The Big Three agreed to form an international organization, and Roosevelt sketched the outlines of what would eventually become the United Nations. Stalin thought it could work but shrewdly probed the depth of the president’s commitment by saying that in the future the United States might have to send ground troops to trouble spots. FDR was not sure that his country would agree. In the postwar world, he said, the U.S. would consent, at most, to dispatch “planes and ships to Europe.”63
Stalin could take these candid remarks to mean that, at least if he proceeded with reasonable caution, he could have his own way without much worry. Indeed, that was how some U.S. observers present at the talks saw the unfortunate turn of events.64
THE RED ARMY OPENS THE DOOR FOR COMMUNISM
At Tehran, Stalin sounded as though he trusted his allies and wanted only to get along. But his contempt for them knew no bounds. The record is full of examples, like one from March 1944, when he spoke to visiting Yugoslavian Communists. He told them not to be fooled by his cordial relationships with Roosevelt and Churchill, whom he likened to capitalist pickpockets. He warned his guests not to “frighten” the Western Allies, by which he meant “to avoid anything that might alarm them into thinking that a revolution was going on in Yugoslavia or an attempt at Communist control.”65 Stalin’s political attitudes and ambitions were unchanged, despite any gestures of friendship he might make.
For now the war made its own demands, and Stalin, as commander in chief and as promised at Tehran, wanted a major strike against the Germans to coincide with Overlord, the landing in Normandy. The Soviets prepared Operation Bagration—named after a Georgian general who had fallen in the war against Napoleon. It faced numerically strong and fiercely determined Axis forces.66
Planning for Bagration began in March and April 1944. It was to be at the heart of a series of five coordinated offensives that would begin in the north against Finland, with the next strikes coming in phases to the far south toward Romania.67 The operation was conceived on a grand scale, eventually involving some 2.4 million Soviet troops and more if we include the partisans, with a minimum of 140,000 in well-organized units. The Red Army aimed at achieving overwhelming numerical superiority and used 5,200 tanks, 5,300 planes, and 36,000 pieces of artillery and mortars. By comparison, the numbers for the Germans were 900 tanks, 1,350 planes, and artillery and mortars at 9,500. When the attack came, it was preceded by elaborate and successful deception.68
This herculean operation greatly exceeded the June 6, 1944, landings in Normandy, where 57,500 soldiers from the United States went ashore along with 75,215 British and Canadians. Soldiers from other nations soon followed. By June 30, when the first phase of that invasion ended, just over 850,000 troops had landed. Hitler’s much-heralded Atlantic Wall could not hold them back, so he decided to withdraw some forces from the east to stop the advance in the west and in Italy. In that way, the Allied invasion contributed to the success of the Red Army in the east.
On March 8, Hitler ordered the creation of another line of defenses along the eastern front with “fortified positions” (feste Plätze) running from the north at Tallinn (Reval) near Leningrad, in the middle at Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev, Borisov, Minsk, and Bobruisk, in a line finally ending far to the south at the Black Sea west of Odessa. Eventually there were twenty-nine such fortresses. Hitler’s directive stated that each was “to allow itself to be surrounded, thereby holding down the largest possible number of enemy forces,” as fortresses in history had done.69
Bagration began after a short delay on June 22, by coincidence three years to the day since Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa opened the war against the USSR. Famed Marshals Georgi Zhukov, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, and Konstantin Rokossovsky led the Red Army forward along a 350-mile-wide front that soon extended to 600 miles, often through the toughest slogging—including the almost impenetrable Pripet Marshes. The full scope of the offensive was disguised so well that the Germans were unable to figure out the direction of the attack.70
By chance, famed Soviet writer Vasily Grossman was in Bobruisk on June 27, just after it fell. He saw the thousands of corpses so dense that trucks and tanks had to drive over them. “A cauldron of death was boiling here,” as the Red Army took its revenge, “a ruthless, terrible revenge over those who hadn’t surrendered their arms and tried to break out to the west.”71 In the first two weeks, the Soviet forces destroyed not just Bobruisk but nearly all of Army Group Center, some 25 divisions and more than 300,000 men. Bagration was costlier to the Germans than Stalingrad. Soviet commanders were surprised that the enemy would not retreat, but Hitler ordered his troops to hold.
On July 8, Stalin called Zhukov back to Moscow for a conference with General Aleksei I. Antonov, the operations chief of the general staff. All agreed that Germany’s final defeat was a question of time. Molotov, who was also there, suggested that Hitler would likely try to negotiate with the West. Stalin thought that Roosevelt and Churchill would not go along. Instead, he believed, they would “try to attain their political interests in Germany by setting up an obedient government, not by collusion with the Nazis who have lost the trust of the people.”72
On July 17, Stalin put on a parade in Moscow of 57,000 captured Wehrmacht soldiers, most of them taken prisoner near Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia. The defeated and depressed marched through the streets, twenty abreast in grim silence. They took three hours to pass. By all accounts, the sight of them raised as much pity as hatred. For the most part, the men in the crowd remained silent; a few women had tears in their eyes, with one murmuring they were “like our boys, also driven to war.”73
Beginning on August 20, the Red Army mounted yet another major offensive, toward Romania to the south. It was designed to retake Moldova (at the time, the Moldavian Soviet Republic, acquired in 1940) and to crush the German-Romanian alliance. Although its massive proportions (with 1.3 million men) came as a surprise, the troops were anything but crack divisions. Many were drafted off the streets or the fields, put in a uniform, and barely trained. In addition, there were penal (shtraf) units, made up of men who volunteered or were conscripted from the Gulag. These shtrafniki might have been sentenced for “counterrevolutionary” crimes, though many were felons, including convicted murderers. Whereas initially such men were used separately on suicide missions, by mid-1944 they could be found in regular units. Perhaps they added to the fighting spirit, but they may also have contributed to the moral erosion in the ranks.74
German forces were also replenished with less than fully trained personnel. More of them began to desert, and their Romanian allies were hardly fighting at all. The death toll of Wehrmacht soldiers in the summer of 1944 was staggering. German figures show that on the eastern front in June, the Red Army killed 142,079; in July 169,881; and in August 277,465. In addition, large numbers of prisoners were taken, and for these months alone, they range around 200,000. The fates of war had turned decisively against Germany and its allies. While it is true that the Red Army paid a dreadful price for this great victory, with 243,508 killed and twice as many wounded, the Soviet Union was able to replace the losses, to grow its total forces, and to equip them with more (and better) tanks and artillery.75