Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile unlimited, premium wireless! Get 30-30, get 30, get 30, get 20-20, get 20-20, get 20-20, get 15-15, 15-15, just 15 bucks a month, so... Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees, promote 8 for new customers for limited time, unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month, slows, full turns at mintmobile.com. Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome to the new books network. My name is Rick Northrup and I will be host as we discuss the war on the Eastern Front during World War II with Jonathan Dimbleby. Following the destruction of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad and the breaking of the siege at Leningrad in January 1944, the Red Army began to push back on the Eastern Front. By June 1944, Stalin and his generals had launched operation by Grasjean, involving more than 2 million soldiers marching through the cold and mud westward. Within three weeks, Army Group Center, the core of the German army, had lost 28 of its 32 divisions, thus began the ending of the war in the east. In his latest work, Endgame 1944, how Stalin won the war, Jonathan Dimbleby chronicles the military, political and diplomatic events of the final months, unarguably the most crucial front of World War II. Jonathan Dimbleby has enjoyed a long career in television, beginning with ITV and BBC for a covered world affairs. He presented ITV's flagship weekly political program this week for over 10 years. He has also worked in radio with BBC Four, his book Destiny in the Desert, The Road to L. Adamaine, one was shortlisted for the Penn-Hessel-Tiltman Prize awarded to the best work of historical nonfiction. He is also chair of the Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund named after his father. It's an honor to have you on the new book's dead work, Mr. Dimbleby. It's a great pleasure to be with you. So, the war on the Eastern Front is probably less well researched, but your work takes place after Stalin Grasb for the most part, which is one of the key turning points. Maybe we should review what's happened up to that point, just to give our listeners some context. The war in the East began in 1941. - June 1941, June 22nd, with the launch of the Wehrmacht, the German army into Russian. It was actually the something in my first book, which is called Barbarossa, how Hitler lost the war. More than three million Axis troops crossing the border, taking the Russian soldiers, the Soviet troops toky by surprise, and sweeping eastwards towards Moscow and to the south and to the north. And it looked as though it was all going to be over quite quickly. In fact, in Washington and in London, it was presumed that it would be a matter of months, even weeks before the Stalin would have to surrender. It didn't turn out like that, but Moscow, they were vaulted and reversed, and at that point, it seemed to me and to others, crystal clear that in military terms, it would be impossible for a gradually weakening Wehrmacht to prevail against a quite rapidly strengthening Red Army. And they advanced Hitler's ideological obsession, a militarily very unsoundly advanced stunning grad in the south up to the edge of the river Volga, and thereafter the most terrible, erocious struggle. They were beaten back and driven back south, and my book picks up, really, at the point at which just after they got a battle of Kursk, which was the greatest tank battle, many military specialists believe, the greatest tank battle of the Second World War, they're driven back along a line of about 3,000 kilometers, still a huge front. And you have from north to south, from the Baltics to the Balkans. You have something like 6.2 million Soviet troops basing 2.3 million German troops. And what is it very telling, I think, that at the, when those 3 million plus invaded in 1941, German soldiers, they were facing over 6 million unprepared Soviet soldiers. Go forward until 1944, by which time there's been over 9 million deaths on the eastern front, 9 million, and of that 9 million, 80% were Soviet deaths, and yet come 1944, they can still mount 6 plus million men along that front. The huge numbers of cannon fodder, if you want to put it as in the incredulous act, that Stalin could call upon to fight vastly outnumbered the armies, the soldiers, and also, relatively speaking, the weaponry in the same relationship, the weaponry, whether it was tanks, aircraft, artillery, and so forth. And so the outcome, by the time you reach 1944, if not earlier, and I think I argue earlier than that, the outcome was certain. So just one more point, when the big three met at Tehran, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, they knew that the question was how far west would Stalin seek to go, and how that might play out, and they had very different views about that. That was one of the things that was obvious to the people at the time, and I think with a bit of hindsight, now we can look and ask other questions, too. You're right, the main point of historiography is about the ability for the Soviet army to raise new armies. But your work talks a lot about the Soviet practice of Mascarovka, if I'm saying that right, the military deception. Mascarovka. Mascarovka. Mascarovka. I didn't expect my conversation is that much better than yours. No, and mine is not good. It seems like that practice contributed a lot to the Soviet victory, but it's talked about a lot less. Why do you think this is? I think in part, people shied away from the Eastern Front. In crudest terms, if you're writing big books that are designed for quite large audiences, that have to be academically sound, that no scholar is going to say, "Excuse me, this is rubbish." But you want it to be accessible to wide numbers of people. Where do you focus if you come from the United States or, indeed, from Britain or from the West? You focus on the Western Front, and you focus on particularly on the big centre of that D-Day and what followed. And therefore, it's easy to overlook the much greater conflict that was going on in the East. Also, very complex. I tried to digest the sieve through, you've got to use the outline figures, to sieve through the enormous numbers in 1944 of operations that run the way in Ukraine alone, in the first three months of 1944. Ten major offences involving more than two million men. Yes. Which is a lot than the Western allies did after D-Day. And it was just an up in the North. Leningrad was being in the process of being liberated in the early 1944. And it's complicated. And it's, and it's, and so it's possibly because there's less of a reading market for it, although I hope it changes because it's very important to understand what happened in 1944. It's very important because it actually sets the framework for the end of that war and the extraordinary power authority that Stalin was able to exercise, not the matter at that point at great anxiety. To Roosevelt, we're talking 1944 before his death. He was non-Julie worried by that. Churchill was horrified at the prospect. And they saw Stalin through very different classes. That's true. They had very different opinions of Stalin and Roosevelt seems to try to saddle up to him where Churchill was afraid of the Red Manus right away. He knew what that meant. And I think you cover a bit of that in the book. Should Operation Bagration be considered in the same breath as this battle of Stalingrad or Kursk in terms of importance? Or was the East of the war in the East over by that point? Was Kursk the final point where they say Germans were going to, the popular historiography is that the Germans were going to lose, and now they were going to lose quickly is what Kurs determined. Do you think the Migration was still another step that had to be fought? Yes, I don't. I'm not persuaded by historical infinity that has turning points that are moments in time. I think the events devolve and you can never be absolutely certain. I mean, I take the view that is easy. This is easy with the benefit of hindsight. I take the view that actually it was all over by the shouting and a lot of killing by 1941, the end of 1941 after with the rebuff at Moscow, as I touched on, Stalingrad was a massive defeat. Yes, at a certain point, the Germans were going to be defeated. Where and how was very uncertain and what contribution would be needed or not needed to the defeat of the Germans by the Western Allies was as yet undiagnosed. But this is a big strategic diplomatic political debate going on at the same time. And the fact of the huge, the Wehrmacht was finally broken, put it that way, in a space really of a fortnight. The virtual total destruction of Army Group Center, we touched on the Masquerovka deception. The Germans' intelligence was very poor, relatively very poor. And Masquerovka was on a huge scale. People know about Operation Fortitude before D-Day, the fake army that was created with a very famous American general in command to steer the Berlin into thinking that the invasion was going to be in Calais, rather than for the West in Normandy. You have that in one's mind. Masquerovka was on a fantastically greater scale. For a long time, it was a technique that originated a long time away, but the sophistication and complexity and planning of Masquerovka, the movement of entire armies, divisions up and down that line, Bambusling, the German front, which had many fewer troops, to Hitler, who had taken ready to ungrate a detailed command, overruling his generals, would say, "Yes, we'll move from the center." This was just before backgrounds. We'll move from the center, an entire panzer division to the south, because my general in the south, who I'm trusting at the moment, General Modell believes like me that the attack is going to be in the south, the next attack that's coming in the south, and it was completely wrong. And, of course, therefore, the army group center was even weaker than it might otherwise have been in the south. He then sacks a field martial boot. She was just a cipher, a completely dreadful commando, who just did as he was told by Hitler, who didn't know what was going on, holding a front which couldn't be held, or seeking to hold a front that couldn't be held. Modell is summoned after he summarily sacks. But Modell, his favorite commander, is summoned from the south up to the center, and immediately brings back the very same panzer divisions that he demanded went south. But at that time, it was too late. You know, you cover that in one of the chapters of your work, and it is kind of amazing that it seems like the German intelligence service in the east, the friend here, Ost, if I'm saying that right, they just put relatively less effort into intelligence as compared to the Russians. But I was wondering, is this a function of the racist Nazi ideology and their view of the communists, or was it a hollow belief in the primacy of will that Hitler really followed, that if you will it, it will happen? Why would they not put more effort into intelligence? It seemed like they didn't try. You have it spots on, it's both. Right, the weak, the triumph, I mean, in December 1944, it was as if we go down to be a failure of the German will. He says in private conversation, recorded by his interpreter. But they also thought that the Russian armies, the Soviet armies, not just the Russian armies, were all intermentioned. They weren't, they were subhuman people, the Slavic peoples. This was part of the Nazi ideology. And they were also part of the Judeo-communist conspiracy. And therefore, you would, the will would triumph over these inferior subhuman species. And despite the evidence to the contrary, which was more than available, Hitler went on insisting that it could be done. And of course, his generals were in those who had the guts to argue, so say we ought to retreat and then they were forbidden. As a result, I mean, in Bagrasión, at the very beginning of Bagrasión, there were three Soviet fronts. They called their army groups fronts. You had three Soviet fronts attacking in what is in Belarusia, we now call Belarus, and they were attacking, and there were four cities that had defined by Hitler as fortified places. Festa Bledsa, a festa blats of fortified places. So you had to hold that city regardless. Well, the Russians just went round the cities and then encircled them and then went into them all the way round. And in one of them, Bob Rusk, where the armies under General Rokosofsky, who was a marshall, he was then, who was, I think, one of the two very best Soviet generals. They walked through Bob Rusk where there were some four-and-a-halfs now, there was a garrison left, and the survivors from that walked through. They were massed, very well-described by the great Russian writer, historian, war reporter Vasily Gogsu. There were 54 survivors of the 4,500 garrison. The rest were slaughtered. Yeah, this was madness. It seemed like war on us. He did all along the line in various ways. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. Already here are the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about work. You really, really wanted all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow. Wherever you are, tap the banner to go to Monday.com. Yeah, the divisions and armies were decimated every time they tried to hold one of these festive blazas, and the military strategy behind that was just nuts. It seemed like the generals may have understood some of that. I'm going to say one person, Hans Jordan, who is commander of the 90s. Yes. He was not fooled, but information would not float up to the top of the command of the Wehrmacht. They weren't willing to listen to their commanders in any sense. Perhaps you could comment on that and why that was. Is that a primacy of will or the view of the Judeo communist conspiracy? I think those two attitudes underpinned, but I think it was more by this point that their commanders, like I mentioned Bush, who was being given information which was beyond doubt, demonstrated what was happening. He just was too frightened to do anything. Gaines say Hitler had said, "Hold the line. Hold the line." And only when it was too late and the line was broken did Hitler then agree that they could retreat, whereas what the generals wanted to do, they didn't want it. They only pushed to one side because he's an anomaly. What other generals knew they had to do apart. One or two, like Shunner, who were real die-hard Nazi fashionists, who were quite willing to obey and thought it was possible, but for the rest the wiser ones knew that they should withdraw to new defensive lines at the very least in order to regroup and prepare for the next onslaught with the view to go back to defend the fatherland. That's what the generals thought the best case, we go back and defend our own borders. The part of the reason why I think Hitler, as it were, was able to insist, was, yes, the commitment of generals. Sometimes after the war a lot of them said, "We had nowhere. We were just patriots. We didn't believe any of that stuff." They absolutely did. Don't ever believe anyone who tells you they didn't know exactly what was going on at least, including the massacre of civilians and amongst those civilians huge numbers of Jews. It is inconceivable they didn't know, and their men didn't also participate in that process. Along with the other many of those who were fighting on the Soviet side. The other reason was the degree to which the Germans had laid waste to Russia and Soviet territory, burning villages to the ground, ruining cities, taking civilians. For every German soldier who was not in the front line, but who was elsewhere and who was killed, the order went out from from Kitell, who was the commander of the Vermatt, that a hundred civilians should be executed. We're talking about figures where the total death toll, that whole so-called patriotic war, as the Russians call it, was in the order of 27 million people. Now, a large number of those, the majority of those, have been killed by 1944. The German soldiers understandably feared the wrath of the Soviet soldiers as the Soviets marked East-Westwards, so they fought with that desperation, a lot of them wanted to escape to the West in the hope that they would receive better treatment as they undoubtedly would have done, but they fought with desperation to hold off the Germans, so they imagined would slaughter huge numbers at the Russians, who they imagined would slaughter huge numbers of people. Well, they did slaughter quite a lot, there was a terrible rape, and it wasn't actually on anything like the scale that had they just not had their own commanders who kept order for the most part. It would have been much, much worse, but it was that that drove the ordinary soldier to say, "We will fight even though the odds look terrible." I mean, in the book, as you know, you've seen, I quite extensively from different primary sources on both sides, describing none of them being glorious, very few of them being glorious, none of them triumphant, really, all of them talking about the horror and the slaughter of a war that they wanted to be over, one side was, as it were, the righteous side, the other side was the utterly opposite, but the same sentiments were being expressed and were clearly in the breasts on both sides. You do a good job of that in your work, in quoting extensively from the diaries or from the written sources of German and Russian soldiers in their experiences of the war, it's not something that's been covered in the war in the East quite a bit, you know, we were talking about Catherine Meridale and her explorations of the social aspects of the war in the Eastern Front. Your work does do that quite well. I would like the explorations of the Partisan War, and the Germans, as you stated, treated the Russians horribly. They starved more Russian soldiers to death than the Russians did by far, not that any of those numbers are excusable, because they're both in the millions. But how important was the Partisan War to the larger war on the Eastern Front, and by the spring of 1944, were they more organized than they had been in previous years? The Partisan said yes, they were, at the very beginning, it was more sort of bravado than anything else, highly disorganized and beating on other and lacking weapons. By 1944, there's a command structure, which emanates from Moscow, the stavka, the army command, the military command, and through the generals so that they cooperate very closely. I talk about Rokazovsky a little bit earlier. He, on the central front there, in by the spring of 1944, had working loosely for him, as it were, something in the order of 150,000 Partisan's. So damaging, were they, that the under-resourced, overextended German armies had to divert 380,000 men to try and hunt them down. There were terrible, bloody scenes, because when they did hunt them down, they sorted them, and in vice versa, you got German soldiers, you stalk them. And immediately before Bagracil, in June 19, 2021, the Partisan launched a terrific operation destroying railway lines, bridges, planting mines that really held up the German logistic lines for quite some time. My overall view is that they were more important than some people have given them credit for. They were not, I mean, if you look at France and the Macchi, the French resistance, it was extraordinarily spirited, but it didn't really transform the warfront or make a substantial difference to what happened on the Western Front. The Partisan's on the Eastern Front definitely made a significant difference. It didn't determine, but it helped, and just in the same way as American and British aid, didn't determine the outcome, but it accelerated the outcome of the Second World War and the defeat of Hitler. Maybe it could be considered as more of a moral victory. I know the French Communist Party makes a lot of the Macchi in there. Their fight against the fascist, was it a turning point in the war in the West? Probably not, but much has been made about their heroic fight, and perhaps the Partisan movement could be characterized that way. The historiography of the Eastern Front, the Bylorussian campaign is relatively less well researched as compared to Stalingrad. I think I personally have three or four books on Stalingrad downstairs. What can we learn from the extraordinary losses taken by the Russians at this point in the campaign? Or were they able to sustain an army? Such a good question. We can learn, I mean, the fact is that their population was two and half times the size of Germany's population, at least. Both sides had to corral people and send them to the front. The effect on the Soviet economy, for instance, war economy was far less than the... impact on the German side. On the German side, totally unsuited, hits, well on the front, often unarmed and old men. I say old men, men younger than me, but men who were in their 60s, who were defending impossible positions. They had to mount a quasi-citizen's army, which was under-armed and was massacred whenever it was, and it was very incompetent as well. On the Russian side, there was a little bit more training for their new recruits, but the essence of the readiness to fight of the Soviet troops. There's one which we touched on, really, a real hatred of the Germans, the horror at what had been perpetrated, the urge to re-revenge it. That was one thing, the other thing was, that they had really only two choices. When they were under pressure, all armies under pressure make a strategic or tactical withdrawal in order to regroup, and on the Russian side, that was almost impossible in any case. And that was because the Soviet soldier knew that if he withdrew, it would be counted as surrender. Just as it was counted as surrender, if he was taken prisoner, and if either of those two things happened, your families were punished. They lost their rights to education, to social services. So they were dragooned, and as a backstop beyond that, there were so-called blocking regiments, which if you turned and ran, you'd be confronted by your own countrymen who would be firing at you for running from the battlefield. So the other alternative was the one you took. You went, if you were taken prisoner, it was a horror because you were very likely. You knew that by 44, you knew that 300 million plus German troops had been killed after being taken prisoner, Russian troops have been killed after being taken prisoner. So you fought and died on the battlefield, rather than those any of those other options. It was a better choice to be died on the battlefield than to die in a German prisoner of war camp. Absolutely. Is that why? Sorry? No. Go ahead. Go ahead. As you can see, up until 44, the Russian deaths greatly exceeded German deaths, despite the fact that they maintained an art. But in 44, that closed, and by the Germans who were getting to lose as many as the Russians, at a point where they couldn't begin to afford to take such losses, and it had been decimated. I think the really important thing, from my perspective, and I think this book has had a lot of attention in this country, and no one has challenged it of very senior historians has challenged the argument. The Second World War, Hitler was defeated, not on the Western Front, but on the Eastern Front, the Western Front accelerated the process made it easier, obviously, it grew off German troops. But it was as much in reality, certainly in Churchill's mind, it was as much to protect Western Europe as far east as you could get from what he feared about the Soviet advance. And that was very important, but of course, they were our allies, so you didn't go around trumpeting that and saying, "Oh, well, we're really what, trying to stop our allies." From thinking over, I mean, and the essence of it was that it was a support, I was able to take it longer, but this is always to be a realm of speculation, historians shouldn't do it, but nonetheless, the counterfactual is quite interesting. And imagine that the Americans have said sorry, you know, our wars in the, in the, in the, in the, as a lot of Americans did say, "I'll get to be in Europe." That was Roosevelt's greatness from the European perspective, actually, from the world's perspective, was that he took the first strategy. The, if that hadn't happened, or if indeed, we had not mounted D-Day belatedly as in what in American terms, when we did, I think that two things might have happened. One is that Stalin could have gone as far west as he wanted into Europe, on the continent of Europe, and or, not with Hitler, but with Hitler's successors, it might have done a deal. But in those years, you have, you know, Western Europe, we'll have Eastern Europe, and we'll have a rather long fine, we have both dictatorial monsters, and we will look after Europe between us. Donuts are one of his, the Hitler's successors that took over after that, the Admiral, you know? Yeah. Yeah. With that. It, it seems like the Germans, like you mentioned, used old and raw green troops in the latter months of the war. But the Russians did as well, we know this, because they were corralling men, they had to use those straff bats to the blocking units to keep their men pointing forward, instead of running. Was it the effectiveness of these blocking units that kept the raw green Russian troops fighting in a much more effective manner? Or were they better equipped? We know that the Russians had five to ten times as many tanks as the Germans had, their own Red Army Air Force had just as many airplanes while the Luftwaffe was protecting Berlin from the Allied bombing campaigns. But I've always been amazed that the Russian army was, they were recruits, they were reserves drawn up from Siberia and other places, and yet they fought with much more effectiveness than the Germans did at that point. What, the reserves that were drawn up from Siberia, which happened in late '41, when actually harps troops, they've been fighting under the most famous of the Soviet generals on that bar Eastern front, as the Russians, and the generals took off. And they were hardened troops, so they were vitally important in the defence of Moscow. Scots started being formed while at his spies, who he allowed to be executed later, in Japan, that the Japanese were not going to invade the Soviet Union, as the Russians want, as I'm sorry about that, as the Germans wanted, they're not going to invade the Soviet Union in the Far East, but we're going to go south to check and get their oil and their other resources, rather than north, and that allowed him to withdraw large numbers of troops, so they were hardened. But as you go forward, the younger soldiers, the green recruits, first of all, they were trained a bit. Secondly, I think the fact that they were on the offensive made quite a difference. It was, you know, they bought into the fact that they were liberating their own land because the Soviet territory was not, there was still German troops on Soviet territory at the end of 1943, indeed, going all the way, it was after that, they swept, not as far fast as one might think, nothing like the speed move, which depends on swept eastwards in 1941, at their own limit, covered after Bagration, the central group was able to advance very fast towards Warsaw under Rokosowski, so they advanced something in the order of, in the space of three, four weeks, they advanced 600, 700 kilometers. That huge distance is promised to travel, especially all of the numbers on the Eastern Front are like this, huge numbers of men, huge distances, and they're mind-boggling. If you understand anything about the book, it's the scale of the war in the Eastern Front is dwarfs anything that's ever been done before in terms of military history and hundreds of divisions, millions of men, and 10,000 planes. What is Mr. Dimbleley working on now? What is your next project? Well, I'm just, I'm about to take a holiday, this has been three years of life, along with things, and, and since it's come out, I've been invited very, I need to talk about a great deal, so I'm about to take a holiday, and I shall, my wife will try to persuade me not to take with me my early research for my next book, but to celebrate my 80th birthday in Japan, and I'm going to be severely torn between devotion to my wife and the urge to start the next book, which actually is another facet of the Second World War, and I hope we'll reach America as well as the, I think all the other ones have come to America, and, and it's about the Arctic skin, not very well, we know, we know about the Arctic convoys, we didn't know much more about why Norway was going to end, and why politically it was so important, and, and what contribution happened, so that what, what contribution was made by that aid, with a highly contentious territory and steadily, so I'm, I'm, I need to look at the terrible drama, and one of those people who both love the sea, to give the idea of the sea, and the idea of sailing, and all of those things, and at the same time, horrified and easily terrified by, by like all serious sea men are, by the rate up the sea, and in this case you have, not only the part of the most terrible conditions you can imagine on order, but you have a confrontation, bigger, a huge confrontation between the, the Allies at sea, and the German occupiers of Norway, who have at their disposal, theoretically, you boats, the Luftwaffe, and the surface, great surface ships like the Turpitz, so that is the next directory which I'm exploring, but I'm not going to be allowed to do it for a few weeks. Well, we look forward to reading your next work after your break. Please enjoy your holiday, and spend some time with the wife, and thank you for your time there, Mr. Wie, and maybe for closing comments, we would let us know where your book is available. Can our listeners get it on Amazon and other booksellers? Yeah, you can get it on Amazon if you like listening to it, you can get it, and you don't mind the dulcid English tones, you can listen to it on audio, and it's out in kindle, and I think it's being published in America by OUP, so you can buy a hard copies there if you don't. If you want to, if you want to support the book shops, you can do it that way. If not, you can get, you can get medium cut price from it. It's, it's, it's, it's, well, I don't always advertise in the States, but it's, it's three, five pounds sterling in hard copy in the shops, and it's down at now, I think it's something like 15 pounds, 18 pounds Amazon. See, 80 money ticks, a choice as we say. Well, thank you very much. I know, I, I, I like to think, I don't think it's just vanity, but judging what, you know, your great interest is and what the very senior British critics and stories have said about it here, and ordinary readers, because you mentioned earlier, I, I don't got to work in television, ordinary readers stopping me in the streets and saying, saying, saying, it's happened on separate occasions now saying, thank you, I'm a third of the way through. I said, well, I hope we're going to get the rest of the way through. So, so, I think it's, it's not a book that I'm, you're allowing me to promote it, so you probably want to cut all this out. But anyway, it's not a book that stops you turning the pages, put it that way around. I think I did find it quite readable. Thank you very much for your time today, Mr. Dibbleby, and we will look forward to reading your next work. Pleasure talking to you. Thank you. [Music]
