Operation Bagration
Operation Bagration (Russian: OPерация Багратиóн) was the code name given to the great general offensive of the Red Army to destroy the Group of the German Center Armies during the summer of 1944. On June 22, 1944, three years after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviet forces began the operation, coinciding with the open conflict on the Western Front over the landing of ally in Normandy, started two weeks earlier. The attack, which was to prevent the transfer of entire German divisions to the Western Front and withdraw Finland, Romania and Bulgaria from the war, reached its peak five weeks later and ended up inflicting huge losses on the German side. When the Red Army arrived at the gates of Warsaw at the end of July, it forced Nazi Germany back into its own territory, until its final defeat in the war with the fall of Berlin a year later. It was the greatest defeat of the German army in its entire history.
Background
Soviet Plans
At the end of November 1943, the Tehran conference was held, the first to bring together the allied presidents Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In that meeting, characterized by mutual mistrust, Roosevelt and Churchill told Stalin that in August of the following year, they would land on the French coast, finally opening the western front that the USSR had been demanding for three years. Stalin then argued that the USSR should carry out an offensive that would deal a devastating blow to the German forces, simultaneously with the Allied landing, and thus prevent the transfer of German forces to the Western Front, but for strategic reasons, Stalin postponed it.
Planning for the operation began in the spring of 1944. In mid-April the General Staff postponed due to adverse weather until June 6. On May 20, after receiving no other proposals, Stalin himself chose the code name for the operation: "Bagration", named after the commander Pyotr Bagration, who gained fame during the 1812 Patriotic War at the Battle of Borodino. in which he died facing the Napoleonic Army. The offensive would begin on the third anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 23. The Soviet high command held the final conference on May 22 and 23. The objective was the destruction of Army Group Center, with a simultaneous advance in six sectors and with two main offensives that would advance on Babruisk, on the Minsk route, which was where the three Belarusian fronts coming from two directions would have to converge, at both sides of the Berézina River.
This battle has been described as the triumph of the concept of military deception, based on a complete disinformation of the adversary thanks to the complete coordination of all movements on the front lines and signal traffic in order to mislead the enemy about the real offensive target. Despite the large number of forces deployed in front of Belarus, the Soviet forces managed to completely prevent the Germans from knowing where the offensive would be concentrated, until it was too late. The Soviets called this type of operation maskirovka, which in Russian literally means "camouflage," "concealment," or "disguising."
The Soviet Stavka had defined three attack options by mid-1944, making it clear to both the German Army High Command (OKH) and the Stavka itself that the Soviet forces would not miss the opportunity to launch a major offensive in the boreal summer of 1944 (between June and September). The Red Army's options were:
- A Soviet attack from northern Ukraine against Romania, trying to cross the Carpaths;
- An attack started from northern Ukraine against southern Poland to reach the Vistula valley and to follow the Baltic Sea;
- An attack launched from northern Belarus on the Baltic coast.
All alternatives were rejected, due to the risk of meeting severe German resistance, and it was finally decided that an advance through the very center of Belarus was the only option that would allow the Wehrmacht to be taken by surprise, considering that the swamps of The Pripyat river basin was a military obstacle that was almost impossible to cross, but precisely the difficulty in saving this geographical accident caused the Center Army Group of the Wehrmacht to still have troops in good condition, unaffected by the Soviet counteroffensives. Given this, the Stavka decided that the main attack of the Red Army would be launched north of the Pripyat swamps against the main forces of Army Group Center, in order to destroy as many German troops as possible and at the same time compromise the escape route. Army Group North.
The maskirovka was designed by the Soviets in great detail for Operation Bagration and involved the apparent deployment of six armored armies in the Ukraine, left highly visible for Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance, causing a German defensive deployment intended to counter an alleged attack on Army Group South from northern Ukraine towards the Baltic. The traffic of Soviet vehicles was intentionally reduced in the central zone of Belarus and intensified in the north-western sector of Ukraine, so that the German OKH would not suspect that the real blow would be dealt by the Red Army precisely in Belarus against Army Group Center. While the few Soviet vehicles that transited through the Belarusian region carried large contingents of troops, the numerous Soviet convoys that appeared in the Ukrainian area of Lviv and Przemyśl were running empty, fooling the Germans and their aerial reconnaissance. The movement of Soviet reserve troops was also carried out in the utmost secrecy, issuing orders well in advance, requiring the staffs of each Soviet Army to issue only verbal (and never written) orders, and avoiding any use of radios or telecommunication devices. In the same way, the Stavka ordered to transport troops only at night and without turning on the lights of the trucks; In order to avoid accidents, very strict orders were issued for the trucks to march at the same speed as the convoy.
Similarly, it was arranged that the deployment of Red Army forces in the front positions would be executed only when all the divisions of an army had reached the assembly point, prohibiting isolated divisions from marching to the front. It was even ordered that, in case of spotting a possible German reconnaissance plane, the Soviet ground forces dispersed and pretended to build roads or airfields. Operation Bagration, in combination with the Lviv-Sandomir Offensive launched a few weeks later in the Ukraine, allowed the Soviet Union to recapture almost all the territory it controlled before the German invasion in 1941, penetrate German Reich territory through East Prussia, and reach the outskirts of Warsaw after occupying the region east of the Vistula River from the General Government, the portion of Poland occupied by Germany after the partition of Poland between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
German forces and plans
After the defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, German troops retreated until they established the eastern front east of the Baltics, east of Belarus, and west of Ukraine. The Germans knew that in the summer of 1944 the Soviet Union would carry out an offensive, more or less simultaneously with the Allied landing on the Atlantic coast. Due to the fact that the Soviets had made the maximum advance in the Ukraine, coming to be located just 200 km from Warsaw, the Germans discounted that the attack would be concentrated there, in the Kovel area. The successful Soviet intelligence was oriented to ratify that belief.
To prepare the defense, Hitler strengthened the armies located in the Ukraine by transferring large numbers of troops, tanks, and weapons from Belarus. Simultaneously, in March 1944, he dismissed Generals Erich von Manstein and Ewald von Kleist, and reorganized the two armies established in the Ukraine, placing at their head two "convinced Nazi" generals, Walter Model (the only German general with an officer of the SS in his staff) and Ferdinand Schörner. From that moment, Hitler decides to end the strategy based on maneuvers, to adopt a strategy of "strong places", such as Ternopil and Kovel in Ukraine, Vitebsk, Orsha, Maguilov and Babruisk, located in eastern Belarus (on which the Bragation operation will fall), and Vilnius in Lithuania.
In the area of Belarus, there was Army Group Center, under the command of Ernst Busch, a soldier with little initiative of his own who limited himself to carrying out Hitler's orders. Additionally, Hitler decided not to establish a second line of defense in Belarus, so that his generals on the ground could not use them to arrange a withdrawal. Army Group Center had been drastically reduced in troops and tanks, which were sent to the two Ukrainian armies, due to the previously mentioned belief that the Soviet offensive would be concentrated in Kovel. However, the bulk of the Bagration operation will be concentrated here.
In the north, in the area of the Baltic republics, captured by Germany, was located Army Group North, commanded by Georg Lindemann.
At that time, Hitler was mainly focused on the Western Front, which would open with the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, something that the Soviets had been demanding from the Allies for three years. Hitler's preference for the Western Front and insufficient planning on the Eastern Front, was due to the fact that the Nazi leader already considered by then that the war against the USSR was a lost cause.
The attack begins
In the northern zone, Soviet Marshal Ivan Bagramyan, commanding the First Baltic Front, launched a major offensive on July 5 (comprising the 43rd Army, the 4th Shock Army, and the 6th Army). of Guards) towards Lithuania, targeting the cities of Šiauliai and Kaunas, while also the Soviet forces were preparing to reach the Baltic coast and block the German forces stationed in Estonia and eastern Latvia. The city of Šiauliai was taken by the Soviets on July 27, who with this triumph entered deep into Lithuanian soil, while on July 31 the Red Army forces reached the Gulf of Riga threatening an imminent siege of the Teutonic forces. located to the east of Latvia and Estonia; in fact, most of Army Group North was concentrated along the Baltic coast from Narva to Riga (including some Waffen SS), so the Soviet offensive made OKH fear a massive encirclement against the remnants of Army Group North. Northern armies of the Wehrmacht.
Only a massive German counter-attack (both from the south and from the encircled forces) was subsequently able to re-establish the unbroken land connection from Lithuania with the encircled German troops further north, but this was only enough to allow Army Group North a quick and effective withdrawal. ordered in the month of September, definitively abandoning Estonian territory and eastern Latvia, to concentrate on the Courland coast. In doing so, Operation Bagration also threatened to isolate the German units of Army Group North fighting in Courland from the rest of the Reich; just as it meant for the Soviets to occupy most of Lithuania to, from there, then penetrate into German territory, in East Prussia, in mid-August 1944.
Meanwhile, in Belarus, the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center numbered about 800,000 soldiers, which would be faced by 1,200,000 Soviet soldiers. The rapid advance was initially achieved by the surprise of the attack and the lack of mobile reserves that would allow the movement of German troops, beginning the attack with a sustained air and artillery bombardment of the German positions, then the Soviet troops took excellent advantage of their numerical superiority in infantry and artillery on the Germans, trapping Wehrmacht detachments in small pockets along the front; this allowed the Soviets to overwhelm the defensive positions of the Germans and maintain a sustained advance where the surprise factor was a decisive element in favor of the Red Army. OKH's belief in a Soviet attack on Army Group South prevented the German forces in Byelorussia from having enough gun batteries and Panzer units in time to stop the violent and sudden Soviet advance, thus it was decisively fatal for the German forces of Army Group Center. This situation was aggravated by the fact that the Soviets simultaneously launched the Lviv-Sandomir Offensive in the southern sector, which forced OKH into excessive logistical effort to provide enough guns and tanks to two seriously threatened sectors: Ukraine and Byelorussia.
In Belarus the factor of surprise led to the Soviet forces of the 1.er Belorussian Front and of the 2nd Belorussian Front under Marshal Konstantin Rokosovski at the gates of Warsaw at the end of July, after damaging the Wehrmacht's 4th Army in successive offensives against Minsk, Mogilev, Vitebsk and Babruisk, expelling the Germans from Belarusian soil throughout the month of July, and using in this operation massive air support at critical moments when the Luftwaffe was seriously compromised in France to stop the British and Americans who had just landed in Normandy.
Using their numerical superiority to the full, the Soviets launched their attack on Vitebsk and advanced rapidly towards the town itself, encircling it on June 25. Despite stubborn German resistance, Soviet troops took Vitebsk after fierce fighting on June 27. The situation in Minsk was also a total surprise for the German forces, since this city was the Belarusian capital and the headquarters of Army Group Center, as well as its communications center. The Soviet attacks against Minsk began on June 25, when the German troops stationed in the outskirts of the city were quickly overwhelmed by Red Army soldiers; German defense lines were also rendered useless by Soviet superiority in tanks and artillery, making it unfeasible for German troops to hold their positions for long.
In Babruisk, the Soviets launched their offensive on June 25 and soon controlled all access to the town, forming a kessel (encirclement) that enclosed a large number of German troops taken by surprise; here the German resistance was especially violent and the Wehrmacht soldiers trapped in Babruisk (two full infantry divisions, plus a panzer brigade) quickly realized that they had no chance of receiving reinforcements to flee the encirclement, for which reason they should break through the heavy Soviet artillery fire to reach Minsk. The Soviets launched the attack of the troops surrounded in Babruisk, starting fierce combats in the surroundings of the town, and then a very violent urban combat within the city itself. The German commands of Babruisk, from Division 383 and Division 134, had to fight simultaneously against the Soviet troops that were trying to take the city and against the forces that were occupying the possible escape routes.
The command to exit was executed by the German garrison commanders despite suffering heavy casualties during the Soviet attacks against the town itself. In fact, the escape from the Babruisk kessel was especially difficult, since the point of departure arrival was Minsk itself, which was already under attack; furthermore, the German soldiers would have to cross a 40 kilometer zone of forests occupied by the Soviets, and at the same time break through the Soviet forces that were penetrating the city. The escape was successful despite the fact that the Wehrmacht units suffered some casualties. The town of Babruisk was finally taken by the Soviets on June 27, seizing the German soldiers who had to be left behind in the evacuation (as the combat wounded), while the survivors of the German garrison who were able to flee the encirclement headed to Minsk.
The capital of the Byelorussian SSR, Minsk, had become the rallying point for all the Teutonic troops retreating from the environs of Mogilev and Vitebsk, as well as for the German garrison in the city of Babruisk that had been able to flee from the same besieged town; however, the German forces in Minsk themselves were already under heavy pressure from the Red Army, and the surviving Wehrmacht who reached the Belarusian capital were immediately absorbed into the defense of the city by order of General Ernst Busch, who insisted to hold the city for as long as possible. Despite stubborn German resistance, Minsk was taken by the Soviets on 3 July after a fierce defensive battle, capturing 50,000 German soldiers in a new pocket, including small groups of German soldiers who they had retreated to more advanced posts, were captured or had to flee immediately as soon as they reached Minsk, before the imminent capture of the city by the Red Army.
After the fall of Minsk, the push of the Soviet troops continued, setting the westernmost areas of Belarus, bordering Poland, as their next objectives, launching attacks against Vilna, Grodno and Bialystok. At this stage of the fighting, the Red Army vanguards were supported by Polish partisans.
The Soviets enter Lithuania and Poland
The AK was already very well organized at that time, and launched a revolt in the city of Vilnius (the current capital of Lithuania) on July 7, upon learning of the Soviet advance. Despite having little heavy weaponry, the Polish partisans managed to break into Vilnius and encircle the Wehrmacht garrison, simultaneously faced with stopping the Soviets and regaining control over Vilnius. After several days of encirclement, the German forces had to withdraw before the push of the Red Army in the east of the city and the impossibility of repelling the AK, which had taken control of Vilnius on July 14.
Soviet advance guards arrived en masse the next day, but on Stalin's orders, the Soviet NKVD almost immediately seized the AK leaders who tried to reach a Polish-Soviet collaboration agreement, while the Stalinist regime was eager to suppress all Polish political or military force overshadowing the Polish communist-controlled Armia Ludowa. The rest of the Polish AK partisans, understanding the impossibility of maintaining good relations with the Red Army, returned to their refuges in the forests of the region, beginning a tenacious guerrilla fight against the Soviets.
Parallel to the offensive on Vilnius, the Soviet outposts continued their attack towards Grodno and Bialystok simultaneously, Grodno was a rallying point for Wehrmacht units that had been retreating for weeks from Belarus, but their rest was short-lived, while from July 5th the 49th Army, the 50th Army and the 3rd Army launched their attacks on the town.er Soviet Army of the 1st Belorussian Front. The surviving German units were the LV Armeekorps and the remnants of the 2nd Army, but they did not prevent the fall of Grodno on 16 July. The German troops defeated in Grodno tried to form a nucleus of resistance in Bialystok (under attack by the 3.er Soviet Army since July 5) but without reserves of food and ammunition, they had to withdraw despite stubborn resistance. The Soviets finally took Bialystok on July 27.
At the most severe points of attack, the qualitative and numerical advantages of the Soviets were overwhelming, so the Wehrmacht defense lines simply collapsed, lacking enough men to hold up against a massive attack by the Red Army, to the point that the abandonment of the positions was the only alternative for the Germans before an almost certain annihilation at the hands of the Soviets.
Offensives in the south
Northern Ukraine
The offensive executed by the Soviets on the northern territory of Ukraine was directed at the South Army Group of the Wehrmacht, although it had less success and scope than those obtained in Belarus a few weeks before. Even so, they managed to liberate the important city of Lviv and the entire area of western Ukraine that remained under German control.
Effects of the offensive on the Balkans
The serious German defeat caused by these operations also facilitated the entry of the USSR into the Balkans in August 1944, because at the end of the Bagration operation various Romanian politicians carried out a coup that overthrew the pro-Nazi regime of Ion Antonescu on 25 August and installed a government favorable to the Allies and the USSR. Fearing that the Soviets would launch their full military force against Romania and it being evident that the German forces of Army Group South would hastily withdraw to the northwest to avoid encirclement, leaving the Romanian troops to their fate. Indeed this happened and the Wehrmacht troops abandoned most of Romania concentrating only a brief defense in eastern Romania. German troops also promptly evacuated the Romanian region of Transylvania between August and September 1944, fighting there simultaneously against the Soviets and against the Romanian Army that had just switched sides.
Romania's change of sides also dragged Bulgaria, still an ally of the Third Reich. On September 5, the Red Army crossed the Danube (a river that forms the Romanian-Bulgarian border), invading the country. The Bulgarian government reacted by accepting the requirements of the USSR on September 8, the following day a new anti-Nazi regime was installed in Sofia that declared war on Germany. This decision did not affect Bulgaria militarily, as Germany had never stationed troops on Bulgarian soil. The success of Operation Bagration thus indirectly allowed Soviet troops to freely cross Romania and Bulgaria at the end of September 1944 to help Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia, precipitating the Nazi withdrawal from the Balkans.
A collateral consequence of Operation Bagration was then that Teutonic troops in Greece and the Balkans hastened their withdrawal in September and October 1944 for fear of being trapped if the Red Army launched an immediate offensive towards Hungary, cutting the land communication routes between the Balkan garrisons of the Wehrmacht and the territory of the Reich. Such fears were confirmed in mid-October, when the Soviets began to advance towards the Hungarian plain.
Results
Operation Bagration was only halted when the Soviet supply lines began to risk missing the vanguard, such had been its success. However, the Soviet decision to provide only irrelevant assistance to the Polish Territorial Army in the Warsaw Uprising that began just on August 1, a few days before Soviet forces reached the outskirts of that city, but without they effectively helped the Polish rebels. Also contributing to the German defeat was the sudden transfer of entire divisions to the west in response to the Normandy invasion, begun two weeks before Operation Bagration began. Thus the four "fronts" Soviet (army groups), totaling more than 120 divisions, charged into a German line even more precarious than it already was. At various points in the line of battle the Soviets were able to achieve 10 to 1 tank and 7 to 1 aircraft superiority over the Germans.
The question of the human losses of the Wehrmacht is debatable. The most common among Western historians, particularly the German military historian, Karl-Heinz Frieser, are as follows: 26,361 killed, 109,776 wounded, and some 262,929 missing and captured; adding more than 339,929 casualties. These figures are taken from ten-day casualty reports provided by the German armies. The extremely small death toll is due to the fact that many of the dead were registered as missing, sometimes all division personnel were declared missing.
However, these figures have been criticized. In particular, the American historian of the Eastern Front D. Glantz drew attention to the fact that the difference between the numerical strength of Army Group Center before and after the operation is much greater. D. Glantz emphasized that the data from the ten-day reports are the minimum, that is, they represent the minimum estimate. For the American historian, Army Group Center casualties were 450,000 between dead, wounded and taken prisoner. Russian researcher A. V. Isaev, in a speech on the "Echo of Moscow" radio, estimated German losses at about 500 thousand people. S. Zaloga estimated German losses at 300-350 thousand people before the surrender of the 4th Army inclusive, on 10 July.
According to official Soviet data published by the Soviet Information Office, German troop losses from June 23 to July 24, 1944 were estimated at 381,000 killed and missing, 150,000 wounded, 158,480 prisoners, 2,735 tanks and self-propelled guns, 631 aircraft and 57,152 vehicles. These figures, as is often the case with claims for enemy losses, are significantly overestimated. In any case, the point on the question of the human losses of the Wehrmacht in "Bagration" has not yet been raised.
It is also necessary to pay attention to the fact that in all cases the losses of Army Group Center are calculated, excluding the losses of Army Groups North and North Ukraine, as the offensives carried out, simultaneously with the operation Bagration; such as the 1st and 2nd Jassy-Kishinev Offensive, and the Lviv-Sandomierz Offensive, which, with Romania as an Axis ally, had 203,294 casualties among dead, wounded, and prisoners.
Official Soviet casualties were 378,000 killed and missing, 587,306 wounded, and 5,073 Poles. 922 aircraft, 4,957 tanks and 5,447 guns, according to Krivosheev.
In order to demonstrate to other countries the meaning of success, 57,600 German POWs captured near Minsk marched through Moscow - for three hours and after the march the streets were washed and led straight to the Gulag (General Directorate of Correctional Work Camps and Colonies).
They clearly demonstrate the magnitude of the catastrophe that most affected Army Group Center, the loss of command personnel was enormous.
Compared to other battles, this was by far the biggest victory in numerical terms for the Soviets, plus they reconquered a vast expanse of territory in two months, recapturing almost all areas of the USSR before the 1941 German invasion. The German Wehrmacht no longer recovered from the losses of material and soldiers suffered during this offensive. At the end of the Bagration operation, the Teutonic forces lost almost a quarter of all the active troops they held on the Eastern Front. The greatest losses suffered until then by the Wehrmacht were the casualties sustained in the 200 days of the Battle of Stalingrad, but the Bagration operation caused them a much higher number of casualties in just 58 days. The Red Army offensive reached the Baltic shores and was aimed at isolating Army Group North in Courland until the end of the war, while Army Group South was forced to withdraw promptly from the Soviet territory of Ukraine, in order to to avoid massive fences. The prompt entry of the Red Army into Bessarabia, then integrated into Romania. This fact indirectly caused the Romanian and Bulgarian regimes to abandon their alliance with the Third Reich in August and September 1944, respectively, facilitating the penetration of the USSR in the Balkans. Faced with the threat that Soviet advances would cut off the escape route in the Balkans, the German command authorized the evacuation of Army Group E from Greece on August 26. In turn, Finland was threatened by a Soviet invasion and left the Axis that same month.
To put this battle in perspective, in the Normandy landings and the invasion of Italy the Allies faced only 100 divisions of the total Wehrmacht forces available in Europe; Some 245 divisions of the German forces were fighting the Red Army somewhere on the Eastern Front. In other words, compared to the figures of Operation Bagration, the Normandy invasion was a numerically smaller theater where both sides used far fewer men and resources than in Operation Bagration, which confirmed that on the Eastern Front of World War II the Germans had lost to the Soviets.
In the aforementioned context of maskirovka, the Germans were the object during the month of June 1944 of two of the greatest strategic deceptions in modern military history. On the one hand, with Operation Fortitude, for the Normandy campaign, the Western Allies created the fictitious I United States Army Group (FUSAG) under the command of Patton and induced the German OKW to hold the north of the Seine and the pass de Calais large forces waiting for a landing that never took place, thinking that the landing in Normandy was a diversionary operation and not the main action. On the other hand, a few weeks later, the Soviets consummated their deception in Operation Bagration, ensuring with their skilful maskirovka that the German command of the OKH deployed its troops to stop the coup in the wrong place, assigning the armored units from Army Group Center to Model's Army Group North Ukraine and leaving Army Group Center with virtually no reserves to meet the Soviet onslaught.
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