Russia at war 1941-1945

[IVOVSS, vol. IV, p. 164. German sources put the Russian superiority even higher.]

This looked, indeed, like 1941 the other way round! In the breakthrough areas, the

density of artillery was often as much as 320 guns per mile. For several weeks enormous reserves of ammunition, petrol and food had been accumulated behind the Russian lines; 100 train-loads had been arriving daily for the four Fronts, besides large quantities brought by lorries (chiefly American). A large fleet of motor ambulances was in

readiness, as well as hospital accommodation of 294,000 beds for the wounded.

[Ibid., p. 166.]

A fleet of 12,000 lorries was in readiness to transport 25,000 tons of ammunition, petrol, etc., to the advancing troops in a single journey. It was—with the possible exception of Kursk—the most thoroughly prepared of all the Russian operations, with everything

worked out down to its finest detail, and nothing left to improvisation, as had been the case in the past, even at Stalingrad, chiefly because of serious shortages in equipment and motor transport.

One characteristic of the Belorussian campaign was the very important part played by the partisan formations behind the German lines. Despite some particularly savage German punitive expeditions against the Belorussian partisans in January-February 1944, and again in April, with massacres of entire villages (for example, the village of Baiki in the Brest province where 130 houses had been burned down and 957 people massacred on

January 22, 1944), the partisans of Belorussia still constituted an appreciable armed force of 143,000 men on the eve of the offensive. There was close coordination between the Red Army Command and the partisans who succeeded between June 20 and 23, in

putting practically all the Belorussian railways out of action—precisely what the Red Army needed to paralyse the movement of German supplies and troops.

From the very start, the Russian offensive was tremendously successful. Between June 23

and 28 the four Russian Fronts broke through the German lines in six places, and

encircled large German forces at Vitebsk and Bobruisk. Tens of thousands of Germans

were killed and some 20,000 taken prisoner in these two encirclements alone. After the Germans' loss of the Vitebsk-Orsha-Mogilev-Bobruisk line, Hitler sent a frantic order to hold the Berezina line. But in this the Germans failed completely. Striking out from north-east and south-east, the Russians entered Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, on July 3, and in the process encircled large German forces in a vast "bag" east of Minsk—a total of about 100,000 men, the majority of whom surrendered. Some 40,000 were killed or

wounded, but 57,000 Germans, with several generals and dozens of officers at their head were marched in July 17 through the streets of Moscow. The purpose of this unusual

procedure was to disprove both the German claims of a "planned withdrawal from

Belorussia", and suggestions in the British and American press that if the Russian campaign in Belorussia was a "walkover", it was because large numbers of German troops had been moved to fight the Western Allies in France.

That parade of 57,000 Germans through Moscow was a memorable sight. Particularly

striking was the attitude of the Russian crowds lining the streets. Youngsters booed and whistled, and even threw things at the Germans, only to be immediately restrained by the adults; men looked on grimly and in silence; but many women, especially elderly women, were full of commiseration (some even had tears in their eyes) as they looked at these bedraggled "Fritzes".

I remember one old woman murmuring, "just like our poor boys ... tozhe pognali na voinu (also driven into the war)".

The Russian soldiers fighting in Belorussia did not, on the whole, feel quite so charitable towards the Germans. Everywhere the retreating Germans had tried to destroy as much as they possibly could. At Zhlobin, the Russians saw a trench with 2,500 corpses of newly-murdered civilians, and it is estimated that well over a million people had been murdered in Belorussia during the German occupation— among them the entire Jewish population

and many hundreds of thousands of partisans and their "accomplices", including women and children.

Most of Belorussia, and the country east of it between Smolensk and Viazma, had been turned into a "desert zone". In the spring of 1944, anticipating a probable withdrawal from Belorussia, the Germans had ordered that the winter crops be ploughed under, and had tried to prevent spring sowing. They even devised special rollers to destroy the crops.

Practically all the cities were in ruins. It is true that with nearly sixty percent of the rural areas more or less under partisan control (and even jurisdiction, complete with Soviet administrative and party organs) these orders could not be put into effect in many places.

General Tippelskirch, Commander of the 4th German Army which took part in the