Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War by JonathanDimbleby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 640 pp. $34.99. ISBN 978‐0‐1977‐6531‐9

When the Western Allies landed on the shores of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Red Army had been enduring the brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany for almost three years, suffering horrendous losses in both military and civilian lives in the “war of the century” against the Wehrmacht. By June 1944, the Red Army had liberated most of the territory occupied by the Germans since June 22, 1941, and was poised to launch further offensives in the direction of the Reich itself. As a matter of fact, when the Americans, British, and Canadians were slowly battling their way forward from their bridgehead, the Red Army launched Operation Bagration, exactly three years to the date of the start of Operation Barbarossa. Bagration would result in the Wehrmacht’s worst defeat of the war: Army Group Center was destroyed and the Soviet forces advanced hundreds of kilometers. However, in the Western literature on the Second World War, relatively little attention is paid to Bagration. In his accessible and well-written Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War, Jonathan Dimbleby does devote a considerably number of pages to Bagration, pointing, for example, to the “logistical challenge of mind-boggling proportions to transport hundreds of thousands of men, thousands of tanks, thousands of tanks and artillery, as well as the fuel and supplies required for a huge and sustained offensive” (p. 216). Bagration dwarfed the fighting in Normandy with regard to scale, as the Eastern Front generally did when compared to the Western Front. However, Dimbleby’s approach is much broader than Bagration, encompassing basically the whole last year of the war. He makes abundantly clear that the Eastern Front was indeed the decisive theater of WWII. It was here that the back of Nazi Germany was broken in what is called “the Great Patriotic War” at the cost of enormous casualties: “In the two and a half years since the launch of Operation Barbarossa […], a total of some 9.5 million young men and women had been killed or declared “missing in action” in the battlefields of the eastern front. More than 80 per cent of those victims […] were Soviet soldiers” (p. 7). Like his previous book on Barbarossa, Dimbleby makes excellent use of journals, diaries, and other personal testimonies, which makes Endgame 1944 very personal and an almost exciting read. Moreover, he does a great job in switching between the higher level— Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and so on—and those “on the ground” undergoing the immense suffering of the last year of the Second World War. Since the failed German offensive around Kursk in the summer of 1943—where the Germans did not have 3,000 tanks as Dimbleby claims—and the subsequent Soviet counterattack, the initiative on the Eastern Front was firmly in Soviet hands (p. 11). The Red Army launched a series of successful offensives, although these came at a terrible cost. For example, the Zhitomir-Berdichev offensive of January 1944 resulted in 100,000 casualties in three weeks’ time, including 20,000 fatalities. However, the Red Army could afford these losses, whereas the Germans—who also saw their losses mount significantly—could not. Behind the frontlines, a savage (anti-)partisan war waged, correctly labelled by Ben Shepherd as “War in the Wild East.” Dimbleby’s descriptions of the violence against partisans (and their retribution) and civilians is harrowing. He makes convincingly clear that “the partisan war in the spring of 1944 was not a sideshow but, like the genocidal horrors in the Ukraine, was integral to the war on the eastern front” (p. 147). The German Ostheer devoted as many as 380,000 men to “hunt down this growing menace” (p. 197). When Bagration was launched, it was described as “an inferno of fire that obliterated the horizon […] the earth itself was in flames” (see text accompanying photo 15). While describing the huge battles fought on the Eastern Front, Dimbleby never loses sight of the immense individual suffering, for example, in chapter 18, aptly titled “Devastation.” The year 1944 also saw, for example, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz. In fact, the last year of the Second World War was the deadliest of the conflict, certainly for Nazi Germany: “In the five months since the start of Operations Overlord and Bagration a total of 1,460,000 men had been killed, wounded or captured, 900,000 of these on the eastern front” (p. 370). From the air, Nazi Germany was mercilessly bombarded by the British and Americans, whereas both the Western Allies and the Soviets were poised to invade Nazi Germany itself. The Red Army would extract a terrible toll on the civilian population in the process on its way to the capture of Berlin. Dimbleby ably describes the growing mistrust between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union once the defeat of the Third Reich became evident, but also between London and Washington, for example about the question of who was to take Berlin. Roosevelt gave the prize to Moscow. The end of the Second World War in Europe was “a moment of jubilation. But the celebrations were to be short-lived. The political and military barricades would soon go up” (p. 467). Indeed, within two years of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Cold War would start. Dimbleby concludes that Stalin, by May 1945, had gotten what he wanted: “A victory almost entirely on terms that he had dictated both in the conference chamber and on the battlefield. It is in this sense that 1944 might fairly be seen as the ‘endgame’ year of the Second World War in Europe, the twelve months that shaped the destiny of an entire continent for half a century and more” (p. 468). Endgame 1944 provides a fascinating, often harrowing read of indeed an essential period in recent European and world history. While Dimbleby does not necessarily present many new things, he succeeds in bringing the larger story and the “petite histoire” together in a fascinating way. Especially for an Anglo-American public that still remains largely ignorant of the Eastern Front and its crucial role in the Second World War, Endgame 1944 is a welcome and very accessible contribution to the historiography.