‘Bagration’, the great Soviet summer offensive, has not received the attention given to other battles on the Eastern Front, which is all the more strange as it was without a doubt the single most successful Soviet military operation of the entire Second World War. It also came as a complete surprise to the Germans. Stalin had decided that his attack should not be against Romania, northern Ukraine or the Baltic, but rather should go straight into Byelorussia. His aim was nothing less than the complete encirclement and destruction of Army Group Centre, which was situated in a bulge of occupied territory that jutted into the Soviet Union like an enormous balcony. This was, apart from anything else, the shortest route to Warsaw, and to Berlin.
On 14 May 1944, Stalin summoned his commanders to formulate a plan of attack. It was the most ambitious task he had yet set for the Red Army, and he assembled an extraordinary team with which to achieve it. One of his greatest strategists was the complex and controversial General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had recently proven himself both at Stalingrad and at Kursk. In his surprisingly high voice for such a bearlike figure, he told Stalin that his 1st Byelorussian Front should attack Bobruisk along both sides of the Berezina River, creating a giant pincer to hit the flanks of 3rd Panzer Army and the 9th Army, and then encircle the 4th Army and destroy it. Stalin, who believed that there should be a single thrust against the German lines, disagreed, and twice sent Rokossovsky out of the room to ‘think it over’. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov tried to convince him to toe the line, but Rokossovsky stood firm, declaring that he would rather be relieved of his command than attack as Stalin wanted him to. After the third discussion Stalin walked over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. The room froze, with those present convinced that Stalin was about to tear the epaulettes from his shoulders. Instead he smiled. Rokossovsky’s confidence, he said, ‘reflected his sound judgement’, and he was to attack as he wished.15 Stalin also made it very clear, however, that Rokossovsky would be blamed for any failure.
Rokossovsky’s defiance revealed great personal courage. This was, after all, a man who had experienced the Terror first hand. The fact that he had been born in Warsaw, to a Polish father and a Russian mother, had made it easy for Lavrentii Beria, the notorious head of the NKVD, to accuse him of being a Polish spy, although in reality Rokossovsky had been targeted because he had openly favoured the innovative military methods of Marshal Tukhachevsky over traditionalists like Semyon Budenny. Arrested in 1937 for allegedly having conspired with another officer to betray the Soviet Union, he was dragged through a ridiculous show trial, during which it emerged that his alleged co-conspirator had been killed in the Civil War twenty years before. ‘Can dead men testify?’ Rokossovsky had asked incredulously. Imprisoned until March 1940, he was repeatedly tortured: his teeth were knocked out, leaving him with a steel denture, and his toes were beaten to a pulp with a hammer; he also had his ribs broken and endured a number of mock executions.16 Despite all this, Rokossovsky never signed a confession; nor did he denounce any of his erstwhile colleagues. Unlike so many of his compatriots who perished in Beria’s indefatigable ‘meat grinder’, Rokossovsky escaped with his life. He would soon be a pivotal figure in the fate of his home town of Warsaw, for it was he who would lead the Soviets to the gates of the city, and who would watch from across the Vistula River as the Germans crushed the desperate uprising in the summer of 1944.
Rokossovsky’s argument with Stalin proved that the Red Army of 1944 was a completely different entity from that of 1941. Officers with talent were finally being promoted rather than being sent to the gulag, the ideology of an officer corps was brought back, and officers were given a certain amount of freedom from the NKVD. Propaganda abandoned dull, Communist rhetoric in favour of rousing talk of the Great Patriotic War and the fight for Mother Russia. Three years earlier Rokossovsky would have been shot for standing up to Stalin; now he was allowed to argue with the dictator face to face – and win.
Other things had changed too. The Soviets were producing more, and better, weapons than the Germans. By the time of the summer offensive they had introduced a new model of the T-34 tank, now with an 85mm gun; the SU-100, an update of the SU-85 anti-aircraft gun with lethal long-range 100mm barrel; and the Josef Stalin II tank, armed with a heavy 122mm artillery gun, that could wreak havoc on its German equivalents. Huge stockpiles of food, supplies and ammunition, and fleets of trucks, were brought to the front.17 Massive quantities of Lend-Lease matériel from the United States were of enormous importance: American Jeeps whizzed around Byelorussia, and Studebaker US6 trucks were used to launch Katyusha rockets; at the same time Russian soldiers feasted on Hershey’s chocolate and wieners stamped ‘Oscar Meyer – Chicago’.
Stalin approved the final plan of attack against Army Group Centre in Byelorussia on 31 May 1944. The operation, he declared, was to be called ‘Bagration’, after the Georgian general whose heroic resistance at the Battle of Borodino was instrumental in reducing Napoleon’s Grande Armée to such a crippled force that it could never mount an offensive against Russia again. General Pyotr Bagration himself had been killed at Borodino, but the name was a prescient choice. Operation ‘Bagration’ of 1944 would also change history, and when it was over the Germans in turn would be so weakened that they could not mount another significant offensive in the rest of the Second World War. It was the single greatest defeat ever suffered by the Wehrmacht, and in losses of men and matériel far exceeded those at Stalingrad. The Soviets would achieve blistering success, and would race westward at such speed that it surprised even Stavka and Stalin himself. At the same time, Stalin would launch the Lwów–Sandomierz offensive, drawing German reserves to the south to fight phantom armies. The summer of 1944 saw the loss of a million German soldiers on the Eastern Front. It was the success of Bagration and the Lwów–Stanisławów–Sandomierz operations that would lead to the Polish Home Army’s ill-fated decision to begin the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August.
One of the reasons Stalin favoured a full-scale attack on Byelorussia was the element of surprise. His commander Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had long enjoyed duck-shooting in the swamps near Parichi, understood that the Germans had dismissed the possibility of a Russian attack in the area, believing that the marshes were impassable. For Zhukov the landscape was ‘crucial in shaping the course of the attack’. The front held by Army Group Centre was 1,000 kilometres long, with the ancient and beautiful cities of Mogilew, Orsha and Vitebsk strung along it like pearls on a necklace. The southern sector ran through the Pripyat marshes, an enormous 100,000-square-kilometre wetland, a maze of ‘swamps and bogs, mud and mosquitoes, impassable for armoured vehicles without special knowledge and equipment’. The rivers Dnieper, Prut, Berezina, Svisloch and Ptich were also natural obstacles. The Germans, Zhukov said, believed that ‘the wooded and boggy terrain would not allow us to move to Byelorussia’. He added wryly, ‘the enemy miscalculated’.18
The next phase of the plan suited Stalin’s devious nature perfectly. Having chosen his target, he set about deceiving the Germans with ‘maskirovka’ – a particularly clever and all-encompassing form of camouflage, misinformation and deception. All troops and equipment were to be moved up to the Byelorussian front in utter secrecy, while at the same time an entire mock front was to be created in Ukraine to fool the Germans into believing that Stalin intended to attack to the south. The plan succeeded brilliantly.
It is difficult to imagine the