World War 2
The Red Army Rolls On
Between December 1943 and June 1944, a series of Soviet offences drove the Germans out of the Crimea and the Ukraine and back into eastern Poland. While the struggle in Normandy in the days after D-Day absorbed Hitler and the western Allies, the Red Army was gathering itself for a renewed attack.
Operation Bagration, named after Napoleon's Russian adversary in 1812, opened on the 22nd of June, the third anniversary of Barbarossa. The offensive tore great holes in the front held by the German Army Group Centre. When the offensive finally ran down in August as it approached the River Vistula, it had punched a 250 mile gap in the German line, advanced 450 miles to the Gulf of Riga and the boarders of East Prussia and destroyed the equivalent of 25 German enemy divisions.
The German Army Group Centre had been smashed and Army Group North isolated on the Baltic Coast, where it was to remain cut off, for the rest of the war. The German Army on the Eastern Front had been dealt a blow from which it would never recover.
In the Russian offensive of the first four months of 1944 the Red Army recovered the Ukraine and drove the Germans back to the Carpathians and almost to the boarders of Poland.
Bagration had brought the Red Army right to the gates of Warsaw, where on the 1st of August 1944 the Polish Home Army rose up against the Germans. The Red Army did not come to the aid of the Poles but stood by while the Germans suppressed the uprising with great brutality. The Germans were not driven out of the Polish capital until January 1945.