The blow to Army Group Center, however, had been as spectacular as it had been swift. In a bit more than two months, it had lost almost 400,000 men killed, wounded, and missing, making Operation Bagration a far worse disaster for the Wehrmacht than the comparable one at Stalingrad or even that of Verdun in the previous war. Indeed, only the Battle of the Somme in 1916 had exacted a greater toll. Again, some slight comfort could be found in the fact that the Red Army had paid a very high price for its brilliant success: total casualties of almost 800,000 men, along with almost 3,000 armored vehicles destroyed, while auxiliary operations in the Lvov area had cost another 300,000 casualties and 1,269 armored vehicles. The Germans, however, could not have found much comfort in the reasons behind the enemy success. First, and perhaps foremost, the Soviet quantitative advantage in manpower and materiel had become so great as to produce a qualitative effect. The Soviet edge in manpower remained enormous; despite the losses of Bagration, the strength of the Red Army steadily rose, while that of the Ostheer shrank. In addition, the Soviets’ war production, supplemented by Lend-Lease deliveries, swamped that of the Germans. In 1944 alone, for example, the Soviets lost 23,000 tanks and assault guns, while the Germans produced only 22,000. During the entire war, in fact, the Soviets lost the astounding total (their figures) of 96,500 tanks and assault guns, 106,400 aircraft, and 317,5000 mortars and artillery pieces. Even as his mobilization effort struggled to keep pace with Germany’s enemies in equipment, Speer could not generate the resource most desperately needed—trained soldiers. In his analysis of this operation, Niklas Zetterling has noted the astonishing fact that the Germans’ “casualty inflicting capability” was 5.4 times greater than that of their adversary yet they still suffered a crushing defeat.26
The reason for this lay in the second key factor, the new operational mobility of the Soviets, which allowed them to strike rapidly and deeply into the German rear. More than anything, the Russians could thank Lend-Lease for this decisive advantage, for, during the war, their Western allies delivered over 450,000 trucks and jeeps to the Red Army. Without these vehicles, Bagration simply could not have been executed to its full extent since the Soviets would have had no way to supply or maintain the momentum of the offensive. Indeed, David Glantz has estimated that, without deliveries of these vehicles, the Red Army in its various offensives between 1943 and 1945 would have achieved only shallow penetrations and not meaningful operational breakthroughs, for, without this key element of mobility, the Germans would have been afforded time to build new defensive lines in the rear. The dominant image in the summer of 1944 on the eastern front was one of plodding German columns of men marching on foot accompanied by horse-drawn wagons being overtaken and harassed by Red infantry riding on tanks, trucks, or jeeps. In terms of aid from their Western allies, the Soviets also benefited enormously from the success of the Normandy invasion. Hitler, after all, had stripped the Ostfront of men and equipment in the expectation that a triumph in the west would lead to a decisive change in the east. Instead, the lack of men, equipment, and reserves in Russia all but ensured the success of Bagration.27
This overwhelming disparity in strength, in turn, highlighted the third key factor, German mistakes in intelligence assessment and leadership. In this case, deficiencies in intelligence gathering were, perhaps, not as significant as the failure to form an accurate picture from the information obtained. Again, it was not so much that their original assessment of the danger point was wrong as that the Germans credited the Soviets with more boldness than they should have. Then, in the face of the reality of the Soviet attack, they stubbornly clung to this misassessment until it was too late. This accentuated the larger problem of overall leadership, Hitler’s unwillingness to withdraw to more defensible positions in order to shorten the front and create an operational reserve in the east. The problem here was not only his stand-fast mania but also the inversion of character between Stalin and himself. At the outset, Hitler had been the gambler and innovator, willing to listen to his generals’ advice, while Stalin had been mistrustful of his generals, micromanaged battles, and insisted on not yielding any ground. Having survived his early mistakes, however, Stalin had come to listen to and rely on key advisers such as Vasilevsky and Zhukov. Hitler, on the other hand, became not only inflexible tactically and operationally but, especially after the 20 July assassination attempt, also both contemptuous and distrustful of his generals. The result, ironically, was that Soviet methods in 1944 resembled those of the Germans in 1941. While it had taken the Red Army three years to learn the lesson of mobile warfare and it still suffered far more disproportionate losses, it had now developed the effective use of combined weapons. The Germans, however, under the weight of Hitler’s operational mistakes, reacted to the enemy blitzkrieg much as the Soviets had in 1941. As with that earlier German blitzkrieg, despite spectacular operational victories, it ultimately failed to end the war in one blow. For that, the Germans could thank Stalin and the Stavka, who not only passed on the initial chance to strike boldly out of Kovel to the northwest but also compounded their error by refusing, in the face of the evidence of spectacular success, to accede to Zhukov’s request on 8 July to alter the plan of attack and strike toward Warsaw. Instead, Stalin stuck to the original idea of a general offensive along the entire front. Perhaps, as Karl-Heinz Frieser has suggested, he remembered all too clearly the disaster, and his role in it, that resulted from another sudden lunge to Warsaw, this time in 1920 during the Russian Civil War. Perhaps, as well, he simply could not believe the spectacle of the German debacle unfolding in front of him.28
In retrospect, the most noteworthy aspect of the summer of 1944 was not the heartening (from the Allied point of view) sight of the German debacle but the fact that, despite the savage blows of Normandy, Bagration, the escalating bomber war, and the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, the regime not only survived but also somehow managed to hold off its demise for another eight months. After all, in just June, July, and August alone, on all fronts the Wehrmacht lost a total of 750,000 men killed (590,000 on the eastern front), or roughly a third of the total number who had died from September 1939 to May 1944 (2.23 million). At the same time, the Western allies dropped ten times more tonnage of bombs on Germany in 1944 than they had in the war to date, and would top the 1944 figure by a third in just over four months in 1945, yet proved unable to break the German war economy. Amazingly, despite the battering the German armaments industry took, its output did not peak until the late summer of 1944. Bagration, as well as the other blows, certainly accelerated the German descent into the abyss, but it was not a decisive, war-winning operation.29