On the 1944 Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht was on the defensive, losing territory to the Soviet forces as they fell back westwards. What made the military situation worse was the fact that the German Luftwaffe had already lost the air supremacy, with all major German cities being bombed night and day. In the Summer of 1944, the Red Army would set in motion powerful counteroffensive which could not be stopped.
On June 23, 1944, the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, which was a massive Red Army counteroffensive against the German positions of Army Group Center in Byelorussia (today’s Belarus). The German units were composed of the 800,000 troops, under the command of field marshall Walter Model, while the Soviet forces were made up of 2.3 million men, which included 4,100 tanks. The first military engagement of Operation Bagration was the battle for the city of Vitebsk, where the men of the German LIII Corps were encircled.
By the time Joseph Stalin had launched this powerful and lethal counteroffensive, the Germans were already fighting the war on two fronts, because the Allies had just landed on the beaches of Normandy, on June 6, 1944. And the German industrial capacity was being mangled by the Allied carpet bombing and the German civilians incinerated by fire bombing. Thus, Germany could not recover and refit their army units on both fronts. Below, you can watch a footage of the military situation of the Eastern Front and Western Front in 1944.
The Soviet Storm in 1944 (video)
0 comments:
Post a Comment