June 1944. Operation Bagration: the greatest defeat ever suffered by the German Armed Forces. More than two million Red Army soldiers, facing 500,000 German adversaries, finally avenged their defeat in Operation Barbarossa three years earlier. In the ensuing three weeks, Hitler’s Army Group Centre lost 28 of its 32 divisions.

While the same month saw the Allies triumph on the beaches of Normandy, it was in fact the events on the Eastern Front in 1944 that were the knockout blow in the Second World War. Despite the myths that remain today, it was this brutal struggle from the Baltic to the Black Sea that saw the Wehrmacht crucially defeated.

Drawing on previously untranslated German and Russian sources - many from ‘ordinary’ soldiers - bestselling historian Jonathan Dimbleby describes and analyses with authority and panache this momentous year in the East. He illuminates the bloody battles that raged along the 2000 kilometres-long front, while also explaining the unusual roles played by deception, the partisans, and the war within a war in Ukraine.

Dimbleby’s gripping, masterly narrative sets the drama of the relationships between the “big three” of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin against the history being created on the battlefield, and shows how his victories in 1944 enabled the Soviet leader to dictate the terms of the post-war settlement and lay the foundations for the Cold War.