Prit Buttar-BAGRATION 1944 THE GREAT SOVIET OFFENSIVE

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. Butby 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 puttogether 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 ofWarsaw. 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.  About the Author: Prit Buttar studied medicine at Oxford and Londonbefore joining the British Army as a doctor. After leaving the army, he worked as a general practitioner. An established expert on the Eastern Front in 20th-century military history, his most recent titles include the critically acclaimed new history of the siege of Leningrad: To Besiege A City:Leningrad 1941–42 and Hero City: Leningrad 1943–44. He lives in Kirkcudbright, Scotland.