Stalingrad

Operation Bagration: A June 22 Hitler Had Not Bargained for

Operation Bagration kicked off on the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, and it marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.

Stalin had long been asking that his Western allies open the second front in Europe so that the humongous pressures on the Red Army slackened somewhat. Finally, with the Allies landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944 the European front materialised.

Scarcely any episode of the Second World War has received as much attention – and adoration – as Operation Overlord. After all, it marked the Allies’ getting a foothold on the continental mainland, and Berlin, the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich, was just about 1,200 km from the beachhead via a road that ran through Paris. And the mystique surrounding the largest seaborne invasion in history gives Overlord the heft to be called ‘D-Day’, the day on which the gigantic Nazi war machine apparently began to unravel.

But barely two weeks later, on June 22, 1944 began what turned out to be the largest Allied operation of World War II, a campaign that dwarfed not only Overlord but even the epic battle of Stalingrad, widely believed to have been the War’s turning point.

Also read: When Hitler Realised the End of the War Was Upon Him

Indeed, in the scale of its operations, Bagration (pronounced baag-raat-see-ohn)– the Red Army’s counteroffensive through Byelorussia – towers over every other engagement of the War (with the possible exception of Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941) – including those in Moscow, Leningrad, Kursk, the Ardennes and Berlin. In under two months, Operation Bagration wiped out about a quarter (roughly 500,000 troops) of Germany’s Eastern Front manpower.

Of the four armies comprising the vaunted Army Group Centre, one, the 4th, was decimated and two other – the 9th and the 3rd Panzer – very nearly so. Thirty one of the 47 German divisional or corps commanders (of the rank of General) involved in the battle were either killed or captured. The Wehrmacht’s back was broken.

Bagration also restored the Soviet Union to her pre-1939 borders by throwing the Germans out of Soviet territory, and launched the Red Army on a crushing offensive that was to culminate in the battle of Berlin and the dissolution of the Third Reich.

In comparison, D-Day looks almost like a side-show: German deployment here added up to only 11 divisions (the Eastern Front had 228), and Germany lost no more than 9,000 troops here. The Allied forces were mired on the beachhead far longer than they had anticipated, progress inland was painfully slow, and the port city of Caen, a major objective only about 50 kms from the Omaha beach, was not captured before July 21, or a full 45 days after D-Day.

Bagration, on the other hand, took a little over ten days to punch a hole 400-km wide and 160-km deep in the German frontline. By the middle of August, the Red Army was knocking at Warsaw’s doors, less than 600 km shy of Berlin.

And yet, in most histories of the Second World War, Operation Bagration gets mentioned only in passing. It is only in recent years that critical attention has begun to be directed at this important episode of the War.

Also Read: As in Life so in His Death, Hubris and Delusion Defined Adolf Hitler

The 76th anniversary of Bagration is as good a time as any to go over the ground it covered and recapitulate how it panned out in those crucial two months.

In Yalta in December 1943, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union had agreed to orchestrate the Allies’ future campaigns against the Axis. Churchill and Roosevelt informed Stalin that the Allies planned to open the second front by landing in France in May the following year. In turn, Stalin promised to support that operation by launching a massive strategic offensive around the same time. Bagration – named after the Georgian general of the Tsarist army who died fighting Napoleon’s troops in Borodino near Moscow in 1812 – was the result of that commitment.

The Soviet armies involved in bloody fighting in the winter and early spring of 1943-44 had made spectacular advances, particularly in the south, in Ukraine and the Caucasus. They had also managed to lift the crippling siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) that had lasted nearly 900 days. At that point in the war’s eastern theatre, the Soviets had over 6.5 million troops spread over 12 fronts (or army groups) aligned along a 3,200-km front facing four German army groups and an independent army, which together numbered 2.25 million men. Of the 12 Soviet army groups, four, namely the First Baltic, and the Third, the Second and the First Byelorussian, would come into play in the operation.

Of the four German army groups, the one directly in front of these Red Army formations was the famed Army Group Centre commanded by Field Marshal Ernst Busch, not a particularly capable commander, but a favourite of Hitler’s because of Busch’s obsequiousness to the Fuehrer.

Numerically the strongest army group on the Eastern Front – it had around 700,000 troops in 51 divisions – Busch’s group had two major weaknesses other than being led by an unenterprising leader. Spread over a 780-km front, its was a thinly-held line; and its forces occupied a somewhat awkward salient: a bulge extending substantially eastwards north of the inaccessible Pripyat Marshes close to the headwaters of the Dvina and Dnieper rivers east of Vitebsk (please see map), making the flanks vulnerable to spirited enemy attacks. STAVKA (the Soviet High Command) now settled on striking at Army Group Centre in a series of surprise ‘deep operations’ manoeuvres that would destroy this jewel in Hitler’s crown.

But the Soviet decision had not been made with an eye on Marshal Busch’s vulnerabilities, personal or strategic. STAVKA had determined that the demolition of Army Group Centre would bring the Red Army to the borders of Poland and East Prussia and facilitate future operations hugely. Equally importantly, the best – and perhaps shortest – road to Berlin from the East ran through Warsaw, which sat on a straight line from General Rokossovsky’s First Byelorussian Front through the deep defences of Army Group Centre.

Besides, other options open to the Red Army at that point had been considered and dropped: for example, a strike into the Balkans by one or more of the northern spearheads (viz., the Third Baltic and Leningrad fronts) – rejected because it would still leave much of western Russia in German hands; or the option of a northwest strike from northern Ukraine across Poland to the Baltic Sea – not pursued because it would mean a long and perilous drive with dangerously open flanks.

Having thus decided on the broad contours of the offensive, the Red Army set about filling in the tactical and operational details, a project of astonishing ingenuity and skill, the like of which has been seen only rarely in the history of modern warfare.

First, the Soviets launched an elaborate tactical programme of deception – maskirovka in Russian. In April, the entire Soviet army assumed a defensive posture, and kept up the appearances with great verve, so that German intelligence was inclined to discount the possibility of an imminent, large-scale operation. But more importantly, the Red Army build-up managed to deflect attention to the south-western part of the front, to Ukraine, giving out clever and seemingly bona-fide signals, which the Germans picked up with alacrity, of an impending operation against Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group North Ukraine.

Somehow, the Germans had also persuaded themselves that a Ukrainian offensive would best serve the Red Army’s operational objectives, and when reports of a large Soviet build-up in the front opposite Army Group Centre started to come in beginning early June, the German High Command viewed that build-up as a deception, thus playing fully into Soviet hands.

The deception was so complete that the Germans, incredibly, started shifting a lot of their fire-power, and a whole Panzer corps, from Busch’s command to Model’s. Thus, as the Red Army was rearing to go, Army Group Centre lost 15% of its divisions, 23% of its assault guns, and a staggering 50-88% respectively of its artillery and tank strength.

Hitler had no answer to the Red Army’s T-34 tank.

And the Soviet build-up on the eve of Bagration was the War’s most massive – 4,000 tanks, 5,300 aircraft, and over 25,000 pieces of mortars, assault guns and other indirect-fire weapons gave the Red Army armour, artillery and air superiority of 10:1 at the assault point, even as two million troops faced off with about 500,000 German combatants.

This build-up necessitated reinforcements to the extents of 300%, 85% and 62% respectively in tank, artillery and aircraft strengths. Marshal Zhukov, one of Bagration’s heroes, recalls that the front needed to be supplied with 400,000 tonnes of ammunition, 300,000 tonnes of fuel and lubricants, and 500,000 tonnes of food and fodder before the battle.

It is a tribute to the Red Army’s organisational virtuosity that it managed to amass these enormous quantities of fire-power, accessories and provisions without giving their game away. Battle-hardened veterans Marshal Georgiy Zhukov and Marshal Alexander Vasilevskiy were made responsible for planning, coordinating and directing two fronts each: Zhukov for the two southern fronts (2nd and 1st Byelorussian) and Vasilevskiy for the two northern fronts (1st Baltic and 3rd Byelorussian). The front commanders were Generals Bagramyan (1st Baltic), Chernyakhovskiy (3rd Byelorussian), Zakharov (2nd Byelorussian) and Rokossovskiy (1st Byelorussian, the largest formation, also tasked with covering the most ground).

A vital component of the Soviet plan was parallel partisan warfare. By this phase of the War, Byelorussian partisans, numbering close to 150,000, were a formidable force, capable of paralysing German supply lines virtually at will and demolishing bridges, highways and railway installations whenever required. The wooded and often boggy terrain made parts of Byelorussia ideal partisan country. Now well-armed and well-provisioned by the Soviets, partisans set and carried out their operational objectives in coordination with the Red Army. In the days leading up to Bagration, they stepped up sabotage and demolition very significantly, waylaying all supplies meant for Army Group Centre but taking care to let supplies in the reverse direction pass unmolested.

Also read: ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’: The Hell-Gates of Dachau

The Soviets’ ‘deep operations’ – a concept borrowed from the ‘Deep Battle’ military theory first formulated by Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Alexander Svechin – worked with deadly effect in Bagration. Breakthroughs were achieved at several points in the enemy line by massive infantry-led attacks with heavy artillery and air support.

When holes had been punched in the German lines, armoured spearheads rushed through them and encircled the communications and supply centres by double envelopments. Waves of such attacks would follow in rapid succession, each spearhead delving deeper than the one before it, overtaking, overwhelming and encircling enemy formations at blinding speed, and keeping the enemy continually guessing which direction the next attack would come from.

All in all, Bagration was to cover a front stretching for more than 1,200 km from Lake Neshcherdo to the Pripyat, and 600 kms deep – from the Dnieper to the Vistula and the Narew. The first avalanche of attacks began on June 22, 1944 and by the morning of the 26th, Army Group Centre appeared to be falling apart. One after another, all the major town and cities occupied by Germany since 1941 were wrested from her control – Vitebsk, Bobruysk, Minsk, Slutsk, Mogilev, Borisov, Stolbtsy, Marina Gorka, Lublin….. All Byelorussia was freed, followed by large parts of East Poland and Lithuania and, in the second leg of the operation, those parts of the Ukraine which were still in German occupation. By 25 July, the Red Army had reached the Vistula.

On the way, it had stumbled upon the Majdanek death camp – the first concentration camp to be discovered – where the Nazis had murdered at least 80,000 people in cold blood. On July 28, the Red Army liberated the historic Brest fortress. Fully, 50 German divisions had been routed, 30 of them destroyed. In the operation’s second leg, after the 1st Ukrainian Front had joined the offensive, the Wehrmacht lost another 30 divisions, eight of which were wiped out.

Konstantin Rokossovskiy and Georgy Zhukov – two of Bagration’s heroes.

The virtual destruction of the Army Group Centre was Germany’s most calamitous defeat in the War. The Soviets could now sit calmly on the Vistula, reorganising and resupplying their forces, confident of their ability to drive to the Oder, the Neisse, and then on to Berlin.

The demoralised Germans, on the other hand – now obliged to fight on two full fronts – could only mount a weak defence along the Vistula. In an irony of history, Operation Bagration, which had begun on the third anniversary of Hitler’s most ambitious military campaign, had now sealed the Fuehrer’s fate.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

Stalingrad at 75: A Battle That Marked the Defeat of More than Just the Nazis

On the 75th anniversary of Germany’s surrender at the iconic Soviet city, it is evident that Stalingrad was also a turning point in the larger practice of empire.

A Soviet soldier unfurls the red flag near the centre of Stalingrad. Credit: Wikimedia

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the victory of Soviet forces over Nazi Germany and its allies at the city of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga.

It was in the nature of those times of epic proportion that a confrontation involving millions of people, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost and bodies maimed, and entire armies destroyed, is remembered as a ‘battle’. The Battle for Stalingrad, nevertheless, became a symbol for heroism, sacrifice, bloodletting, tenacity, ruthlessness and tragedy all in good measure. For the communists it was a byword for hard-fought victory. Its place in the annals of military history survived communism’s fall from grace, and J.V. Stalin’s tumble from the pedestal. There is much in the story that continues to fascinate students of warfare: one of the largest tank battles ever fought, strategic blunders and masterstrokes, a personal duel between Hitler and Stalin, the brilliance of General Zhukhov, but above all, “a psychological turning point” of the Second World War.

Map of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. After Moscow held out, the Germans advanced on Stalingrad.

After a series of spectacular successes against ill-prepared Soviet defenders, Nazi German forces attempted to take Moscow in November 1941. Their progress ground down, however, and by December they were forced to abandon the attack. In the meanwhile, things had gone well for them in the south, and having captured the main grain producing areas of the Ukraine and Russia, Hitler decided to make a lunge for Caspian Sea oil. Stalingrad was the gateway to Baku. This decision more or less sealed the fate of the war in Russia. From the military point of view, there would be a turning point, if not in Stalingrad, then somewhere else along this route. Stalin appears to have understood this, decided that the stand will be made at the city named after him, and gave General Zukhov the task of laying a trap and then closing it.

But how did Hitler’s forces allow themselves to get ‘trapped’ so deep into Russia, at the far end of Europe? If the fate of Napoleon’s armies in the winter of 1812 at the hands of the Russian expanse and winter had preyed upon the minds of Hitler and his generals, why would they choose to extend their supply lines even further to the east?

To the extent that Hitler’s politics, as laid out by him in Mein Kampf, were in the driving seat, we have an answer. Race was the predominant theme. Two groups were singled out as inexorable enemies of the noble Aryan: the “cunning parasitic Jew” and the “subhuman Slav”. A central tenet of foreign policy was to create living space or Lebensraum for Germans by annexing Poland, Ukraine and Russia for settler colonisation. The inhabitants of these lands would either be deported or turned into slave labour for German settlers. With expanded territory and resources, Germany could truly become a “World Power” so that the Aryan race could takes its rightful place as the builder of civilisation.

Some wartime commentators in the west argued that Hitler had abandoned his plans of Mein Kampf, which was published in 1925, in favour of a more ‘conventional’ aim of replacing the Bolshevik government with a collaborationist regime, like the Vichy in France. The conduct of the war in the east formalised under new rules of engagement such as the notorious Commissar and Jurisdiction Orders, however, made it clear that Hitler saw this as a “war of annihilation”, not just of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” regime, but of the people of the occupied land. What seems, with the benefit of hindsight, like an ill-thought and suicidal lunge to the east was no “mission creep”. It was a primary aim of Nazi Germany’s war.

In his book, Hitler set out his position in favour of Lebensraum compared with the policy of seeking colonies in Africa and Asia. He argued against an overseas colonial policy, not because he thought it was outmoded and collapsing, but because he believed that it was firmly entrenched. A racial empire was there to stay, it would be difficult for anyone, let alone the natives themselves, to dislodge England from its colonies:

“England will never lose India unless she admits racial disruption in the machinery of her administration (which at present is entirely out of the question in India) or unless she is overcome by the sword of some powerful enemy. But Indian risings will never bring this about. We Germans have had sufficient experience to know how hard it is to coerce England. And, apart from all this, I as a German would far rather see India under British domination than under that of any other nation.

“The hopes of an epic rising in Egypt were just as chimerical. The ‘Holy War’ may bring the pleasing illusion to our German nincompoops that others are now ready to shed their blood for them. Indeed, this cowardly speculation is almost always the father of such hopes. But in reality the illusion would soon be brought to an end under the fusillade from a few companies of British machine-guns and a hail of British bombs.”

The Soviet Union, however, was a different proposition altogether:

“This colossal Empire in the East is ripe for dissolution. And the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a State. We are chosen by Destiny to be the witnesses of a catastrophe which will afford the strongest confirmation of the nationalist theory of race.”

While Hitler admired England’s racially-ordered colonial system, it was the other contemporary landgrab which was seen as the more appropriate model for German expansionism. America’s Manifest Destiny had come to final fruition in 1890 with the end of armed resistance by the native peoples at Wounded Knee.

The moral and strategic arguments for the landgrab to the east were one and the same. A superior race deserved resources it could fight to take. Just as Indians and Egyptians could not overthrow the English, and the native peoples could not resist the United States, so the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik cabal’, by violently removing the German blood line of the Tsars, had left the lands of the Slavs ready for the picking. While racial supremacy and territorial hunger were not the sole preserves of Nazi Germany, Hitler’s shrill and frantic articulation of these ideas had closed off the possibility of a more cold-headed assessment of ground realities.

Hitler’s forces were not just trapped by the Soviet strategy – or muddle – of retreating before the Nazi German advance, while keeping the bulk of their military strength in secret reserve. They were also trapped on the wrong side of history. The Battle of Stalingrad was a turning point in the practice of empire. Racially-ordered settler colonialism, which was at its apogee when Hitler’s ideas were formed, and which had seemed feasible enough at the start of Nazi Germany’s war in the east, went into unstoppable retreat, with perhaps one or two notable exceptions remaining. The British Empire ended, India and Egypt became independent, and Germany emerged as a world power without any further need for Lebensraum.

It is in the nature of epics to leave behind as many lessons as there are lesson-seekers. Stalingrad will be remembered this year by disparate groups – anti-fascists, Russian nationalists, Soviet nostalgists, communist holdouts as well as the many families and communities who lost or found something there. One of its many lessons is that history does not end, ideas and power centres that lose moral legitimacy will also lose ground, shrill rhetoric notwithstanding, and it is good to keep looking out and preparing for the turning points, because they will come.

Haris Gazdar is an economist who lives and works in Karachi. He tweets at @HarisGazdar

‘Manchester Is the Place’ and Six Other Reminders of What Verse Can Do For an Embattled City

A collection of poems written about cities under attack, about loss, hope and resilience.

Women pay their respects following a vigil in central Manchester. Credit: Reuters/Peter Nicholls

Tony Walsh on Manchester

On May 22, a terrorist set off a bomb at Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester, England. The attack left 22 dead, including an eight-year-old girl. Poet Tony Walsh responded with a tribute to the city – on everything that made it special and would keep it going.

Pablo Neruda on Stalingrad

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote an ode to the city after the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany’s attempt to capture Stalingrad, now in southern Russia, in February 1943. More than a million died in the battle or went missing during the time that many see as the biggest and most brutal conflict during the Second World War.

Translated excerpt:

And you, Russia, you stern warrior
Not experienced the same whether you are now:
And loneliness and cold lying,
Rancor vows … Plagued your chest
Zillion bullets, tens of thousands of cores.
Already scorpion crawled fascist
For your walls, great Stalingrad
In an effort to sting you! .. Where are they,
Your allies in a giant battle?
New York dancing .. and London immersed
In a treacherous thought … Oh shame! –
I shouted to them. – My heart can not,
Can not our heart, no, it can
In the world to live, that looks so calm
On the death of his best sons!
Can it be you leave them in the fight?
Think again! Perish yourself!
We are waiting for! .. What you say something?
Or have you, that on the eastern front
Mountain rose corpses filling
All of your sky? But then a legacy
Will get you the hell! .. Or you want to
Drive to the grave life? .. Erase the smile
With faces stinking mud, blood
Cruel torment? We say, “Enough!
We are tired of your petty affairs,
We are tired of your meetings autumn,
Where ever preside umbrella
Though sleeping in the coffin sinister Chamberlain! ”
Second Front is not! .. But Stalingrad
You can stand at least a day and night
You tortured with fire and iron!
Yes! Death itself is powerless in front of you!
They are immortal, your sons …

Premendra Mitra on Calcutta in the Bengal famine

In 1943 Bengal, nearly four million people died of a famine created by the British colonial government’s policies of making farmers move from food crop to cash crops, and diverting food imports to British troops fighting in the Second World War in a world where trade had dropped substantially. Premendra Mitra poem Phyan (meaning rice gruel) brings out the image of men, women and children on the streets of Calcutta crying out for phyan during the famine.

On the city streets
Roam strange creatures,
Human-like, yet, not quite human,
Cruel caricatures of humanity!
Yet they move and speak,
Like debris they pile up by the road,
Sit, foraging food, on piles of garbage
Weary

And cry out for phyan.

Sankichi Toge on Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, at the height of the Second World War, the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion killed 80,000 people immediately, and tens of thousand died painful deaths in the years that followed from being exposed to the radiation. In this poem, translated by Karen Thornber, Sankichi Toge writes about memories that will never fade. An excerpt:

can we forget that flash?
suddenly 30,000 in the streets disappeared
in the crushed depths of darkness
the shrieks of 50,000 died out

when the swirling yellow smoke thinned
buildings split, bridges collapsed
packed trains rested singed
and a shoreless accumulation of rubble and embers – Hiroshima
before long, a line of naked bodies walking in groups, crying
with skin hanging down like rags
hands on chests
stamping on crumbled brain matter
burnt clothing covering hips

corpses lie on the parade ground like stone images of Jizo, dispersed in all
directions
on the banks of the river, lying one on top of another, a group that had crawled to
a tethered raft

Sinan Antoon on Baghdad

In his work, Sinan Antoon looks at an Iraq caught between wars, at cities that build themselves up only to be torn down again. An excerpt from Wrinkles: on the wind’s forehead –

3
the wind was tired
from carrying the coffins
and leaned
against a palm tree
A satellite inquired:
Where to now?
the silence
in the wind’s cane murmured:
“Baghdad”
and the palm tree caught fire

…
6
My heart is a stork
perched on a distant dome
in Baghdad
it’s nest made of bones
its sky
of death

7
This is not the first time
myths wash their face
with our blood
(t)here they are
looking in horizon’s mirror
as they don our bones

…

11
The grave is a mirror
into which the child looks
and dreams:
when will I grow up
and be like my father
. . .
dead

Zeb and Haniya on Lahore

On Easter Sunday in 2016, a bomber in Lahore killed 72 people outside a park, including many children. Musical duo Zeb and Haniya released a song, ‘Dadra’, as a reaction to the attack, talking about a city that is resilient “even in the darkest of times”. The song and the music video explore Lahore’s past, present and future.

Mahmoud Darwish on Jerusalem

As a city, Jerusalem knows conflict more than most. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote extensively on Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians,talks in his poem In Jerusalem about the conflicting narratives, both historical and religious, that shaped the city’s past and present. An excerpt, translated by Fady Joudah:

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,

I walk from one epoch to another without a memory

to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing

the history of the holy … ascending to heaven

and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love

and peace are holy and are coming to town.

I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How

do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?

Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?

I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see

no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.

All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly

then I become another. Transfigured. Words

sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger

mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”

Postscript: Although the Nazi bombing of the Basque city of Guernica in Spain in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War led to a lot of poetry, the city’s destruction was most iconically memorialised not in words but on canvas, by Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica. Credit: pablopicasso.org

The painting, which Picasso finished in June 1937, now hangs in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.