Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War

640 pages

Tearless

This is the follow-up companion to Jonathan Dimbleby’s How Hitler Lost the War (reviewed in the NR, Vol. 109, No. 3, pp 398-400). I never cease to be amazed how he and Anthony Beevor and Max Hastings find and make time to research and write their works in such detail. They have all trod this path. Another hefty tome of 640 pages.

Hitler lost the war because, after the early speedier successes of Germany’s 1940 blitzkrieg over-running of Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and France and of Hitler’s 1941 Operation BARBAROSSA venture into Soviet Russia, this WW1 Corporal deluded himself to believe he was a military genius of unsurpassable talent. And the Nazi system was such that his generals were held in thrall to believe, or defer, to this. Of course, he found, just as Napoleon had learnt before him, that the logistics trail proved too long. His generals were right and he was wrong but we would brook no dissent.

Stalin won the war because he encouraged his generals to vie with each other as to how far and fast they could advance, taking as few prisoners as possible and, fortified with American and British convoys of support, and outnumbering the German Army by three to one, Soviet Russia’s revenge response by Operation BAGRATION became unstoppable. And with it, of course, the countries of eastern Europe which it overran in doing so, thus creating the post-war hegemony of Soviet occupation. And, for a time, integration and then, as the years passed, dis-Integration as the Soviet Union imploded and these countries favoured independence – and the West.

 Germany’s BARBAROSSA and Soviet Russia’s BAGRATION spared no-one. Mayhem. misery and murder. Civilians, old men, women, children, slaughtered; homes destroyed; scorched earth policy. At the various WW2 ‘Big Three’ Conferences Stalin became, de facto, the biggest player and Churchill, by far the most percipient, became the smallest. Roosevelt, by 1944, already failing in health and who died in 1945, naively believed that Uncle Joe was to be trusted. By 1945, Truman and Attlee knew better but by then it was too late.

Thus, just as WW1 had sown the seeds for WW2, WW2 may have sown the seeds for WW3.

So, for whom is this book recommended? ‘Afterword’, the final chapter, should be compulsory reading for Cadets at Dartmouth as this will set the scene for their whole careers in the Royal Navy. DS at Dartmouth should read the two preceding chapters – ‘Churchill’s ‘Victorious Peace’’ and ‘The Alliance Splinters’ – because they should always be a jump or two ahead of their students.

And, unless you are a glutton for gore and for the wretchedness of war, all the earlier chapters, some 400 pages, need only be consumed by those reading for a degree in modern history.