Everything Went Wrong for the Axis During Operation Bagration

By Robert Beckhusen

The Soviet army’s Operation Bagration offensive in June 1944 destroyed their greatest nemesis — Nazi Germany’s Army Group Center — and drove hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops and thousands of tanks from east of Minsk into the Third Reich itself.

It was, arguably, the greatest disaster for Germany in World War II, ironically kicking off three years to the day after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and resulting in more than 400,000 casualties inflicted on the Reich’s already badly-depleted armed forces.

Bagration’s outcome showed the success of Soviet deep operations, a military strategy pioneered by a coterie of generals — such as Vladimir Triandafillov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky — in the 1920s and 1930s.

This theory of warfare aimed to send enormous military formations crashing into an enemy’s front line in different places, often one after another in waves, with heavily-armored “shock” armies breaking through weak points into an enemy’s logistical backbone in the rear. Given the chaos and disruption caused by this strategy, the enemy would not know where the overpowered shock armies would hit.

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                    **Abandoned vehicles of the German 9th Army in July 1944. Photo via Wikimedia**

The Soviets overestimated German strength when planning Bagration, believing they faced some 850,000 Germans opposite them. This caused a delay to the offensive as the Soviets amassed more than 1.2 million soldiers and another 400,000 with the 1st Belorussian Front — a detached “left wing” taking part in a separate, but related, upcoming offensive from the south aimed at central Poland.

In reality, the actual, engaged combat strength of Army Group Center was around half of the Soviet estimate, although the estimate of total soldiers in the formation was correct.