The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [301]
This huge Russian summer offensive, timed for the moment when attention in the Reich would be most concentrated on events in Normandy, was launched on Thursday, 22 June 1944, the third anniversary of Barbarossa. The codename was chosen by Stalin personally, to commemorate his fellow Georgian, the great Marshal Peter Bagration of the 1812 campaign. The attack was supported by no fewer than 400 guns per mile along a 350-mile front connecting Smolensk, Minsk and Warsaw. Bagration was intended utterly to destroy Army Group Centre, thus opening the way to Berlin itself. The 3rd and 2nd Russian and 1st Belorussian Fronts had almost total air superiority, much of the Luftwaffe having been flown off westwards to try to deal with D-Day and the Combined Bomber Offensive. Rokossovky achieved surprise on 24 June when the tanks and guns of his 1st Belorussian Front suddenly appeared out of the swamps of the northern Pripet Marshes, supposedly impassable to heavy vehicles, but which his engineers had diligently prepared with wooden causeways.28
Much of the Third Panzer Army was destroyed in a few days. The hole created in the by then wildly overstretched German line was soon no less than 250 miles wide and 100 miles deep, allowing major cities to be recaptured such as Vitebsk on 25 June and Minsk – where 300,000 Germans were encircled and captured – on 3 July. Hitler’s strategy of ‘fortified localities’ had to be put into operation immediately at Mogilev, Bobruysk and elsewhere, with the predictable result that the Russians merely bypassed them and left them to be besieged by reserve troops, rather as the Americans were doing in the Pacific by ‘island-hopping’. By 3 July the Russians had moved forward 200 miles from their start lines. Army Group Centre had effectively ceased to exist except on paper, and instead a vast gap had appeared between Army Group South and Army Group North. For the Germans, Bagration has accurately been described as ‘one of the most sudden and complete military disasters in history’.29 Its importance cannot be underestimated. ‘Even in the months following the Allied invasion in Normandy,’ records an historian, ‘German casualties in Russia continued to average four times the number in the West.’30
Although they were exhausted by constant combat over many months, under-equipped, outnumbered and largely unsupported from the air, Army Group Centre might have remained intact had it not been saddled with tactics as illogical and untutored as that of ‘fortified localities’ and other related concepts that Hitler invented. Had the Führer visited the front more often, he might have seen for himself how Order No. 11, which called for ‘stubbornly defended strong points in the depth of the battlefield in the event of any breakthrough’, was a recipe for denuding the German line yet further, merely permitting further such breakthroughs.
Field Marshal Walther Model, by then nicknamed ‘Hitler’s fireman’, was appointed to Field Marshal Ernst Busch’s command of the 1.2 million men of Army Group Centre, while continuing to command Army Group North Ukraine, but he could do little to hold back the Russians. By 10 July, twenty-five of the thirty-three divisions of Army Group Centre were trapped, with only a small minority able to extricate themselves. The choice of the third anniversary