Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Army Group North was the smallest of the three army groups, but the road network in the Baltic States was much better than that in the USSR proper, and in the first phase the tasks of Army Group North were to establish a crossing over the River Dvina, in the process cutting off and destroying Russian forces west of that river, to take the city of Riga and then to swing north and north-east to link up with the Finns advancing south from Finland to surround the city of Leningrad. To do this Field Marshal von Leeb had Panzer Group 4 (Colonel-General Hoepner), Sixteenth Army (Colonel-General Ernst Busch) and Eighteenth Army (Colonel-General Georg von Kuchler). Altogether, the army group fielded three panzer, twenty-two infantry and two motorized infantry divisions, with one motorized division (3 SS Totenkopf)* in reserve. The armour would advance as fast as possible in two spearheads. On the left General of Panzer Troops Hans-Georg Reinhardt with XXXXI Corp’s two armoured, one motorized and one infantry division would push towards Jacobstadt on the Dvina, while on the right General of Infantry Erich von Manstein’s† LVI Corps would head for Dunaburg, also on the Dvina, with one armoured, one motorized and one infantry division. The two armies, Eighteenth on the left and Sixteenth on the right, would deal with Russian units bypassed by the panzer group, establish a bridgehead over the Dvina once crossing points had been seized by the armour, and protect the panzer group’s flanks as far as they could. Once all that had been achieved, the army group would take Riga and then link up with the Finns.

  Army Group North knew it outnumbered the Russian forces opposing it – one armoured division, four armoured brigades and eighteen infantry divisions of the Baltic Military District – but it had only vague intelligence as to how they might fight. It could be that the Baltic States would not be defended at all, and despite reconnaissance flights by the Luftwaffe it was unclear whether the bridges over the lesser rivers between the jump-off line and the Dvina had been prepared for demolition. The probability was that the population would welcome the Wehrmacht as liberators, so, while civilian resistance need not be feared, there would inevitably be Russian troops cut off by the rapid advance who would have to be dealt with. It was a huge task – both Jacobstadt and Dunaburg were 200 miles from the start line and were fifty miles apart. To get to their assembly areas for the attack, the German troops had to cross the River Nemen where it flowed through East Prussia and this could not be concealed from the Russians; nor the quantities of bridging equipment being stockpiled behind the frontier. Resupply of the armoured columns would be impossible because of the speed at which it was intended they would move, and the presence of enemy units bypassed but still on the supply routes, so they would carry all the fuel and rations they needed with them. Although the mud of the spring thaw had dried up, the threat now was dust, which got into vehicle engines, clogged up air filters and radiators and for the marching infantry made it difficult to see beyond a hundred yards. In four months the snows would come, but by then the war would be won.

  The Russians were caught completely unprepared. Although Timoshenko had become increasingly convinced that the intelligence suggesting a German attack was genuine, he could not convince Stalin, who insisted on doing everything possible to avoid a war. Thus, when the attack came, the Russian army was deployed neither for an offensive into German occupied Poland nor for defence, but for something in between and that not very well. Most units were in barracks when the blow fell and even then Stalin took some while to accept that Hitler really had broken his word and that all Soviet Russia’s cooperation since the pact of 1939 had only bought him a little time. There was less excuse for General Kuznetsov as, even under the contingency plan for an offensive, his troops were supposed to remain on the defensive, but in his North-Western Front headquarters in Mitau in Latvia, 200 miles from the front line, there was first confusion and then panic. Information was slow coming in and, when it did arrive, it was incomplete. What was happening? What were the enemy trying to do? Where were they heading for? How many were there? Crossing the Nemen south of Memel, Manstein’s armour pushed bewildered frontier guards out of the way, burst through the right flank of the Russian Eighth Army and drove deep into Lithuania through negligible opposition. By early afternoon Manstein had crossed the River Dubissa and was advancing through wooded country in the direction of the rail junction at Schaulen. That the terrain was unsuitable for armour mattered not – the few Russians that he met were quickly dealt with. Reinhardt’s corps attacking from Tilsit met stiffer opposition as he hit the one division in the centre of the Eighth Army that was able to put up some resistance but that was quickly dealt with and, after a series of skirmishes, he was through Tauragé and well beyond the frontier. Now the two infantry armies began to move, the Eighteenth along the coast towards Libau to force the Russian Eighth Army back from the sea, and the Sixteenth at the junction between the Russian Eighth and Eleventh Armies. Both armies met scattered groups of Russians, some of which put up a fight before being destroyed or driven back into the woods. Kuznetsov was still trying desperately to work out what was happening, but an attempt to counter-attack the Germans at Tauragé with his armour failed when units were unable to communicate with each other, and Reinhardt’s tanks stopped another attempt to move armour south to stem the advance of Army Group Centre.

  It was Army Group Centre, which it was intended would eventually capture Moscow, that would deliver the main thrust of Barbarossa and so it had as much armour as the other two army groups combined. The Chief of the General Staff of the army, General Franz Halder, already concerned that Hitler would start to interfere with the drive on Moscow, had posted his own chief of operations branch, Major-General Hans von Greiffenberg, as Chief of Staff to Field Marshal von Bock in order, as Halder put it, to ‘avoid the russian war cross-fire from the upper atmosphere’. The plan was to strike north and south of Minsk to the area north of Smolensk to destroy the Russian forces in Belorussia with two pincer arms provided by Panzer Group 2 (Colonel-General Heinz Guderian with six panzer and six infantry divisions and the German army’s one horsed cavalry division) on the right and Panzer Group 3 (Colonel-General Herman Hoth and four panzer, three motorized and four infantry divisions) on the left. The armour would push on, bypassing any major enemy formations, the cavalry would look after the northern edge of the Pripet Marshes and the two armies, Fourth commanded by Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge and Ninth commanded by Colonel-General Adolf Strauss, would deal with the city of Brest-Litovsk, strongly garrisoned by NKVD troops,* and follow up the armour to deal with Russian forces caught in their encirclement. Opposing them would be the southern army (11th) of the North-Western Front and the thirty rifle, twelve tank, two horsed cavalry and two airborne divisions of General Dimitri Pavlov’s Western Front. Pavlov was one of the Red Army’s better generals. Aged forty-four in 1941, he had fought as a young soldier in the Russian Civil War, earning rapid promotion after it. He had commanded the Russian troops sent to Spain, survived Stalin’s purges, commanded one of the few successful Russian attacks of the Winter War, and both understood and was an advocate of armoured warfare. It would be of little avail.

  As the German armour crossed into Russia, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Second Air Fleet hit Kutznetsov’s southern army and Pavlov’s supporting air fleet, which was virtually wiped out. Unwilling to report the disaster to Moscow, the air commander, the forty-nine-year-old Major-General Ivan Koppets,† shot himself, probably only anticipating his fate once Stalin had learned what had happened. On the right of Army Group Centre’s advance, Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 bypassed Brest-Litovsk, dropping off its 45 Infantry Division to take the town, crossed the River Bug and headed for Minsk, while from south-west of Vilnius Hoth’s armour drove through the southern flank of the Russian Eleventh Army, already under attack from Reinhardt to the north, captured three bridges over the River Nemen and struck the junction of the North-Western and Western Fronts. General Kutznetsov eventually learned of this rupture and tried to send his armour south to deal with it. Harried by the Luftwaff
e from the air, those Russian tanks that were not knocked out on the way were stopped by Reinhardt’s XXXXI Corps. It would have made little difference to the result had the commander of the Western Front not been on his way back from a concert party when the blow fell.* There was no one at his Western Front headquarters capable of making a decision, and, when Pavlov did get there at around 0400 hours, he found his staff and much of his command in panic mode. The Luftwaffe had hit headquarters, radio relay stations, supply routes and ammunition dumps, and communications, never particularly good at the best of times, were in disarray. Pavlov tried to find out what was going on but was not in contact with most of his subordinates. Unable to get through to HQ Tenth Army by telephone or radio, he sent two of his staff officers to find out what was happening. As nobody at Tenth Army knew either of them, they were both assumed to be German spies and shot. Pavlov did manage to move some of his tanks, which held up one of Guderian’s armoured divisions for a while, but by last light the Germans were investing Brest-Litovsk and the Russian armies were withdrawing behind the Nemen.

  Army Group South covered a frontage equal to the other two army groups put together and its combat formations were split by 250 miles of the Hungarian frontier, which was to be defended by the Hungarians themselves. Commanded by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the doyen of the German officer corps, the army group’s Sixth Army (Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau) and Seventeenth Army (Colonel-General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel), mustering between them twelve infantry, one mountain and three light divisions, began the war from Poland. There too was the Group’s armour, Panzer Group 1 with seven panzer, two motorized and six infantry divisions commanded by Colonel-General Ewald von Kleist, who had commanded the armoured thrust through the Ardennes to the Channel coast in the Battle of France. Also under the command of von Rundstedt was Eleventh Army in Romania, commanded by Colonel-General Ritter von Schobert with six German and four Romanian infantry divisions, one German air-landing division, three Romanian mountain brigades and three Romanian cavalry brigades. All told, Rundstedt faced the Russian Southern and South-Western Fronts with fifty-six infantry, around thirty armoured and eleven horsed cavalry divisions. In sheer numbers the Germans did not stand a chance but what looked like an overwhelming Soviet superiority in armour was negated by the inability of the Russian armoured formations to manoeuvre independently, their lack of radios and the Luftwaffe’s ability to pounce on any vehicle column. The tasks given to the army group were to destroy Soviet forces in Galicia and western Ukraine and to capture crossings over the River Dnieper at and south of Kiev, in the words of the OKH operation order ‘at an early stage’. Kiev was 300 miles from the jump-off line.

  The plan was for the Sixth Army with the panzer group under command to create a breach in the Soviet defences to allow the armour to break through and strike at the junction of the Russian Fifth and Sixth Armies, while farther south the Seventeenth Army would strike at Lvov, which was a mere 100 miles from the start point. In the south, there had been some discussions regarding the command of Romanian units. They were resolved with the appointment of the Romanian dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, as overall commander; HQ German Eleventh Army would, however, exercise operational command over Romanian units attached to it, although those of the latter nominated to defend their frontier to the south and not taking part in the attack would remain under Romanian command. The initial assault was entirely successful; the Luftwaffe knocked out 300 Soviet aircraft and the Sixth Army forced a way through the forward frontier defences. Even the Romanian units whose only remit was to hold the frontier managed to capture crossings over the River Prut to their front. Then, as the Russians realized what was happening, resistance stiffened. All three elements of the army group found that they were faced with a determined defence and Panzer Group 1’s advantage in communications and training was largely negated by the heavily wooded country, which made it difficult for the armour to manoeuvre.

  At the end of the first day of Barbarossa, despite the slower than expected progress of Army Group South, the German high command had every reason to be pleased. The Germans had broken through at numerous locations, the armour was racing ahead to complete a series of encirclements and Russian armies, broken and disorganized, were retreating in disorder. In Moscow, Stalin had eventually accepted that this was no private venture by a disaffected German general but the real thing, a fact confirmed when a somewhat embarrassed German ambassador delivered a formal declaration of war some hours after hostilities had opened. His reaction was to send Zhukov off to find out what was happening – thus depriving himself of a chief of staff in Moscow just when one was needed – and to order all fronts to mount immediate counter-attacks but, perhaps still hoping that it was all a terrible mistake, to pursue the Germans only as far as the border.

  On 24 June the wings of the Fourth and Ninth Armies met east of Bialystok, and Panzer Groups 2 and 3 drove on to complete the encirclement. When Hoth and Guderian met east of Minsk on 28 June, 170 miles from their start line, the best part of four Russian armies were still within the pocket. Stalin had ordered that on no account was Minsk to fall to the Germans: it was of no strategic consequence whatsoever – neither a communications hub nor an industrial centre – but it was the capital of Belorussia, White Russia, a constituent republic of the USSR and so to Stalin a symbol that must not be lost, and, when it was, the game was up for Pavlov. He and his staff were summoned to Moscow, interviewed by the NKVD, forced to confess to all sorts of sins, including being in the pocket of foreign enemies of the state, and he, his chief of staff, artillery commander and chief intelligence officer were shot. Such a reversion to the tactics of the Great Terror was not likely to boost morale in a paranoid army of a paranoid country.

  The creating of the Minsk pocket was a great success for the Germans, but the elimination of the Russian troops trapped within it would take time and tie down the mobile units, particularly as the infantry, despite prodigious feats of marching, could not keep up with the tanks. The Chief of the General Staff of the army, Halder, knew perfectly well that the two panzer group commanders were trying to get as free a hand and as much independence as they could, but at the same time he recognized that to use armoured units merely to hold a ring was not to make the most of their capabilities, and so he reorganized Army Group Centre. Field Marshal Kluge, Fourth Army commander, would take under command the two panzer groups and two of his own infantry corps, the whole to be renamed Fourth Armoured Army (Panzerarmee), to continue the drive on Moscow. Second Army, commanded by Colonel-General Maximilian Freiherr von Weichs, hitherto in OKH reserve, would now take under command the rest of Fourth Army and Sixth Army and reduce the pocket.

  On 29 June, the day after the closing of the Minsk pocket, Brest-Litovsk, stoutly defended by the NKVD, fell to 45 Infantry Division of Guderian’s Panzer Group 2, although by then ‘Fast Heinz’ was on the road to Moscow. The Soviet defences, such as they were, were fast falling apart and Kuznetsov attempted to pull what troops he could still control to the east of the Dvina. In the north, as the Russian Eighth Army retreated north into Estonia and the Eleventh east towards home, a gap opened up that Kuznetsov could not close and into which General Busch’s German Sixteenth Army marched. On 26 June, Manstein’s armour captured intact a bridge across the River Dvina at Dunaburg – he had fought his way 150 miles in four days – and on the 30th Reinhardt did the same at Jacobstadt. The Dvina line was now breached and the wretched Kuznetsov was sacked, narrowly escaping being shot. In the far north, Finland too was now at war. The Finns had always intended to enter the war on the German side but were biding their time and declared neutrality on 22 June when Barbarossa began. However, when the Russians opened fire on Finnish shipping and bombed the mainland (quite possibly accidentally), the Finns declared war on 26 June, coordinating their movements with two German mountain divisions which were crossing the Norwegian–Russian border and moving to threaten the Russian port of Murmansk. Meanwhile, in the south, despite stubb
orn resistance the Germans captured Lvov on 26 June. A counter-attack by Russian tanks was broken up by the Luftwaffe, and as they retreated through the city, NKVD troops settled old scores with the population (Poles and Ukrainians), shooting several thousand political prisoners out of hand.* On 27 June, Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union.

  Three hundred miles east of the German jump-off line, the River Dvina, which has hitherto run from east to west, changes its course and turns northwest for the Gulf of Riga in the Baltic. Fifty miles south, the River Dnieper, which has also run from east to west, turns south into the Ukraine. Between those two rivers is an eighty-mile-wide corridor. It is the traditional invasion route to Moscow and it was a major objective of Army Group Centre in the first phase of Barbarossa. It was here that Napoleon took the Grande Armée in 1812 and back again, now distinctly less grand, in 1813, and here that Barclay de Tolly marched a Russian army westwards in 1815. At the eastern end of the corridor on the Dnieper is the city of Smolensk. The plan now was for Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 to cross the River Berezina in the area of Lepel and attack along the northern side of the corridor, while Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 would cross the Dnieper where it bent to the south and push along the southern side. The two armoured groups would meet at Smolensk and seal the eastern end of the corridor, while the infantry armies would block the western end. To give the infantry sufficient troops to surround and subdue the huge 4,000-square-mile pocket, XXXV Corps, a large corps of five divisions, and XXXXII Corps, comprising two divisions, were brought out of reserve and placed under the command of Army Group Centre. On 3 July the armour began its 150-mile advance. Progress was not as fast as had been hoped: despite covering thirty miles a day, the infantry could not keep up; the weather turned wet and thundery; the roads were bad and this particularly affected Panzer Group 3, which was largely equipped with captured French vehicles, and there were disagreements between von Kluge and Guderian over routes and speed of advance. Guderian was never an easy subordinate and had had similar arguments with his superior, von Kleist, in the advance through the Ardennes in 1940. Most of all, however, Russian resistance was stiffer than expected. Marshal Timoshenko had brought up five so far uncommitted armies with the aim of stopping the Germans from getting to Smolensk. The requirement to defeat Soviet units in the corridor and disarm roving bands of enemy stragglers conflicted with the need to press on to close the pocket at Smolensk. Despite the problems, and increasing interference from Hitler that at this stage of the war could be largely deflected by Halder in Berlin, the two armoured groups met at Smolensk on 24 July. Timoshenko was unable, or not permitted by Stalin, to extricate his armies and, although large numbers of Russians did escape to the east and resistance inside the pocket did not end until 5 August, the result was another resounding success for German encirclement tactics. The number of Russian dead is unknown but Army Group Centre took 330,000 prisoners of war and captured 3,300 tanks at Minsk, and now another 348,000 prisoners and huge numbers of tanks and artillery pieces at Smolensk. Army Group Centre had advanced nearly 400 miles in just over a month and, in the view of those at OKH at least, was now well poised to press on and take Moscow, only 200 miles away.