Dan Snow's History Hit - The Other D-Day: The Eastern Front

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Historian, broadcaster and author Jonathan Dimbleby joins Dan to explain how Hitler's plans in the East went disastrously wrong.2 weeks after the D-Day landings, a gigantic Soviet offensive tore through the German lines on the Eastern Front. Named for the Russian general who fought Napoleon, Operation Bagration swept through Byelorussia and put the Red Army within striking distance of Berlin. On the anniversary of this vital offensive, Jonathan and Dan look at the role it played in the liberation of Europe.Jonathan's new book is called 'Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War'.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hears. Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration was a Russian general, a noble from Georgia, who fought against Napoleon on many occasions at the start of the 19th century. He's one of the towering figures of the Russian Empire's battles against Napoleon, both in Central Europe and as Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, falling back to the gates of Moscow itself. He commanded one wing of the Russian force that fought one of the bloodiest battles in history to that point, the Battle of Borodino, just outside Moscow. He fell mortally wounded at that battle and was enshrined as one of the great heroes of the Russian army.

He was also Georgian. He was from the Caucasus. And so it was perhaps unsurprising that Joseph Stalin, another notable Georgian, fighting the European enemies of Russia on sacred Russian soil, would choose to name one of his greatest offensives after his Georgian forebear. And to this day, Bagration will be remembered less for his own deeds than for the gigantic onslaught that carried his name in the summer of 1944, 80 years ago. It was just two weeks after D-Day. The Allies had fought their way ashore. They were locked in a terrible battle for Normandy, for France, for Western Europe,

and Stalin refused to be outdone. He would take this opportunity to deliver another one of his mighty hammer blows on the eastern front of Hitler's empire, just as the Allies had re-engaged on the continent of Europe on the western front. On the 20th and 21st of June, there was a surge in partisan activity in the occupied Soviet Union. Attacks on railways, bridges, roads, supply convoys, transport, behind the lines of the German army group centre, which stretched across much of what is now Belarusia. Then coming off the back of that intense partisan activity, in the early hours of the 22nd of June 1944, a massive, and I mean massive, artillery barrage smashed into German lines. It was the start of an offensive

that would see something like two million men thrown against less than half that number and those German units totally outnumbered were also comprised of knackered, young, ill-trained, Wrecked, young, ill-trained, equipment-starved troops. It was a horrific mismatch. Stalin's Bagration Offensive would take place over a front of 450 miles. That's the equivalent of the distance of Aberdeen down to the south coast of England, of Boston to the shores of the Chesapeake. The scale of this warfare was almost unprecedented. It's probably the largest single

military offensive in the history of war, and let us hope it will never lose that title. The German group of armies attempting to stabilize the center of the Eastern Front were annihilated. Just a few weeks later, on the 17th of July, nearly 60,000 German prisoners were marched through Moscow 20 abreast, packed in, moved along quickly, and it still took 90 minutes for them to pass It's known as the Parade of the Vanquished And that was only a portion of the German troops that were captured A fraction of those that were injured, sickened, and killed. Bagratin saw thousands of square miles fall to the Red Army. It took Soviet arms

to the borders of East Prussia, of Poland. It made it crystal clear that the fate of East and Central Europe would now be decided by Joseph Stalin, whatever his Western allies might hope and think. On this anniversary of the greatest offensive in the history of the world, I've got Jonathan Dimbleby, best-selling author, journalist, broadcaster of decades of experience, a national treasure. I've got him back on the podcast to talk about his latest book about Bagration. He was on only three years ago, talking about the anniversaries of the enormous offensives that took Axis powers to the very gates of Moscow. Here he is for the sequel, the bloody sequel. Enjoy.

Jonathan, great to have you on the podcast. Very good to be with you. It seems like yesterday that you were on here telling me all about Operation Barbarossa, the greatest invasion of all time. And then we talked again 80 years on from the great battle at the gates of Moscow. And here we are. Here we are three years later. Just bring me up to speed. I know this is a big one.

What has the Eastern Front been doing since Hitler's great gamble of knocking the Soviet Union out with one enormous punch quickly when that gamble failed? Just bring me through the next couple of years up to where we are now. I'll summarise it. Hitler lost the war, my view, and that's not an outlandish view, in late 1941 when he failed to break the Red Army at the gates of Moscow effectively. He didn't give up, of course, because he was Hitler with this lunatic vision of controlling the Soviet Union, controlling Europe in a way that would allow the Aryan peoples to dominate the continent. And so he made a lunge further

south than Moscow, made a lunge which was bound to fail to Stalingrad because his logistic lines were so long and the armies of the Soviet Union were getting stronger, better equipped. They were by now supported as well by the Allies with supplies from the West, the Western Allies. And after a fearful, terrible struggle at Stalingrad, they were driven back. He could not cross the Volga as he wished, driven back steadily, steady retreat after retreat after retreat, many hundreds of kilometers. There was one counterattack at Kursk, which was in fact in the summer of 1943, the biggest tank battle of the war, in which the Germans had a tactical victory to start with, but it became a strategic defeat simply because of the weight of arms that the Soviet Union, the Red Army, could deploy. They were driven back in the south towards Ukraine, center towards Belarus. In the north, they were surrounding Leningrad, but they were under immense pressure because the Red Army was driving north and west. And it was an unstoppable, massive force.

More than 6 million soldiers altogether along this 3,000-kilometer front. If you remember, at the beginning of the invasion of Barbarossa, they had an army of 6.2 million. The Red Army was 6.2 million strong. By the beginning of 1944, by which time the Germans were in full but slow retreat, they still had an army of over 6 million, although they had lost almost 8 million men already. The reserves they could call on, twice as many tanks, four times as many aircraft, and they were overwhelmingly more powerful than the Germans, who had lost many fewer men, but proportionately were about to lose a far greater proportion of their armies and were

draining all the time. And of course, then D-Day happened later in 1944. And there are offensives whose names are unknown, and yet they're some of the greatest offensives in the history of warfare. For example, the offensive across the Dnieper into eastern and central Ukraine of the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944. These are just monumental military operations. Dan, you are so right. If you look at it dispassionately, if you were looking at the planet from outside, you would see this massive enterprise happening in Eastern Europe. And on the ground in Western Europe, nothing happening at all,

or virtually nothing happening at all. And in the South, you had no less than 10 offensives. The Red Army called their army groups fronts. There were 10 fronts altogether. In the south, the Ukrainian fronts, which there were three key fronts, first, second, and third Ukrainian fronts, were taking on army groups south. And they launched over the river, over the Dnieper, sometimes together, sometimes successively, and sometimes overlapping, 10 offences involving hundreds of thousands of men. And on the German side, led by their most able commander, Field Marshal Manstein, who had been at the fore of the Wehrmacht from the very beginning of the Second World War, when the Germans went into Polar, right the way through playing key role in the encirclement of

Leningrad, key role in the attack and then the retreat from Stalingrad at Kursk again. And he was a formidable commander. And he was one of the few who had the guts, although he overstates his case probably about just how brave he was, to stand up to Hitler. He knew that by this time, the beginning of 1941, on the banks of the Dnieper, he knew that they had to retreat, that the only chance of salvation was a much narrower front of more like a thousand kilometers. And only then, he thought, would it be possible to hold the advancing tide of the Red Army. He, however, was overruled again and again by Hitler, as Hitler persisted in doing right the way through the rest of 1944. He said that there is the Eastern Wall. You protect the Eastern Wall.

The Eastern Wall was a crumbling barricade which couldn't be defended, but he was not allowed to pull back until it was too late, and he was forced to pull back. Then, of course, he did not have the opportunity properly to regroup and establish new defences behind which to protect the lands occupied by the Nazis. And let's get now to 1944. This gigantic assault is timed, presumably, to coincide with the Allies' effort in Western Europe. This is an astonishing example of the power of coalition warfare. It is and it isn't, because at the end of 1943, it had been confirmed at the first big three conference, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. It was confirmed that the D-Day landings, that that operation by the West would finally

take place in the early summer. In fact, it was May at that point, early summer of 1944. And this had been a very difficult decision for Churchill to make. He was bullied into it effectively by Roosevelt and by Stalin at the conference at Tehran. He was mocked. He was humiliated to the point where Roosevelt said, I'm going to rough you up today to please Stalin. So please don't worry about it too much. Actually, Churchill, not unnaturally, was somewhat aggrieved. And afterwards, he described his real situation at Tehran on reflection. He didn't say so publicly at the time, obviously. He said, there was I, on my right,

the great American bison, on my left, the great Russian bear. And there was I in the middle, the little British donkey. So in effect, the big three were two plus one. And Churchill had feared D-Day. But at Tehran, he was bullied effectively into accepting D-Day, despite arguing vehemently against it and being mocked by Stalin openly without being given any support by Roosevelt. And it was agreed. And it was soon after that, that the preparations were made, but not announced to the Western allies by Stalin for a massive offensive at roughly the same time in the early summer of 1944. But in January to March, those 10 offenses were taking place in what is now Ukraine, was the Ukraine. And in the north,

in the end of January 1944, Leningrad was relieved after nearly 900 days, 800,000 deaths, and the slow advance west and the north was happening. So you had the south and the north slowly advancing. In the center, in what is now Belarus, there was Army Group Center, the Wehrmacht's most powerful force, defending quite effectively a line against the Belarusian fronts, i.e. the army groups of the Red Army, and a very unrecorded part of Soviet history, reluctantly exposed because they did not do very well. It was an attritional conflict in which they lost huge numbers of soldiers between January and April of 1944. But you have the center, and on the morrow of D-Day, Churchill has informed Stalin that it's a success. Churchill feared it would be a disaster,

but he informed Stalin it has been a success and a great relief. And Stalin for once was extremely generous in his praise and said, this is a fantastic achievement, which he recognized it to have been, and added, we are now going to launch our own offensive very soon. He didn't go into any more detail, but of course, you know, intelligence sources meant that the British had a pretty fair idea and the Americans. And that's when more than 2 million Soviet soldiers were lined up against 800,000 German troops of Army Group Center. And it was an extraordinary period because it was achieved in part. British had Operation Fortitude trying to persuade, and quite successfully trying to persuade the Germans that the landings would not be in Normandy, but by the Calais. And maskarovska that the German armies,

thinly protecting a diminishing front, the expanding Soviet armies, found themselves in a position where the Germans were constantly moving their forces left and right, up and down, to try and block this hole or that hole where they suspected the attack might come from. and down to try and block this hole or that hole where they suspected the attack might come from. In the case of this mammoth operation called bagration, bagration, it sounds like in English, indeed, I'm sure you being a very informed historian would know, but when I discovered the word bagration, I called it bagration, and I tried it out on lots of peers who are quite well informed. They had no idea what bagration was. They had no idea that what was about to be mounted was the greatest ever offensive. And that in that offensive, the back of the Wehrmacht would be broken. The destruction of Army Group Center, the capture or or death of 300,000 plus German soldiers. And it happened immensely fast because the Germans believed that the main offensive would continue to be in the south and everything that was

happening in the center was in fact a feint. It was the exact opposite. They were fainting in the south as they prepared to attack in the center. And you had the extraordinary obverse of Barbarossa. In Barbarossa, Stalin refused to believe that the Germans were actually about to invade three million German soldiers, Axis soldiers. Three years later, almost exactly three years later, the Germans, Hitler, refused to believe, despite mounting evidence, that they were about to be invaded with this huge, unstoppable force in which, as I say, the back of the Wehrmacht was broken. The culmination of that was an unstoppable Soviet advance, which left Stalin, which is why I call the book How Stalin Won the War, in an unassailable position, to use that cliched phrase, an unassailable position to determine effectively the fate of Eastern Europe, regardless of what either Churchill or Roosevelt might think about that. Although, as it happens, the two Western leaders had very different views about it.

Take me through the start of it, Jonathan. A massive, massive artillery barrage. How long was the front line that they were going to attack along? The front line was approximately 600 kilometers. That is a very big front. You have more than 2 million Soviet troops on one side, and you have no more than 800,000 German troops on the other side, most of which are really either very war-weary or very ill-trained and very young. They are incredibly under-equipped. Their weaponry is in need of constant repair, breaking down, and they don't have enough of it. Bush, who was the commander-in-chief of the Central Front Army Group Centre, was being ordered by Hitler, who was very much under the influence of his new favourite, General Model. He'd sacked Manstein because Manstein refused to accept his orders

and to be humble enough. I'm putting it crudely. But Model was in the south, who had been saying, I need forces in the south. So Hitler was denuding the center of a whole panzer army and sending forces to the south to shore up a front which was not going to be under attack at that point, it was later. And there were four key cities that had to be taken in order to move through to the west, further into Belarus. They were Vitebsk, Orsha to the south, Mogilev, and Bobruisk. And Roksavsky, who was one of the great Russian generals, was in command of the Ukrainian front that was attacking Bobruisk, which was the critical victory and the most difficult to achieve. They had lost a lot of lives there earlier. And there was this unbelievable artillery barrage. I was very fortunate because, thanks to a brilliant researcher who I've worked closely with, Kordelyuba Vinogradova,

who is much cherished by all historians of the war on the Eastern Front, she unearthed extraordinary firsthand accounts by ordinary Soviet soldiers, which have not been translated before. And one of them, a man called Pezhnytsky, was a commissar. And he knew what was going on because he was a commissar on the front. And he describes so vividly the cacophony of sound, the terrifying sound, and also the fact they didn't do the job. He was in the group attacking the northern city of Vitebsk and Orsha. But the front just erupted in flames. Very vivid images of it.

Extraordinarily powerful. And the initial reaction of the Germans was absolute panic. What was happening? This wasn't meant to be happening. Although one of their commanders on the eve of this assault on the 21st of June 1944 called Jordan, who was in Bobruisk, which was about to come under the most terrible, heavy offensive, he was saying, we're facing a nightmare. They are going to attack. He was being told by Bush, it's not, it's a feint. There's nothing happening. And the day before, Bush was

having a meeting with Hitler and he had to hurry back to the front when this all erupted. He paid the price by being entirely the creature of Hitler's will. These cities that I mentioned, of Hitler's will, these cities that I mentioned, these four cities, have been defined by Hitler as fortified places, and they were not to be abandoned under any circumstances. They were to fight to the last and to die in the cities, the garrisons in those cities. And as a result, the Red Army just went around them and then surrounded them. And the Germans tried to escape. Horrific loss of life. Some of which Vasily Grossman, who's the greatest Russian chronicler of the Second World War as a war correspondent, as well as being a great novelist, was in Bebrusque.

And he describes walking in and the horror of the dead soldiers, German soldiers on the ground, tanks driving over the bodies, having to find your way past bodies, wounded people, total destruction. It's a hideous, hideous slaughter that happened there. He called it their revenge. But I think the revenge he was talking about was not a sort of slaughter of the innocence of civilians. It was a slaughter of German soldiers. I suspect a great many of those soldiers had been caught and were just then killed. Full knowledge, of course, that the Nazis, the Germans had done that on a huge scale between 1941 and 1944.

So you have that happening. And then the advance, they get to Minsk, capital Belarus, So you have that happening. And then the advance, they get to Minsk, capital Belarus, crossing rivers, incredible bottlenecks as they try to cross key rivers, Germans in the forests and woods in little groups being mown down as they're caught, trying to find a way out. And they get to Minsk, which is virtually being evacuated by the Germans. And there they regroup. Germans, and there they regroup. And that whole thing, the 350,000 or so men that became casualties of that attack were rounded up in two weeks. If you compare that, and this is the only way in which I want to compare it at the moment, with the Western Front after D-Day, it took 80 days

to cover a very similar distance. The Allies had a terrible struggle getting through Normandy and then getting towards the Seine. So the speed of this assault was quite remarkable. And that opened the way. Once they got to Minsk and further south, and so they now opened up the southern front again. They opened up the northern front much more slowly. The main force was in the center and the Germans had no idea which way the Red Army would go. Would they now focus on going up into the Baltic, up towards Prussia? Would they focus on going towards Warsaw? Would they focus from the south. They just had no idea which way it was going to go. And in fact, the main assault led by Rokossovsky was towards Warsaw, and the other armies diverted off in various directions. So it was a phenomenal military achievement,

which gave Stalin formidable, formidable political diplomatic power. You listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about Operation Bagration. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. I sometimes wonder, Jonathan, whether this is one of those examples of it's a bit unfair in military history. Sometimes we're keen to remember and celebrate the close run things where both sides sides were duking it out and it therefore is a bit more dramatic and there's jeopardy. Some of the more one-sided and therefore most effective and therefore perhaps praiseworthy military operations, we tend to overlook slightly because it's just one enormous shellacking from start to finish. You've mentioned the vast superiority in numbers, tanks, aircraft, artillery. Why was this such a crushing victory for the Soviets,

apart from those elements? There's a really important point. I'd say two things. One is the German soldiers, partly through the propaganda and partly because they correctly feared changes partly through the propaganda and partly because they correctly feared what would happen were they defeated at the hands of the Red Army, fought with real desperation. There was a lot of chaos. There was a lot of running away, but that happens on all fronts. And it happened on the Western Front as well. But the essential resistance against any realistic assessment. I don't think it would have been possible for a democratically led government to have asked its men to do what Hitler instructed and they obeyed the German soldiers under his command to do. So that's the first thing. It was hard fought. And the second thing was, as you rightly observe, it wasn't just the weaponry and the

numbers. By this time in the war, Stalin's principal generals, Zhukov, Konev, Rokossovsky, Agramyan, Malinovsky, and so on, were war-hardened veteran generals, commanding officers used to commanding very large numbers of men, very clear-minded. And whereas in 1941, notably when Kiev, as it then was, was taken by the Germans, Stalin panicked and told the then commander that Kiev would have to be held and it was not possible to hold it. And therefore, there was a massive defeat of the Soviet forces. Contrast, by the time you get to 1944, he is trusting of his generals much more. They're on the offensive. They make good decisions. It doesn't mean he doesn't make important decisions himself. I mean, he had a real battle with Rokossovsky before the start of Operation Bagration. And quite an interesting, extraordinary encounter in April of

1944, because Rokossovsky had been tortured during the purges in 1938. He had been imprisoned, he had been threatened with execution, and he had refused to confess to any crime because he had committed none. And eventually, having been beaten and tortured, he was simply instructed to leave prison and go back to the front, where he then played a major part in defending Moscow. He had not changed. He knew what the risk was. He confronted Stalin about how Bobrush should be taken. He said, we can't go straight into the city. We need to go around it. go straight into the city. We need to go around it. And Stalin said, I don't think you mean that. Go out and think about it. Now, every other general, practically speaking, would have known what that meant. He came back in again and said, no, I haven't changed my mind. We must divide the

front and do two-pronged attack. He was sent out again. This time, the satraps of Stalin, Molotov, Malinowski, Malenkov, Beria, and others went out and said, do you realize you have got to do what Comrade Stalin says? He describes, there are three overlapping accounts of it. He describes walking around in the antechamber with a clock ticking, shall I give way or shan't I? He went back into Stalin's presence and there was Stalin standing there smoking a cigarette, staring. And he was asked, have you changed your mind? He said, no, comrade Stalin. There was a long silence after which Stalin walked up to him, clapped him on the shoulder and said, I like a general that stands up for himself. And he got his way. And as a result, he was a very key figure in the assault on Warsaw,

the key figure. But to the more general point that that evokes is that with few exceptions like that, Stalin had come to trust his generals, whereas Hitler was sacking them all over the place. Bush, the commander-in-chief who was just his cipher, ludicrously instructing his forces to stay put even when they were surrounded, was sacked and a model was brought up from the south. He was constantly moving them around and getting more and more hands-on control of a weaker and weaker army. And in pure military terms, it was grotesquely absurd. But if you have any sense of Hitler, it was what he believed. And by the end of 1944, he was saying to his adjutant in a late night

conversation, which the adjutant recorded, he was saying, well, if we lose, we go down, but we'll bring the world down with us. It was a sort of got to them around mentality. And are there any great moments of jeopardy or is it just one gigantic flood of Soviet arms from east to west? There was no major moment of jeopardy. The greatest jeopardy was the outturn from this, which was the political conflict. What I've tried to do in the book, Dan, is to get the military history right. And it's a very complicated story. And I've tried to tell it in a way that you can understand if you're a lay person. You don't need to know the distinction between every single unit of an army and the experiences of ordinary people, the ordinary soldiers on both sides. And sometimes they're heartbreaking, some of these stories, and in other cases, horrifying, and also the impact on the civilians. But I give quite a lot of space, more perhaps than most

military histories do, because I find it fascinating in itself. I also think it's really important to know how and why the decisions were being reached at the very top, not only the commanding officers, not only the strategic advisors, but as represented by Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, the major state players, and of course, Hitler as well. And the most tension was between Churchill and Stalin. And it was quite extraordinary because we've reached in the military story going on towards Warsaw, moving across in the spring into Poland, advancing on Warsaw. Remember, the ostensible casus belli, of course, self-interest, enlightened self-interest, you hope, is what leads nations into war. But the ostensible Casus Belli cause of the war was Hitler's invasion of Poland, which led Chamberlain to declare war in September

1939. And by now, you have a situation in which Churchill is trying to protect the interests of the Poles. At Tehran, and incidentally, Tehran was much the most important conference between the big three of the war. Yalta, which came in February of 1944, was really a codicil, a sort of dressing up in legal language what had in principle been agreed at Tehran. One of the things agreed at Tehran was that Poland's border with the Soviet Union, which was roughly along the Molotov-Ribbentrop line that had been created in September 1939, and was very close to the Kherson line, as it was known, which had originally been drawn up by the British to protect Poland. It was 200 miles or so west of the former border of the

Soviet Union. Churchill came up with this idea that lock, stock, and barrel, Poland could move 200 miles west, west from the Soviet Union and west into Germany. And Roosevelt tacitly went along with that, but kept very quiet, but went along with it, recorded as going along with it. And Stalin rubbed his hands and said, yes, that will do us. And Churchill hoped two things. One is that he'd persuade the Polish government in exile, recognized at that point by all three, led by Michalajczyk, who's the prime minister, who had ostensibly the Home Army in Poland fighting for Poland against the Nazis, but also having an increasingly difficult relationship with the Red Army and the Soviets, who they loathed equally, Mikhailichik, however, was enthralled to his own right wing. I'm oversimplifying for the point of clarity. And he refused to accept the shift in borders, which Churchill had committed himself to. Churchill, he spent more time talking to Mikolajczyk in London and to Stalin in

correspondence and in meetings about Poland than almost any other issue of the war, apart from the conversations that build up to D-Day and also his alternative strategy. He spent hours and hours and days, and I wager that it was for him the most exhausting of all, because what he thought was, what he hoped was, that he could persuade Stalin, as the Red Army moved into Poland, the Comis in Poland, the so-called Lublin Poles, would agree to collaborate with the Western Poles, if you like, the exiled government in London, to form a government in which Poland would be allowed its independence, to develop its own political democracy, form a democracy. And Stalin, the smile of a tiger, half went along with this and half sneered his way in rejecting it.

And the result was that Churchill found himself in the most dramatic confrontations with Mikolajczyk, saying, don't you realize this is your only chance? If not, you will be overrun by the Russians. They will control Poland. You have to give way on the borders, and then I can deliver you democracy. In fact, although Mikolajczyk in the end nearly did give way on the borders, it was too late because Poland was occupied by the Red Army, and was a question therefore of what Stalin would allow the Poles to have. And at Yalta, they found a form of words that all sides could sign up to about democracy, freedom. It never meant more than a row of beads and everyone knew it, not least the Poles. But I think that's how the military and political

interact. And of course, Poland then became really the principal grounds on which the distrust that was very deep in Churchill. Before D-Day, he talked about the Russian tide, a very great evil descending upon the world. Roosevelt, on the contrary, believed he would be able to deal very well with Stalin together with the British and the Chinese playing a minor role. They would police the world for independent free states. And he never really accepted that Stalin was going to be as insistent on defending his borders in the way in which Stalin eventually did. And it's a story of the intensely important relationship between military success and political achievement. So this monstrous offensive gives Stalin the

whip hand in Eastern Europe, massively strengthens his bargaining power. In fact, no bargaining can go on really with the Red Army so dominant in Eastern Europe. But let's finish up by saying also then how does it affect events in Western Europe? People will be familiar. Eight years ago now, D-Day has taken place, terrible battle for Normandy, battle for France going on. That shouldn't be seen in isolation, should it? How did the Germans deploy their resources between these two fronts? I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest their resources between these two fronts. rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Hitler had made this extraordinary and bizarre misjudgment of bringing about a situation in which he was fighting a war on two fronts with diminishing resources against forces that had growing resources. And he had made

the decision to invade the Soviet Union, which was extremely unwise, and his generals had warned that it would not be a smart move. And so now you have him, he had to pull aircraft, this was around D-Day, pull aircraft to the Eastern Front, and they were reducing in number sharply in any case. So he had no protection. The reason why D-Day, partly why D-Day was such success, it was a brilliant, extraordinary, a sort of triumphant venture on a scale that itself was unprecedented. But the aircraft, the German aircraft, were not there, which would have made all the difference. So you can hear on the Western Front, all the Western Front commanders and so on saying, there are no aircraft here. It's all enemy aircraft. It was absolutely fundamental in the failure to prevent the Allies. Put it this way, perhaps. Had the Soviets not achieved or were not achieving the success they were achieving, had Hitler not invaded, had there not been a struggle, then historians, as you know only too well, don't like predicting the future or second-guessing the past. But it's hard to see how Western Europe and therefore Britain would have been safe, secure. So two things, I think. One is that the German inability to defend against both fronts at once, it didn't mean the Germans didn't try.

They fought with immense desperation as the fighters on the Western Front, Arnhem being the obvious example, Market Garden. But the impact of that was simply to extend the conflict and the importance of the Western Front and the Eastern Front. They were both forces were coming together on Berlin. And there is a fascinating aspect to that, I think, which is that Churchill strongly believed that you had to go for Berlin because then you would control the head of the demon and you would destroy, you would decapitate the Nazis in Berlin. Roosevelt, on the contrary, did not think it was important because he was quite content for Stalin to take Berlin, as indeed happened, and his armies were to go to the south, to the incomprehension of the British, Stalin had had a conversation with Eisenhower in which Eisenhower said, we're going to the south, because the assumption was they were going to have a good post-war relationship. And he then summoned Zhukov and Rokossovsky and said, who's going to get to Berlin first? It was a question that brooked.

No answer. It wasn't necessary. It was, as Antony Beaver, I think, said, because it was on April 1st, the most extraordinary April Fool that you could ever imagine pulling off. And the effect of that was that Berlin then became the center. And it very quickly became clear that the Allies were not going to get the future for Europe that they had hoped. Democracies being formed in those countries that were not part of the Soviet Union. So much so, Churchill's despair was so great that a few days after VE Day, this is really a historical footnote, but it's a measure of the degree of distrust that he validly had for the Soviet Union and for Stalin. A few days after VE Day, he ordered the chiefs of staff. Remember on VE Day, he'd been Whitehall, crowds in the streets below, chanting, singing, dancing, he waving.

He sent an instruction to the chiefs of staff to find out whether it would be possible to launch an offensive dramatically against the Red Army in Germany. What would it take? His codename was Operation Unthinkable. And the chiefs of staff came back after about two, three weeks of proper attempt to analyze as they would have to do, as Churchill had ordered it, and said it could conceivably be done. It would involve all the British, all the Commonwealth forces, all American forces,

the remains of the German army, and it would be a war of attrition. And it would take a very long time. Of course, that's why it remained only a footnote attrition, and it would take a very long time. Of course, that's why it remained only a footnote in history, but it's just a political measure of the degree to which well before the end of the war, British distrust of Stalin had reached such a pitch. And I think that today, there are many, many Poles who still look bitterly on the failure of the Western Allies to come to the rescue of the Poles during the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. I don't think it was possible. I don't think it was possible.

I think Churchill did what he could. I don't think the Red Army would have sensibly attacked Warsaw. It was drained. It needed refueling in every single way. Warsaw. It was drained. It needed refueling in every single way. And its strategy was not to go into a huge city like Warsaw, but to bypass Warsaw and go west. A lot of Poles, I'd say, didn't really forgive the British for that. But I think that is an understandable but misplaced anger. Well, an extraordinary story. Thank you very much, Jonathan, for coming on and talking to us all about it. What is your book called? It's called Endgame 1944, How Stalin Won the War.

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