On this day the Soviet Army launched operation bagration, It was in the center, in Belorussia (so-called White Russia), where the main Soviet blow would fall. There Adolf Hitler fielded 38 infantry divisions, two Luftwaffe field divisions, seven security divisions, two Panzergrenadier divisions and one panzer division, all grouped into four armies and led by Field Marshal Ernst Busch, a commander whose promotion was mainly due to his unquestioning loyalty to the Führer. While Belorussia was the center of gravity for Germany’s eastern forces, it had by no means come fully under Wehrmacht control. Partisan activity was more pronounced there than in other sectors, where Nazi reprisals since 1941 had been brutal even by Eastern Front standards. Punitive operations by the Germans in January, February and April 1944 had left entire villages leveled, their inhabitants lined up and executed. All told, an estimated 1 million people, including the region’s entire Jewish population, had been exterminated. In response to this terror, by mid-1944 partisan numbers had swelled to something between 143,000 and 374,000, depending on who was counting. What was worse for the occupiers, those partisan forces were becoming increasingly well organized and in better touch with Soviet authorities — who could direct their activities to maximum advantage. The Red Army’s earlier progress in the Baltic region and Ukraine left a “Belorussian Bulge” in the center, from which Field Marshal Busch requested permission to withdraw in order to shorten his line and relieve the danger of a pincer movement against the salient. Hitler, concerned with wavering support among his Finnish, Hungarian and Romanian allies, was determined to cling to his defenses at the eastern end of the bulge, and the army high command, Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH, denied Busch’s request. Hitler’s no-retreat policy in the east left Busch in a vulnerable position. His sector was a tempting target for the Red Army, since the eastern end of the bulge included the 50-mile-wide land bridge between the Dniepr and Dvina rivers that guarded Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Control of that gap would allow armies to pass overland to Moscow — or Berlin. Another problem for Busch was that his army, while strong in raw numbers, included a large proportion of Luftwaffe field units, security troops, Hungarian and Slovak divisions, and Volksdeutsche — ethnic Germans from the occupied territories whose desire to lay down their lives for the Führer was rightly suspect. By 1944 the German army, still dependent on horse-drawn wagons for supply and movement, was an old-fashioned, slow force compared to its Communist opponents, who had been liberally supplied with the ubiquitous 2.5-ton Studebaker truck manufactured in capitalism’s heartland. Worse yet was the lack of air cover; Germany’s Sixth Air Fleet was vastly outnumbered along Army Group Center’s front. The offensive would be a characteristically Soviet enterprise, a massive push along a 450-mile-long axis of advance. Four army group fronts would launch artillery barrages and attack simultaneously. To the north, the First Baltic Front under General Ivan Bagramyan, ultimately fielding 359,500 men, would push into Latvia to screen the right flank of the main assault and support forces farther south. Below him, the Third Belorussian Front under General Ivan Chernyakhovsky, with 579,300 men, would capture heavily defended Vitebsk and the area north of Orsha, then push southwest toward Minsk, the Belorussian capital, and Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, crushing or encircling Busch’s Third Panzer Army at Vitebsk and his Fourth Army, centered around Orsha. South of Orsha, General Georgy Zakharov’s Second Belorussian Front, with 319,500 men, would help complete the encirclement of Minsk and push west toward Grodno on the Niemen River as part of a mopping-up operation in the wake of the other fronts........
Posted on: Sun, 22 Jun 2014 11:47:18 +0000
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