Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War
Jonathan Dimbleby
Viking, £25

IN this history of 1944’s battles on the Eastern Front, author and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby draws on the diaries, letters and reminiscences of soldiers on both sides, from generals to foot soldiers. His account rightly emphasises the decisive role the Red Army played in winning the second world war.

As Dimbleby asserts, Operation Bagration, fought from June 22 to August 19, was “the greatest single battlefield victory of the second world war. In operational scale and strategic significance … [it] was of more moment even than Operation Overlord, the overlapping Allied campaign in Normandy that began with the cross-Channel invasion on 6 June 1944.” 

Operation Bagration assisted the D-Day operation. It stopped Hitler from reinforcing his defences in Normandy, and helped the British, US and Canadian forces to complete the greatest amphibious operation in history. As the BBC said in 1944 (though never nowadays), “But for the Russians, D-Day would have been impossible.”

During 1944, the Red Army drove the Nazi armies back to Germany, freeing all the countries of eastern and central Europe from Nazi tyranny, and helping them to create their own anti-Nazi governments.

As Dimbleby observes, by October “the Anglo-US-Canadian armies had barely advanced from the positions they had first secured four months earlier. Their progress had been systematic, dogged and cautious and, in scale and impact, it was entirely overshadowed by the immeasurably more dramatic achievements of the Red Army on the eastern front.” 

The Red Army had to overcome huge obstacles to its advance. In late July, it had to halt its advance outside Warsaw. The Nazis had built up a powerful defensive system around Warsaw, comprising 22 divisions including four Panzer divisions newly transferred from France.

The Red Army was in no position to liberate Warsaw. It had just advanced 724km in five weeks, the longest and fastest advance it had yet achieved. It was at the very limit of its supply lines; troops, ammunition and rations were all exhausted.

As Dimbleby notes, “there were compelling military reasons for the Stavka [the Red Army’s high command] to call a halt at the Vistula.” The Red Army’s need for a pause of months was genuine, as Stalin assured Churchill in Moscow — an assurance that Churchill accepted absolutely at the time. 

Britain’s British Joint Intelligence Committee had judged that if the Polish “Home Army” carried out its intended uprising in Warsaw, it was doomed to failure unless it co-operated with the Red Army.

As General Rokossovsky said of the uprising, “It was a bad mistake. The insurgents started it off their own bat, without consulting us … Let’s be serious. An armed insurrection in a place like Warsaw could only have succeeded if it had been carefully co-ordinated with the Red Army.” 

But the rising’s leaders refused to liaise with any of the Allies.

The Red Army liberated Warsaw on January 17 1945. In all, 600,000 Soviet troops died freeing Poland from Nazism. In three weeks in January the Red Army had advanced more than 450km, sometimes covering 50km in a day. Dimbleby comments, “By any reckoning, it had been an awesome military achievement.”

When the newly confirmed US ambassador to Poland raised the need to secure Poland’s right to independence, president Franklin Roosevelt asked rhetorically: “Do you want me to go to war with Russia?”

As Dimbleby notes: “It was quite unrealistic to suppose that, for the sake of Poland, either Roosevelt or Churchill would wittingly choose that moment to tear down the fragile pillars of peace and security they were painstakingly constructing from the ruins and bloodshed of war.” 

Dimbleby accuses Stalin of indifference to the lives of his troops. This is the usual imperialist projection, which sees Asians as indifferent to the value of human lives, because there are just so many of them. Dimbleby never accuses Churchill in similar terms, not even when, for example, Churchill authorised using the “utmost force” against Greek republican troops stationed in Cairo and Alexandria. 

Dimbleby fails to mention that in December 1944, Churchill sent 60,000 troops to Greece to crush the Resistance, ordering them to “act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion was in progress … We have to hold and dominate Athens. It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.” In the resulting war 158,000 Greeks were killed.

What of Stalin’s role as a war leader? Foreign secretary Anthony Eden wrote of him: “As a negotiator he was the toughest proposition of all … If I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated. Hooded, calm, never raising his voice, he avoided the repeated negatives of Molotov which were so exasperating to listen to. By more subtle methods he got what he wanted without having seemed so obdurate.” 

Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff from 1941 to 1946, judged that Stalin had “a military brain of the very highest order.” The veteran US diplomat Averell Harriman wrote of Stalin’s “high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and the surprising human sensitivity that he was capable of showing, at least in the war years. I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders.” 

Churchill acknowledged that the Russians “had broken the German Army as no other nation could have done.” 

But for all the virtues of Dimbleby’s book, John Erickson’s The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany remains the best book on the last years of the war.