wolfgang von skeptik
11-16-2007, 09:27 AM
Reading In Praise of Barbarians, a collection of essays by Mike Davis, I ran across this, the 2004 original of which I found via Dogpile:
The decisive battle for the liberation of Europe began 60 years ago this month when a Soviet guerrilla army emerged from the forests and bogs of Belorussia to launch a bold surprise attack on the mighty Wehrmacht's rear.
The partisan brigades, including many Jewish fighters and concentration-camp escapees, planted 40,000 demolition charges. They devastated the vital rail lines linking German Army Group Centre to its bases in Poland and Eastern Prussia.
Three days later, on June 22 1944, the third anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Marshal Zhukov gave the order for the main assault on German front lines. Twenty-six thousand heavy guns pulverised German forward positions. The screams of the Katyusha rockets were followed by the roar of 4,000 tanks and the battle cries (in more than 40 languages) of 1.6 million Soviet soldiers. Thus began Operation Bagration, an assault over a 500-mile-long front.
This "great military earthquake", as the historian John Erickson called it, finally stopped in the suburbs of Warsaw as Hitler rushed elite reserves from western Europe to stem the Red tide in the east. As a result, American and British troops fighting in Normandy would not have to face the best-equipped Panzer divisions.
But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was several times larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy), both in the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.
By the end of summer, the Red army had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the Carpathian passes commanding the entrance to central Europe. Soviet tanks had caught Army Group Centre in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.
Thank Ivan. It does not disparage the brave men who died in the North African desert or the cold forests around Bastogne to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried not in French fields but on the Russian steppes. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately 40 "Ivans" died for every "Private Ryan". Scholars now believe that as many as 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the second world war.
Yet the ordinary Soviet soldier - the tractor mechanic from Samara, the actor from Orel, the miner from the Donetsk, or the high-school girl from Leningrad - is invisible in the current celebration and mythologisation of the "greatest generation".
full text -- very much worth reading to its conclusion -- is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story ... 09,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1236209,00.html)
The decisive battle for the liberation of Europe began 60 years ago this month when a Soviet guerrilla army emerged from the forests and bogs of Belorussia to launch a bold surprise attack on the mighty Wehrmacht's rear.
The partisan brigades, including many Jewish fighters and concentration-camp escapees, planted 40,000 demolition charges. They devastated the vital rail lines linking German Army Group Centre to its bases in Poland and Eastern Prussia.
Three days later, on June 22 1944, the third anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Marshal Zhukov gave the order for the main assault on German front lines. Twenty-six thousand heavy guns pulverised German forward positions. The screams of the Katyusha rockets were followed by the roar of 4,000 tanks and the battle cries (in more than 40 languages) of 1.6 million Soviet soldiers. Thus began Operation Bagration, an assault over a 500-mile-long front.
This "great military earthquake", as the historian John Erickson called it, finally stopped in the suburbs of Warsaw as Hitler rushed elite reserves from western Europe to stem the Red tide in the east. As a result, American and British troops fighting in Normandy would not have to face the best-equipped Panzer divisions.
But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was several times larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy), both in the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.
By the end of summer, the Red army had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the Carpathian passes commanding the entrance to central Europe. Soviet tanks had caught Army Group Centre in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.
Thank Ivan. It does not disparage the brave men who died in the North African desert or the cold forests around Bastogne to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried not in French fields but on the Russian steppes. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately 40 "Ivans" died for every "Private Ryan". Scholars now believe that as many as 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the second world war.
Yet the ordinary Soviet soldier - the tractor mechanic from Samara, the actor from Orel, the miner from the Donetsk, or the high-school girl from Leningrad - is invisible in the current celebration and mythologisation of the "greatest generation".
full text -- very much worth reading to its conclusion -- is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story ... 09,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1236209,00.html)