Bagration 1944

The Great Soviet Offensive

By: Prit Buttar

Narrated by: Leighton Pugh

Bloomsbury presents Bagration 1944: The Great Soviet Offensive by Prit Buttar, read by Leighton Pugh.

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.©2025 Prit Buttar (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Fantastic!

Wonderfully in depth, well researched and written, just absolutely so riveting and informative, would recommend to anyone curious about Bagration, one of the most important parts of ww2 that no one ever talks about.

Excellent

A breeze of fresh air in an otherwise biased western approach of history writing…in a nutshell author looks at historical events objectively, always trying to contextualise them, not looking at things and justifying them from one perspective.

Impressive amount of detail, as expected from the author.

Highly recommend starting from the first book and reading or listening to the entire series. Superb detail told from both sides of the conflict.

This Author is Brilliant - I Read All His Material

Prit writes amazing history! Leighton is a great narrator for this material. Prit uses other narrators as well. So far so good, but I prefer Leighton to narrate Prit's work. I am often astonished at how Prit is able to gather and present so much detail while weaving it all into such engaging narratives. Never been disappointed by Prit's extensive work.

Impressive detail. Fascinating, with no apparent bias.

The older I get, the more I enjoy the smaller details; the minutiae of smaller unit actions.
Prit Buttar always delivers. This is the third or fourth book of his I’ve read.
Great narration. Had to find my own maps, though. Gotta have a map!