Operation Concert

Operation Concert (Russian: Операция «Концерт») was a large-scale railway sabotage operation carried out by Soviet partisans in the German rear from 19 September to late October 1943, during the Great Patriotic War. It was the second phase of the Rail War, following the operation conducted between 3 August and 15 September 1943, and it followed the line laid down in June 1943 by the resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia calling for the destruction of enemy railway communications by the rail war method. The operation was conducted under the plan and management of the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement, whose head, Panteleimon Ponomarenko, worked to secure interaction between Red Army operations and the partisan forces. Each partisan formation received a specific combat task and underwent large-scale training in mine and demolition work, and when bad weather meant that Soviet aviation had delivered only 50 percent of the planned supplies by 19 September, the start of the operation was moved to 25 September.

The operation involved 193 partisan detachments from Belorussia, the Baltic region, Karelia, Crimea, and the Leningrad and Kalinin regions. Russian-language sources put the number of participants at more than 120,000, while English-language sources give more than 210,000 men, women and children. (The figures differ between sources.) The frontage of the operation, excluding Karelia and Crimea, was about 900 kilometres and its depth more than 400 kilometres. It was closely tied to the forthcoming Soviet offensive on the Smolensk and Gomel axes and to the Battle of the Dnieper, the crossing of the Dnieper. The Smolensk offensive operation (Operation Suvarov, 7 August to 2 October 1943) aimed to defeat the left wing of the German Army Group Centre and prevent it from transferring forces to the southwestern direction, while the Western, Kalinin and Bryansk fronts conducted the Smolensk and Bryansk offensive operations to pin German troops down and keep them from being redeployed to the Dnieper. The purpose of the operation was to put large stretches of railway track out of action in order to disrupt enemy military transport.

On the night of 19 September part of the partisan brigades reached their jumping-off lines and struck at the railway communications, and on the night of 25 September the main mass of partisan formations entered the fighting. The partisans destroyed some 150,000 rails, out of the 11 million rails on occupied territory on 1 January 1943. Belorussian partisans alone destroyed about 90,000 rails and 1,041 trains, blew up 72 railway bridges, and destroyed 58 garrisons. As a result, rail carrying capacity fell by 35 to 40 percent, greatly hampering the regrouping and supply of German troops and giving substantial help to the advancing Red Army. Other accounts report more than 1,000 trains derailed. Russian-language sources further state that 30,000 German soldiers and officers were killed, and the figure of 58 destroyed garrisons appears only in the same Russian-language record.

The German command tried to restore rail traffic: new railway repair battalions were transferred to Belorussia, the local population was driven out to repair work, and rails and sleepers were brought in from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany. The partisans nevertheless put the repaired sections out of action again. The operation was halted for lack of explosives, and the shortage also led to the cancellation of a winter phase. Ilya Starinov, the prominent Soviet saboteur, assessed that concentrating the partisans' main efforts on destroying rails reduced the number of train wrecks and in fact increased the carrying capacity of the roads, while making their restoration harder for the Red Army during the offensive. Later accounts place the operation together with Operation Bagration as the second of the three stages of the Rail War, and the experience gained in it was used in later operations against German troops.