Operation Bagration

Yes, and you came up with some other volumes regarding the Eastern Front, and we'll definitely get into that at the end of the discussion.

But yeah, I even, as I mentioned, I just got your book on Bagration, and I'm looking forward to your work on the Battle for Berlin.

Good.

Look, I will be very happy to come and talk on your show about that whenever you feel it's appropriate.

Little bits of eastern France are still occupied.

They've moved into Belgium and the Netherlands.

And in the east, Operation Bagration and the neighboring operations to north and south have totally destroyed all of the armies along the Eastern Front.

I think from memory, during 1944, at some point, Nearly every army and possibly every army on the Eastern Front in the German order of battle is encircled at some point.

So it's definitely something that I'm glad they had this option for players.

So primarily, just kind of scooting through this, overwhelmingly, the meta breakdown, if you summarize Germans, Germans would probably be one of the largest, but There's so much diversity between if you're doing like, was it D-Day, Berlin, you have Bagration, you have so many different types of Germans that can be fielded in the late war.

So as far as like mono faction, the bulge American forces were overall the most popular.

um now why were they the most popular it was primarily because you have access to the m4 sherman variants and uh you get the m4 jumbos n7 priests the t26 uh pershings and you get the uh the battle wary rifle platoons that everybody loves to see The second and third alternate between the British forces.

Lubbock, Texas, late war, 110 points, three rounds.

That's a lot of points, though.

It's essentially Bagration or D-Day.

That's a lot of points.

So it will exceed this.

But to put it again in context, listeners know this is a First World War podcast, but I'm sure you've heard of the destruction of Army Group Centre by Operation Bagration in the Second World War in 1944, this great Soviet offensive through Belarusia into Poland.

That takes out about 450,000 men.

in about two months.

They did remember to ask that Stalin wage a simultaneous offensive in Eastern Europe to draw off strength from D-Day.

While there was a Soviet offensive earlier that year, a much more kind of subsidiary offensive, the actual offensive named after Bagration, the commander from the Napoleonic Wars, was actually delayed so that it was not launched until more than two weeks after D-Day, so that the Germans were able to transfer troops from the Eastern Front to Normandy and Western Europe.

And of course, from Stalin's purpose, that was all delayed.

to the good and entirely justified.