What Then We Take Berlin Actually Is and Why It Still Matters
The book Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton came out in 1967. It covers the last eight months of the European theater in World War Two, from the crossing of the Rhine through to the fall of Berlin and the German surrender. Lawton was a freelance journalist and historian who had access to both German and Soviet sources at a time when a lot of that material was either too new or too hard to get. A lot of books in this space are either dry regurgitations of the official record or heavily fictionalized war stories. Lawton sits somewhere in between, though closer to the dry side. The book traces the Soviet advance from the Vistula-Oder offensive in January 1945 all the way to the capture of the Reichstag. It also gives substantial coverage to the Western Allied push through France and Germany, though the Soviet narrative carries most of the weight. That is not accidental. Lawton seems to have felt the Eastern Front was the decisive operational theater, which is debatable but defensible if you look at casualty figures and the actual collapse of German command and control.
Then We Take Berlin John Lawton
If you are looking for the exact citation, the first edition was published by Frederick A. Praeger in New York. It runs roughly 350 pages depending on the printing. Later editions include additional maps and appendices that patch some of the gaps in the original. The paperback versions tend to be more accurate than the early hardcovers because they caught some of the factual corrections that historians pointed out after 1967. I read through this when I was trying to get a handle on how the Soviet high command actually coordinated operations across three Ukrainian Fronts in March 1945. The official Soviet histories at the time were sanitized to the point of being useless for operational analysis. Lawton dug past that. He used captured German Army High Command (OKH) documents and Red Army staff diaries to reconstruct the sequence of orders. That is where the book earns its keep.
How the Book Handles the Major Campaigns
The book covers several distinct phases. First comes the Vistula-Oder offensive, which is arguably the most impressive operational maneuver of the entire war in terms of speed and distance. The Soviets pushed about 400 miles in about two weeks while maintaining supply lines that should have collapsed under normal conditions. Lawton explains how they managed this by using forward supply dumps, commandeered German rail gauge converters, and an almost reckless reliance on motorized transport that the Germans did not expect to function in the spring mud. Then there is the Lower Silesian and Upper Silesian operations. These are less famous than the push to Berlin itself but they were critical for securing the southern flank before the final assault on the German capital. Lawton dedicates reasonable attention to the Third Ukrainian Front under Marshal Malinovsky here. His description of the fighting around Budapest in the closing weeks is particularly useful because most Western accounts barely cover it. The Berlin strategic offensive gets the longest treatment, naturally. Lawton draws heavily on Soviet after-action reports and German memoirs like General Heinrici's accounts of the Seelow Heights defense. What is interesting about his treatment of Heinrici is that Lawton does not romanticize him the way some later writers do. Heinrici was a competent defensive commander who built effective forward defense zones with overlapping fields of fire, but he was also running an operation that was already strategically doomed. Lawton makes that distinction without much fuss.
Get the Full Details
What the Book Gets Right and Where It Stumbles
One thing Lawton handles well is the interaction between political objectives and military operations. The Soviet leadership was not just fighting a war. They were trying to reach Berlin before the Americans and British could make a serious claim on it. This affected everything from the placement of armored reserves to the allocation of artillery ammunition during the final assault. Lawton shows how Zhukov and his counterparts adjusted their timelines based on Stalin's political calculations rather than purely military ones. That insight is valuable because it explains operational decisions that otherwise look like mistakes. The book also does a decent job with the German side. Lawton interviewed surviving officers and worked through their testimonies with a degree of skepticism that was unusual for military history writing in the late 1960s. He did not fully exonerate anyone, but he also did not treat every German account as propaganda. The section on the Battle of Berlin itself is clear about the disorder in the German ranks, the reliance on Volkssturm units with no anti-tank weapons, and the fact that many regular divisions were below half strength with mostly teenage and elderly conscripts manning positions. There are errors. Lawton sometimes confuses the sequence of events when multiple fronts were operating simultaneously. The timeline of the April 16th to May 2nd period gets muddled in a few places, and he occasionally attributes Soviet actions to decisions made by Stavka when in reality field commanders were improvising under pressure. I ran into one specific issue while cross-referencing the descriptions of the crossing of the Oder near Küstrin with German positions. Lawton states that the Third Shock Army crossed at a particular point in the evening of April 16th, but captured German documents show that the main crossing by that unit actually happened before dawn on the 17th. The difference matters if you are building an operational timeline, but it is the kind of error that would never show up in a casual reading.
Another problem is the handling of Soviet casualties. Lawton uses figures from the mid-1960s when Soviet open records still downplayed losses considerably. More recent Russian archives have revised those numbers upward substantially. If you are relying on this book for casualty statistics, you will want to check against the works of David Glantz or Christopher Bellamy for updated figures. The narrative analysis holds up, but the raw numbers are too low.
Who Should Read This and When
If you are new to the Eastern Front in the final phase of the war, this is a solid starting point. It is not as dense as Glantz's academic work but it gives you a clear picture of the major operations. Lawton writes in a straightforward style that does not get bogged down in unit-level citations the way modern academic histories do. For most readers that means it is actually more readable. If you already know the basic sequence of events, the value here is in the operational detail. The sections on how the Soviets prepared the battlefield with extensive minefields, fake positions, and deception operations are worth the price of admission alone. The Soviet military did not simply overwhelm Germany with numbers. They developed sophisticated operational art that combined deep battle theory with practical logistical innovation, and Lawton describes that process without the usual Cold War shorthand. There are better books on specific parts of this campaign. Niklas Zetterling has done important work on the Berlin offensive itself using German records. Richard Overy covers the same period in broader strategic surveys with more recent archival material. But those books tend to be narrower or more academic in tone. Lawton's strength is the overall narrative. He keeps the big picture visible while still explaining the mechanics of how the campaign unfolded.
Where to Find a Copy
The book is out of print in most formats. You will find it on Amazon as a print-on-demand reproduction, on eBay, and through used book dealers. The Kindle version exists but some reviews note that the map reproductions are lower quality than the physical editions. If you care about the operational maps, get the paperback or hardcover. The information in Then We Take Berlin is still relevant enough that a reprint would not be surprising, but no publisher has committed to one yet. The most practical route is to check AbeBooks or Alibris. You can find decent condition copies for under twenty dollars. The Praeger first editions from 1967 are the reference standard for scholars who cite this work. Later editions are fine for general reading but the pagination differs enough that citations get messy if you are writing something formal.
Bottom Line
This is not the most up-to-date book on the subject. The archival research available since 1991 has changed several details. But it remains one of the clearest single-volume narratives of the Soviet drive to Berlin. Lawton understood the operational level of war, which is where most popular military history writers lose track. He also had the patience to read through German accounts critically instead of accepting them at face value. That combination is rarer than it should be. For anyone trying to understand how the Eastern Front ended, this book still deserves a place on the shelf alongside the more recent works. It is not perfect. The casualty figures need updating, the timeline has minor errors in the April sequence, and some of the source material has been superseded by Russian archives opened in the 1990s. But the core narrative is sound, and the operational explanations hold up better than most books from the same era.
