very much so uh so now to get to the book directly uh we'll start at the end kind of december 1944 that's kind of where you uh begin the book so what is the strategic situation overall looking uh on the eastern front obviously for the soviets it's looking a little more positively the germans not so much to put it like

yeah yeah um In a way, it's worth going back one further year to see the transformation between the end of 1943 and the end of 1944.

So in the last quarter of 1943, Hitler, I can't remember which Führer directive it was, 57 comes to mind, I can't remember the details.

This was the one in which he articulated his strategy for the rest of the war, which was that at some point the Western Allies will make an invasion of mainland Europe and destroying this has to be the best last opportunity for Germany to avoid the nightmare of a two-front war.

Therefore, Building up sufficient forces in France and elsewhere to crush an invasion of mainland Europe has to be the priority.

And once we have defeated the Western Allies and the new U-boats are able to resume the Battle of the Atlantic to prevent the Americans from recovering from a failed invasion, then we can send our forces east and destroy the Soviet Union once and for all.

So in the meantime, on the eastern front, the Wehrmacht has to hold the Red Army as far away as possible.

Yes.

Why is this so challenging for them?

It's a very difficult thing to counter, as anyone who has done any training for urban warfare or fighting in built-up areas would, would testify, because people can open fire on you at very close range from concealed positions.

And during the advance from the Vistula to the Oder, the biggest number of Soviet tank losses w-were inflicted by man-carried weapons, so either the Panzerschreck or the Panzerfaust.

Earlier versions of the Panzerfaust had a very limited range of perhaps fifty meters or maybe a hundred meters.

The newer ones that are now available can reach a little bit further, but in practice, they're actually still being used at very, very close range.

And although the shaped charge warhead on these can burn through even the armor of something like a Stalin tank, the advantage of using these in a built-up area is you can use loft space.

You can g-get it above tanks and fire down onto the relatively thin decking, and that causes enormous devastation.

Tell me a bit about these plans that weren't even revealed until the late '90s and why they didn't come about.

But does that give then the Germans a moment to catch their breath? I mean, how much men and material do they have, uh, can they gather for the de- defense of, of Berlin? Can they, they, can they put a plan in action?

Well, it does give them time to recover, but you can only really use that time effectively if you actually have resources to shuffle around.

The troop strengths, if you look at them, are actually quite misleading.

So the Germans managed to mass about seven hundred and fifty thousand men along the Oder line to defend it.

The Red Army has two point three million.

Of those three quarters of a million men that the Germans deploy, an awful lot of them are Volkssturm, a lot of them are teenagers, uh, or young men, who are not really competent and are not going to stand up to the ferocity of fighting that's coming.

So the numbers are misleading.

What does that mean for the fighting?