An offensive greater than day D forgotten

 Since the end of WWII, western historiography has led us to believe that the Normandy landing was the decisive element for the victory in Europe. Nothing is further from reality.
The Russians were already near Poland and in Operation Bragation they defeated, and eliminated, the German Army Group Center, causing them more casualties than in Stalingrad.
The Russians would have arrived alone at the Atlantic and some say that the Anglo-Saxon landing was to avoid it, because Churchill had been delated it so that the human waste in front of the Germans would suffer the Russians.

 If you look at the number of Anglo-Saxon soldiers in front of the Russians, you can see the difference in effort, 2.5 million Russian soldiers against 160,000 Allied soldiers in Normandy the day of invasion (about 2 million at the end of August ), and only 50,000 in the South of France.
The initial D-Day landings were made with approximately 175,000 Allied troops against about 80,000 Wehrmacht soldiers.
Operation Bagration, which was launched on June 22, 1944, pitted 2.3,  million Russian troops, supported by 36,400 artillery pieces, 5,200 tanks and 5,300 aircraft, against the Germans’ Army Group Centre, which numbered 700,000 men, 900 tanks and 1,350 aircraft.

Within a month of launching, Bagration had succeeded. In relentless lightning attacks, Soviet forces annihilated 17 German divisions and reduced another 50 to half-strength, which translated into a net German loss of 42 divisions. Army Group Centre was no more. Moreover, the Soviets had punched a hole 400 kilometres wide and 160 kilometres long in the German front. By September, they would be knocking on German-occupied Warsaw’s door.*

Meanwhile, the western Allies, wedded to Montgomery’s unimaginative tactics, were still mired on the Normandy beachhead. Only on July 26, 1944, did their attempts to break out succeed, under Patton’s — not Montgomery’s — leadership.

Their breakout was aided by the fact that Bagration had forced the Wehrmacht to redeploy 46 divisions, including some from France, to the eastern front. Even then, the western Allies’ failure to close the Falaise pocket in August allowed the retreating Germans to escape. The Soviet juggernaut made no such mistake. Indeed, as Bagration showed, by the time the western Allies got around to launching their second front, which Stalin had been clamouring for since 1941, the Red Army almost didn’t need it.*

The total casualties in Normandy of the allies were . from D-Day to 21 August 225.000 about , in the D Day operation about 10.000.

The Red Army suffered 178.507 killed and missing and 587.308  wounded and non-battle casualties, 765.815 in total *

The casualties of the Germans , against the Russians, only in the Operation Bragation were 445.000 about.

In the West, twenty-five out of 38 German divisions had been utterly destroyed. The rest had been reduced to shattered remnants. In total, the Germans suffered 290,000 casualties in Normandy, including 23,000 dead, 67,000 wounded and around 200,000 missing or captured. 

*https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-operation-bagration-was-the-real-d-day-1.1127733

** Hitler´s Greatest Defeat . Paul Adair 

 By the end of May 1944 the Wehrmacht had 58 divisions in the west, of which only 11 were deployed against the D-Day landings. At the same time, however, the Germans deployed 228 divisions in the east. Thus, the Germans had almost four times as many troops facing the Soviets. And they had less than one-20th of that number in Normandy

In order to show the outside world the magnitude of the victory of Operation Bragation, some 57,000 German prisoners, taken from the encirclement east of Minsk, were paraded through Moscow: even marching quickly and twenty abreast, they took 90 minutes to pass

Parade German Prisoners in Moscow.

Operation Bragation

So, the Operation Bragatios was a lot more important that D Day, and some people said that the D Day Celebration would have to be changed by Operation Bragation´s celebration, but that is a utopia when Russia is not even invited to the events celebrating D-Day.