Barbarossa (10 page)

It appeared that this division of strength (which was soon to be
matched by an equivalent Russian disposition) corresponded to the
three objectives of Moscow, Leningrad, and the Ukraine, and this
assumption has passed into history as a guide for measuring the
success of German strategy. But in fact the "general intention"
of the
Barbarossa
directive was, geographically, imprecise. It
set out in very loose terms the aim of reaching a line from Archangel
to the Caspian, but made it clear that the primary objective was
exclusively military:

. . . Destruction of the bulk of the Soviet Army located in
Western Russia by bold operations involving deep penetrations by
armoured spearheads; prevention of the withdrawal of battleworthy
elements into the Russian interior . . .

The Panzer forces were to carve up the Soviet Army, the
slower-moving infantry and artillery were to force their surrender.
Hitler had no desire to fight for, or in, the cities of the Soviet
Union, and many of the generals on the staff agreed with him. The
battle of France had been won by striking for the Channel—not
for Paris.

This formula, as will be seen, carried in itself the seeds of
trouble. There was often friction between the Panzer commanders, who
believed that they had the whole of Russia at their feet and longed
to be sent after the glittering spires of the capital cities, and the
infantry locked in combat with the stubborn Russian masses in the
rear, who felt that the tanks should be held back to help them. This
friction was to cause a number of local tactical errors, and
gradually came to infect the whole High Command with indecision,
leading to a succession of command crises in the early autumn. But in
June it certainly seemed as if the terms of the directive were being
followed to the letter.

In the vital central sector, where the eight hundred tanks of the
2nd
Panzergruppe
were piled up behind the Bug, both bridges
over the river to the south of Brest-Litovsk fell, intact and
undefended, at the first rush. North of the town the 18th Panzer
Division, using tanks which had been specially waterproofed for "Sea
Lion" (the projected invasion of England), forded the river and
struck across the marshy ground to the main Russian defences on the
left bank of the Lesna, reaching them three hours later and there
also capturing the bridge intact. Minute by minute, as the tanks
probed deeper and the German guns lengthened their range, the tremors
which shook the Russian front magnified in strength and frequency. A
few fragments, a gradual crumbling—by midday the vital sectors
were already in landslide.

During the afternoon, when the first positive orders began to
percolate to the defenders, a gradual stirring at corps and
divisional levels took place. But there was no real effort at
concentration—not, at least, in any coordinated sense. It is
simply that all the units grouped behind the frontier seem to have
packed up as best they could and moved off to encounter the Germans
head on. And in that time the Luftwaffe had finished its work on the
forward Soviet airfield network, and these approach marches led
straight into the German bomb-sights. Roads were smashed and raked
with machine-gun fire; tank parks were blasted; fuel stores set
alight; thousands of horses were scattered, wounded and in terror,
across the countryside. It was the classic stencil of
Blitzkrieg
,
imprinted now on the broadest canvas.

In addition to the advantage of surprise the Germans had secured a
devastating superiority of numbers and firepower at the points
selected for their armoured penetration. Halder's plan had put the
entire tank strength of the German Army into these opening attacks,
dividing it into four
Panzergruppen
whose purpose was to
perforate the Russian defensive membrane at the first blow, then to
wheel inward, isolate, and cut to pieces the mass of Soviet army as
it stood on the frontier. The map will show how effective a degree of
concentration was achieved.

In the north three Panzer divisions (over six hundred tanks) and
two infantry divisions had an attack frontage of less than
twenty-five miles. Opposite them stood one weak Russian unit, the
125th Rifle Division. In the centre, where Bock's army group carried
the
Schwerpunkt
of the opening days, the two Panzer groups,
under Hoth and Guderian, comprised seven divisions with nearly
fifteen hundred tanks between them.

[A
Blitzkrieg
term, meaning spearhead, point of maximum
concentration.]

They were opposed by one complete rifle division (the 128th),
regiments from four others, and a tank division (the 22nd) which was
understrength and in process of reorganisation.

On the southern front two Soviet rifle divisions faced six
infantry divisions with about six hundred tanks distributed among
them in close support. Small wonder, then, that the comment of a
German lieutenant of the 29th Motorised Division was, ". . . the
Russian defences might have been a row of glass houses," and
that by the afternoon of 22nd June the leading elements of all four
German armoured groups were motoring fast along dry, undamaged roads,
with the sound of gunfire fading in their rear.

These "reconnaissance detachments" were mixed groups of
motorcyclists with armoured cars and half-track infantry carriers
towing antitank guns: sometimes they were supported by a sprinkling
of light or PzKw III medium tanks. On the road they moved at about
twenty-five mph. Immediately behind them travelled the mass of the
tank strength, in continuous radio contact with the leaders and ready
to deploy into attack formation if the head of the column should get
held up. Still farther to the rear was a "sandwich" of
mechanised infantry, divisional artillery, and more infantry. The
whole column, deployed in extended order of advance, stretched over a
distance of from seven to ten miles, yet by the evening of 22nd June
all the leading Panzer divisions were well clear of the fighting zone
and had penetrated to nearly twice their own length.

The deepest advance had been made by Manstein's 56th Corps in the
north, which had crossed the East Prussian frontier at dawn and
captured the bridge at Airogola, over the Dubisa gorge, before
sundown—a forward leap of over fifty miles! In the centre
Guderian's columns had joined up on either side of Brest-Litovsk,
captured Kobrin and Pruzhany, and crossed the line of the Krolewski
Canal.

But even before dusk on the 22nd certain differences from previous
campaigns were apparent. Like some prehistoric monster caught in a
net, the Red Army struggled desperately and, as reflexes gradually
activated the remoter parts of its body, with mounting effect. Until
that day the Germans had always found that bodies of surrounded enemy
lay down and died. There would be a contracting of perimeters, a
drawing in of "flanks," perhaps some perfunctory efforts to
break out or counterattack, and then—surrender. The speed and
depth of a Panzer thrust; the tireless ubiquity of the Luftwaffe;
above all, the brilliant coordination of all arms, had given to the
Germans an aura of invincibility that had not been enjoyed by any
other army since the time of Napoleon. Yet the Russians seemed as
ignorant of this as they were of the rules of the military textbook.

The reaction of the surrounded formations was in every case
vigorous and aggressive. Their very lack of coordination bewildered
the Germans and hampered the plans for containing the various
pockets. Whole divisions would assemble and move straight into the
attack, "marching towards the sound of the guns." During
the day the tank parks emptied as one brigade after another took on
fuel and ammunition and clattered off to be destroyed piecemeal in
the sights of the German artillery. By the afternoon fresh masses of
aircraft, summoned with desperate urgency from the flying fields of
central Russia, began to appear over the battlefield, though "It
was infanticide, they were floundering in tactically impossible
formations." By that time Stalin's restriction against sorties
over German territory had been lifted, and the Russian bomber force
(which had largely escaped the first Luftwaffe strike, owing to its
bases being farther from the frontier) took off obediently in
accordance with an already outdated operational plan. Over five
hundred were shot down.

On 23rd June, Lieutenant General Kopets, commander of the bomber
group, committed suicide, and within a week General Rychagov, the
commander of aviation on the northwestern front, was under sentence
of death for "treasonable activity" (that is to say, having
been defeated). In the first two days the Russians lost over two
thousand aircraft—a casualty rate without precedent. The
(numerically) strongest air force in the world had been virtually
eliminated in forty-eight hours.

The effect of being thus completely deprived of air cover was, on
the frontier armies, disastrous. For the rest of the year the
Russians were to fight with only minimal support from their Air
Force, and were quick to adjust themselves to the operational
limitations this imposed. But in those first hectic days of confusion
and encirclement, when there were no orders, when there was no
central direction, nothing more specific than the standing
instructions, ". . . attack the invader whenever and wherever he
be encountered," casualties were increased tenfold by this
blindness in reconnaissance and vulnerability on the march.

While the Panzers streaked across the plain, toward objectives
seventy miles distant, a slow polarisation took place among the
Russian armies left standing in Poland. Like giant cedars, which
remain erect after their roots have been cut, they stood up to
assaults whose result was certain before crashing down to disappear
forever under the saw. In the first week of the campaign four major
"battles of annihilation" cleared the way for the German
Army to step bodily into European Russia as far as the line of the
Dnieper.

The idiotic disposition of the frontier armies [Refer to
disposition chart] had left Pavlov with a weak centre (known in the
first ten days of the campaign by its peacetime designation, "Western
Military District") and a bare numerical parity with the Germans
opposite him in terms of infantry. In tanks Pavlov was completely
outclassed, for he faced nearly 80 percent of the German strength,
including the
Panzergruppen
of Hoepner, Hoth, and Guderian.

Pavlov had three armies, the 3rd, 10th, and 4th, drawn up in a
line running south from the Latvian frontier to Wlodawa, on the
fringe of the Pripet Marshes. In close reserve there were five
mechanised corps (little bigger than a division, in reality), which
were evenly distributed and fully occupied in training to assimilate
the
volte-face
which had come over the Red Army Command's
attitude to the employment of armoured forces.

[See Ch. 2.]

Hoepner brushed his sleeve against the right wing of the Russian
3rd Army on the first day, tearing a wide gap between it and the edge
of the Baltic Military District area, and through this Manstein's
56th Panzer Corps flowed at breakneck speed. Russian counterattacks
during the afternoon had run into the full strength of the 4th Panzer
Army, now fast eroding the walls of the breach, and withered under
its fire.

By nightfall three Russian infantry divisions had gone
completely—men, guns, staff organisation, transport,
everything—and another five were licking their wounds. More
serious, half of Pavlov's tank strength was lost in the desperate
confusion of that first afternoon's encounter. The 14th Mechanised
Corps, assembling in the Pruzhany-Kobrin area, had been so badly
punished by German bombers that it never got under way; the 13th,
being nearer the point of impact, was in action by six o'clock in the
evening, but shortage of fuel, mechanical failures, and unsuitable
ammunition dissipated its effect, for the brigades went into battle
singly, often following their predecessor's tracks and repeating his
mistakes.

[The majority of Russian tanks (mainly T 28 and the T 50-60 light)
were fitted out with high-explosive ammunition for "close
support," and altering the ration in favour of armour-piercing
shot, for antitank work, was just beginning.]

During the night Pavlov attempted to draw off the remainder of his
tank strength from the 10th Army, forming the 6th and 11th Mechanised
Corps and 6th Cavalry Corps into a special "shock force"
under his deputy, Lieutenant General I. V. Boldin, with instructions
to attack the southern flank of the German penetration on the 23rd.
It is probable that these orders were not evenly disseminated during
that first hectic night; likely also that the 10th Army commander,
Major General K. D. Golubev, was not overanxious to hear them
en
clair
, as his own front was under mounting pressure. At all
events, only the 11th Mechanised Corps was in position the following
morning. Both the 6th and the cavalry were still on the road, strung
out in all directions, vulnerable and understrength. During the
morning all were visited by the Luftwaffe, and the cavalry, in
particular, paid a terrible price for their delay. The result was
that no move was made by Pavlov's armies to close the gap during the
24th.

In the meantime the commander of the Baltic Military District (now
redesignated the "northwestern front") had been assembling
such tank strength as remained to him, and during the afternoon of
the 23rd it was all (about the equivalent of three divisions in
strength) committed in an attack south-westward from Shaulyai. It is
highly doubtful that the gap could have been closed even had this
attack been simultaneous with that of Boldin's group. With Boldin
inactive, it was doomed to failure, running straight into the
concentrated strength of Reinhardt's 41st Panzer Corps, which was
deploying to attack Kovno (Kaunas). The following day, 24th June,
Boldin at last put in his attack, but punishment on the march and the
isolated character of the operation made it, too, a failure. By now
the northwestern front, denuded of its armour, was disintegrating
fast, with the surviving armies falling back on Riga and uncovering
the approaches to Dvinsk. By 24th June, Manstein had penetrated over
a hundred miles, as far as Wilkomierzi; on the 25th he was in sight
of the town; on the 26th he entered it, the motorcyclists of the 8th
Panzer capturing the huge road bridge over the Dvina at the very
moment that the sentries were fumbling with the demolition charges.