Following their astonishing success in France, the panzer formations dashed ahead in the perfect summer conditions, leaving the infantry divisions to catch up as best they could. Sometimes, when the tank spearhead ran out of ammunition, Heinkel 111s had to be diverted to drop supplies by parachute. The lines of advance in the heat could be seen by burning villages, the dustclouds churned up by tracked vehicles, and the steady tramp of marching infantry and their horse-drawn artillery. Gunners riding on limbers were coated in a pale dust which made them look like terracotta figures, and their plodding draught animals coughed with a resigned regularity. More than 600,000 horses, assembled from all over Europe, just like for Napoleon’s Grande Armée, formed the basis of transport for the bulk of the Wehrmacht in the campaign. Ration supplies, ammunition and even field ambulances depended on horse-power. Had it not been for the vast quantities of motor-transport which the French army had failed to destroy before the armistice–a subject which provoked Stalin’s bitter anger–the German army’s mechanization would have been limited almost entirely to the four panzer groups.
Already the two large panzer formations of Army Group Centre had achieved their first major encirclement, trapping four Soviet armies with 417,000 men in the Biaystok pocket west of Minsk. Hoth’s Third Panzer Group on the north side of the pincer and Guderian’s Second Panzer Group on the south met on 28 June. The bombers and Stukas of the Second Luftflotte then pounded the trapped Red Army forces. This advance meant that Army Group Centre was well on its way to the ‘land bridge’ between the rivers Dvina, which flowed into the Baltic, and the Dnepr, which ran down to the Black Sea.
General Dmitri Pavlov, the Soviet tank commander in the Spanish Civil War and now the hapless chief of the Western Front, was replaced by Marshal Timoshenko. (In the Red Army a front was a military formation similar to an army group.) Pavlov was soon arrested along with other senior officers from his command, then summarily tried and executed by the NKVD. Several desperate senior officers committed suicide, one of them blowing his brains out in the presence of Nikita Khrushchev, the commissar responsible for Ukraine.
In the north, Leeb’s army group was widely welcomed in the Baltic states after the waves of Soviet oppression and the deportations of the week before. Groups of nationalists attacked the retreating Soviets, and seized towns. The NKVD 5th Motorized Rifle Regiment was sent in to Riga to restore order, which meant immediate reprisals against the Latvian population. ‘Before the corpses of our fallen comrades, the personnel of the regiment swore an oath to smash the fascist reptiles mercilessly, and on the same day the bourgeoisie of Riga felt our revenge on its hide.’ But they too were soon forced to pull back up the Baltic coast.
North of Kaunas in Lithuania, a Soviet mechanized corps surprised the advancing Germans with a counter-attack, using heavy KV tanks. Panzer shells just bounced off them and they could be dealt with only when 88mm guns were brought up. The Soviet North-Western Front withdrew into Estonia, harried by improvised nationalist forces, which neither the Red Army nor the Germans had expected. Almost before the Germans marched in, murderous pogroms began against the Jews, who were accused of siding with the Bolsheviks.
Rundstedt’s Army Group South was less fortunate. Colonel General Mikhail Kirponos, who commanded the South-Western Front, had been forewarned by NKVD border guards of the attack. He also had stronger forces, for this is where Timoshenko and Zhukov had expected the main thrust to come. Kirponos was ordered to launch a massive counter-attack with five mechanized corps. The most powerful, with heavy KV tanks and the new T-34s, was commanded by Major General Andrei Vlasov. Kirponos, however, was unable to deploy his forces effectively because the landlines had been cut and his formations were widely spread.
On 26 June, General der Kavallerie von Kleist’s First Panzer Group advanced towards Rovno with Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, as his ultimate objective. Kirponos ordered in five of his mechanized corps with very mixed results. The Germans were shaken to find that the T-34s and heavy KV tanks were superior to anything they had, but even the People’s Commissar for Defence had found Soviet tank gunnery ‘inadequate on the eve of war’, and out of 14,000 Soviet tanks, ‘only 3,800 were ready to fight’ on 22 June. German army training, tactics, radio communications and speed of reaction in their panzer crews generally proved far superior. In addition, they had strong support from Stuka squadrons. Their main danger was over-confidence. Major General Konstantin Rokossovsky, a former cavalry officer of Polish origin who later became one of the outstanding commanders of the war, managed to draw the 13th Panzer Division into an artillery ambush after his own obsolete tanks had been mauled the day before.
Faced with continuing panic and mass desertions, Kirponos introduced ‘blocking detachments’ to force men back to fight. Wild rumours caused chaos, as they had in France. But the Soviet counter-attacks, although costly and unsuccessful, at least managed to delay the German advance. Nikita Khrushchev had already, on Stalin’s order, begun a massive effort to evacuate the machinery from Ukrainian factories and workshops. Ruthlessly carried out, this process succeeded in transporting by train the bulk of the republic’s industry back towards the Urals and beyond. Similar operations were carried out on a smaller scale in Belorussia and elsewhere. In all, 2,593 industrial units were removed in the course of the year. This would eventually allow the Soviet Union to recommence armaments production well out of the range of German bombers.
The Politburo had also decided to send Lenin’s mummified body, as well as the gold reserves and Tsarist treasures, in great secrecy from Moscow to Tyumen in western Siberia. A special train, with the necessary chemicals and attendant scientists to maintain the corpse’s preservation, departed in early July, guarded by NKVD troops.
On 3 July, General Halder noted in his diary that it was ‘probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks’. He did, however, acknowledge that the sheer vastness of the country and continued resistance would keep the invasion forces occupied ‘for many more weeks to come’. Back in Germany, the SS survey on attitudes reported that people were betting on how quickly the war would be over. Some convinced themselves that their armies were already within a hundred kilometres of Moscow, but Goebbels tried to damp down such speculation. He did not want their victory to be undermined by an impression that it had taken longer than expected.
The overwhelming immensity of the landmass which the Wehrmacht had invaded, with its endless horizons, began to have its effect on the German Landser, as the ordinary infantryman was known. Those from Alpine regions were the most depressed by the flatness of what seemed like an infinite ocean of land. Front formations soon found that, unlike in France, pockets of Soviet soldiers fought on even after they had been bypassed. They would suddenly open fire from hiding places in the enormous cornfields and attack reinforcements or headquarters moving up. Any of them taken alive were shot out of hand as partisans.
Many Soviet citizens also suffered from over-optimism. Some told themselves that the German proletariat would rise up against their Nazi masters, now that they were attacking the ‘Motherland of the oppressed’. And those who pinned up maps to mark the successes of the Red Army soon had to take them down as it became clear how deeply the Wehrmacht had advanced into Soviet territory.
The triumphalism of the German armies, however, soon began to wane. The great encirclement battles, especially Smolensk, became increasingly arduous. The panzer formations achieved their sweeping manoeuvres with little difficulty, but they had insufficient panzergrenadiers with them to hold the immense circle against attacks both from within and without. Many Soviet troops slipped through before the hard-driven German infantry caught up, stiff and footsore from the forced marches of up to fifty kilometres a day in full kit. And those Red Army soldiers who were trapped did not surrender. They fought on with a desperate courage, even if it was often enforced by commissars and officers at the point of a gun. Out of ammunition, great waves of men surged forward
, bellowing, in an attempt to break the cordon. Some charged with linked arms, as the German machine-gunners scythed them down, their weapons over-heating from constant use. The screams of the wounded continued for hours afterwards, grating on the nerves of the exhausted German soldiers.
On 9 July, Vitebsk fell. Like Minsk, Smolensk and later Gomel and Chernigov, it was an inferno of blazing wooden houses from Luftwaffe raids with incendiaries. The fires were so intense that many German troops in their vehicles felt obliged to turn back. It took a total of thirty-two German divisions to reduce the Smolensk Kessel, or cauldron, as they called an encirclement. The Kesselschlacht, or cauldron battle, did not cease until 11 August. The Soviet forces suffered 300,000 ‘irrecoverable losses’, of men killed or taken prisoner, along with 3,200 tanks and 3,100 guns. But Soviet counter-attacks from the east helped more than 100,000 men escape, and the delay to the German advance proved critical.
Vasily Grossman visited a field hospital. ‘There were about nine hundred wounded men in a little clearing among young asperns. There were bloodstained rags, scraps of flesh, moans, subdued howling, hundreds of dismal, suffering eyes. The young red-haired “doctoress” had lost her voice–she had been operating all night. Her face was white, as if she might faint at any minute.’ She told him with a smile how she had operated on his friend, the poet Iosef Utkin. ‘“While I was making incisions, he recited poetry for me.” One could barely hear her voice, she was helping herself speak with gestures. Wounded men kept arriving. They were all wet with blood and rain.’
Despite their formidable advances and the erection of signposts pointing to Moscow, the German army on the Ostfront had suddenly begun to fear that victory might not be achieved that year after all. The three army groups had suffered 213,000 casualties. The figure may have represented only a tenth of Soviet losses, but if the battle of attrition continued much longer, the Wehrmacht would find it hard to defend its over-extended supply lines and defeat the remaining Soviet forces. The prospect of fighting on through a Russian winter was deeply troubling. The Germans had not managed to destroy the Red Army in the western Soviet Union, and now the Eurasian landmass broadened out ahead of them. A front of 1,500 kilometres was increasing to 2,500 kilometres.
Estimates of Soviet strength by the army intelligence department soon appeared to be woefully short. ‘At the outset of the war,’ General Halder wrote on 11 August, ‘we reckoned on about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360.’ The fact that a Soviet division might be manifestly inferior in fighting power to a German one was insufficiently reassuring. ‘If we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen.’
For Russians, the idea that the Germans were on Napoleon’s route to Moscow was traumatic. Yet Stalin’s order to mount massive counter-attacks west towards Smolensk had an effect, even though the cost in men and equipment was terrifying. It contributed to Hitler’s decision to direct Army Group Centre to go on to the defensive, while Army Group North advanced on Leningrad and Army Group South on Kiev. Third Panzer Group was diverted towards Leningrad. Hitler, according to Generalleutnant Alfred Jodl of the OKW staff, wanted to avoid Napoleon’s mistakes.
Generalfeldmarschall von Bock was horrified by this change of emphasis, as were other senior commanders who had assumed that Moscow, the centre of Soviet communications, would remain the principal objective. But a number of generals believed that, before advancing on Moscow, the huge Soviet forces defending Kiev should be eliminated in case they attacked their southern flank.
On 29 July, Zhukov warned Stalin that Kiev could be encircled and urged that the Ukrainian capital should be abandoned. The Vozhd (or boss), as as he was known, told Zhukov he was talking rubbish. Zhukov demanded to be relieved of his position as chief of staff. Stalin put him in command of the Reserve Front, but kept him on as a member of the Stavka.
Guderian’s Second Panzer Group was given the task of making a surprise right turn from the Roslavl salient and advancing 400 kilometres south to Lokhvitsa. There, 200 kilometres east of Kiev, he was to meet up with Kleist’s First Panzer Group, which had begun to encircle the Ukrainian capital from below. Guderian’s dash caused chaos on the Soviet side. Gomel, the last major city in Belorussia, had to be abandoned hurriedly. But Kirponos’s South-Western Front, reinforced on Stalin’s orders, was still not permitted to abandon Kiev.
Vasily Grossman, escaping into Ukraine, only just managed to avoid being caught by Guderian’s panzer divisions during their drive south. In the confusion of the invasion, some Russians at first thought that Guderian must be on their side because his name sounded Armenian. Grossman, unlike most Soviet war correspondents, was deeply moved by the suffering of civilians. ‘Whether they are riding somewhere, or standing by their fences, they begin to cry as soon as they begin to speak, and one feels an involuntary desire to cry too. There’s so much grief!’ He was scornful of the propaganda clichés of fellow journalists who never went nearer the front than an army headquarters and resorted to dishonest formulae such as ‘the much battered enemy continued his cowardly advance’.
Rundstedt’s Army Group South had already captured 107,000 prisoners near Uman in Ukraine on 10 August. Stalin issued an order condemning to death the Red Army generals who had surrendered there. Underestimating the threat of Guderian’s strike south, Stalin still refused to allow Kirponos to withdraw from the line of the Dnepr. The vast dam and hydroelectric plant at Zaporozhye, the great symbol of Soviet progress, was blown up as part of the scorched-earth strategy.
Evacuation of civilians, livestock and equipment continued with an even greater urgency, as Grossman described. ‘At night, the sky became red from dozens of distant fires, and a grey screen of smoke hung all along the horizon during the day. Women with children in their arms, old men, herds of sheep, cows and collective farm horses sinking in the dust were moving east on the country roads, by cart and on foot. Tractor drivers drove their machines which rattled deafeningly. Trains with factory equipment, engines and boilers went east every day and night.’
On 16 September, Guderian’s and Kleist’s panzer groups met at Lokhvitsa, trapping more than 700,000 men in the encirclement. Kirponos along with many staff officers and some 2,000 men were wiped out by the 3rd Panzer Division near by. Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau’s Sixth Army advanced into the heavily bombed ruins of Kiev. The civilian population left behind was condemned to starvation. The Jews faced a quicker death by firing squad. Further to the south, the Eleventh Army and the Fourth Romanian Army moved on Odessa. Army Group South’s next objectives would be the Crimea, with the great naval base of Sebastopol, and Rostov-on-Don, the gateway to the Caucasus.
The Kiev Kesselschlacht was the largest in military history. German morale soared again. The conquest of Moscow again seemed possible. To Halder’s relief, Hitler had already come round to the idea. On 6 September, he issued Führer Directive No. 35, authorizing the advance on Moscow. And on 16 September, the day that the two panzer groups had met at Lokhvitsa, Generalfeldmarschall von Bock issued preliminary orders for Operation Typhoon.
Leeb’s army group, after its rapid advance through the Baltic states, had found resistance increasing the closer it came to Leningrad. In mid-July, a counter-attack by Lieutenant General Nikolai Vatutin caught the Germans by surprise near Lake Ilmen. Even with the support of Hoth’s Third Panzer Group, Leeb’s advance had slowed in the difficult terrain of birchwoods, lakes and mosquito-ridden marshes. Half a million men and women from the threatened city were mobilized to dig a thousand kilometres of earthworks and 645 kilometres of anti-tank ditches. On 8 August, Hitler ordered Leeb to encircle Leningrad, while the Finns retook their lost territory either side of Lake Ladoga. The untrained and scarcely armed People’s Levy, the narodnoe opolchenie, was thrown into futile and murderous attacks, literally acting in the Russian phrase as ‘meat for the cannon’. Altogether over 135,000 Leningraders, factory workers as well as professors, had volunteered, or been forced to volunteer. They had no training,
no medical assistance, no uniforms, no transport and no supply system. More than half lacked rifles, and yet they were still ordered into counter-attacks against panzer divisions. Most fled in terror of the tanks, against which they had no defence at all. This massive loss of life–perhaps some 70,000–was tragically futile, and it is far from certain that their sacrifice even delayed the Germans at all on the line of the River Luga. The Soviet 34th Army was shattered. As men fled, 4,000 were arrested as deserters and nearly half of the wounded were suspected of self-inflicted wounds. In one hospital alone 460 men out of a thousand had gunshot injuries in the left hand or left forearm.
The Estonian capital of Tallinn had been cut off by the German advance, but Stalin refused to allow its Soviet defenders to evacuate by sea up the Gulf of Finland to Kronstadt. By the time he had changed his mind, it was too late for an orderly withdrawal. On 28 August, the ships of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet in Tallinn embarked 23,000 Soviet citizens as German troops fought their way into the city. Lacking air cover, the improvised fleet set sail. Altogether German mines, Finnish motor torpedo boats and the Luftwaffe sank sixty-five ships, with up to 14,000 killed. It was the greatest Russian naval disaster in history.
To the south of Leningrad, the Germans pushed across the main railway line to Moscow. On 1 September, their heavy artillery was within range and began bombarding. Soviet army trucks full of wounded and a last rush of refugees pulled back into Leningrad, with peasants driving overloaded carts, others carrying bundles and a boy dragging a reluctant goat on a piece of rope, as their villages burned behind them.
The Second World War Page 28