Not Another WWII FPS: 10 Neglected Eastern Front Battles To Consider
5. Operation Bagration
Almost since the very moment Hitler kicked in his front door, Stalin had been all but begging (read: angrily demanding) Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front to distract the idle occupation forces in the West and take some of the enormous pressure away from the USSR. It finally came on the infamous 6 June 1944, and the entire world knows that story. It is what happened two weeks later that is far broader in scope: on 22 June 1944, three years since the wars start, the Red Army initiated Operation Bagration: having amassed over 2.3 million troops and thousands of tanks and planes, they threw them against the pitiful remnants of Army Group Centre in the Byelorussian SSR and, it is fair to say, utterly broke their back. By the time the offensive ended two months later, the Red Army stood outside the gates of Warsaw in Poland, which had initiated a famed uprising that they futilely hoped would be assisted by the contemptibly idle Soviets, and were perilously close to the German border in East Prussia, whilst the Germans were all but spent and scattered across half of Europe. The main thrust of the offensive was towards the capital of Minsk, with the aim of liberating it after three years of brutal occupation some estimates place Byelorussian losses alone at one third of the whole population. Three Soviet armies rushed towards their goal, with the road barred by shattered but steadfast German forces. The struggle, whilst epic on the outside, was remarkably brief within the city itself, even with the street fighting bringing to mind images of Stalingrad. The defenders ultimately fled or were killed, joining a flood of comrades being forced unavoidably westwards that summer, finally being evicted from pre-war Soviet territory. In a symbolic gesture, tens of thousands of captured Germans were paraded through Moscow in July, showing the world once and for all that Stalin had the upper hand. Taking part in the grand battle towards and inside Minsk itself, whilst constituting just a small part of the overwhelming scale of Bagration, would be quite the adrenaline rush: after making players face defeat and disaster, playing through an ever-increasing string of fantastic victories would be a great morale boost leading into the second half of the campaign.