> Well, what makes Bagration unique in the same sense as Overlord? The scale alone does not cut it, and it's not the largest land operation anyway.
Scale alone is very important, and Soviet operations were larger scale (meaning harder to coordinate) than Western Allied ones. Also, I explained maskirovka. It's just that you don't find it interesting enough, and I cannot argue against your preferences except to disagree.
Barbarossa to my knowledge was/is the largest land operation of all time (and nobody will disagree it's both iconic and massively important), and Bagration comes second. Let's not mince words here. And also, Barbarossa was impressive at first but ultimately a failure, in particular a logistical failure -- precisely where Bagration succeeded.
> Partially yes, but that's not what makes Bagration forgettable.
> "Iconic" is about human stories. Photos from the landing craft moving onto the beach, soldiers getting mowed by the machine guns while running over completely exposed positions, German soldiers sitting in fortified, but ultimately outnumbered and hopeless positions. Those are very memorable.
> [...]
> You could make stories about Bagration, but it would not appear unique to the reader, you can't really transmit the scale of manouver warfare into the human story.
There's plenty of similar human stories and memorable situations that could be told for Bagration, plenty of furious advances, encirclements and desperate last stands (e.g. the German "fortress cities"), plenty of individual soldier stories to be told with Bagration as the backdrop. There's even smaller scale preparatory actions, such as the partisan operations "Rail War" and "Concert".
It's just that, like I've already said, Western media is not interested in telling these stories, partly because they would overshadow American contributions to the European theater of war, and partly because audiences must not empathize with the Red Army too much. You could make a "Saving Conscript Petrov" movie as powerful as Saving Private Ryan, but who wants to make it?
Overlord was large scale too yet Spielberg found the way to make it smaller and about individual soldiers. You can make this with Bagration as well. You don't need to make a documentary about large scale maneuvers, you can make it about individual soldiers. The Soviets suffered massive losses during Bagration, so you are not even sure your heroes will survive! Spielberg could do it, if he was interested. So could Clint Eastwood. Imagine: comrade Petrov is taking part of partisan actions, but he's captured by Germans; he's carrying some papers/knowledge that would betray the larger Bagration operation... now Stavka must send a platoon to Rescue Conscript Petrov before it's too late. Intersperse with scenes of his mother and girlfriend back behind the frontlines, anxious about his fate. (Ok, ok, I'm no Spielberg).
> You can make stories about close quarters combat for months in a completely destroyed Stalingrad, fighting for every building, pretty much living next to the enemy etc.
And yet... so few good movies have been made, right? The most well-known, "Enemy at the Gates", is a complete distortion of the truth, and pretty bad movie-making as well. Where are all the good Stalingrad movies? The best one is still the German-made one.
I believe the real problem -- affecting even you, now -- is that the Soviets (and later Russians) were not perceived as the good guys after the outbreak of the Cold War, and to this day Russians are not the good guys, and so their big moments in WWII tend to be downplayed in Western pop culture. Movies like "Enemy at the Gates" spent as much time making sure the audience didn't empathize too much with the Soviets, as with presenting the Germans as the enemy.
Complicating things even more, there's the thing that the Germans -- the ultimate bad guys of WWII -- have been somewhat rehabilitated in pop culture, making German "things" somewhat cool. (Unless one is watching a movie specifically about genocide or the Holocaust).
