ABSTRACT
On 9 February General I. Kh. Bagramyan was summoned to the headquarters of the 3rd Belorussian Front, where General Chernyakovskii explained the state of affairs to him, ‘smoothing his thick, dark hair’ and speaking ‘in a pleasant, sonorous baritone’ (Bagramyan, in Erickson, ed., 1987, 221). The trouble was that the German forces in East Prussia, although they were fragmented in three parts, were still powerful and under effective control. Just how much fight the Germans had in them became evident in a few days’ time.
