On today's date seventy years ago the first phases of Operation Bagration began. The goal of the Red Army offensive was to clear the German Army from Belorussia and destroy their Army Group Center. The Soviets chose June 22 to start the offensive because it was the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Two weeks earlier the Western Allies had opened a second front in the war against Germany by landing 150,000 men, roughly 15 divisions, on the beaches of Normandy. For Operation Bagration the Red Army had massed 166 divisions in Belorussia, more than 1½ million men. By the end of August the Soviets would be on the Vistula, across the river from Warsaw, and Army Group Center would exist no more.
The Buildup
The Wikipedia map shows the area liberated during Operation Bagration in blue. You can see that the Germans had mostly been pushed out of Ukraine by this time. The Pripet marshes separate Belorussia from Ukraine and the German held territory north of the marshes was called "the Belorussian balcony." The Soviet objective was to clear this area of German forces.
Click for full size.
The German high command expected the next Soviet offensive to take place in Ukraine and had much stronger defenses there than in Belorussia. The Red Army did everything it could encourage the German misapprehension. Just as the Western Allies used deception to convince the Germans that their landing would be at Calais instead of Normandy, the Red Army used elaborate deceptive measures,
maskirovka in Russian, to hide their true intentions. As in England, dummy units and fake radio traffic were employed and materiel for the offensive was brought in at night. Huge stockpiles of equipment, fuel, ammunition and rations were amassed. 5,000 trains, each 50 freight cars long, made 90-100 trips per day to the staging areas. In the words of Alexander Werth, a Russian-born British correspondent, "It was—with the possible exception of Kursk—the most thoroughly prepared of all the Russian operations, with everything worked down to its finest detail, and nothing was left to improvisation..." According to German figures the Red Army enjoyed a 3:1 advantage in manpower. It was 10:1 in armored vehicles, 8:1 in guns and mortars and 5:1 in aircraft.
There were a number of reasons for the Red Army's overwhelming advantage in materiel. The German belief that the offensive would come from Ukraine led them to keep their assets in the south. Allied strategic bombing of factories in Germany made it difficult for the Germans to replace lost equipment and some units had been pulled out of Belorussia and sent west after the Normandy landings. The most significant factors, however, were Soviet production and Lend-Lease.
Soviet Production
After the German invasion in 1941 Soviet factories had been relocated east of the Urals. By 1944 these factories were churning out huge numbers of guns, tanks and planes. The Soviet Union had vast natural resources and by concentrating on the manufacture of a few relatively crude, cheap-to-build designs the Soviets were able to outproduce every other country in armor and aircraft. By 1944 the T-34 tank had been fitted with a larger 85mm gun and the T-34/85 was available in large numbers for the Belorussian offensive. By way of comparison, the US produced around 49,000 M-4 Sherman tanks; total production of the T-34 was over 57,000. The IS-2 heavy tank, pictured here, was in widespread use by late '44. With its 122mm gun it was more than a match for even the best German design. 3,854 of these monsters were built, more than double the total number of Tiger Is and IIs. It was the same in aircraft. The single most-produced combat aircraft to this day is the Il-2 Sturmovik ground attack plane with more than 36,000 made. Total wartime production of German Bf-109s and FW-190s was 51,000. The Soviets built over 54,000 Lags and Yaks. During Bagration the Germans could no longer concentrate their assets to achieve even local air superiority. They just didn't have the planes or the pilots.
Lend-Lease
Whenever I do a diary about the Great Patriotic War the subject of Lend-Lease invariably comes up in the comments. The Soviets did pretty well when it came to tanks, guns and planes but there were some items that they couldn't produce enough of. Before June 6 ,1944, before there was an actual Second Front, Lend-Lease was about all the help the Red Army got from the Allies. If you read the memoirs of Red Army soldiers you'll read about their appreciation for what they called Second Front soap, Second Front cheese, Second Front canned beef stew and Second Front American boots, which were particularly prized. By the time of Operation Bagration Lend-Lease goods and equipment were pouring into the Soviet Union. Lend-Lease allowed many Red Army tank units to be equipped with American radios, a step up from the signal flags they had been using. By far the most important Lend-Lease items were trucks. Soviet trucks were cast-off American designs, direct copies of Ford Model AA and Autocar 4x2s.The Soviets got thousands of up-to-date American made trucks; ¼-ton, 4x4 Willys Jeeps, ¾-ton 4x4 Dodge WC-series vehicles, and, most importantly, Studebaker 6x6 "Deuce-and-a-Halfs." The 152,000 Studebaker US-6 trucks that the Red Army got from the U.S. made a huge difference. In reliability and off-road performance they were far superior to any Soviet truck. They were used as troop transports, artillery tow vehicles and tankers. The famed Katyusha rocket launcher was standardized as the BM-13 using a Studebaker. Could the Red Army have beaten the Germans without those trucks ? Maybe, but it would have taken them a lot longer to get to Berlin. Interestingly, where Churchill imposed post-war austerity on Britain to pay the Yanks for every penny of their Lend-Lease aid, Stalin was given a pass. The tab for Lend-Lease aid to the USSR was picked up by the American taxpayer.
The Battle
The operations on June 22 were probing attacks all along the front, both to look for weaknesses in the German defenses and to make sure Fritz was in his forward defensive positions to receive the artillery barrage that signaled the beginning of the full offensive on the 23rd. The result was never in doubt. The Germans fell back everywhere before the Soviet juggernaut. They slowed the advance and inflicted casualties with well executed rear-guard actions, but they were running. They wouldn't stop running until the Red Army ran out of stem and supplies and halted at the Vistula. There were large encirclements of German units at Vitebsk, Minsk, Bobruisk, Brest and Vilnius. These were not as large as the ones that caught so many Soviets in '41 but the revenge must have been sweet. Army Group Center ceased to exist. As Werth put it:
According to the Germans themselves, the Russian offensive in Byelorussia was the gravest defeat ever inflicted on the Wermacht on the Eastern Front. Between twenty-five and twenty-eight German divisions were destroyed, a loss of at least 350,000 men. In the words of the official journal of the OKW [armed forces high command] the rout of Army Group Center (in Byelorussia) was 'a greater catastrophe than Stalingrad'.
Final Notes
On July 17, 1944 57,000 German POWs were marched through the streets of Moscow on their way to the Gulag. Very few of these would ever return to Germany. As a symbolic gesture the POW parade was followed by street cleaning trucks which washed the streets after the prisoners passed. In the course of Operation Bagration the first SS extermination camps were liberated in Eastern Poland. Alexander Werth and Vasily Grossman wrote accounts of what they saw at Majdanek and Treblinka respectively. Their reports were initially dismissed in the West as Bolshevik propaganda.