DD Geopolitics

ℹ️Victory Week Special: Unknown Victories⚒ Operation Bagration: Conclusion ➡️Many battles seem to beckon as ‘the greatest of all time.’ Ever since Triandafillov and Isserson Russian Military theorists have argued that the idea of a ‘battle’ is a chimera. Battles do not seamlessly start and end, combat is a continuous process. Modern states, mobilizing and conscripting, have incredible ruthlessness and regenerative powers for their military forces. There is no decisive battle. Operation Bagration seems to show this to be true and challenge it all the same. ➡️As we will see the German Army did not die. Indeed the Red Army had endured worse defeats and survived, but Germany had nowhere near the regenerative powers of the Soviet Union of 1941. It’s manpower pool was effectively exhausted by May 1944 and now the Soviets torn a horrific chunk of flesh from their body. ➡️The toll of Bagration is difficult to fathom. From 20 June 1944 to 10 July 1944 at least 250,000 Germans died and another 150,000 went into captivity. If one includes other German personnel and pro-Nazi collaborators the Soviet estimate of 381,000 German KIA is not at all implausible. The Soviet toll was also horrific. It was perhaps the Red Army’s greatest victory but had cost them 130,000 killed. ➡️And the German woes were only beginning for soon Marshal Konev would open his own offensive. 🔴@DDGeopolitics

ℹ️Victory Week Special: Unknown Victories⚒ Operation Bagration: The Death of 9th Army (2/2) ➡️Soviet armor, artillery, and infantry ringed the fleeing Germans and poured on everything they could. The Germans were in an area with relatively few woods under a clear sky and no heavy weapons. The result was a massacre. Any communications collapsed as command vehicles were targeted and destroyed. Not having a clear way to go or orders units fragmented and attempted to charge forward into the Soviets only to be mown down as units lost cohesion. Those units that scattered were set upon by organized Soviet units with their discipline, high morale, heavier weapons and desire for revenge. Any Germans who did not surrender immediately were killed. After 48 hours it was all over. 7,000 Germans escaped. 20,000 were taken prisoner and 53,000 were killed. ➡️The remains of 9th Army met much the same fate, if a less ignominious, sudden, and violent one. Falling back rapidly and disintegrating but still in some kind of order they used whatever armor, anti-tank and artillery equipment left to inflict painful losses on their Soviet pursuers. But they themselves suffered just as badly. All told 17,000 men escaped from 9th Army to German lines out of a command of at least 130,000. On 3 July 1944 Minsk was taken as the armored columns of four Soviet Fronts pursued whatever was left of HGM. 🔴@DDGeopolitics

ℹ️Victory Week Special: Unknown Victories⚒ Operation Bagration: The Death of 9th Army (1/2) ➡️9th Army was anchored on Bobruisk. Rokossovsky probed aggressively on 23 June – enough to make 9th Army commit its reserves to the front, just where Rokossovsky wanted them. Rokossovsky opened his offensive on 24 June 1944. He surprised the Germans with how his troops crossed the Pripyat marshes. Combat engineers had spent weeks sinking logs into the ground and preparing causeways and pre-prepared log bundles to provide undergirding for tanks to not sink into the mire. Under cover of bombardment these prepared causeways and roads were thrown down in a hurry and by the end of the bombardment the Germans found several Soviet divisions were in the rear of their force at Bobruisk. Further the bombardment had already mauled what few reserves 9th Army had. Concurrently the attacks north of the Pripyat marshes, while less dramatic were even more successful. In desperation the commander of 9th Army took the one armored reserve HGM had for itself and hurled into a counterattack at Rokossovsky’s troops. The panzers gouged terrible holes among the Soviet tanks, but with the advance everywhere the Panzer division could inflict horrible losses but not stop what was happening. ➡️By 27 June 80,000 Germans were sealed in a pocket inside of Bobruisk with Rokossovsky’s armored formations driving relentlessly towards Minsk to their northwest. There were a series of ‘hold fast!’ and ‘breakout’ orders that were issued one after the other by the high command, creating not only confusion for the trapped Germans but outright hysteria. One German divisional commander killed himself out of despair. But finally at 23:30 a definitive order was given for a breakout. As a final parting shot, the Germans set fire to the town and massacred many of the civilians. It started well for the Germans as they attacked and broke through the cordon immediately around them and surged towards their destination. And then the dawn rose. 🔴@DDGeopolitics

ℹ️Victory Week Special: Unknown Victories⚒ Operation Bagration: The Death of 4th Army (2/2) ➡️By 5 July what was left of 4th Army had been reduced to two separate pockets of desperate survivors and there was no meaningful command or control and so the German Generals left alive gave the order ‘breakout, West, however you can’ and what was now a mobbed surged desperately against the Soviets who cut them down as ruthlessly as the Germans had gleefully and smugly down 3 years ago. Now the tables had turned. All told maybe 2,000 Germans reached their own lines, but in scattered groups. The rest of 4th Army – more than 100,000 men, were captured or are forever buried in an unknown part of Belarus, their bodies claimed by the forests or the swamps. ➡️Lest anyone feel too sorry for them, HGM had inflicted untold misery in Winter 1943 and Summer 1943 when they had force marched any civilians who did not have time to hide onto death marches as slave laborers to the Reich. In a grisly foreshadowing of the death marches by the SS of the surviving Jewish concentration camp prisoners in 1945, any Russian civilians who tried to flee or fell from exhaustion were shot in the spot or beaten to death. And as 4th Army retreated they massacred Belarusian villages to loot them for whatever food they could find. Thus they met the fate they had visited on others. ➡️And there was still 9th Army. 🔴@DDGeopolitics

ℹ️Victory Week Special: Unknown Victories Operation Bagration: The Death of 4th Army (1/2) ➡️The German 4th Army was the target of Cherniakhovsky’s 3rd Belarusian Front and part of Zakharov’s 2nd Belarusian Front. As 3rd Panzer Army’s defense was anchored around Vitebsk, 4th Army’s was anchored around Orsha. The German commander Tippelskirch had long wanted to pull his forces behind the river Dnepr, but HGM Commander Field Marshal Busch had refused. When the Soviet bombardment rolled out in its terrible ferocity on 23 June Tippelkirsch’s men disintegrated, figurately but usually literally, underneath the terrible storm of Soviet steel and explosives. He begged for permission to pull his men back beyond the Dnepr and quickly but was refused. Indeed he was ordered to counterattack – but counterattack with what? Eventually the units that were east of the Dnepr were blasted over it by the Soviets while those west of the Dnepr were being pummelled into pieces and sliced apart by powerful Soviet attacks. Soviet air and artillery strikes destroyed radio communications. In desperation Tippelskirch finally obtained permission to withdraw from the Dnepr to the Berezina – the site of the terrible finale for Napoleon’s 1812 invasion. ➡️The fate of 4th Army was just as terrible. Out of supply and almost out of ammunition the 4th Army struggled Westward overcoming Soviet line after Soviet line but always there was another one and the distance they needed to traverse got further and further West as Soviet armored columns raced further and further ahead and as Soviet infantry fired and attacked incessantly. As vehicles ran out of fuel or were damaged they had to be abandoned and so every hour the 4th Army grew weaker. German columns met their end time and again in surprise Soviet attacks and ambushes in the forests, bogs, and sandy tracks of their retreat path. The Germans quickly ran out of food and therefore the energy to go on. 🔴@DDGeopolitics

ℹ️Victory Week Special: Unknown Victories⚒ Operation Bagration: The death of 3rd Panzer Army ➡️On 21 June Bagramyan sent forward reconnaissance in force assaults that overran the German picket line. Sensing an opportunity, Bagramyan started his offensive 24 hours earlier than planned on 22 June. 3rd Panzer Army’s soldiers were buried alive or blasted to atoms by Bagramyan’s artillery in a bombardment that lasted two hours. Bagramyan had moved his artillery based on where his reconnaissance probes had encountered the most resistance. The strongest German units and strongpoints disappeared in an inferno. ➡️The central point of resistance – the city of Vitebsk – was a tougher nut to crack but within 24 hours it was clear to the local German commanders that the situation was hopeless. Four German divisions fended off Soviet attacks even as their numbers dwindled and the units to their flanks and the city itself collapsed around them. On 26 June the Germans tried to breakout. Initially, they were successful but soon became a massacre of the lightly armed Germans – who had had to abandon their heavy equipment – as they desperately tried to fight through much more heavily armed Soviet blocking units. Only a handful of Germans reached their own lines. 10,000 went into captivity. Another 18,000 were killed. Another 5,000 German corpses were identified in the city of Vitebsk and perhaps even more died there. ➡️The rest met a similar fate as they were pursued by Bagramyan’s troops, pinned against the Ulla river, with their heavy equipment running out of fuel, their horses slaughtered by strafing attacks from the VVS or blown to pieces by Red Army artillery and even tanks and anti-tank guns firing over open sights. As the end approached the Germans jettisoned everything and desperately swam the Ulla. The survivors could not be called a fighting force. They were traumatized. But at least some men and some heavy equipment had escaped. Compared to the other armies of HGM, 3rd Panzer Army got off lightly. 🔴@DDGeopolitics

ℹ️Victory Week Special: Unknown Victories⚒ Operation Bagration: Overview (2/2) ➡️The Germans had misread the Soviets. The Stavka, and especially Stalin, had learned to their cost in 1941 and 1942 to not be overly ambitious. Though Stalin never entirely shook that impulse to ‘overachieve the plan’, just what could be overachieved was something he now had a much more realistic idea of. Four Soviet Fronts – 1st Baltic, 3rd Belarusian, 2nd Belarusian, and 1st Belarusian were to launch sequenced but coordinated concentric attacks on the different armies of HGM to wipe an entire German Army Group off the face of the earth. This was an operation four times the size and of much greater ambition than the Vyborg offensive. By itself HGM was twice the size of the Finnish Army. ➡️Top military talent was assigned to the offensive: Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Rokossovsky, Bagramyan, Zakharov, Cherniakhovsky. The two stars were to be Zhukov and Rokossovsky. Rokossovsky was responsible for the most difficult part of the operation, trapping 9th and part of 2nd Army, operations involving forces north and south of the Pripyat marshes. His masterpiece was his part of Bagration. He proposed a double envelopment of the 9th Army in the area around Bobruisk. Despite a nervewracking challenge by Stalin he stuck to his commitment that he could make it work. ➡️In total 1,254,000 soldiers, 6,000 tanks, 26,300 pieces of artillery, rocket launchers, and mortars, 7,000 aircraft and over 70,000 trucks were lined up against HGM. And even then this understates matters as in almost all sectors over 250 artillery pieces were concentrated against each designated breakthrough kilometer. In designated breakthrough areas the Soviets had an up to 20:1 advantage in infantry and sometimes an infinite advantage in armor as the Germans in places had no reserves. 3rd Panzer Army for example had no Panzer divisions and only a handful of armor to its name. 🔴@DDGeopolitics

ℹ️Victory Week Special: Unknown Victories⚒ Operation Bagration: Overview (1/2) ➡️It It was the ultimate showdown. Ever since it had thrust its way into Belarus and destroyed General Pavlov’s doomed command, slugged it out with Timoshenko at Smolensk, doomed Kirponos at Kiev, destroyed much of the Red Army at Vyazma and attempted to take Moscow the true nemesis of the Stavka was German Army Group Center (HGM). After 1943 it had been driven back but as Army Group South was pushed around Ukraine, Army Group Center held into almost all of Belarus, but now with Soviet armies to the north and south of it, Belarus became a giant salient – to both the Soviets and the Germans ‘the Belarusian Balcony.’ In this ‘balcony’ there were 3 German armies: 3rd Panzer army, 4th, 9th, and 2nd. When combined with paramilitaries, Organization Todt, Nazi party staffers, local collaborators, HGM as the Soviets conceived of it was 849,000 strong and 487,000 strong as the Germans saw it. This seems formidable but HGM was no longer the most powerful German grouping of forces. After the liberation of most of Ukraine, the Germans were certain the Soviets would launch their big summer offensive in Ukraine. ➡️This was not ‘stupid’ on the part of the Germans nor can very skilful Soviet military deception be given too much credit. The Germans looked at the map and saw disaster staring them in the face. From their point of view if the Soviets concentrated their armored and mechanized armies in northwest Ukraine and then smashed through and drove up to the Baltic sea near Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) they would trap not only HGM but Army Group North as well as smashing any forces in their way destroying half the German Army on the Eastern Front. So they concentrated their armored reserves in northwestern Ukraine and stripped other areas of the front – including HGM - of panzer divisions to build a reserve that could slow or stop this apocalyptic threat. 🔴@DDGeopolitics

So, let's ask a question here. Is capitalism so irrational and illogical that even it's chief advocates, the people who force it on us under penalty of homelessness, starvation, arrest and even death, cannot understand it? Or Is capitalism so wretched and inhumane that they can't admit what it really is? Perhaps it's both. Capitalism is nothing more than a shell game, designed to pull wads of money out of a hat for the benefit of a few.

🇷🇺☦️Thousands of people have gathered for the service in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow 🔴@DDGeopolitics