I know the basic details of the war. Nazi Germany pushes in and initially enjoys great success against USSR troops who are crippled by the purges, bad orders, lack of preparation, etc. Eventually the Russians are able to bleed the Germans out some with partisans, hitting supply lines, scorched earth and letting winter do its thing. Then counterattack.
My question is what would the actual fighting have looked like? Would it be primarily lines of massed tanks and infantry ploughing into each other? Or lots of small scale skirmishes and ambushes in and around towns? How big of a role did trenches and fortifications play, or were they mostly irrelevant in the face of tanks, bombs and heavy firepower? How close quarters would the fighting be? Was urban warfare a huge component, or were most battles out in the open? How decisive was air power?
Are there any really solid depictions of fighting on the Eastern front in movies or perhaps documentary form? Thanks in advance.
The Eastern Front was extremely large and diverse, so no one type of fighting predominated.
The siege of Leningrad featured a series of siegeworks and trenches around the city for several years. Battles such as Kursk and Kharkov, taking place in mostly open country, featured massive tank formations. Stalingrad was a meat grinder of brutal, personal urban warfare, surrounded by more conventional battles on the outskirts of the city.
Air power was important, but was of a different nature than what was seen in the West or in the Pacific. Neither air force had a large, dedicated strategic bombing force, and most air operations were in support of the ground forces, meaning that missions and combat tended to happen at lower altitudes, and as with most things in the eastern front, the scale was massive. Each side used some dedicated anti-tank and tactical support aircraft that didn't really have equivalents in the other theaters (apart from North Africa), such as the Ju-87G, Hs-129, and Il-2.
I wouldn't be the best source for movies/documentaries; but here are some good books that go over the different types of combat that predominated:
The 900 Days; The Siege of Leningrad, Harrison Salisbury
Stalingrad, Antony Beevor
Barbarossa; the Russian-German Conflict 1941-1945, Alan Clark
The Battle of Kursk, David Glantz + Jonathan House