Operation Bagration

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Bagration began on the 22nd of June 1944, exactly three years to the day after Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union. That symmetry was no accident. What followed across the forests and marshes of Soviet Byelorussia was a catastrophe for Nazi Germany so complete that it has never fully entered Western memory, overshadowed as it was by the Allied landings in Normandy just weeks before. Around 450,000 German soldiers became casualties. Twenty-eight divisions of Army Group Centre were destroyed. Thirty-one of the forty-seven German divisional and corps commanders involved were either killed or captured. How did the Red Army pull off a military victory on this scale, against an enemy that had battered it for three years? And why did the Germans walk straight into it?

• 2. Setting the Trap

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  By June 1944, Army Group Centre was in a precarious position that its own commanders barely recognised. The battles at Kursk, Kiev, and in Crimea during the preceding year had gutted Army Group South, and the retreats that followed left Army Group Centre's lines jutting eastward in a salient, at risk of losing contact with its neighbours on both flanks.

  The German High Command remained convinced that the main Soviet summer offensive would strike Army Group North Ukraine, under Field Marshal Walter Model. That belief was not baseless. Soviet tank armies, visible to German intelligence, were massed in the Lvov region to the south. What German intelligence failed to detect were the Soviet strategic reserves assembling opposite Byelorussia. The Wehrmacht had stripped Army Group Centre of one-third of its artillery, half its tank destroyers, and 88 per cent of its tanks, redeploying them to Model's sector. What remained was a thin line of infantry: the 9th Army sector, for example, held with only 143 soldiers per kilometre of front.

  The Soviets had decided on Byelorussia after eliminating alternatives. An offensive into Romania or through the Carpathians was judged too exposed on the flanks. A Baltic push was blocked by strong enemy preparation. The Byelorussian option offered something the others did not: the chance to hit where the Germans were weakest while appearing to strike where they were strongest. The plan, finalised by the 28th of April 1944, counted on the Germans reading the situation exactly wrong.

• 3. Maskirovka

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  Soviet maskirovka was more than camouflage. The term, as used by commanders in the Second World War, described a coordinated system of deception intended to impose strategic surprise on the enemy. For Bagration, it was a double bluff.

  Four Soviet tank armies were deliberately left in the Lvov area and the Germans were allowed to identify them. While those forces sat visible in the south, massive concentrations of men and matériel moved quietly into Byelorussia. The basic directive from Stavka on the 31st of May set immediate front objectives at 30-40 miles and wider objectives at no more than 100 miles, a departure from earlier, more sweeping plans that had often outrun Soviet logistics. Stalin agreed to push the original start date of the 15th to the 20th of June back by four days, partly at the urging of Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the two special Stavka representatives appointed to coordinate the operation.

  As late as the 19th of June, Army Group Centre noted in its intelligence summary that concentrations of Soviet air forces had grown to 4,500 out of a total 11,000 and that this raised doubts about the German High Command's estimate. OKH dismissed those doubts. Soviet partisan formations in Byelorussia had been instructed to attack railways and communications from the 19th of June, placing large numbers of explosive charges on rail tracks. The disruption was significant, though many charges were cleared. The Germans still did not see what was coming.

• 4. The Walls Fall In

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  On the night of the 21st to the 22nd of June, the Red Army launched probing attacks on German frontline positions. The main blow landed in the early morning of the 22nd, with an artillery bombardment described as being of unprecedented scale against the Wehrmacht's defensive works. In the north, the 1st Baltic Front pushed the German IX Corps back across the Dvina and encircled the LIII Corps, under General Friedrich Gollwitzer, in the city of Vitebsk by the 24th of June, opening a gap in the German line 25 miles wide.

  Gollwitzer received permission to retreat with three divisions, leaving one behind to hold Vitebsk as a Feste Platz, one of the fortified towns Hitler had ordered held at all costs. But by the time the order arrived the city was already encircled. Gollwitzer chose to disobey and ordered his entire corps to break out together on the morning of the 26th. They ran almost immediately into Soviet roadblocks. Vitebsk fell by the 29th of June; all 28,000 men of the LIII Corps were eliminated.

  To the south, the city of Orsha, protected by the 78th Assault Division and its extensive fortifications, fell on the evening of the 26th of June, after the 11th Guards Army shattered the VI Corps to the north. The corps commander, General Georg Pfeiffer, was killed on the 28th after losing contact with his own divisions. Pavel Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army then poured through the gap, reaching the Berezina River on the 28th of June.

• 5. Rokossovsky's Gamble

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  The fight for Bobruysk produced one of the operation's most striking command episodes. General Konstantin Rokossovsky, commanding the 1st Belorussian Front, proposed attacking both Bobruysk and Slutsk simultaneously with equal strength. Stalin and the Soviet General Staff initially rejected the plan. Rokossovsky, a former Gulag prisoner, insisted and personally promised Stalin the operation would succeed.

  His plan divided the front into two sectors. General Alexander Gorbatov's 3rd Army would strike from Rogachev, supervised by Zhukov. Rokossovsky himself would control the forces at Parichi, including the Cavalry-Mechanised Group under Lieutenant-General Issa Pliev, which combined the 4th Guards Cavalry Corps and the 1st Mechanised Corps. On the 24th of June 1944, 7,000 guns, mortars and rocket launchers opened fire on the German 9th Army.

  The Rogachev sector ran into stiff resistance and advanced little. But Pliev's group swept across the edge of the Pripyet Marshes and seized Feste Platz Slutsk, cutting the 9th Army's southern escape routes. The 65th Army then swung north and stormed Bobruysk by the 29th of June, destroying the 9th Army. Generalfeldmarschall Ernst Busch was dismissed by Hitler on the 28th, replaced by Walther Model. Stalin's respect for Rokossovsky was such that he began addressing him by his patronymic, Konstantin Konstantinovich, a distinction otherwise reserved for Boris Shaposhnikov. The victory at Bobruysk also brought Rokossovsky his promotion to Marshal of the Soviet Red Army.

• 6. Minsk and Its Aftermath

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  Minsk, capital of the Byelorussian SSR, fell on the 4th of July 1944. The 2nd Guards Tank Corps broke into the city in the early hours of the 3rd; fighting in the centre continued until the following day. The 5th Guards Tank Army and 65th Army then closed the encirclement to the west of the city, trapping the entire German 4th Army and remnants of the 9th Army in a pocket east of Minsk. Of the roughly 100,000 soldiers caught there, only a fraction escaped. Between the 22nd of June and the 4th of July, Army Group Centre lost 25 divisions and 300,000 men; in the weeks that followed it lost another 100,000.

  To demonstrate the scale of the victory, 57,000 German prisoners taken from the encirclement east of Minsk were marched through Moscow. Even moving quickly, twenty abreast, they took 90 minutes to pass through the streets. This became known as the Parade of the Vanquished.

  The offensive did not stop at Minsk. Soviet forces pushed on into Lithuania, with Vilnius encircled by the 8th of July and taken on the 13th, despite a German counter-attack by the 6th Panzer Division that briefly opened an escape corridor on the 12th. Białystok fell on the 27th of July. Rokossovsky's 1st Belorussian Front reached the Bug River by the 21st of July and the eastern bank of the Vistula by the 25th. Lublin was taken on the 24th of July, Brest on the 28th. By the 2nd of August, Soviet forces held bridgeheads over the Vistula, within striking distance of Warsaw.

• 7. The Scale of Destruction

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  German losses in Operation Bagration exceeded those at Stalingrad by every measurable gauge. Newer research puts German dead, missing or wounded at between 400,000 and 540,000. German sources recorded 27 divisions badly mauled, with 19 disbanded outright and 7 merged to form just two divisions. Thirty-one of the 47 German divisional and corps commanders were killed or captured; nine generals were killed, including two corps commanders; 22 were captured, including four corps commanders. Lieutenant-Generals Zutavern and Philipp, of the 18th Panzergrenadier and 134th Infantry Divisions respectively, died by suicide.

  Soviet losses were also severe. The Red Army suffered 180,040 killed and missing and 590,848 wounded and sick. It lost 2,957 tanks, 2,447 artillery pieces and 822 aircraft.

  The offensive isolated Army Group North and Army Group North Ukraine from each other and forced both to withdraw from Soviet territory faster than they otherwise would have. The destruction of Army Group Centre also coincided, within weeks, with the annihilation of some of Germany's strongest Western Front units in the Falaise Pocket during Operation Overlord. The Germans responded by transferring armoured units from Italy, where they could cede ground, to slow the Soviet advance near Warsaw. The advance that Bagration set in motion ended only at the Vistula, and it was from those Vistula bridgeheads that the Vistula-Oder Offensive would later carry Soviet forces to within sight of Berlin.