School of War - Ep 230: Prit Buttar on the Great Soviet Offensive of 1944

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Prit Buttar, historian and author of Bagration 1944: The Great Soviet Offensive, joins the show to discuss the immense Russian campaign that broke the German Army on the Eastern Front.     ▪️ Times     •      01:48 Introduction     •      02:50 A war unto itself     •      08:02 Flanders             •      15:20 Maskirovka     •      24:35 Soviet intelligence              •      28:27 Bolshevism             •      30:22 Lebensraum          •      31:40 Bagration             •      36:14 Cracking the line            •      39:00 Warsaw Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

A recurring theme here on School of War is the vastness and human cruelty of the Eastern European Front in both World Wars 1 and 2. Today, we welcome back Pritbatar, a great chronicler of that theater, to discuss the summer of 1944 and the Soviet offensive that corresponded with the Allied invasion of Normandy, Operation Bagration. It's a tale of combat on a truly vast scale and a human toll no less massive. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war with Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in grand.

We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show, Dr. Pritt Battar, a medical doctor served in the British Army, now prominent as a historian of the Eastern Front, author of numerous books about the War in the East and World War II. You came on the show a while ago now to discuss the siege of Leningrad,

and you recently wrote a two-volume series on that subject to besiege a city and then Hero City. You're the author most recently of a book called Bagration 1984, the Great Soviet Offensive. Thank you so much for coming back on School of War. Thank you very much for having me. It's good to be back. So I thought we might start with the big picture here as we come into 1944. for listeners, well, of course, they'll know about the Battle of Normandy, and they'll have some

general sense of what happens in the West in 1944. They'll know that the war was won in 1945. They know the Soviets came from the East, but I'm going to make a, I'm going to hazard a guess that our Anglophone listeners are probably less informed about exactly what happens in the East leading up to that. I am less well informed about what happens in the East leading up to that. That's usually how I go. That's usually how I guess it what my audience will have coming into a conversation. And it turns out, as you document, there's a whole, it's a war unto itself, I guess, how I think about it, seeing the scale of what you document.

It's hardly another theater. It's on the scale of probably multiple other wars. What are these series of strategic conferences that culminate in the Tehran conference that determine the grand strategy coming into 44? Just set this stage for us. Yeah, I think there are two things that are worth pairing in mind when you look at the whole of 1944 in Europe on both the East and the West. The first is a decision made by Hitler in the early autumn of 1943, where he decides that the strategy he's going to adopt is to keep the minimum

required strength in the East whilst concentrating Germany's resources in the West in anticipation of an invasion of France. Those forces will then be used to destroy the Allied forces as they come ashore, thereafter using the new U-boats that are being built, he will resume the war at the Battle of the Atlantic to stop the Americans from rebuilding their forces in Britain, whilst turning the land forces east to destroy the Red Army. To add to the point you made about the sheer scale of the Eastern Front, it's worth bearing in mind that the minimum forces required to keep the Soviets at arm's length amounts to 70% of Germany's war effort. So only 30% can be concentrated in Europe and also in Italy and elsewhere.

And given the intensity of the fighting in Normandy and how hard it actually was for the Brits and the Americans to fight their way clear of the beaches, it makes you realize just what an enormous contribution was made by tying down so many units in the Eastern Front. It would have been infinitely harder for the Western forces to fight their way in the land. had even a proportion of those troops being made available. So this is the first thing. Hitler's strategy is prioritise the West whilst doing the minimum required in the East. And that also includes, okay, we can trade some territory for time, but by now he really

doesn't trust his field commanders anymore. He feels they give up positions too soon. So this is the era of the fortress policy. He declares a whole string of cities along the front line as Fortress. Army and army group commanders are required to ensure that there are sufficient forces to garrison them, resources to fortify them, and they are not to be given up without Hitler's explicit permission. The idea is these will act as breakwaters in the event of a Soviet offensive, and basically they have to hold out until a relief column arrives to rescue them,

either to restore the frontline or to allow an orderly withdrawal. It's a strategy that has almost no credibility in any analysis of military history, but in some senses the whole strategy of prioritizing in the West, holding the Soviets in the East, using the fortresses. This is what happens when you find yourself in a card game where your hand is absolutely awful, and really perhaps it is the least bad option, short of just throwing the cards on the table and walking away, which Hitler is never going to do. There really is no other strategy option for him that has any remote chance of succeeding. The second point is, as you allude,

is the Tehran conference at the end of 1943, where a number of major issues come to a head. This is where Stalin gets the, or at least he sees it as he gets the British and Americans to commit to a second front in the coming months. turn he commits to mounting a major offensive in the East that will coincide with those invasions in order to tie down as many German troops as possible. But at the same time, he continues a rolling offensive that's been continuing since really the aftermath of Kursk that has carried the Red Army across Ukraine to the two and over the Nipa River. And before the spring four of 44, those operations culminate in an advance to roughly what is now the war.

the eastern border of Romania. So in the southern sector of the eastern front, the Soviets are finally brought to a halt largely through exhaustion and lengthening supply lines, but the discussions then move on to, so where are we going to make this major attack that we have now promised the Western powers when they finally, finally get around to the second front that Stalin has been asking for since, well, since 1941 really. So I'll go back to the Germans and then we'll come back around in the allies. So you, you know, you identify these key components of the German defensive concept, which really is Hitler's defensive concept personally. You hold in the East, you, you defend in the West. And, you know, I take your point that you're choosing

from a, from the dwindling series of options here, but there is something that makes sense about that. You reserve in the book your harshest criticism for the fortress strategy in the East that you make the point, there seems less justification for that, even given the dire straits. Can you say more about that? Sure. And also speak about, why does Hitler get fixated on this notion of fortress cities and fighting to the last? And where does that come from?

And how does he become persuaded that that's necessary? I think there are multiple threads in that. The first is that Hitler's own military experience really amounts to Flanders in the First World War, where the front line didn't move very much, where quite high troop density, these fortified positions proved to be so resistant. You think of the sheer weight of shelling at Verdun and at the Somme and at Ipr, and yet the line still held out. Men can, you know, even in my day in the army, we were told that two hours of digging, you're going to avoid 70% of the losses you might get from enemy shelling. Six hours of digging, and that gets even

better. So if you've been digging in position for a long time, your troops can shelter quite well. It's then a matter of timing the moment that they emerge from their shelters in order to take up their defensive positions. But, so Hitler's experiences of actually a slightly unusual form of warfare, and those troop densities are never going to occur in the East. It is just too big a front line. However, that's how he sees things that, well, we held out in northern France and Belgium, so why can't the Wehrmacht now hold out in the East? but also he draws on a series of historical events that he consistently takes completely out of context.

For example, when Napoleon's armies were treated across what is now Germany and Poland in 1813, he left behind numerous garrisons, some of which, for example, the French garrison in what is now the city of Gerdansk, was then Danzig, held out right up to Napoleon's surrender in 1814, and even after, Napoleon had abdicated, Davout refused to hand over the fortress until he was given evidence that he could believe that Napoleon was no longer emperor. So Hitler sees this as, well, here's an example of how a fortress can hold out. But holding out in the age of muskets and muzzle-loading guns is a very different matter from holding out in an era of mechanized warfare. The sheer consumption of ammunition, of equipment, of casualties, etc., is so high that it's inconceivable

that a fortress could hold out in that manner. And even if he had looked at more recent history, in late 1914, the fortress of Progemichel in southern Poland was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the retreating Austro-Hungarian forces left a garrison of over 100,000 men to hold this fortress, and this was deliberately intended exactly as Hitler described his fortress policy. It would tie down Russian forces, and then a relief column would come to their aid. In practice, what happened was those 100,000 men were starved into surrender, and the KUK Army lost more than 100,000 men in futile attempts to reach the besieged garrison. In many respects, the opening years of the First World War saw a whole series of fortresses

that had been built in the 19th century and then modernized at enormous expense, proved that they were completely useless. And yet somehow Hitler still believes that this policy can work. And I think the clue to it is he was just almost pathologically incapable of accepting that actually sometimes you just have to give up ground. For him, once he had captured ground, he had such a mind block about giving it up that he really felt that until I am physically forced out of any position, we have to hold that position. Without any regard for the fact that standard Wehrmacht doctrine, which goes right the way back to the Franco-Prussian War and even sooner, was, you know, as one of my great colleagues on Battlefield Tours describes, there are only three certainties in life.

Death, taxation, and German counter-attacks. And this is a German, you know, this is a German way of war. As soon as the enemy overruns your positions, you launch. an aggressive counterattack before they can dig in, before they can stabilize their positions, etc. But to do that, you actually sometimes have to pull back in order to regroup and organize sufficient forces to be able to do that. And without sensible levels of reserves, even that sort of tactic becomes pointless. It becomes impossible. And for Hitler's fortress policy to work, you would have needed much higher levels of reserves at army and army group level

in order to mount these relief operations that he described. I'm proud to say that we've done an episode on the siege of Peshemish here on School of War with Alexander Watson. It was a great show. It was a very early episode, actually. Yeah, even in Quantico, some, you know, almost 20 years ago now, God, we were still training to this general conception of anticipating the counterattack. And our instructors were quite clear that there's a sort of,

there's a fluid relationship between offense and defense, and you shouldn't get too fixated on terrain, that at the end of the day, it's destroying the enemy that matters. And everyone's going to have culminating points and points of exhaustion and sort of tracking that and adapting to it and taking advantage of it. That's the game. The offense or the defense are where you're standing. The first two are terms, and the third thing is not the primary consideration.

It's how do you kill the other guy? And I suppose that's in some ways a kind of Vermacht way of thinking, but Hitler in his own mind at this point is sort of a world historical genius. He's taken complete control at this point and has for a while, right? That goes back almost a couple years at this point. Yeah. So you have, you can almost draw a graph with two lines crossing. So from Moscow onwards, Hitler is imposing more and more centralized control, less and less freedom for commanders at lower levels, at every lower level, to exert any sort of initiative. At the same time, the Red Army is going in completely the other direction.

The central control that went so disastrously wrong in 1941 is gradually relaxed with army and front commanders given increasing levels of freedom. Okay, you know, the penalty for getting it wrong is quite high. Stalin won't be happy. But on the other hand, he now has this carder of experienced, proven senior officers that he can rely on, that he can trust. And so, you know, as the war progresses, these two trends just continue to diver. Even as late as 1945 after the abandonment of Warsaw, Hitler is still tightening up the rigidity of his control of the field forces, whilst Stalin is increasingly relaxed and saying, yep, you know the mission, you know the objective, just get on with it.

That's fascinating. Well, let's talk about the Russians then. Let's talk about how what they are able to accomplish in the summer of 44 channels their own strengths. Again, in this conception of the graph, even as the German strengths are sort of being suppressed. first of all, they pull off successful deception, right? Migration focuses on the central army group center, the center part of the front, and the Germans basically think it could come anywhere but there. And then there's this idea of deep battle as well that is evolved as part of Soviet doctrine.

Could you speak to both of these things and how the Soviet operational concept comes together? By all means. So the Soviet word for the deception was Mascarovka or masking. This has two aspects. The first is to hide your own preparations as much as you conceivably can, and the second is to misleave the enemy as much as you can about the location and timing of your operations, because both of those matter. In the end, you can't marshal the force is required for a grand offensive without the other side detecting it. So the best you can do is camouflage the scale of your intentions and perhaps the timing of it. In a way, the Soviets were pushing at an open door here,

because after the successful advance across Ukraine, the Germans were convinced that the next blow would fall in northern Ukraine. And this was partly influenced by personality. The old army group South had been divided into Army Group North Ukraine and Army Group South Ukraine. And Army Group North Ukraine was under the command of Hitler's favorite, Modell, this great, allegedly great defensive genius. And at this stage, he controls more than half of the panzer forces on the eastern front. So in Modell's case, it's in his personal interest to persuade everybody that the hammer is going to fall on his sector. Otherwise, he's going to have to give up these prestigious forces.

And this is this bizarre thing that even at this stage, German senior officers are playing these prestige games, which don't really bear any relation to the reality of. on the ground. It's not helped by the fact that German intelligence gathering is now massively hamstrung. They've relied on a number of sources over the years. Aerial reconnaissance is no longer quite as good as it was because of their growing imbalance in air power. There's still a steady stream of deserters crossing the line. In fact, Soviet deserters continues across the line right to the last days of the war. And part of this is not because they decided that the Soviets are a terrible people and they'd rather be on the Nazi side.

It's more a matter of you can imagine. A young recruit with very, very minimal training, even if he thinks his side is going to win, might calculate actually the chances of me making it alive to the end of the war are higher if I surrender to the other side and then get liberated than actually get thrown into one of these meat grinder attacks, you know.

So defectors are still coming over. Aerial reconnaissance isn't working very well. And German intelligence gathering from agents, etc., has been shockingly bad. throughout the war. Every single German spy network is pretty much either heavily compromised by double agents or is actually entirely run by the Soviets in order to feed misinformation to the Germans. So the Soviets actually worked very hard to persuade the Germans that, yes, the attack is going to come in North Ukraine and they run train loads of groups down there and then move them

back out again every night and send them back in the following day. So the Germans are, you know, it's one of those things. You believe what you want to believe. And if you see evidences to support your pre-existing ideas, you think, well, there you go. There's proof that this is what's going to happen. I think there's another aspect to Mascarovka, which I think is sometimes overlooked. And this is, if you like, at a more philosophical level. If you can persuade your enemies and your potential enemies that you are good at this and that you are good at misleading them, it then means that they're going to second-guess

themselves forever after that. And I think this is one of the legacies of the war that, The Soviets after the war made such a big deal about Maskarovka. I think certainly in my NATO days, there was almost an exaggerated respect for how good the Soviets were at misleading other people. So in a way, it becomes a sort of self-reinforcing thing. If the other side believes you're good at this, then obviously everything you do, they're going to say, well, do we really trust our intelligence or are they trying to mislead us? But on this occasion, certainly, it did work to a very large extent. The exception was at the southern end of the Soviet offensive against Army Group Centre,

where General Jordan wrote in his war diary that he could see perfectly well the attack that his army was about to come under was completely out of proportion to what you might expect from a local attack. And yet, because of the rigid command structure, all he could do was helplessly wait, tied to a frontline that he couldn't really defend, even though he knew this was all going to go disastrously wrong. And speak as well to this idea of deep battle, this uniquely Russian concepts, well, at least originally. Yeah. And the role that it plays here.

Yes, thank you. Yeah. This goes back to pre-war days when everybody was still thinking about how to use mechanized vehicles and air power in war. And Tokoshevsky, who was, if you like, the first of the, the victims of Stalin's purges of the Soviet military. He had written extensively about this concept, the idea that breaking the enemy's front line in an era where people are going to be mounting mobile warfare

isn't sufficient. You actually have to penetrate through the full depths of their position to the point where they cannot conceivably mount mobile operations, either to restore their original front line or to restore some interim position first. the back. So a starting point of this has to be a correct assessment of how deep the enemy's real positions go and their potential positions, you know, half-built positions, reconnoited positions, etc. And then you launch an attack with the intention, with the intention of pushing beyond the

further most conceivable stop line that the enemy has considered. In doing so, not only do inflict major losses on the enemy, but you're then forcing them to improvise in terrain, that they haven't really considered for defensive operations. And moreover, hopefully by then, they are so degraded that they can't really mount an offensive. This is going to be one of the few occasions that the Red Army really gets this doctrine right. And in the past, one of the problems has been that the initial breakthrough didn't succeed. So when they attacked the German lines, eventually they fought their way through. But it was only after some of the exploitation forces had been committed

to reinforce the original breakthrough forces. And after the Germans abandoned the Révese salient outside Moscow, this was the first opportunity that the Soviets had to examine German positions and realize just how strong they were and how deeply echeloned they were. And then they modified their plans accordingly. So there was a lot more importance placed upon identifying positions, identifying potential positions as well as real positions,

and then ensuring that you tasked artillery and air power to strike at the full depth of those positions. And it's not just military positions, it's also supply dumps, approach roads, etc., in order to create as much chaos as possible, whilst leaving your own exploitation forces uncommitted so that when they do go in, they are at full strength and then they can push in very deep. And this is another aspect that the Red Army is continuously improving. which is they've realized that one of the great advantages of the Panzer divisions is they have this integral engineering support. They have armored recovery teams, they have repair workshops within the division that can turn around tanks very quickly. They've realized as much as the Germans

that half of your tank losses at least are actually either breakdowns or due to terrain difficulties. So the sooner you can get these vehicles back into action, plus the lightly damaged vehicles back into action, the easier it is then to sustain operations for a longer and more sustained period. So it's getting the vehicles into operation, keeping them into operation, and then also supplying them. So they've really paid attention to stockpiling ammunition, food, fuel, etc. And finally, this is where Lend-Leese really plays a big role. The enormous numbers of trucks that have arrived from the United States, from Canada, from Britain, in order to ship all of this material forward. The Red Army, like the Wehrmacht, is still actually very rail dependent at

this stage, but they're aware that the Germans are going to destroy all the railway infrastructure as they pull out. So having motorized transport with sufficient fuel to keep it going is going to be a key element of this. I want to ask a follow-up actually about your previous answer, which was percolating and only formed in the last few seconds. And I've never thought about this before. And maybe I'm actually making the common mistake of zeroing in on a specific example and assuming that it can be generalized from, but this question of the superiority of Soviet counterintelligence over German intelligence, I mean, these are both totalitarian regimes. They're both police states. What accounts for the Soviet six, you know, near total success here?

And it does it play out in other regards? That is to say, is the Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence operation in general superior to the Nazis? And if so, so why? I actually have no idea where I'm going here, of it. I'm curious. It's a very good line of questioning because, ironically, one of the biggest constraints on success of Soviet intelligence is Stalin's paranoia and suspicion. He gets fed enormous amounts of very, very accurate data, so accurate that he just disbelieves it a lot of the time. For example, plenty of tip-offs that the Germans were going to invade in 1941, which he ignored.

even when the operations had started, he speculated perhaps it's just a few rogue officers, and Hitler hasn't really done this, even when the bombing has commenced and tanks are rolling over the front line. Also, later on in the Stalingrad campaign, a German liaison aircraft comes down with the complete battle plans for the advance on Stalingrad. And Stalin's response is, come on, this is far too good to be true. This has to be a plant. This can't be for real. nevertheless, they are getting really high-quality intelligence. It comes from numerous sources. First of all, remember, the battles are being fought on Soviet territory. So they have partisans who are gathering intelligence. And even if the efficacy of the partisans in attacking German units,

blowing up improbable numbers of railway bridges and railway lines and trains, etc., even if that is at least partly exaggerated, that doesn't deny the fact that these people are in a very good actually just to report troop movements, and that is a massively important piece of intelligence, particularly if you can then get a few pretty girls to chat up the Germans, and they can identify which units are being moved around. This is really, really helpful stuff when you're planning your own operations. They're also benefiting from spies right up in the upper echelons of the German military, who are working for, well, numerous reasons. Some of it is ideological, in that they are anti-Nazi.

Others are ideological in that they have pro-left-wing leanings, all sorts of reasons why. Many of them just simply hate Hitler and wants to do whatever they can to bring this war to as early an end as possible. But it's worth bearing in mind that all of what we're going to be talking about here unfolds at about the same time

that the July plot is coming to culmination. And it's worth remembering that whilst today people like Staufenberger are treated as great heroes, they have no intention of stopping the war in the East. The whole purpose of this was to create a situation in which they thought they could negotiate a ceasefire in the West and then continue to wage war in the East because for them, you know, coming to terms with the Bolshevik regime was just unacceptable. Yeah. You know, I actually had this thought reading your book that I don't think I ever really grasped the concept of the July 20 plot or attempt before giving serious

thought to migration and what actually happens in the east in June and into July of 1944. Granted, the, you know, the aspiration to kill Hitler precedes migration. But it throws into sharp relief. I mean, it gives you great understanding of what's going on at the time. And so why this could happen. Of course, in Normandy, the allies are still bottled up on July the 20th. I'm not mistaken. They really haven't broken out. The Battle of Normandy is raging. It's in the east that there's a collapse. I mean, a catastrophic collapse by late July. And these guys, you know, they want to save their necks. They want to save Germany.

And, you know, there is this sort of conservative line, right-wing line of German thinking that Hitler, in a way, has. I think you find moments in the record where Hitler will think this way. It's like these damn English and Americans, can't they see, I guess it's like a 1940 thought, can't they see that we should actually team up and fight the Soviets? And so these officers basically want to follow that through and think they're in a better position to do it than Hitler himself. Yeah, the officers have absolutely.

accepted that logic that ultimately Germany's enemy is Bolshevism. And, you know, the context of this is important. In the Anglosphere, we don't really recognize this, that in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, as the Nazi party rises to power and starts winning elections, the second biggest party in those elections is the Communist Party of Germany. So for these people from traditional right-wing authoritarian backgrounds, they have witnessed. the rise of the hard left in their own country and are terrified of the thought of the Bolsheviks coming in and all of these people who were planning to take away their country estates, etc.

And again, it's worth remembering that in France in the 1930s and the 1920s, quite often the communists were the second biggest party in their elections, which gives some, you know, some hints as to how many French then collaborated with the Germans. And for those who want to participate in the idolatry or idealization maybe of this German officer class, it's hardly as though Hitler and his immediate cronies superimpose this vision of empire in the East with all of its dark dimensions from a top. And there's no buy-in and there's no embrace of it or indeed sort of natural support for it amongst the officer corps. I still remember finding it jarring reading in Hans Goderian's book as a Panzer Leader, which he writes in the 30s. So I don't know if I have the book right.

It's his book on Doctrine that he writes in the 30s. Yeah, Axel and Panzer, yes. Axel and Panzer, thank you. Sorry about that. And just reading the preface, his preface from the 1930s where he's talking about Labensrome. And it's just so jarring because, of course, post-war America in the movies, these guys are all portrayed as like, you know, decent Germans the sort we might socialize with. And actually, their political vision is not that dramatically different from Pillars.

No, and I think in one of my earlier books, I made the point that, This is an exception to the rule that history is written by the Victors, because in the Anglosphere, the history of the Eastern Front that certainly I grew up with in the, you know, 70s and 80s and even in one into the 90s, was dominated by the accounts that the Germans had written after the war. And these were the ones that whitewashed the Vermont and even the Vaffin SS of atrocities, blaming it all on a minority, on somebody else, whatever. Bottom line is they were all complicit. They were all taking part in. this. And as Waitman-Bjohn has very succinctly put it, the Holocaust in the Western Soviet Union

didn't occur because of Barbarossa. It's the other way around. Barbarossa was carried out in order to create the conditions in which mass murder could take place. And they all knew this from the very outset. They all tried to deny it afterwards, but absolutely they all knew it. So let's talk about the operation itself laden with history on a couple of levels. One's the name, which would be interesting for listeners to just hear about the resonance of the name for the Russians. I guess it's appropriate to say Russians and not Soviets in that context. And then two, you know, it's June 22nd is the kickoff, which is like it on the nose. There's, of course, three years of the day after Barbarossa.

Absolutely. And there's no, and, you know, however much, you know, the Soviet accounts say, well, it was a combination of that's when we were ready. And then there were delays because of supplies not being in position, et cetera, et cetera. You're left thinking, come on, who are you kidding? The coincidence of date is just too strong, really, isn't it? For American listeners, to give an idea of the scale of this operation, the start line for the Red Army is the equivalent of a front line running from the northern parts of New York State down beyond Richmond, Virginia.

It's a huge front line. And, you know, coordinating forces along that front line is a problem itself. To do that, the Red Army is organized into fronts. Each front consists of several armies. Each army then has several cores. Each core would have two or possibly three divisions. In order to coordinate these forces, what Stalin does is he sends two of his most trusted officers, Vasilevsky and Zhukov, to the sector. Vasilevsky will oversee the two fronts in the north, while Zhukov controls the two fronts in the south of this enormous operation. Again, if you look at that start line, if you imagine starting from the Atlantic coast of the United States, to advance to Berlin would require you to go west somewhere towards the western edge of Minnesota. So it's quite a, you know, and the Red Army is going to do this in three major pushes. In fact, two major pushes take it within 40 miles of Berlin. So this is a huge operation and just imagine advancing over that sort of distance,

not in the current United States where you have superb roads and multiple alternative avenues of advance. Instead, you're advancing across an area where actually a lot of the roads are fairly primitive, and to make matters worse, the Germans are going to destroy everything as they pull out. A lot of the area is swamp and forest, which channels any avenues of advance a great deal. And you're doing so where really until you get those railways functioning again, you are entirely dependent on what kit you can move forward in trucks. And the Red Army has entire railway battalions organized to try to restore these railway lines as rapidly as they can.

But nevertheless, it's still going to take time. And one interesting thing that I've came across in a book about Lend-Leese was the sheer number of locomotives that the United States provided to the Soviets during the war. And for me, this raised a question which I still haven't found an answer to. Were these locomotives specifically built for the Soviet gauge, because the Soviet railway gauge was wider than the North American gauge? Or did they have to be modified? And if so, were they modified before they were shipped or after they were? I have no idea.

But it's one of these sort of curious questions you come across and then you're lying in bed at night and suddenly this thought comes up and he think, I'm not going to be able to sleep now until I've at least tried to find the answer, you know. So I have no idea, but it's another example of how, you know, although the Soviets played all of this down and said, you know, Lendlis was, it was peripheral at best, even to the point where many Soviet veterans described how they were told that these strange tanks, the Sherman's and the Valentines, actually these are built in Siberia. That's why they're coming from the east. They're not coming from the Western powers at all, you know. So the Soviets always downplayed the importance of it, but it was a huge importance. And as, you know, the old cliche goes that amateurs study tactics, professional study logistics. And on this occasion, my goodness, they, for once the Red Army got the logistics right. And the consequences of the planning and the initial stages of the attack are just devastating. Yes. For the Germans.

So you have the Western allies sort of bottled up in Normandy. You have the Battle of Normandy raging in late June. Of course, you know, we sit here in 2025 and look in retrospect. And they go, of course, they're going to break out. And maybe it was inevitable. but I'm sure it didn't feel entirely inevitable at the moment to the guys fighting in the hedgerows. So that's slogging away. The breakout won't come until later in the summer.

The progress in the east moves pretty rapid. It's sort of almost a mirror image of 1941, right? Minsk falls in 41 in early July. It falls in early July in the other direction here. And these guys are just, they're destroying divisions. They're killing generals. I mean, German generals are just getting killed and captured by the dozen. Yes.

It's astonishing. Absolutely. And they've really figured out how to crack the German front line. Numerous veterans say they were told, just remember, it's the first three or five kilometers that's difficult. Once we're through that, everything gets easier because they've realized something that a comment I've repeatedly made is that even at this stage, the Germans are massively dependent upon horse-drawn transport, particularly for their infantry divisions.

So if you can get to the stage where they have to relocate their artillery, their firepower just diminishes dramatically. They'll have to abandon a lot of those guns because they no longer have sufficient draft animals to be entirely mobile. So these infantry divisions may be able to form a very strong crust defense, but once that crust breaks, then the line breaks up very rapidly. And also, remember, the German infantry divisions are now numerically smaller than they were in 1941. one, and they've compensated by increasing the number of automatic weapons, the number of

support weapons, to a degree the amount of artillery. However, if you get driven out of your positions, then actually you lose a lot of those support weapons of that artillery. And then that's when the numerical weakness of these divisions really comes home, particularly as Hitler is still insisting, they're holding the same frontage as a 1941 division would have held, even though they have two or three thousand men fewer. So the Red Army, it's also come up with a much better way of organizing its own armor. In the early phases of the war, the Soviets had armored units that had a mixture of tanks. Now they tend to be pretty much either just T-34s and just Yosef Stalin's, or if they do have a mix, it'll be because they have a few lighter reconnaissance tanks to help out.

But this is an important thing. It allows them to concentrate their heavy armor in in units that are going to be used the initial breakthrough, and it allows them to keep back the fleets of T-34s for mobile exploitation. So once that crust breaks and the armor enters the breach, particularly as the Germans have such little armor in Army Group Center, with which to intercept those breakthroughs, then those tank columns can just run riot. There's one more episode I want to get to before we run out of time.

There's just so much to cover here. There's no way to do more than an introductory chat of some important. important themes and episodes. And folks should check out the book, which is a wonderful narrative with really thoughtful discussions of these more thematic items. But I want to talk about Warsaw right at the end in August. This is just, again, to keep the parallel going. Now we are breaking out. The Western allies are breaking out of Normandy. They're starting to race across France. And meanwhile, in the east, the Red Army, Stalin himself, pause. What's going on in Poland? Poland is really the ultimate victim here of everybody. The Polish

resistance forces are organized as a home army, the army of Khova, which is loyal to the government and exile in London. Stalin has been kind of lukewarm towards them at the start of the Soviet involvement in the war, but when news of Katian and the massacre of Poles by the NKVD broke, he immediately accused the government and exile of bad faith and for refusing to accept his version of events that the Katian massacre was carried out by the Katiin massacre was carried out by the Germans. There's ample evidence to show that Churchill and Roosevelt knew full well that this was a lie, but they went along with it because they had to keep Stalin on side and, you know, keep him within the alliance. They didn't want to risk the Red Army, you know, or the Soviets

coming to some sort of agreement with the Germans. So they accepted that lie. But one of the consequences was that the Soviets ordered their own partisan movement to treat any AK that they encountered as enemy. And they started increasingly portraying the Poles as anti-Semitic, as pro-Nazi, as reactionary as, and even if they weren't pro-Nazi, there were so right-wing, there were no better than the Nazis. The Poles had hoped that ultimately that the Western powers would come to their age, but now when it was quite clear that the Red Army was going to get to Poland first, they came up with a strategy which in purely military terms doesn't make a lot of sense, but I think you have to take the political dimensions and the cultural dimensions into account. Poland has a long,

long, long history of enmity towards Russia, which is then transferred to the Soviet Union. And you have to understand that deep-seated hostility, it's not even mistrust, it's outright hostility towards everything from the East in Poland. But they just have absolutely no confidence that the Russians, Soviets, could be trusted. So they came up with this plan under code-named Bursa or Storm, where as the Red Island, Army advanced as they approached the major cities of Eastern Poland, the AK would attempt to seize control of those cities, so that when the Red Army then arrived, the AK would welcome them in, but the Red Army could not claim to have liberated these cities. In the event, none of these

uprisings actually succeeded and the Germans were able to crush them. On some occasions, the Soviets deliberately slowed down their advance to give the Germans time to defeat the AK. And on the occasions when they didn't, then the first thing they did when they cleared that area was to arrest everybody from the AK and then give the Poles a choice. The officers were dispatched to prison camps. The ordinary soldiers were given a choice. You can either join the Red Army and the Polish units within the Red Army or it's prison camp for you too. Warsaw was then the biggest and in some respect,

the most tragic of these uprisings. It took place as the Red Army was approaching Warsaw. It hadn't reached the eastern outskirts yet. And it was doomed for many reasons, not least because they failed to take control of the entire city in the early phases. They lacked the heavy weapons to do so. The Germans happened to launch a counteroffensive against the overstretched Soviet advance with the result that Soviet troops took a lot longer making up that last 10, 20 kilometers to Warsaw and they might otherwise have done. And then utterly cynically, the Soviet stopped and they allowed the Germans to crush the uprising with brutal consequences for the population. But some of the most atrocious crimes committed by

Nazi forces in the war took place during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. My daughter and I have just written a book that culminates in this. And it was just the most horrific terrific stuff to research. And in his book on the Warsaw uprising, Norman Davis I think summed it up very, very well that when the AK forces in the city finally surrendered after five or six weeks of fighting, he says they marched into captivity whilst just a short distance away, the largest army in the world pretended that it wasn't there. And anybody who has been to Warsaw will know, you know, okay, the Vistula is a pretty big river. But, I'm not a marksman, but I'd feel pretty confident if I was on one bank that with a decent

rifle, I could pick off targets on the other side. And at the very least, they could have moved artillery up to the shoreline. They could have stopped the Germans moving along the West Bank. They could have run supplies in, or maybe okay, supplies might have been difficult, but they could certainly have provided fire support, instead of which they made a couple of token crossings, but largely they let the Germans eliminate the AK, because the, The last thing they wanted was for a pro-Western regime to seize Warsaw. They wanted to make sure that when they liberated, Warsaw liberated. When they took Warsaw, they could put their own regime in power.

Yeah, and there's, in addition to the ruthlessness of it, there's an understanding of the links between politics and strategy there that is characteristic of Stalin in combination with the ruthlessness. This is all in the service of building a Soviet empire. And you say, you know, the Americans and the Brits both sort of downplay Katyn. You know, Churchill always has a better sense of what Stalin is and who he is than Roosevelt does. The Americans who are really naive in this period. I'm not sure how naive they are.

I think Rosevelt mistakenly believed that in the end, there was sufficient, for want of a better word, goodness in the Soviet leadership, that he could make common cause for them with them, again. the Germans and that in the end that would prevail and that something, some accommodation could be worked out for Poland. But the reality was that Stalin was absolutely playing him all the way through and had absolutely no intention of accommodating anything other than his preferred solution. We'll leave it here. We could go on more for hours and hours.

I hope you'll come back and we'll keep touching on different episodes of the war in the East. It's always wonderful to have you. Well, I'd love to. And this book, your listeners may be interested here, actually is effectively the first of a trilogy. Wonderful. The second one into the Reich comes out in a few weeks. And that is the Vistula Oda operation that carries the Red Army across Poland, the Odenaisal line. And then Berlin comes out at some point next year to take the stories to its final conclusion.

We'll look forward to it. A listener should start with Bagration 1944, which is out now. And Prit Bhutar, thank you so much for joining. Thank you very much. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.