Marshal Andrei Ivanovich Yeremenko

Yeremenko, Marshal Andrei Ivanovich (1892-1970). Yeremenko played a decisive role in the 1941 battle of Moscow and inflicted a disastrous delay on the German timetable for invading the USSR. Conscripted into the imperial Russian army in WW I, Yeremenko reached the rank of corporal and then joined the new Red Army, fighting in the Russian civil war and taking part in the invasion of Poland in 1920. In 1941 he was given command of the Western Front (army group) and got every aircraft available into the air to attack the advancing columns of Guderian and Hoth. He followed this with an attack by a tank group equipped with the new T-34 and KV tanks, just coming into service, which were hard for German anti-armour guns to destroy. This was temporarily successful and, in delaying the Germans, made them more vulnerable to the Russian winter. He was wounded twice, the second time badly, but after seven months' treatment returned to take part in the battle of Stalingrad and then to command the Kalinin and Baltic Fronts. He commanded fourth Ukrainian Front from March 1945, and his troops captured Prague in May in the last operation of the European war. He was outstandingly brave and showed great tactical skill, but was overshadowed by Zhukov and given little opportunity to decide strategy. He was only made a marshal in 1955.

— Christopher Bellamy