Operation Bagration and the Soviet contribution to WWII

Soviet military historians have long complained about the overly generous credit most military historians have given to the Allies on the Western front for defeating Nazi Germany in World War II. To give just one example, many thousands of history books, documentaries, television shows, novels and, of course, movies (“The Longest Day” and “Saving Private Ryan” being two notable examples) have been devoted to the critical importance of “Operation Overlord,” the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France in June of 1944.

As a result, scant notice has been paid to the Soviet offensive against Germany, codenamed “Operation Bagration,” that occurred just two weeks after D-Day, this week (June 22) in 1944. Yet in terms of military personnel and equipment alone, Operation Bagration was Union in 1941, which had lasted three years and involved a front of several thousand miles. Bagration successfully ousted the German army from virtually all of western Soviet Union, including Ukraine, after which the Soviets evicted the German army from Romania, Poland, and eastern Germany until the Soviet Army was at the gates of Germany’s capital Berlin, which it then captured.

Small wonder that Operation Barbarossa and Operation Bagration have been called “the most calamitous defeat of all the German armed forces in World War II.”

To put it mildly, the outcome of the fighting between the Germans and the Soviets on the Eastern Front BRUCE G. KAUFFMANN

Emailauthor BruceG. Kauffmann atbruce@ history lessons.net

Had the Germans conquered the Soviet Union any time before 1944, it’s almost certain Germany would have won World War II regardless of what the Allies did in the West.

Let’s look at the numbers. From Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941 until December of 1944, 2.4 million German soldiers died fighting on the Eastern Front. In the same time period 202,000 Germans died fighting on the Western Front.