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allowed the T-34/85 to fire from six to eight times per minute. The length and height of the two T-34 models were much the same, but every T-34/85 had a radio, whereas only the command tanks of the original version had been equipped with one. Although the 45mm armour thickness on its sides and 90mm on the front made the T-34/85, at 32 tonnes, 3½ tonnes heavier than the earlier model, its powerful engine meant that it could reach a top speed of 20mph, not much slower than the 21.4mph of the T-34/76. The later model also had two 7.62mm machine guns, and could drive 235 miles on a full tank of 690 litres of diesel (including the barrels attached to its outside). It carried seventy-four shells, 2,500 bullets and ten grenades inside, only marginally fewer than the ninety-two shells that fitted into the T-34/76’s magazine.17 When it was produced in enough numbers, therefore, Stalin finally had a campaign-winning weapon for 1944.

The lack of armour on the top of tanks – even Tigers had only 18mm – made them highly vulnerable to air attack and in built-up areas where they could be attacked from rooftops, as the Germans discovered in Stalingrad and the Russians in Berlin in 1945 (and fifty years later in Grozny). The 20mm SHAK-20 cannon on Soviet fighter planes could penetrate tank roofs, although the planes needed to attack almost vertically downwards in order to do so. With the Luftwaffe swept from the skies of Belorussia in the latter part of 1943, the German tanks there were immensely vulnerable. Tank for tank, however, they were still the best in the world. Had Hitler started the war much later, in 1943 or 1944, and if tank– and aircraft-production factories had been better protected and dispersed in a way that the Allies found harder to destroy, especially with Me-262 jet fighters protecting them from the Allies’ Combined Bomber Offensive, the Wehrmacht would have stood a far better chance of winning the war.

Between 22 and 30 October 1943, Russian forces crossed the River Dnieper in several places along a 300-mile stretch from the Pripet Marshes to Zaporozhe, and when Kiev fell on 6 November the northern flank of Army Group South’s defence of the river’s great bend was threatened too. On 27 and 28 December Manstein begged Hitler that the bend be given up, thereby shortening his line by over 125 miles, but he was refused permission to do so. ‘I am worrying myself sick for having given permission for retreats in the past,’ Hitler replied.18 By 2 January 1944, the Russians had advanced north of Kiev and were about to cross the pre-war borders of Poland.

Up in the north of the country, the Red Army launched a major offensive to relieve Leningrad south of the city on 15 January 1944, when General L. A. Govorov’s Leningrad Front and General Kirill A. Meretzkov’s Volkhov Front took advantage of the freezing weather to cross the Gulf of Finland and the iced-up lakes and swamps to attack the German Eighteenth Army on both flanks. After the bloodiest siege in human history, lasting 900 days, during which 150,000 shells and 100,000 bombs had fallen on the city and more than 1.1 million people had died, Leningrad was finally liberated on Monday, 17 January 1944. Novgorod fell two days later as the Germans recoiled rapidly. When General Georg von Kuchler withdrew Army Group North from its forward positions, Hitler replaced him with Model, who managed to persuade the Führer that a Schild und Schwert (shield and sword) strategy should allow minor withdrawals as part of a larger, planned counter-offensive. Nevertheless, by 1 March the Red Army had reached a line from Narva to Pskov to Polotsk. (Govorov attacked Finland in June, which came to terms in September, promising no longer to aid the hard-pressed German war economy.)

Model was able to persuade Hitler of things, such as the withdrawal, that other generals could not because the Führer admired him and was utterly convinced of his loyalty. He argued with Hitler to his face, but only on matters of military policy, and would not allow any criticism of Hitler at his HQ. Because he led