Between Giants: The Battle For The Baltics In World War II, by Prit Buttar

My instincts concerning this book are somewhat mixed. Although I do not come from the background that would be the obvious market of this book, namely readers from the Baltic states or descended from such communities, I am interested in the Eastern front of World War II and have read other accounts of the horrific cost that being caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of whom killed large numbers of people in their fight for domination of the bloodlands between them. This book chooses a worthwhile topic and manages to write about the subject very knowledgeably. Particular praise must be given for the author’s account of the battles at Courland which lasted until the end of World War II where an isolated German detachment was able to hold off Soviet forces despite having no discernable impact on the larger course of the war. The author also deserves to be recognized for his attempts to be fair-minded to the people involved in the war efforts during World War II, recognizing the complexity of who fought on which side for what reasons and also discussing that for the small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, their own freedom from complete domination required them to pick a side between East and West, and so far at least they appear to have picked West and received proper benefits for so doing.

That is not to say that I like everything about this book. Some of my difficulties with the book are stylistic, as the author packs in so much densely plotted information to demonstrate his knowledge of the material that it sometimes hinders the readability of the work. The author seems to be an amateur historian and while that is no slur when one examines the background knowledge of the author (which is quite impressive), there is something that is wanting about how that knowledge is conveyed smoothly to the reader. There is one more substantial problem that bothers me about this work and many others which seek to quantify the losses to the nations of the Baltic region (which is also true of nations like Poland when one considers their losses in World War II), and that is the way that largely Jew-free nations today are viewed as having suffered immensely as victims in World War II in large part because of the losses to the Jewish populations of those nations which were not viewed fondly by nationalists of the area then or now–and this book provides plenty of information that shows how the enthusiasm of leftist Jews for Soviet rule in many cases painted Jews as being more leftist in general (and more pro-Russian) that was actually the case, with deadly consequences. It is by no means clear how the problem of Jewish losses for residents or second-class citizens of states are to be accounted for in a way that does not overly inflate the losses suffered to the nations where they lived and all too often died at the hand of willing local and foreign executioners, but this book does not even attempt such a calculation.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit more than 350 pages long and it is divided into 12 chapters with numerous supplementary material. The book begins with a list of illustrations, a list of maps, an author’s note, a detailed list of people involved from the Baltic states, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union (listed helpfully as dramatis personae), as well as a short preface and a longer introduction. The main part of the book then begins with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the first Soviet Occupation of the Baltic region in 1940 and early 1941 (1). This is followed by a discussion of German preparations for Barbarossa (2) as well as the initial flood of the German effort over the Baltic states (3). After this the author discusses the Baltic Holocaust (4) as well as the way in which many people found themselves reluctant allies of the new Nazi regime (5). An entire chapter is spent discussing the context as well as the battle in Narva from January to April 1944 (7), as well as the way that the Russians broke the deadlock in summer of 1944 (8). A chapter is then spent talking about the period from Doppelkopf to Operation Casar (8) as well as the resulting battles that left Army Group North isolated (9). An entire chapter is spent discussing the battles of Courland from October to December 1944 (10), as well as the endgame of World War II in the area (11) and the aftermath (12). The book ends with appendices on place names (i), ranks (ii), acronyms (iii), and foreign terms (iv) as well as endnotes, a bibliography, an extract from Battleground Prussia, and an index.