A detailed and engrossing account of the final year of fighting in
Ukraine during World War II, making use of the extensive memoirs of
German and Russian soldiers involved in the fighting, as well as
partisans behind the German lines, to bring the story to life.
By the end of 1944 the Red Army was poised on the very frontiers of the
Third Reich. How had the once unstoppable, mighty Wehrmacht faltered so
disastrously? Certainly it had suffered defeats before, in particular
the vast catastrophe of Stalingrad, but it was in 1944 that the war was
ultimately lost. It was no longer a case of if but rather when the Red
Army would be at the gates of Berlin.
Prit Buttar retraces the ebb and flow of the various battles and
campaigns fought throughout the Ukraine and Romania in 1944. January and
February saw Army Group South encircled in the Korsun Pocket. Although
many of the encircled troops did escape, in part due to Soviet
intelligence and command failures, the Red Army would endeavor to not
make the same mistakes again. Indeed, in the coming months the Red Army
would demonstrate an ability to learn and improve, reinventing itself as
a war-winning machine, demonstrated clearly in its success in the
Iasi-Kishinev operation.
The view of the Red Army as a huge, unskilled horde that rolled over
everything in its path is just one myth that The Reckoning reassess.
So too does it re-evaluate the apparent infallibility of German military
commanders, the denial of any involvement in (or often even knowledge
of) the heinous crimes committed in the occupied territories by German
forces, and the ineffectiveness of Axis allies, such as the Romanians at
Iasi, to withstand the Soviet forces. Like all myths, these contain many
truths, but also a great many distortions, all of which are skillfully
unpicked and analysed in this powerful retelling of 1944 on the Eastern
Front.
