Turning the pages back... July 22, 1944 (07/23/00)

Turning the pages back...

July 22, 1944

Begun on July 13, 1944, the Battle of Brody in western Ukraine pitted the combined forces of the German army and the recently established Galicia Division (later renamed as the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army), a volunteer division of young Ukrainian men within the German army, against advancing Soviet forces. Within days Soviet troops encircled the German and Ukrainian forces and on July 22 with the completion of a three-day breakout by the soldiers of the Galicia Division (dyviziia), the battle of Brody ended. It was one of the final battles on the territory of Ukraine during the second world war and was a major effort by Ukrainians to block the complete takeover of Ukraine by the Soviet Union.

Soon after the battle began it became clear that the German positioning of the Ukrainian troops left them vulnerable to encirclement by Soviet forces. The Ukrainian troops, well-armed and trained, fought a good ground battle, but were relentlessly bombed and strafed by Soviet fighter planes.

The number of casualties suffered by the "dyviziinyky" at Brody have differed widely. In particular, Soviet propagandists, citing tens of thousands of casualties, disseminated in the West widely inflated figures after the war to make it appear that the battle was a rout of superior Soviet forces against inexperienced Ukrainian soldiers sent in by a weak and receding German Army. In fact, the soldiers withstood overwhelming odds.

Many Ukrainian diaspora sources cite figures of 7,000 to 8,000 Ukrainian division members lost at Brody. Some cite 3,000. However, more current estimates, using resources available to post-Soviet historians, place the number of Ukrainian soldiers originally deployed at Brody at approximately 10,400, with more than 5,300 breaking out and surviving the Soviet encirclement, putting the Ukrainian casualties, dead and captured, at closer to 5,000, though some of these also later escaped and eluded captivity.

Formed in 1943 to fight the advance of the Soviet Red Army into western Ukrainian territory and to provide a foundation for a future army of an independent Ukraine, many of the young Ukrainian men who had survived Brody joined the underground Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and continued to battle against Soviet troops and Communist partisans until the end of the second world war and then into the 1950s.

(Sources: "Galicia Division: The Waffen-SS 14th Grenadier Division 1943-1945" by Michael O. Logusz, Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer Military History, 1997; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 1, "Brody, Battle of," Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984; "Ukraine: A History," second edition, by Orest Subtelny, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

| Home Page |