Bagration 1944: The Great Soviet Offensive

by Prit Buttar

A fascinating history of the great summer offensive launched by the Red Army in 1944 which turned the tide of the war.

Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, there were two consistent trends. The Red Army battled to learn how to fight and win, while involved in a struggle for its very survival. But by 1944 it had a leadership that was able to wield it with lethal effect and with far more effective equipment than before. By contrast, the Wehrmacht had commenced a slow process of decline after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler became increasingly unwilling to delegate decision-making to commanders in the field which had been crucial to earlier success. The long years of fighting had also taken a heavy toll. Thousands of irreplaceable junior officers and NCOs were dead, wounded or prisoners.

Renowned Eastern Front expert Prit Buttar expertly brings these contrasting fortunes to life, trends which culminated in the huge battles of Bagration. As this masterful study conclusively shows, in 1944 the Red Army finally put together a campaign that utterly destroyed the German Army Group Centre. The Wehrmacht suffered the loss of over 300,000 men killed, wounded or taken prisoner and the Red Army rolled forward across Belarus to the outskirts of Warsaw. The end of the war was still many months away, and the Germans managed to reconstruct their line on the Eastern Front, but final victory for the Soviet Union was now only a matter of time as a direct consequence of Bagration.

Genres: History, World War II, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, Russia

480 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2025

About the author

Prit Buttar studied medicine at Oxford and London before joining the British Army as a doctor. After leaving the army, he has worked as a GP, first near Bristol and now in Abingdon. He is extensively involved in medical politics, both at local and national level, and served on the GPs’ Committee of the British Medical Association. He appears from time to time on local and national TV and radio, speaking on a variety of medical issues. He contributes regularly to the medical press. He is an established expert on the Eastern Front in 20th century military history.

Reviews

[Darya Silman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publication: March 11, 2025

In his new book BAGRATION 1944: THE GREAT SOVIET OFFENSIVE, Prit Buttar, an ardent explorer of the Eastern Front, examines the series of decisive battles in June-August 1944 on Belarusian soil. While Stalingrad is considered the turning point of the German conquest of the Soviet Union, the Bagration offensive of magnificent proportions - 1.7 million Red Army men - was the straw that broke the camel's back. On June 6, 1944, the Allies opened the second front in Normandy, thus tying up substantial German resources. Germans suffered from confirmation bias, convinced that the main Soviet offensive in 1944 would be against the Army Group North Ukraine. Three years of Red Army and Stavka learning the hard lesson, through the blood of both civilians and combatants, paid off: the Soviet forces reciprocated the Wermarcht's 1941 campaign, smashing the German lines and moving as far away as Warsaw and the borders of East Prussia. Prit Buttar illuminates multiple reasons behind Bagration's success. For example, while the Red Army became more flexible in decision-making on all levels, Hitler's inability to accept the nearing German defeat resulted in command paralysis and unneccessary life loss.

BAGRATION 1944 will be a great source of information for history buffs. It's not suitable for people not familiar with WW2 and the Eastern Front, as the narrative focuses on a narrow topic.

I received an ARC through Netgalley, and I'm leaving this review voluntarily.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well researched and engaging account of one of World War II’s most decisive campaigns. The author details the Soviet Union’s massive offensive that shattered German Army Group Centre, combining strategic analysis with personal accounts from soldiers on both sides. The book has a clear narrative, good (not great) maps, and a balanced perspective, though some readers may find the narrative a little dry (think David Glantz- who I personally enjoy). The most telling part of the story was the almost complete reversal of roles from the beginning of the war when, the fast and flexible Germans, ran roughshod over the ponderous and rigid Soviets.

Those looking for future reading in the bibliography would do well to speak Russian or German.
I give this 4.5 stars which I'm rounding to 4.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Be it first or second of the World Wars, Buttar always delivers a tome as relentless and punishing as a Soviet Streamroller. He finally got around to my favorite (land) battle of WWII, making this an extra treat. Can only read one of these per year though, for reasons familiar with anyone who has read his work. Their denseness and spartan brass tacks are great but almost require work to read.

I know it is outside of the archives/languages/focuses he has had so far, but I can't help but suspect Buttar could write a good book on the Turkish War of Independence or the Iran/Iraq War.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prit Buttar takes no prisoners on the detail of what is certainly one of the most important military operations of the twentieth century - the meticulously planned if humanly expensive Soviet counter-offensive that effectively smashed German aspirations in the East over four or five weeks in 1944.

Although primarily a technical military history (which the publisher Osprey specialises in), Buttar shows a fair-mindedness, decency and wisdom in dealing with associated events - notably the July Bomb Plot against Hitler and the Warsaw Uprising - that shows him to be a fine general historian.

The pleasure in the book (although there is no pleasure in the barbarity of the war and particularly the Wehrmacht and SS under the Nazi regime) lies in his refusal to polemicise through Cold War tropes as well as to humanise the action through memoirs of combatants on both sides.

If courage is a virtue (and I start to have my doubts if it is courage in support of evil), then there was certainly courage on both sides but it is hard, for all the negativities within Sovietism, not to root for the Russians on this occasion. Buttar roots for no one. He just tells the tale.

One reads the memoirs and neither side questions their struggle (even allowing for such questioning receiving a bullet from a superior). One is led to the sad conclusion that, as Ernst Junger taught us, war is for many men a giver of Meaning where ordinary life is bereft of it.

Perhaps this is why war will never be eliminated. Ukrainian identity, Russian existential defence, Palestinian identity, Israeli existential defence ... identity and existential defence will always ensure that conflict will create bodies of professionals and then the basis for conscription.

In essence, the Germans were still a formidable and superbly organised opponent in the Summer of 1944 despite Stalingrad. The Russians (which seems to be a national characteristic) took a long time to learn how to be as formidable and to become better organised.

This was a clash of titans but with, finally, the Western Allies opening the Second Front in Normandy a month before Bagration, history was against a poorly led (politically) and ultimately resource-constrained continental power fighting on two fronts.

Nevertheless, Bagration's success was not a foregone conclusion. Theoretically, Germany could have bottled the Allies in a bloody salient on the wrong side of Falaise and then withdrawn to a defensible line (much as Russia did in Ukraine today) watching the Soviets degrade assaulting it.

This may have only bought time, perhaps for political changes that might have saved the regime (although these look unlikely), but tensions between the Soviets and the West might have seen a very different outcome if the war had dragged on for another two or three years.

Stilll, alternative history is idle speculation. History is what it was. In this case, defeat seems inbuilt into the situation because Stalin did not interfere in operational decisions and Hitler constantly did with instructions that took no account of field conditions.

Bagration cannot be seen in isolation from events elsewhere, Buttar is good on ensuring that we see the bigger picture amidst the detail. Western supply of equipment to the Soviets was important but more important was that Second Front which meant no transfer of divisions eastwards.

There are insights in this book that help us to understand some of the critical events of today. The most noticeable is that there is a natural boundary on one side of which the Soviets were fighting for their own land and, on the other, were fighting on territory more sympathetic to the Germans.

Bagration brings the Soviets across that boundary at the end. It also brings them to the first of the Nazi extermination camps - the 'small one' (where 60,000-80,000 were murdered) Majdanek - which provides us with a gear change in our assessment of an evil regime with more to come.

The importance of the 'behind the lines' partisan movement in Soviet combined operations is also made clear on frequent occasions. These partisans operated where Belarussian and Russian (and Jewish) sentiments tended to seek liberation from the Germans.

Cross the 'boundary' with its gray zone of mixed populations and you are moving into Polish territory but also into Ukrainian and Lithuanian territories where the Soviets were the threat and the mood changed. Lithuanian militia were definitely implicated in atrocities.

In the Polish case, the AK (the Polish Underground Army) was anti-German, of course, but placed its trust in the West which was far away and was a rival of a Lublin Government-in-waiting which was pro-Soviet.

Buttar covers the Warsaw Uprising sufficiently to make us understand that it is all a little more complicated than Western Cold War mythos would have us believe. The West actually accepted Stalin's borders which were not entirely unreasonable since they matched the Curzon line.

The point is that the bit between the post-First World War Curzon Line and the Soviet Union, reoccupied by Stalin in 1939, was, in fact, not a Polish but a highly mixed cultural zone that could have gone to either side. It was, bluntly, the Soviets who were spending blood winning the war.

Similarly the Nazis drew auxiliaries used for appalling crimes against humanity from Ukrainians and Lithuanians (and some Belarussians). The Baltics in particular tended to see Germans as liberators with the Lithuanian 'Forest Brothers' maintaining a partisan war against Moscow into the 1950s.

This leads us to the claim that Stalin deliberately failed to support the Warsaw Uprising with his troops on the other side of the Vistula but this too is a half-truth. What actually seems to have happened is that the Soviet Army was burned out by the time of the Warsaw Uprising.

Other than creating a vital national legend, the Warsaw Uprising was probably futile and absurd. It was the civilians who suffered because the AK made a political decision to rise up believing the Soviets would enter the City and that they could claim their own political role after the City was captured.

They heard the guns in the distance but failed to understand that what was actually happening was a final and vigorous localised German counter-offensive against a Soviet force that had travelled over 300 miles and was now with serious supply line difficulties.

Romanticism might have demanded a last drive for Warsaw but what this exhausted force would have faced was some formidable panzers and attritional street-fighting. The pro-Soviet Polish Army attempted entry to the City but faced appalling losses trying to cross the Vistula.

It is also true that Stalin had decided on an operational pause on the day of the uprising for sound military reasons (the front now stretched to the Baltic Sea) but before the rising started and that he had seriously considered relieving Warsaw but was dissuaded by military leaders.

The rising would continue for some months so Stalin is not fully exonerated. Something political happened to shift his opinion. It is probable that it was partly fear that a strong AK would act to bar the way to Germany as well as other motives including strengthening forces for a drive to Berlin.

Periodically there seems to have been minor attempts to broker a German-Polish rapprochement against the Soviets whether with Polish partisans or the AK as a force to be deployed against them. This, of course, was absurd but mutual distrust between AK and Stalin was not irrational.

The point is to be wary of simplistic evaluations of complex decision-making on all sides. Everyone is playing to their own perception of advantage. There are few angels and many devils in war. The vileness of the German regime is perhaps the one thing we might all agree on.

We can see, however, the lineaments of positions taken today in this history - the Russians trying to restore what they think is their natural boundary, the Belarussians on their side, the bitter hatreds infecting NATO from Balts and Ukrainians and Poland seeking independent great power status.

Even today, a newly militarising Germany finds itself allying culturally and politically with the same nations that preferred collaboration in the early 1940s while Russia continues to see an existential threat from the West. The 'real' West intervenes and dabbles uncomprehendingly as usual.

But it is the state of Germany that is central to events in the summer of 1944 because what we are beginning to see is knowledgeable German Officers beginning to understand that the game may be up and having to make their own existential choices.

The codes of the military and the ideology of the SS combined with a general collective view that the hordes from the East would behave as Germany had itself behaved in the East when they emerged on German soil - a view partially to come true in the drive across Prussia.

These codes and beliefs resulted in a general determination to fight on and a culture of Germanic heroism matched by a dogged Soviet proletarian equivalent for defence of the homeland and the extirpation of a hated enemy. There was always promise for Germans of 'wonder weapons' to come.

However, a group of German Officers in the middle of the Operation took an alternative view - the infamous Operation Valkyrie centred on the failed July Bomb Plot. This failed, of course, was almost certainly futile (since unconditional surrender was allied policy) and strengthened the regime.

We should not make the plotters more heroic than they were. The aim was typically German - simply to end the war on both fronts by cutting a deal with the Western powers and prosecute the war to a successful conclusion in the East. There is little sign of concern over war crimes.

We might guess that the exterminations would end, both to pin them on the deposed monsters and to assist in peace moves - maybe a pro-German puppet Poland to satisfy Western sensibilities - but the war in the East was now out of control. The approach would have remained 'existential'.

Perhaps there are elements in Germany today thinking through a version of this strategy of expanding eastwards (as a 'democracy' within NATO) alongside 'their' petty neo-nationalists and, while holding no love for Russia, we sense the Poles to be a healthy restraint on such madness.

There is also some judgement to be made here about atrocities, committed by both sides. The differences appear to be the very deliberate use of violence and terror against civilians and ethnic groups (notably Jews) by the Germans compared to the Soviets.

Of course, we must not forget the Gulags and so forth or the rapine of Soviet forces across Prussia in the following year but, in 1944, the fundamental difference is that Soviet atrocities came from below and that the authorities made reasonable efforts to control them.

This was almost certainly because the Soviets were recovering (in their eyes) their own lands and people even to the extent, at one point, of making efforts to protect important Belarussian wild life! To the Germans these lands were to be depopulated ultimately for German settlers.

Himmler was explicit about this in considering the Warsaw Uprising as a 'good thing' because it enabled Germany to wipe out the Polish capital and expel its citizens en masse. The Soviets did not adopt the same biological imperative in their conquered territories.

Operation Bagration was an impressive operation. It took three years of war for the Soviets to learn how to wage war and, even then, with a still under-educated force, it took losses a more professionalised army would not. Given the level of development, a bloody achievement.

Not only was Hitler's decision-making working against successful defensive tactics but the Germans had become complacent by the summer of 1944. They simply could not believe that the Soviets were capable of sufficient rational thought. 1944 became 1941 in reverse. Game nearly over!

[Eric Zadravec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bagration 1944 covers the momentous Soviet summer offensive in June of 1944 that brought the Red Army from the borders of Belarus to the banks of the Vistula in the span of a month. While a lesser known operation in general public knowledge of the Second World War, Operation Bagration is well-known amongst anyone interested in the history of the Soviet-German conflict. Prit's work is one of the few full-length studies of the operation in English.

As a writer, it certainly must level the critical field to both write on an unknown subject, and cater to a particulary niche audience of military history enthusiasts. Fortunately, Prit's work excellently satisfies this niche with a well-researched and excellently written narrative, covering the planning of the operation, the troop movements to a strategic-operational level, and the major personalities involved on other side. Moreover, Prit uses memoirs and journals from various participants involved in the battles, giving a much more human face to otherwise dry military jargon. In other words, when reading that XIV Tank Corps was engaged in combat on 27 June, the ramifications are far more vivid when reading an actual recollection of combat from a soldier in the unit.

Even then, XIV Tank Corps advancing 320km from 22 June to 3 July has ramifications in its own right. Military history, if more than a particularly niche hobby, is a close appromixation to a science of historical change. That is, the movements, numbers, battles, hardware, outcomes - the hard, dry facts of military history - are the factors by which a state imposes its control over a geographical location, with all its attendant historical consequences. In other words, war is a fulcrum of history, or a catalyst for rapid historical change. In the case of Operation Bagration, this was a major part of the defeat of Nazi Germany, one of the most momentous events of the 20th century. All that makes studying these operations in detail worthwhile for me. Or perhaps I'm only practicing my rhetorical arguments for the usefulness of a future PhD funded by tax dollars.

In any case, Prit's history stands as one of the most authoritative and accessible studies of Operation Bagration, alongside his other works covering the Soviet-German war. Not only because there are so few histories available, but because it is excellently written and researched.

[Rory · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 10% into the book. I recently moved near the Gettysburg battlefield, like Bagration a major battle in a brutal war. Gettysburg has a major movie, based on a novel that centered on a handful of characters. Many of thousand histories written on the battle, despite close to 200,000 soldiers involved, center on just handful of key figures. The battle was less than 30 square miles, most of the action occurring over just 3 days. And most histories of the battle have only very brief overview of the 2 years of prior fighting, usually picking up from battle of Chancellorsville.
Battles on the Eastern Front of WWII, however, ranged over hundreds of miles. In the English speaking world, much of the Eastern Front events beyond Moscow/Stalingrad/Kursk/Berlin were shrouded in mystery and what was covered usually painted with hyperbole for over 50 years, until the Cold War ended in the 1990's. John Erickson and his wife, and Earl Ziemke were perhaps THE only English-writing historians showing the Russian side until David Glantz and others after him gained access to the Soviet Archives.
As a result, Bagration has rarely been covered, overshadowed by Normandy and the Western Front. Moreover any book on Bagration is handicapped with a good portion of the book having to provide a much longer overview as Western audiences not only are not as familiar with the Eastern Front but also a brief history of the Baltic States. This book doesn't simply pick up the narrative after Kursk. No, the author is obligated to cover and explain the setting in much more detail than say required with a book on Gettysburg.
Nevertheless, his first chapter, state of the army, goes beyond the usual "recap" of the war to also cover albeit briefly some of the handicaps that the German army of 1944 faces--like lack of fuel, inability to tow artillery quickly in retreat from a breakthrough, and lack of Luftwaffe. To be honest, whole books could be devoted these handicaps as many lessons to be learned here that could be applied even today.

[Ron Baumer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-written novel about the Soviet offensive in the Eastern Theatre of WW2 that broke the Nazi backs. Although the author made good use of first-hand accounts from the participants in the battles, the only drawback of the book was that it comes across more of a historical summary rather than a novel. Still, this book was extremely informative and well-done. A good historical read.

Thank you to #NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb

[Todd A · Rating 5 out of 5]

First book like this I’ve read on the east front. Really liked hearing about this front with the depth Pritt brings.