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of Barbarossa for the launch of Bagration was instructive: the destruction of Army Group Centre was in many ways the mirror image of what had happened in the early stages of Barbarossa, with strongpoints being encircled with bewildering speed by swarms of highly mobile opponents. Bagration lasted for sixty-eight days, and saw average German casualties of more than 11,000 per day. In the course of this vast Kesselschlacht (cauldron battle), the Russians punched the Wehrmacht in its solar plexus, regained Belorussia and opened the way to attack East Prussia and the Baltic States. Small wonder the year 1944 is regarded as an annus mirabilis in today’s Russia. During Bagration, the Soviets claimed to have killed 381,000 Germans, wounded 384,000, captured a further 158,000 and destroyed or captured 2,000 tanks, 10,000 guns and 57,000 motor vehicles.31 For all that is made of the Anglo-American victory in the Falaise pocket, this victory was over ten times the size, yet is hardly known in the West beyond the cognoscenti of military history.

On 14 July 1944, the Russians attacked south of the Pripet Marshes, capturing Lvov on the 27th. The Germans were therefore now back to their Barbarossa start lines of three years earlier. The offensives north and south of the Pripet Marshes meant that the Red Army was able to cross the pre-war borders of Poland and recapture Kaunas, Minsk, Białystok and Lublin, and by August they had crossed the River Bug. They stopped on the Vistula, outside Warsaw, because Model managed to check Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front to the east of the Polish capital. It is often assumed that the Russians stopped on the Vistula on 7 August for entirely political reasons, in order to allow the Germans to crush the Warsaw Uprising, but they had a good excuse to do so, for their 450-mile advance since 22 June had stretched their supplies and lines of communication to the limits.

At the celebrations in Moscow soon afterwards, 57,000 German POWs were paraded through Red Square, with many of the twenty-five captured generals at their head. The war correspondent Alexander Werth reported:

The Moscow people looked on quietly without booing and hissing, and only a few youngsters could be heard shouting, ‘Hey, look at the Fritzes with their ugly snouts,’ but most people only exchanged remarks in soft voices. I heard a little girl sitting on her mother’s shoulders say: ‘Mummy, are these the people who killed Daddy?’ And the mother hugged the child and wept. The Germans had finally arrived in Moscow. When the parade was over Russian sanitation trucks disinfected the streets.32

Churchill used the occasion of the destruction of Army Group Centre to make another quip at Hitler’s expense in the House of Commons, saying on 2 August, the tenth anniversary of Hindenberg’s death and thus of Hitler becoming undisputed master of Germany, ‘It may well be that the Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of Herr Hitler – of Corporal Hitler. Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in some of his actions… Altogether, I think it is much better to let officers rise up in the proper way.’33

There were a few scrawny scraps of comfort for Hitler, however. With the Red Army only 15 miles from the borders of East Prussia on 1 August, Model – outnumbered and outgunned, especially in the air – had nonetheless managed severely to maul the Second Tank Army and force the Soviets back 30 miles. During the ‘hurricane of fire’ from German assault guns, the following Russian wireless conversation was intercepted by the Abwehr:

A: Hold your position!

B: I am finished.

A: Reinforcements are moving up.

B: To hell with your reinforcement. I am cut off. Your reinforcement won’t find me here any more.

A: For the last time, I forbid you to speak openly over the wireless. I would prefer you to shoot your own people than allow the enemy to shoot them.

B: Comrade No. 54, perhaps you will grasp the situation when I tell you that I have nobody left I can shoot, apart from my wireless operator.34

Model’s victory, though