This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame which came up and almost blinded us from our guns.

Hello and welcome to the World War II podcast.

For this episode, I'm joined by Prip Boutar to discuss Operation Borgration,

the massive Soviet offensive launched in the summer of 1944 that shattered the German Army Group Centre. While the D-Day landings dominate the narrative

of mid-1944, events on the Eastern Front were just as decisive, if not more so, in determining

the course of the war in Europe. Pitt's latest book in his series looking at the Eastern Front

during World War II is Bagration, 1944, the Great Soviet

Offensive. Welcome back, Pritt. I wonder if we should start by perhaps looking at where we left

off, start by looking at the overall strategic situation on the Eastern Front in mid-1944.

Was the Soviet Union ready to launch a large offensive?

As you'll probably remember from the book, I start the narrative actually with the Tehran

conference, which lays the groundwork for the fighting of 1944. This is, if you like,

the test of Hitler's Fuhrer directive from the autumn of 1943, where

we're going to hold the Red Army back with the minimum number of troops that we need for the job,

and if absolutely necessary, we will trade space for time whilst we concentrate all of our

resources in the West in anticipation of a Western invasion. And when the Western Allies come ashore,

we'll smash them on the beaches and then we'll send everything east to defeat the Soviet Union.

As strategic plans go, it's a pretty awful plan, really, but given the

resources left for Germany and given the options, I guess it was about the only conceivable plan

short of admitting it was all over and surrendering. It was about the only option left. So really, you can look at

...