18 February 2025
March 2025 will see the publication of Bagration, an account of the great Soviet summer offensive of 1944 and the follow-on operations that took the Red Army from eastern Belarus to the Vistula. Coinciding with the breakout of the Western Allies from Normandy, this operation inflicted irreparable damage on the Wehrmacht.
This was the great offensive in which the Red Army got things right: planning; preparation; deception; execution; and exploitation. All-arms coordination was still short of the standards achieved by the Wehrmacht or the Western Powers, but sufficient to inflict a near-fatal wound on Nazi Germany. It ensured that Stalin’s forces would control the eastern half of Europe after the war.
27 January 2025
I was delighted to be invited back on Jonathan Russo’s excellent ‘Out Of The Box’ podcast; we had a wide-ranging discussion about the value - and limitations - of studying history, and the reasons why I enjoy both researching and writing about the great events that shaped the 20th Century. We talked about the Eastern Front and Leningrad in particular, but about many other topics too.