Marlborough LitFest – Jonathan Dimbleby – Endgame 1944 *SOLD OUT*

While Allied forces were winning through on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, Russian troops were embarking upon Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front. After three years of stalemate, two million Red Army soldiers were pitted against 500,000 German adversaries, seeking revenge for their defeat in Operation Barbarossa. The bloody battles along 2000 kilometres proved decisive in defeating Hitler’s forces, with the loss of 28 out of 32 divisions.

In Endgame 1944, broadcaster and journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, a familiar voice to us all and now acclaimed for his Second World War histories, has drawn on previously untranslated German and Russian sources, many from ‘ordinary’ soldiers, to paint a picture of this momentous year in all its complexity. His dramatic narrative also sets the backdrop for the relationship between the ‘big three’ of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, explaining how the Soviet leader was able to exert such influence on the post-war settlement.

“It shines a light for general readers on a period of history often the preserve of Eastern Front academics,” says historian Colonel Robert Kershaw. “It’s a story too little known, and Dimbleby tells it brilliantly,” agrees Sir Rodrick Braithwaite, author of Moscow 1941.