

The more the general trend has passed, and it is necessary to make the choice of abandoning the car to protect the commander, the more eyes will be in the minds of the multinational joint combat forces, and the more open and covert battles will become. In order to compete for the right of way on some important roads and bridges, Allied forces did not hesitate to use force against each other, and the Allied air forces, which were supposed to play a key role in the Soviet army's advance, were also constantly fighting among themselves. In the first few days of fighting, the Allied medium and light bombers suffered more than expected losses due to the fast and flexible assault tactics of the Soviet fighters, and with the rapid advance of the Soviet troops, more and more airfields were in danger. Airplanes are no more expensive than guns, artillery or tank vehicles, their cost and resources and manpower are much higher than ordinary weapons, pilots are also the most expensive of all arms, the United States, France, British countries, and Sweden and Brazil, which have sent air forces to the European continent, all want to move their air forces to safe rear airfields as soon as possible. As a result, although there were no losses due to the runway grabbing, when the planes that far exceeded the processing capacity were piled up at the airfields in western Germany, eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the efficiency of these air units in wartime was greatly reduced, and the heavy bombers were affected in the containment bombing of the Soviet army's deep areas.

Mecklenburg, Saxony, Rhine, in the past three years, the scene that those people in Germany are most worried about and afraid of finally appeared, the Soviet troops rushed westward along the German railway lines and highways at an unprecedented speed, but the role was different from that of more than three years ago, this time the Soviet army was more like a group of transitmen who guarded themselves, they neither attacked towns and villages, robbed food and property, or humiliated women, nor did they declare the occupation with the posture of a victor, and what made the German people even more stunned was that The German troops, who had been "collectively annihilated" in the Polish campaign in the previous stage, actually appeared in a lined up with loaded guns. The men wore red armbands on their arms to distinguish them from the Wehrmacht, but the majority of the German population did not seem to care who they were nominally for, and there was very little underground resistance in the areas where they were stationed and responsible for policing, and the Soviets even raised extra food and oil in these areas. …,

Much of the Soviet Army's progress in the Polish campaign depended on the country's plain terrain, and in Germany, it took only 16 days from the time the Soviets launched their river-crossing attack to the appearance of the Red Flag in Aachen, a city west of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was a strange war for the Germans, which took place on German soil, where German casualties were kept at extremely low levels, and when they took it for granted that they were going to accept life under the red flag, and that the fate of the entire continent was no more than that, the Soviet army stopped on the western border of Germany. To be precise, the offensive was stopped before the line of demarcation between Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. To the south, there are majestic and precipitous Alps; To the west, there was the French line built on the old Maginot Line, and the fortress system built by Belgium and the Netherlands with the help of the United States and Britain, as well as the Allied fleets, air forces, and nuclear weapons that could be thrown into desperate positions at any time. After all, in such a situation, the military power of the Allies on the European continent, along with the hope of retaining their inherent ideology, was condensed into Western Europe. If they lose again, the United States and Britain can only rely on the sea to temporarily block the Soviet Union's ambitions, but it is only a matter of time before the Soviet Union's system, population, resources, and industrial base can gather the strength of almost the entire European continent and become a sea power.