Two Views of Operation Bagration

With 2024 marking the 80th Anniversary of the penultimate year of the Second World War, there were, of course, several new books on the military operations of 1944. The most important action of that year on any front was Operation Bagration, launched by the Red Army two weeks after the Western Allies staged Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of Normandy. The Red Army smashed its way through Army Group (AG) Center, inflicting severe damage on the Wehrmacht, and advancing from Vitebsk to Warsaw.

Prit Buttar continues to write major works on the operations of the Red Army, thus adding to the limited English-language literature on the subject. With his Operation Bagration, as with his earlier works covering the campaigns of the Red Army, Buttar presents a largely Western (which means mostly relying on German sources) perspective, with some Russian accounts added. One gets the usual effort to place much of the blame for the grievous defeat suffered on Hitler’s fortress policies and on the slavish adherence to these policies by Feldmarschall Ernst Busch, the Commander of AG Center, to holding the line in the early days of Bagration. Busch was dismissed from his post at the end of June, and replaced by the “Furhrer’s Fireman,” Marshal Model.

During Bagration, the Wehrmacht suffered a second grave blow further South from the Lvov-Sandomierz Operation. With the Red Army reaching the limits of its logistics, Model was able to patch together a solid line with Army Group Center in August, and to halt the Russians in the suburbs of Warsaw. Twenty-eight German divisions were destroyed in Bagration, along with 11 sent as reinforcements that were gutted. More than 20 German generals were captured. Losses by AG Center are estimated at between 375,000 and 540,000, the greatest loss suffered by Germany in a single action of the Second World War.

The maps in Buttar are disappointing, as it’s often tough to match what’s in the text to the maps. In general, I felt that Buttar adhered to the existing German narrative of Bagration, not adding much that was new except in using recently published soldiers’ accounts on both sides.

I much preferred Boris Sokolov’s Operation Bagration, as Sokolov was able to use the Russian archives and presents a fresh perspective, based on dozens of new Russian-language secondary sources that have been published since 2000.

This preference is despite the fact that Sokolov’s book has no maps. What it does have is extensive analysis of the personnel and equipment losses suffered in Bagration based on returns from the Soviet archives. To give one specific example, one can discover that Gen. B.S. Bakharov’s 9th Tank Corps lost 11 T-34s destroyed, 15 knocked out, and one missing during the period of June 26-29. Buttar cannot match this detailed information. Sokolov is also able to provide a much more detailed Order of Battle for the Red Army at different points in the narrative.

Sokolov begins his book with the sacking of the commander of the Red Army’s Western Front, Gen. V.D. Sokolovski in April 1944, due to the general’s failure to take the cities of Vitebsk and Orsha in early 1944. This reorganization of Soviet forces in Belorussia paid off in June 1944 when the First, Second, and Third Belorussian Fronts broke through the German lines that they had failed to penetrate earlier in the year. The book then proceeds to examine partisan operations in Belorussia and preparations for Bagration. The remaining chapters track the evolution of Bagration, culminating with a chapter assessing the losses suffered by both sides at the end of operations in August 1944. Sokolov also gives the reader a detailed assessment of the Red Army’s air operations during Bagration, including losses and sortie rates.

In addition, Sokolov devotes a chapter to the false memoir, The Black March, supposedly written by a soldier of the SS Viking Division, Peter Neumann. According to Sokolov, the real author of the “memoir” was an anti-communist Frenchman, Pierre Daix. Black March was one of several post-war fake Soviet memoirs that includes the alleged memoirs of Stalin’s nephew! Unfortunately, the Neumann “memoirs” have continued to fool Western historians; Jonathan Dimbelby uses this fraudulent work in his book on the Eastern Front in late 1944.

In contrast to the traditional perspective on Bagration, Sokolov argues that Busch’s standfast strategy at the beginning of Bagration was the best strategy he could have chosen. He disagrees with the usual argument that only a pullback of German forces from the fortress cities of Vitebsk and Orsha could have saved AG Center. Sokolov argues that the Red Army’s mobility was so superior to the Wehrmacht’s in 1944 that any attempt to fall back to a new defensive line would have led to an even quicker collapse of AG Center, and the Red Army would have suffered fewer losses in over-running Belorussia. It is difficult to prove Sokolov’s provocative thesis, and it ignores the multiple German divisions that were trapped in the fortress cities early in Bagration.

Sokolov argues further that Model is given more credit than he deserves for stabilizing AG Center’s front in August 1944. In his opinion, Busch had already slowed down the Soviet advance greatly in July, and Busch would have been able to restore the front if he would not have been sacked then.

Despite my disagreement with some of Sokolov’s arguments, I much prefer his work to Buttar’s as it makes much better use of the Soviet archives, though Buttar cannot entirely be blamed for that, given how Russian archives have become less accessible to Western scholars in recent years under President Vladimir Putin. Both books are worth reading, but if one has to choose, Sokolov is the better book, despite the lack of maps.

---///---

Our Reviewer: Dr. Stavropoulos received his Ph.D. in History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. Currently an Adjunct Professor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, his previous reviews include Prelude to Waterloo: Quatre Bras: The French Perspective, Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies, In the Name of Lykourgos, The Other Face of Battle, The Bulgarian Contract, Napoleon’s Stolen Army, In the Words of Wellington’s Fighting Cocks, Chasing the Great Retreat, Athens, City of Wisdom: A History, Commanding Petty Despots, Writing Battles: New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe, SOG Kontum, Simply Murder, Soldiers from Experience, July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta, New York’s War of 1812, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777, The Spear, the Scroll, and the Pebble, The Killing Ground, The Hill: The Brutal Fight for Hill 107 in the Battle of Crete, The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, Stalin's Revenge: Operation Bagration and the Annihilation of Army Group Centre, The Farthest Valley, The Soldier's Reward, The Traitor of Arnhem, Che Guevara's Final Adventure, The Italian Army in the Balkans, 1940-41, and The Crimean Offensive, 1944: The Russian Battle for the Crimea.

---///---

Note: both books are also available in e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium