"Endgame 1944
By Jonathan Dimbleby
Oxford, 640 pages, $34.99
Remembering D-Day, many of us already know that 1944 was a fateful year in the course of World War II. Jonathan Dimbleby wants to remind us of the fighting going on elsewhere that year, equally momentous if not more so. "After a protracted and barbaric struggle," he writes, "the Soviet Red Army finally annihilated Germany's armed forces on the battlefield."
"Endgame 1944" is Mr. Dimbleby's epic account of the Soviet Union's triumph on the Eastern Front. As he notes, the Soviet victory avenged the humiliation of Operation Barbarossa, the German blitzkrieg invasion of the U.S.S.R. that began in June 1941 and brought the Wehrmacht to the outskirts of Moscow. "Barbarossa" was the title of Mr. Dimbleby's previous book, subtitled "How Hitler Lost the War." This sequel's subtitle, "How Stalin Won the War," may seem like a provocation -- especially since the book appears on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings -- but it's hard to argue with the author's conclusion that the Red Army's battlefield victories "allowed Joseph Stalin effectively to dictate the terms of the post-war settlement."
Mr. Dimbleby is a sure-footed guide to the labyrinthine military operations along a front line that extended nearly 2,000 miles, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The focal point is Operation Bagration, the Soviets' code name for their offensive on the Belorussian front, which took the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw and put it within striking distance of Berlin. The author draws from the testimonies of German and Soviet soldiers to depict what he justly calls "the charnel house of the eastern front during the bloodiest and most brutal mega-conflict in the annals of human warfare." The book describes countless scenes of vicious combat and horrific violence against civilians, with glimpses of the unfolding Holocaust, whose unfathomable scale had yet to come into focus in 1944.
Soviet military strategy, Mr. Dimbleby explains, relied on "massive blows on narrow fronts at different times to 'fracture' the enemy's defences with the deployment of tanks, artillery, aviation and infantry in overwhelming numbers." Soviet generals capitalized on their mastery of maskirovka: the use of deceptive techniques, including fake troop movements and radio disinformation. As supreme commander, Stalin had learned to give his senior generals latitude, while Adolf Hitler continued to impose a "strangulated command system" on the Army High Command, to self-destructive effect.
The retreating Germans fought with a victory-or-death ferocity, aware that the advancing Red Army soldiers were bent on revenge. In Mr. Dimbleby's narrative, roads and roadsides are strewn with German corpses. A member of a Soviet sapper regiment on the Belorussian front recalled: "We were catching Fritzes and killing them like mice." Of course the Fritzes had seen to the murder of millions of captured Ivans during the previous three years.
Mr. Dimbleby argues that Operation Bagration -- named after a Georgian prince who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Borodino in 1812 during Napoleon's invasion of Russia -- was "of more moment" than Operation Overlord, the Allied campaign in Normandy that began with the cross-channel invasion in June 1944. It is an arguable claim, but he might have added some nuance to it. He could have given more emphasis, for instance, to Overlord's role in drawing elite German units away from the Eastern Front. The role of the Allied bombing raids on Germany in diverting the Luftwaffe's resources from the east is relegated to a footnote. And while Mr. Dimbleby mentions the targeting of "German cities," he says nothing about the bombers' industrial and transport targets, whose destruction was surely a factor in the outcome in the east.
Such reservations aside, the battlefield action carries the narrative along, and when it starts to feel numbing Mr. Dimbleby ably shifts his attention to the strategists and diplomats, beginning with the Tehran Conference at the end of 1943. The Big Three are all recognizable here. Stalin is "wily, thuggish and charming . . . adept at subtly playing off the Western Allies against each other." President Franklin Roosevelt naively believes that he can co-opt Stalin as a partner in the postwar order and conducts a "charm offensive" in pursuit of that goal. Prime Minister Winston Churchill is increasingly alarmed by Roosevelt's "insouciance about Stalin's territorial ambitions" and chafes at his own feelings of impotence. This is not the heroically defiant "We shall fight on the beaches" Churchill of the war's onset. His physician noted on Aug. 4, 1944: "In truth he is less certain of things now than he was in 1940, when the world was tumbling around his ears."
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the book's endpoint, the most divisive issue was the future of Poland. Western diplomats could do little more than make an appeal for a democratic Poland and hope for the best. The purge of the Polish underground -- and of anyone else opposing Moscow's authority -- was soon under way. The Soviet leader had played his negotiating hand adroitly. "If I had to pick a team for going into a conference room," the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden remarked, "Stalin would be my first choice."
It was Eden who in December 1941 had urged the immediate opening of negotiations to establish the postwar borders of the U.S.S.R. At the time, German forces were deep inside Soviet territory and the notoriety of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the starting pistol for the obliteration of Poland, still smoldered. Delay would be costly, Eden warned. At some point, he said, "Russia's position on the European continent will be unassailable." An epilogue explaining how Soviet postwar hegemony took shape would have been welcome instead of the author's ham-fisted afterword invoking the Eastern Front in 1944 to rationalize events in Ukraine. Even so, there is much here to admire and to reflect on as we commemorate the heroism in Normandy.
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Mr. Patenaude, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921," just published in Russian translation in St. Petersburg." [1]
1. A Savage Conflict In the East. Patenaude, Bertrand M. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 June 2024: A.15.
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