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Soviet troops, Brest - 28 July 1944

BAGRATION OPERATION

The Bagration Operation was a Soviet code name for a multifront strategic offensive operation (23 June– 29 August 1944) during World War II on the eastern front that shattered the German Army Group Center. Named after Peter Bagration, a tsarist general of Georgian heritage who fell at Borodino in 1812, and also known as the Byelorussian Operation, it was perhaps the most important of the ‘‘ten destructive blows’’ during 1944 that marked all-out Soviet pursuit of the strategic initiative against Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Despite the recent Allied landing at Normandy, the German army retained over 235 divisions in the East, in comparison with roughly 85 in the West. Even as the Allies slugged their way through French hedgerows, the Bagration Operation initially yielded 57,000 German prisoners for a minor victory parade in Moscow, while continuing to roll back German army defenses in the East by several hundred additional kilometers.

The actual execution of Operation Bagration unfolded over two stages. The first, 23 June– 4 July 1944, began with breakthrough attacks rippling across the front from north to south. By 27 June, the 1st Baltic and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts had encircled and annihilated five German divisions at Vitebsk. Meanwhile, the 2nd Byelorussian Front had crossed the Dniester to seize Mogilev on 28 June. Almost simultaneously, the right wing of the 1st Byelorussian Front had encircled and destroyed six German divisions at Bobruysk. On 3 July, advancing mobile groups from the north and south flanking Soviet fronts occupied Minsk, encircling to the east the German Fourth and Ninth Armies (100,000 troops). As Soviet forward detachments pressed ever westward, they managed over the first twelve days of Bagration to reach penetrating depths of 225 to 280 kilometers (140 to 175 miles). These depths, together with the 400-kilometer-wide (250-milewide) breach in German defenses, signaled liberation for the majority of Byelorussia. The German defenders, meanwhile, hampered by Hitler’s injunction against retreat, by partisan sabotage against railroads, and by the piecemeal commitment of reinforcements, utterly failed to reverse their disintegrating situation.

The second stage of Bagration (5 July– 29 August 1944) involved pursuit and liquidation of resisting German pockets. Between 5 and 12 July, the German forces trapped east of Minsk attempted a breakout, but were either destroyed or captured. As the Soviet offensive rolled to the west, the German high command threw in units drawn from the west and other parts of the eastern front, but to no avail. Later coordinated offensives in the north by the 2nd Baltic Front and in the south by the 1st Ukrainian Front only added to German woes. By the end of August, the Red Army had established crossings on the Vistula and the Narew, and had overrun Vilnius and reached the border of East Prussia. German Army Group North was now isolated. But Soviet offensive momentum stopped short of Warsaw, where Stalin apparently chose consciously not to support a rebellion against the German occupiers by Polish patriots beyond his control.

Bagration had enormous military and political-military consequences. It liquidated German Army Group Center and inflicted punishing losses on neighboring groups. It destroyed two thousand German aircraft and twelve German divisions and brigades, while reducing to one-half the strength of an additional fifty divisions. Meanwhile, it opened the way for further Soviet offensives into central Europe and the clearing of the Baltics. The cost to the Soviets was more than 178,000 dead and another half-million wounded. In the realm of military art, Bagration represented a further refinement of breakthrough and encirclement operations and of the ability to insert, after such operations and without pause, mobile groups into the operational depths of enemy defenses.

http://www.soviethammer.net/blog/621...ion-operation/




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