As the day wore on the sun grew increasingly hot. Russian resistance around the church and officers’ mess inside the citadel perceptibly increased. Walking wounded soldiers began to stumble back across the bridges, many bandaged and half undressed, always under fire. By midday the division’s attack was visibly faltering. The subsequent post-action report explained:
‘During the early morning hours it became clear that artillery support for close quarter fighting in the citadel would be impossible because our infantry were totally enmeshed with the Russians. Our own line was in a tangle of buildings, scrub, trees and rubble and could hardly be identified as it ran partly through Russian resistance nests or was in places surrounded. Attempts to engage the enemy directly with individual heavy infantry weapons, anti-tank guns and light artillery often failed due to poor visibility, the danger to our own troops and primarily the thickness of the fortress walls.’
A passing battery of self-propelled guns was commandeered and employed to no effect. Infantry Regiment 133, the corps reserve, was moved forward after 13.15 hours to the South and West islands, but was unable to influence the situation because:
‘New forces reappeared after a short time, where the Russians had been driven or smoked out. They emerged from cellars, houses, pipes and other hiding places, shooting accurately, so that our losses rose even higher.’(26)
Gefreiter Hans Teuschler, near the church inside the citadel, was directing the fire of a light machine gun from an abandoned Russian anti-aircraft position. Using binoculars, he had barely discerned muzzle flash from a casemate 300m away when the number two on the gun shouted urgently ‘Get down!’ The sniper round slammed into Teuschler’s chest as he attempted to do so. Spun around by the massive force of the impact, he remembered drowsily trying to squeeze the hand of the machine gunner lying alongside him, to give an indication of life that might be ebbing away. Thoughts of God and home welled up in his mind before blacking out. On regaining consciousness later he was confronted with a bleak scene:
‘On the forward edge of the Flak position was the half-constructed tripod of a heavy machine gun. Behind it lay its gunner, mortally wounded, gasping with a severe gunshot wound to the lung. His eyes were glazed over and he groaned with pain and thirst. “Have you anything to drink Kamerad?” he asked me. I passed him my canteen with difficulty. To my right the machine gunner sat bolt upright, unmoving. There was no response when I spoke to him. In the immediate vicinity a sad concert of cries from the helpless wounded could be heard from all sides. “Medic, medic. God in Heaven, help me!” The sniper had been particularly effective in his work.’
Teuschler, nearing the end of his strength, weakly struggled to extricate himself from the top of an uncomfortable ammunition box, upon which he had fallen backwards after being shot. ‘My chest felt as heavy as lead,’ he admitted, ‘and my shirt and tunic were soaked in blood’. He placed a field dressing on his chest to ‘build up a crust’ to match that which had congealed over the exit wound on his back, where he had lain on the box. His senses, dulled by shock, barely enabled him to complete the process. But having achieved it ‘he felt himself rescued and began wandering through a wonderful dream world’.(27) He was delirious. All the time the sun beat mercilessly down.
At 13.50 hours Generalleutnant Schlieper, the commander of 45th Infantry Division, on the North Island observing the faltering attack from a vantage point in Infantry Regiment 135’s sector, resigned himself to the inevitable. The citadel would not be taken by infantry attack alone. Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, the commander of Army Group Centre, had visited the XIIth Corps Command Post 40 minutes before, and came to the same conclusion. At 14.30 hours it was decided to withdraw the 45th Division vanguard elements who had already penetrated the citadel. The move would have to be conducted under the cover of darkness. Once a clear combat demarcation line had been established, the Russian garrison could be reduced by systematic and directed artillery fire. Commander Fourth Army confirmed the decision. The division log explained the reasoning:
‘He did not want any unnecessary casualties; traffic on the “Rollbahn” and railway line already appeared possible. Enemy interference to this should be prevented. In general, the Russians should be starved out.’(28)
It was a depressing start to the campaign for 45th Division: 21 officers and 290 NCOs and men had been killed in the first 24 hours.(29) This represented two-thirds of the entire losses suffered during the preceding six-week French campaign.
The XIIth Corps requested additional support from self-propelled guns and flamethrowers. Mopping up was unlikely to be achieved by artillery alone.
Across the River Bug, the decisions being enacted at headquarters had no impact upon the intensity of the fighting raging in and around the citadel as dusk settled. The outline of the garrison church was barely discernible, shrouded by the dust and smoke of battle. Some 70 German soldiers, still holding Russian prisoners, were cut off. There was radio contact, but intermittent. Fresh salvoes of artillery fire howled over the headquarters and began to flash and crackle in the dying light. This appeared no easy task.
‘Only 1,000km as the crow flies to Moscow’
‘Thank God! It’s started up again!’ wrote a Wochenschau newsreel cameraman on his calendar.(1) The tension of the previous weeks had broken at last. ‘It appears that we brutally surprised the Russians early this morning,’ confided 28-year-old Ulrich Modersohn in a letter to his mother. Modersohn, serving with Army Group South, described how:
‘It was never possible for him to muster any worthwhile resistance. Our artillery and Stuka fire must have been pure hell for him. By midday assault bridges were across the Bug and ready. Now our troops are rolling over into Russia. This afternoon I saw how the earth shook and the sky hummed… Everything is following the set plan.’(2)
First-day impressions recorded by soldiers reveal elation at the extent of success and atmospheric descriptions of conflict often just out of sight. Robert Rupp, a Berlin school teacher in civilian life, wrote: ‘The thunder of artillery woke us at 03.15 hours. 34 batteries are firing.’ He was observing the River Bug border from the edge of a wood 7km away:
‘Soon villages were burning and white Very flares climbed high. The front raged like a lightning storm. Grey stripes climbed up into the sky if Flak fired and dispersed slowly. An aircraft fell burning to the ground. The sky, which to begin with was red and clear, became tinged with purple and green. A huge smoke-cloud stood behind the low base-line silhouette of the ground and turned slowly to the right. I tried to sleep a little but managed only a doze.’(3)
Oberleutnant Siegfried Knappe observed the infantry assaults that advanced following the pause in the opening artillery barrage in the Army Group Centre sector:
‘As the infantry moved forward, the morning darkness was filled with the sounds of shouting, the crack of rifle shots, the short bursts of machine guns, and the shattering crashes of hand-grenades. The rifle fire sounded like the clatter of metal-wheeled carts moving fast over cobblestone streets. Our infantry overran the barbed wire the Russians had erected on each side of their no-man’s land and stormed the guard towers and pillboxes the Russians had built immediately beyond the death strip.’
Short bitter fire-fights took place with an enemy who often stood his ground even though surprised. ‘Our men took as prisoners those Russians who surrendered and killed those who resisted,’ commented Knappe. A bottle-neck of retreating Russian soldiers was decimated at a bridge in Sasnia, the objective, by Stuka dive-bomber support. Knappe, a veteran of the French campaign, confronted with the sight of the first dead bodies, declared: ‘although I was no longer shocked by the sight, I had not become accustomed to it either.’ The advance rolled irresistibly eastwards. Knappe’s unit, the 87th Infantry Division, was preceded by Panzer formations. ‘We took Sasnia and Grajewo the first day,’ he declared, ‘and then started the long road to Moscow.’(4)
Progress was evident along the entire 3,000km front. Curizio Malaparte,
an Italian war correspondent with Army Group South standing on the banks of the River Prut, watched the advance of a mechanised division near Galatz.
‘The exhausts of the Panzers belch out blue tongues of smoke. The air is filled with a pungent, bluish vapour that mingles with the damp green of the grass and with the golden reflection of the corn. Beneath the screaming arch of Stukas the mobile columns of tanks resemble thin lines drawn with a pencil on the vast green slate of the Moldavian plain.’
He was held up for two hours as the column rumbled by. ‘The smell of men and horses gives way to the overpowering reek of petrol,’ he remarked. Traffic control at crossroads was conducted by groups of ‘stern, impassive Feldgendarmen’ (military police). Lorried infantry followed the tanks. ‘The men sat in strangely stiff attitudes; they had the appearance of statues.’ The open trucks filed by, raising huge columns of dust, which settled upon the weary infantrymen hunched in the back. ‘They were so white with dust,’ observed Malaparte, ‘they looked as if they were made of marble.’(5)
Leutnant Alfred Durrwanger, commanding an anti-tank company in the 28th Infantry Division attacking from East Prussia near Suwalki, said: ‘When the battle began, we found the Russians surprised, but not at all unprepared.’ His men crossed the Soviet border with a sense of foreboding. ‘There was no enthusiasm,’ he declared, ‘not at all!’ The prevailing atmosphere ‘was rather a deep feeling of the immensity of that enterprise, and the question immediately arose: where and at which place would there be an end to the operations?’(6)
This was a question asked by many German soldiers at the outset of the campaign. Some were arrogantly confident; one Leutnant in the 74th Infantry Division wrote:
‘I tell you in advance that in four to five weeks time the swastika flag will be wafting over the Kremlin in Moscow, and that moreover we will have Russia finished this year and Tommy on the carpet… Ja – it is no secret, when and how, that we will be in Moscow within four weeks with our as yet undefeated Wehrmacht. It is only 1,000km from Suwalki as the crow flies. We only need to conduct another Blitzkrieg. We only know how to attack. Forward, onward and again forward in concert with our heavy weapons raining fire, cordite, iron, bombs and shells – all on the heads of the Russians. That’s all it needs.’(7)
Another infantry Oberleutnant declared that, unlike his comrades, he was not surprised at the outbreak of war ‘which he had always prophesied’. He rationalised that ‘after this war with Russia, and that in Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, is over – which I believe will be in a short time – then Ribbentrop [the German Foreign Minister] will need only to send a single German soldier to England to negotiate’ the peace. Whatever the outcome, he sarcastically continued, ‘perhaps we will all have to go over [to England] but we will have at least secured our rear with five to six air fleets and 10,000 Panzers.’(8) Others were fortified by ideological conviction. ‘Na, what do you think of our new enemy then?’ wrote an infantry Feldwebel. ‘Perhaps Papa will recall how I spoke about the Russian army during my last leave, emphasising even then that it’s not possible to maintain lasting friendly relationships with the Bolsheviks,’ commenting sinisterly: ‘There are too many Jews there.’(9) Not all members of the invading army were so patriotically motivated, as anti-tank gunner Johann Danzer recalled:
‘On day one during our first break one of the company’s soldiers shot himself with his own rifle. He put the rifle between his knees, placed the muzzle in his mouth and squeezed off. For him, the war with all its pressures was at an end.’
Danzer’s experiences on this first day bore mute testimony to the horrors his suicidal comrade sought to avoid. After the opening bombardment he and his anti-tank gun crew ‘could see absolutely nothing at first, except for powder smoke. But as this began to disperse, and it got lighter, the devil broke loose from the Russian side.’ The PAK crew of five and commander had to drag their 37mm anti-tank gun into the attack, maintaining the same pace as the infantry advancing alongside. Four additional infantry soldiers were earmarked to assist so they could keep up. ‘Our immense load became, as a consequence, the primary target for enemy fire.’ The first burst of Russian machine gun fire tore the entire group apart. ‘Three men were killed instantly,’ said Danzer, ‘all the others were severely wounded and I was the only one left uninjured.’(10)
After the crust of Russian resistance was broken by the infantry, on the frontier the Panzers began to clatter through the breaches and penetrate the hinterland. Their passage was not totally unimpeded. ‘I found myself on the Eastern Front encountering what seemed to be a different and terrible race of men,’ declared Hans Becker,(11) a Panzer crew man with the 12th Panzer Division. ‘The very first attacks involved sharp, fierce fighting.’
Seventh Panzer Division achieved an initial deep penetration. Border defences were weak in relation to what had been reported by intelligence, ‘and enemy artillery never emerged in any consequential strength’. By 12.45 hours on the first day the bridge spanning the River Neman at Olita was captured intact, falling victim to a determined swiftly advancing vanguard. The bridgehead was immediately counter-attacked by Russian heavy tanks supported by infantry and artillery. During this first tank-on-tank battle of the Russian campaign, 82 Soviet tanks were shot into flames.(12) Karl Fuchs, a tank commander in Panzer Regiment 25, wrote home:
‘Yesterday I knocked off a Russian tank, as I had done two days ago! If I get in another attack, I’ll receive my first battle stripes. War is half as bad as it sounds and one thing is plain as day: the Russians are fleeing everywhere and we follow them. All of us believe in early victory!’(13)
Olita village burned furiously. Numbers of German tanks smouldered along the roads leading into it. Rubber treads on road wheels formed miniature flaming hoops. Many had turrets blown clean away. All had been picked off during the advance by dug-in Russian tanks. Seventh Panzer Division almost immediately burst out of its bridgehead on the other side of the River Neman, but Oberst Rothenberg, the commander of Panzer Regiment 25, was to call the engagement ‘the hardest battle of my life’.(14)
The weather on this first attack day was, as the 7th Panzer Division official history declared:
‘… particularly favourable for fighting, and over the following days. It was dry, the sun shone, roads and tracks were easily negotiable, and even the terrain off roads and paths, normally swampy, had dried out and was drivable for both tracked and wheeled vehicles.’(15)
Gefreiter Erich Kuby summed it up with some irony in his diary: ‘This is truly Hitler war weather,’(16) he declared. The official history of the 20th Panzer Division, also with Panzergruppe 3 under Generaloberst Hoth, commented on the impact the heat was having on accompanying marching infantry regiments, which traversed considerable stretches on the first day, some as far as 50km. Assessments of Soviet strength on the border proved exaggerated. Three hundred prisoners, including 20 officers and 10 lorries, were captured on 22 June. Deeply rutted sand tracks caused unexpectedly high levels of fuel consumption. Shortages resulted when wheeled fuel tankers found they were unable to keep up in the hot sandy conditions. Columns began to stretch out. ‘The long slow division line snaked along dry shifting tracks in the summer heat,’ recorded the division history, ‘raising clear dust-cloud outlines, offering a promising target for enemy bombers.’ Six air attacks fell on these lines of erratically moving vehicles on the first day alone.(17)
Where was the Red Air Force?
‘We were not bothered at all by the Red Air Force,’ remarked Leutnant Michael Wechtler. His men, lying in reserve with Regiment 133, awaited the call forward to Brest-Litovsk. They basked in the sun in an open meadow seemingly oblivious to air attack, awaiting further orders.(1) Leutnant Heinz Knoke, a Bf109 fighter pilot flying with JG52, had already attacked his early morning Russian headquarters objective. Total surprise was achieved:
‘One of the huts is fiercely blazing. Vehicles have been stripped of their camouflage and overturned by the blast. The Ivans at
last come to life. The scene below is like an overturned ant-heap, as they scurry about in confusion. Stepsons of Stalin in their underwear flee for cover in the woods.’
Five or six more strafing runs were conducted over the camp and headquarters. Light Flak began to open up and was immediately suppressed. ‘An Ivan at the gun falls to the ground,’ Knoke observed, ‘still in underwear.’
His flight arrived back at Suwalki fighter base at 05.56 hours, managing a turn-round within 40 minutes before returning to their previous objective, guided ‘by the smoke rising from the burning buildings’. After systematically raking the target the wing was refuelled and rearmed again; this time it took 22 minutes. By the end of the day Knoke saw that:
‘Thousands of Ivans are in full retreat, which becomes an utter rout when we open up on them, stumbling and bleeding as they flee from the highway in an attempt to take cover in the nearby woods. Vehicles lie burning by the roadside after we pass. Once I drop my bombs on a column of heavy artillery drawn by horses. I am thankful not to be down there myself.’
By 20.00 hours Knoke’s squadron was flying its sixth mission of the day. The Luftwaffe, the most modern arm of the Wehrmacht, had many technically trained young Germans in its ranks. They had, in the main, been educated by a National Socialist regime extolling the virtues of modern technology and racial purity. Air attacks as a consequence were pursued with pitiless ferocity. Knoke admitted:
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