labor battalions and driven to the German rear. Only a few hundred old people and children were allowed to stay in the town. The witnesses described to Werth how, on the night before the Wehrmacht pulled out of the town, they had been locked into the church and observed German soldiers looting houses and systematically setting each on fire. They were freed by the advancing Red Army. Werth described the countryside of the "Yelnya salient" (territory that had been held by the Wehrmacht) as "completely devastated", with "every village and every town destroyed, and the few surviving civilians living in cellars and dugouts". The Wehrmacht losses included 23,000 casualties of the XX Army Corp for the period from 8 August to 8 September. The Red Army losses for the period from 30 August to 8 September are estimated at 31,853 overall casualties. Historian David Glantz states that although the offensive succeeded in attaining its strategic objective, the operation cost the 24th Army nearly 40 percent of its operational strength. This, combined with other failed Red Army offensives in the Smolensk area, temporarily blunted the German drive but seriously weakened Red Army formations defending the approaches to Moscow. In a lecture to the US Army Heritage and Education Center, Glantz asserted that in the run up to the Battle of Moscow, the Wehrmacht would not have made nearly as much progress as they did if the Stavka had not suffered losses in unsuccessful counter-offensives east of Smolensk. At the same time, in the 2015 edition of When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (co-written by Glantz and Jonathan House), the authors state that while "Western Front's losses undermined its ability to contain a future German offensive (...), the damage it did to Bock's army group [contributed to the later] German collapse at the gates of Moscow". In German and Soviet propaganda The Yelnya offensive was the first substantial reverse that the Wehrmacht had suffered during Barbarossa. Nazi propaganda presented the retreat as a planned operation; in September 1941, a German infantryman wrote: Officially it was called a "planned withdrawal" (...). But to me it was so much bullshit. The next day, we heard on the radio, in the 'news from the front' [the Wehrmachtbericht] about the "successful front correction" in our Yelnya defensive lines and the enormous losses we inflicted on the enemy. But no single word was heard