BATTLEGROUND PRUSSIA-The Assult on Germany's Eastern Front 1944-45

I picked up this book in a Seattle use book store. This book is the author's (Prit Buttar) first work on WW2 and it's a very credible first book. It details the little known Soviet attack and German defense of Prussia. This is a battle that is often glossed over in most histories. Here was one of the most bitter battles of a long and bitter war. Germany was finally defending its own soil after over-running the western Soviet Union and then being fought back in what was arguably the most horrible of mankind's wars. The Soviet forces were determined to force an end to the war that had brought the country large-scale devastation and to exact a horrible revenge on the Germans. The Germans, knowing this, were trying to hold the Red Army back with insufficient forces, or being denied this, at least to give the civilians time to evacuate westward.

The hard part about recording this campaign was that it became several battles often fought at the same time as German forces fell back to the Baltic Coast. Courland, Saamland, Konigsberg, and Danzig-Gotenhofen were all separate battles being fought at the same time. I found I had to keep a sharp eye on the dates in order to make sense of how these battles came off time-wise.

A lot of the book was dedicated to the Kriegmarine's support and evacuation of over two million German soldiers and civilians (as well as quite a few Russian POWs, French POWs and even some British POWs who wanted no part of the Soviet liberation.)

While I didn't think I'd enjoy this book all that much but just the opposite was true. I ended up reading every one of the book's 454 pages. It uses a lot of first-person accounts which helped give the account a human perspective. My only beef was that he didn't do this 20 years earlier when more Red Army veterans could have been accessed. Sometimes it's hard reading, especially the accounts of Soviet "revenge" but war is never clean. Anyway, I highly recommend this book.