All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [343]
Through those summer months, the British and American peoples thought of little save their armies’ struggle in Normandy. But in Berlin, Hitler confronted an even graver threat: less than three weeks after the landings in France, in the east the Soviets launched Operation Bagration, the greatest offensive of the war and the last to be launched from Russian soil. Hitler’s refusal to allow a strategic retreat during the spring left his forces defending a 1,400-mile front, with few reserves. Two-thirds of the entire German army was still deployed against the Russians, but this was not enough to meet an assault by 2.4 million men and more than 5,000 tanks, deploying twice the firepower committed to the Soviets’ 1943 assaults.
Stalin said in a speech to his people on May Day 1944: ‘If we are to deliver our country and those of our allies from the danger of enslavement, we must pursue the wounded German beast and deliver the final blow to him in his own lair.’ The Russian word for ‘lair’ is berloga. Thus, armoured crews painted on their tanks not ‘On to Berlin!’ but ‘On to berloga!’ On 22 June three Soviet fronts under Zhukov’s command struck at the 700,000 men of Army Group Centre. Simultaneously, a partisan offensive in the German rear almost severed Field Marshal Ernest Busch’s lines of communication. The Russians concentrated four hundred guns a mile for their preliminary bombardment, along a front of 350 miles. They had total air superiority, thanks in large measure to the Western Allies’ destruction of the Luftwaffe over Germany.
When Zhukov’s infantry and tanks stormed forward into the palls of smoke and dust shrouding the defenders’ positions, German phone lines were dead, command links broken. Busch’s formations were shattered where they stood, vainly attempting to execute Hitler’s demand for a rigid, no-retreat defence. Designated ‘fortresses’ at Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev and Bobruisk were ordered to hold out to the last man. The consequences were catastrophic. The Russians swept forward in an irresistible tide, bypassing the ‘fortresses’ and driving headlong westwards. On 28 June Model was hastily transferred to replace Busch, but the situation was irretrievable. Minsk fell on 4 July, while in the north the attackers thrust towards Riga on the Baltic, which was soon encircled.
The Red Army never displayed much tactical subtlety, save perhaps in harassing the enemy through the hours of darkness, a skill in which its men surpassed the Western Allies. A British analyst has written: ‘In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity … in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.’ Russian attacks emphasised massed artillery bombardment and sacrificial tank and infantry advances, often led by ‘staff battalions’ – penal units of political and military prisoners offered the possibility of reprieve in return for accepting the likelihood of extinction. Some 442,700 men served in them, and most died. The Russians continued to suffer higher casualties than did the Germans. If all soldiers find it hard to describe to civilians afterwards what they have endured, for Russians it was uniquely difficult. Even in the years of victory, 1943 to 1945, the Red Army’s assault units accepted losses of around 25 per cent in each action, a casualty rate the Anglo-American forces would never have accepted as a constant.