By the evening of 24 August, the main forces of Timoshenko’s Western Front, specifically, Konev’s 19th and Khomenko’s 30th Armies, had weathered the most powerful counterstroke Strauss’ Ninth Army could throw at them. In the two days of bitter fighting on 20 and 21 August, Konev’s 19th Army met and defeated Ninth Army’s reinforced 7th Panzer Division, destroying or damaging roughly two-thirds of its tanks and forcing it to withdraw from combat to lick its wounds. For the first time in the war, Red Army infantrymen, cooperating closely with field and antiaircraft artillerymen, a handful of tanks, sappers, and some supporting pilots and their crews were able to repulse a German armored thrust and, by doing so, keep the 19th Army’s bridgehead intact. However, as he penned his after-action-reports to Timoshenko, Konev also understood his victory had a price. Specifically, the heavy losses his army suffered during the recent fighting had severely sapped its combat effectiveness. Unless reinforcements arrived, Konev concluded, it would be exceedingly difficult for his army to match its recent performance in the near future. To the north, Khomenko reached the same conclusion regarding his threadbare 30th Army. Thus, in this sense, the victories the two armies had won over the past week were largely Pyrrhic in nature.

At the Western Front’s headquarters, Marshal Timoshenko was also enough of a realist to understand that, without reinforcements, his most important shock groups had “shot their bolt.” Thus, while encouraged by 19th Army’s performance west of the Vop’ River, he was already gathering the reinforcements to sustain his counteroffensive. As a matter of fact, with the Stavka’s agreement and support, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the Western Main Direction Command, he was already considering expanding his more modest second counteroffensive with the forces of two fronts into an even more ambitious general counteroffensive employing the forces of three fronts.

From the perspective of Bock and Strauss at Army Group Center and Ninth Army, it was now very apparent that, with their armored counterstroke defeated and no other panzer forces at hand, their infantry divisions would have to continue “bleeding” along what both considered to be the army group’s unfortunate and senseless “eastern front.” Thus, while Bock desperately scraped the bottom of the barrel in his search for fresh infantry, as reflected by his personal diary, his protestations over what he perceived as the Führer’s misguided military strategy increased in ferocity. Moreover, while frustrated, Bock was also now convinced that only a signal victory on his army group’s left wing would end the carnage in the army group’s center. As the next chapter demonstrates, that victory was indeed close at hand.