Endgame 1944
  • Published: 28 May 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241536728
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $40.00
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Endgame 1944

How Stalin Won The War

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
28 May 2024
Hardback
23 Jun 2024
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A gripping and authoritative account of the year that sealed the fate of the Nazis, from the bestselling historian

June 1944. Operation Bagration: the greatest defeat ever suffered by the German Armed Forces. More than two million Red Army soldiers, facing 500,000 German adversaries, finally avenged their defeat in Operation Barbarossa three years earlier. In the ensuing three weeks, Hitler’s Army Group Centre lost 28 of its 32 divisions.

While the same month saw the Allies triumph on the beaches of Normandy, it was in fact the events on the Eastern Front in 1944 that were the knockout blow in the Second World War. Despite the myths that remain today, it was this brutal struggle from the Baltic to the Black Sea that saw the Wehrmacht crucially defeated.

Drawing on previously untranslated German and Russian sources - many from ‘ordinary’ soldiers - bestselling historian Jonathan Dimbleby describes and analyses with authority and panache this momentous year in the East. He illuminates the bloody battles that raged along the 2000 kilometres-long front, while also explaining the unusual roles played by deception, the partisans, and the war within a war in Ukraine.

Dimbleby’s gripping, masterly narrative sets the drama of the relationships between the "big three" of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin against the history being created on the battlefield, and shows how his victories in 1944 enabled the Soviet leader to dictate the terms of the post-war settlement and lay the foundations for the Cold War.
  • Published: 28 May 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241536728
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Jonathan Dimbleby

Jonathan Dimbleby is a distinguished broadcaster and author, who has reported from Russia at pivotal moments in the country's recent history. His documentary series The Eagle and the Bear and The Cold War Game investigated the impact of the Soviet Union on the rest of the world. In 1989 he became the first British journalist to interview President Gorbachev when he met the Soviet leader shortly before his fall from power.

Jonathan Dimbleby has written several bestselling books, including a biography of his father Richard Dimbleby, The Palestinians, The Prince of Wales and The Last Governor. For many years he presented flagship political programmes for ITV, and he is well known as the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Any Questions.

portrait photo of Jonathan Dimbleby

Also by Jonathan Dimbleby

Barbarossa
Russia
The Battle of the Atlantic
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Praise for Endgame 1944

Dimbleby has unearthed some powerful voices to producing an engaging mix of the familiar and the new. Fascinating stuff.

Roger Moorhouse, author of The Forgers

Pacily written . . . The detail is terrific, and the extracts from diaries, letters and so on make an indelible impression. The description of the last months of the war in Budapest is a tour de force.

Sir Richard Evans, author of The Third Reich in History and Memory

Magnificent . . . draws on so much good material.

Dr David Stahel

Extraordinary . . . Dimbleby paints a unique picture of the vast, unremitting living hell that was the Eastern Front in the final full year of the war.

Frederick Taylor, author of Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February, 1945

One of the strengths of this book is the line it draws between the awful then of 1944 and the grim events of today . . . Endgame 1944 is thus as much a primer for the present as it is sound history

Patrick Bishop, Telegraph

Endgame 1944 paints a vivid picture of the fighting at both the bayonet end and at high command, but rightly probes the complex relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, powered by different and incompatible visions of the purpose of victory

Allan Mallinson, Country Life

Mr. Dimbleby is a sure-footed guide to the labyrinthine military operations alonga front line that extended nearly 2,000 miles, from the Baltic to the Black Sea

Wall Street Journal

Titanic . . . This book is his best yet . . . For all their popularity, many books about the world wars are immensely boring and inelegantly written. Dimbleby’s work is in a different league, told with such skill and judgment that, despite the harrowing subject, it is still a pleasure to read. As in all good narrative histories, it is the human details that linger in the mind.

Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

Jonathan Dimbleby’s best book yet

Observer