2RHPZ
06-30-2004, 11:43 AM
By Martin Sieff
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Washington, DC, Jun. 4 (UPI) -- Russia's biggest contribution to the success of D-Day started 16 days after the invasion of Normandy.
On that day -- June 22, 1944 -- three years to the day after Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union -- the Red Army launched the most-crucial single military campaign of its revenge. Named Operation Bagration, after the great military hero of the 1812 war against Napoleon Bonaparte, it has gone down in history as the Battle of Belorussia. And more than Stalingrad, more than Kursk, it was the battle that broke the back of the German army in the East and decided the fate of Central and Eastern Europe for a generation to come.
Wehrmacht staff officers at their operational headquarters in Minsk watched in disbelief as the Russians used the very tactical concepts they themselves had used with such effectiveness from June 22, 1941, for 15 months to conquer vast swathes of European Russia.
In the space of a month, Army Group Center, the great center of gravity and hard strategic rock on which German domination of Russia's heartland had rested for three years, was annihilated. Sweeping Red Army tank columns surrounded 100,000 of the best troops Nazi Germany still had. In all, the Germans lost 350,000 men. It was a cataclysmic defeat on an even bigger scale than Stalingrad.
In German military history, the campaign was named "The Destruction of Army Group Center." It came at the same time, and in large part made possible, the great Allied victory in the West at the Battle of Normandy. The scale of destruction visited upon Army Group Center dwarfed that visited within the Falaise Pocket upon Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt's formations in the West.
The military achievement of the Soviet armies was far greater, too. When Gen. Dwight Eisenhower gave the green light for Operation Overlord, the climactic Allied operation of World War II in the West, some 53 or so Wehrmacht divisions were assembled throughout Western Europe to meet it. But at the same time, Hitler had to keep more than 180 Wehrmacht divisions of much greater operational strength simultaneously fully engaged against the Red Army alone in the East.
The Battle of Belorussia did more than annihilate the German army in the East. It also established the Soviet Union as the dominant Eurasian military power for almost half a century right down to the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.
Because of the Battle of Belorussia, it was inevitable that all of Central Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to the borders of Greece would fall under Soviet control before the Anglo-American armies driving in on the Third Reich from the West could get there.
The Battle of Belorussia also holds a crucial lesson on the strength, endurance and resilience of the Russian people. In the three years following June 22, 1941, more than 25 million Russians died at the hands of the Nazi invaders. Not since the Mongol heirs of Genghis Khan conquered China in the 13th century, had so much loss of life been visited upon a single nation. Even a limited nuclear strike upon Russia or the United States now would not produce such comparable casualties and human suffering.
Yet on June 22, 1944 -- a date very pointedly chosen for the third anniversary of the terrible invasion -- the Russians struck back. And, unlike the Germans, they won.
The devastation the Russian people suffered during those three years from June 1941 to June 1944 dwarfed in scale even the impoverishment and national humiliation they experienced in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet they surged back from adversity to win the decisive battle of World War II and became one of the two dominant global superpowers thereafter.
And because the Russians won such an annihilating victory in the Battle of Belorussia, they ensured the success of the Allied drive to liberate Western Europe too. Hitler and his OKW command staff had no reserves of troops they could switch from the East to the West to try and plug the holes in the bursting dam as the American legions of Gens. George S. Patton and Omar N. Bradley swept across France.
Patton realized the moment could not last and in the idyllic days of August appealed in vain for the gasoline supplies to help him smash through the Siegfried Line, the Third Reich's formidable West Wall, before Hitler could mobilize the reserves he needed to man it.
Still, the Russian victory in Belorussia saved at the least thousands, probably scores of thousands, of American and British lives. It was also the greatest encirclement defeat the Nazis ever suffered. Unlike the Falaise Gap in the West, where a too-cautious Bradley again did need heed Patton's calls to allow him to drive ahead and seal the trap shut, the Soviet commanders did not make the same mistake. No one got out of the Minsk pocket. The swamps and forests of Belorussia became a huge killing zone as Red Army forces and their partisan auxiliaries took their overdue but thorough revenge.
When the late Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was asked to compile a list of military blunders and elementary disasters to avoid, he put at the very top of the list, "Invading Russia. It is always a bad idea."
The German soldiers serving in Army Group Center learned that lesson the hard way in June 1944. Most of them did not survive the experience.
But the Allied troops fighting through Normandy at the time, hedgerow by bloody hedgerow had good cause to be thankful for it.
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Washington, DC, Jun. 4 (UPI) -- Russia's biggest contribution to the success of D-Day started 16 days after the invasion of Normandy.
On that day -- June 22, 1944 -- three years to the day after Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union -- the Red Army launched the most-crucial single military campaign of its revenge. Named Operation Bagration, after the great military hero of the 1812 war against Napoleon Bonaparte, it has gone down in history as the Battle of Belorussia. And more than Stalingrad, more than Kursk, it was the battle that broke the back of the German army in the East and decided the fate of Central and Eastern Europe for a generation to come.
Wehrmacht staff officers at their operational headquarters in Minsk watched in disbelief as the Russians used the very tactical concepts they themselves had used with such effectiveness from June 22, 1941, for 15 months to conquer vast swathes of European Russia.
In the space of a month, Army Group Center, the great center of gravity and hard strategic rock on which German domination of Russia's heartland had rested for three years, was annihilated. Sweeping Red Army tank columns surrounded 100,000 of the best troops Nazi Germany still had. In all, the Germans lost 350,000 men. It was a cataclysmic defeat on an even bigger scale than Stalingrad.
In German military history, the campaign was named "The Destruction of Army Group Center." It came at the same time, and in large part made possible, the great Allied victory in the West at the Battle of Normandy. The scale of destruction visited upon Army Group Center dwarfed that visited within the Falaise Pocket upon Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt's formations in the West.
The military achievement of the Soviet armies was far greater, too. When Gen. Dwight Eisenhower gave the green light for Operation Overlord, the climactic Allied operation of World War II in the West, some 53 or so Wehrmacht divisions were assembled throughout Western Europe to meet it. But at the same time, Hitler had to keep more than 180 Wehrmacht divisions of much greater operational strength simultaneously fully engaged against the Red Army alone in the East.
The Battle of Belorussia did more than annihilate the German army in the East. It also established the Soviet Union as the dominant Eurasian military power for almost half a century right down to the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.
Because of the Battle of Belorussia, it was inevitable that all of Central Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to the borders of Greece would fall under Soviet control before the Anglo-American armies driving in on the Third Reich from the West could get there.
The Battle of Belorussia also holds a crucial lesson on the strength, endurance and resilience of the Russian people. In the three years following June 22, 1941, more than 25 million Russians died at the hands of the Nazi invaders. Not since the Mongol heirs of Genghis Khan conquered China in the 13th century, had so much loss of life been visited upon a single nation. Even a limited nuclear strike upon Russia or the United States now would not produce such comparable casualties and human suffering.
Yet on June 22, 1944 -- a date very pointedly chosen for the third anniversary of the terrible invasion -- the Russians struck back. And, unlike the Germans, they won.
The devastation the Russian people suffered during those three years from June 1941 to June 1944 dwarfed in scale even the impoverishment and national humiliation they experienced in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet they surged back from adversity to win the decisive battle of World War II and became one of the two dominant global superpowers thereafter.
And because the Russians won such an annihilating victory in the Battle of Belorussia, they ensured the success of the Allied drive to liberate Western Europe too. Hitler and his OKW command staff had no reserves of troops they could switch from the East to the West to try and plug the holes in the bursting dam as the American legions of Gens. George S. Patton and Omar N. Bradley swept across France.
Patton realized the moment could not last and in the idyllic days of August appealed in vain for the gasoline supplies to help him smash through the Siegfried Line, the Third Reich's formidable West Wall, before Hitler could mobilize the reserves he needed to man it.
Still, the Russian victory in Belorussia saved at the least thousands, probably scores of thousands, of American and British lives. It was also the greatest encirclement defeat the Nazis ever suffered. Unlike the Falaise Gap in the West, where a too-cautious Bradley again did need heed Patton's calls to allow him to drive ahead and seal the trap shut, the Soviet commanders did not make the same mistake. No one got out of the Minsk pocket. The swamps and forests of Belorussia became a huge killing zone as Red Army forces and their partisan auxiliaries took their overdue but thorough revenge.
When the late Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was asked to compile a list of military blunders and elementary disasters to avoid, he put at the very top of the list, "Invading Russia. It is always a bad idea."
The German soldiers serving in Army Group Center learned that lesson the hard way in June 1944. Most of them did not survive the experience.
But the Allied troops fighting through Normandy at the time, hedgerow by bloody hedgerow had good cause to be thankful for it.