Jassy-Kishinev Operation

[Gotthard Heinrici]

This operation was considered to be one of huge significance in that it opened the way for the Balkans to be occupied by the Soviets. It involved the clearing of the Moldovian area of German and Romanian troops. Malinovsky's finest hour!

Read more about it here: Jassy-Kishinev Operation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There's a whole area of the Ostfront just waiting to be explored and Kudos to Owen for opeining it up!

[Zoya]

From that, it's interesting to see that the German losses, for once outnumbered the Soviet. Is this because of an imporvement in the fighting methods/planning of the Soviets, do you think, or because by this time the German army was clearly on its last legs?

Statistics:

Soviet losses

Men:

• 13,197 irrecoverable
• 53,933 wounded/sick.

Material

• 75 tanks and self-propelled guns
• 108 guns and mortars
• 111 aircraft

German losses

Men:

• >250,000 men irrecoverable losses, unknown number of wounded.

Material:

• 83 tanks and self-propelled guns
• 3,500 guns
• 3,300 motor vehicles
• 330 planes

[Gotthard Heinrici]

I think that at this stage of the war, the russians were becoming extremely adept at large scale offensives and were able to sustain the offensive even after the initial breakthrough. On a strategic level in 1944, the Germans were definitely inferior to the Soviet Army.