Operation Danube: Soviet and Warsaw Pact Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968

On 20 August 1968, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles, and hundreds of military aircraft of the Warsaw Pact armed forces invaded Czechoslovakia in an operation code-named Danube. It was the largest military undertaking in Europe since 1945.

Starting with a description of the history of Czechoslovakia and the communist takeover of power in 1948, this volume describes the birth and development of the Prague Spring in 1968 and an attempt to reform the communist system from within. It recounts the hostility this process encountered from the USSR and its allies within the Warsaw Pact, and the split in the Kremlin over solutions for the resulting ‘Czechoslovak problem’. The crisis that subsequently developed throughout the spring and summer of 1968 led to the military intervention.