Operation Bagration: The Most Underrated Offensive In Modern History
Everyone knows about D-Day and Market Garden but few know about Bagration
June 6th is a date that most people know but very few people know about June 22nd. Operation Overlord kicked off on Tuesday, June 6th, 1944, and landed thousands of troops and tonnes of material supplies on the beaches of France. The invasion of France caused Germany to frantically redeploy vital men and equipment from the Eastern Front back to the Western Front. This gave the Soviet Union an opening that they could not pass up.
June 22nd was the three year anniversary, to the day, of Operation Barbarossa and it was the day that the Soviet Union kicked off Operation Bagration. Not only was this one of the largest offensives in military history, it was a smashing success and is supremely underrated in terms of its effect on ending the war in 1945.
Secretive planning
After the loss at the Battle of Stalingrad and then Kursk, the Germans were beating a hasty retreat out of the Soviet Union and back towards more friendly lines. In the north, the German army group was being pushed back from their long siege of Leningrad. In the south, the Soviets managed to dislodge the Germans from the Crimean Peninsula. By June of 1944, the…
