Now a corridor, amost a hundred miles wide at its entry, was
leading directly toward Leningrad. In five days the Germans had
halved the distance which separated them from the "Cradle of the
Revolution."
Frantic to close this gap and to regain contact with the
disintegrating northwestern front, Pavlov continued to shift
divisions pell-mell out of the 10th Army area northward to stiffen
the shaky 3rd Army. This uncovered Minsk and left the luckless 4th
Army commander, Major General A. A. Korobkov, without support on
either flank. Had the Russians but known it, the threat to Leningrad
was as nothing beside the menace bearing down on the 4th Army. With
his centre under pressure from Kluge, Korobkov was isolated to the
north by Hoth's 3rd
Panzergruppe
and his left flank driven in
by Guderian's 2nd
Panzergruppe
. In three days Guderian had
driven a hundred miles northeast to Slonim, drawing, with Hoth, a
noose around the bulk of the Soviet infantry and the remaining
armour, which Pavlov had left in position. On 25th June, the 26th
Panzer Corps took Lesna and advanced fifty miles toward Slutsk; on
the 26th, the 66th Panzer Corps captured Baranovichi in the morning
and drove nearly sixty miles during the day to enter Stolpce at
nightfall. On the 27th this corps covered the remaining fifty miles
to Minsk, where it joined up with the southern arm of Hoth's pincer,
putting a "long-stop" behind the Slonim pocket and
achieving one of the most spectacular marches in the history of
armoured warfare.
In the south the Red Army held its ground better, thoueh at a
fearful price in men and equipment. The front commander was Colonel
General M. P. Kirponos (commander of the Kiev Military District), and
the forces of which he disposed were substantially stronger both than
those of his colleague to the north, the unfortunate Pavlov, and of
the Germans opposite him.
The main German thrust was directed down the relatively narrow gap
between the southern edge of the Pripet Marshes and the foothills of
the Carpathian range. Here Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group
South, had concentrated the whole of the 1st Panzer Army (Colonel
General von Kleist) and the 6th Army (Field Marshal von Reichenau)
and the 17th Army (Colonel General von Stülpnagel).
The longer front along the Prut and down to the shore of the Black
Sea had only one German army, the 11th (General von Schobert), to
stiffen a large mixed group of Hungarians and Rumanians. These last
were slow in getting off the mark, and being fitted out with French
equipment, were not formidable.
Kirponos therefore was free to concentrate against Kleist and
Reichenau. He had four infantry armies, [These were the 5th (Major
General of Tank Troops M. I. Potapov), the 6th (Lieutenant General I.
N. Muzychenko), the 26th (Lieutenant General F. Kostenko), and the
12th (Major General P. G. Ponedelin).] three mechanised corps in
close support (the 22nd, 4th, and 15th), one (the 8th) in reserve,
about 250 miles inland, and two in "strategic reserve" at
Zhitomir (the 19th and 9th). But this powerful force was dissipated
in a sequence of piecemeal counterattacks, and due largely to command
difficulties and the inexperience of the senior officers of the Red
Army in handling masses of armour, the strongest concentration of
Russian tank strength in the east lost its cutting edge before the
really critical phase of the southern battles developed.
On 22nd June, Kirponos had ordered up all three mechanised corps
from the reserve with the intention of concentrating them northeast
of Rovno and staging an attack, together with the 22nd (which was
already in position there), against Kleist's left flank. In fact, the
22nd Mechanised Corps was drawn into battle on the first day and cut
to pieces. The 15th Mechanised Corps, attacking from the south, was
likewise fought to a standstill in front of the German antitank
screen. With his tank strength seriously diminished, Kirponos held on
grimly, but by the time the 8th Mechanised Corps had completed its
forced march the situation had become so bad that it was sent
straight into action alone. Once again the Russian tanks took a
severe mauling, though better combat discipline and more up-to-date
equipment (some regiments had just been refitted with the T 34)
helped the corps preserve its cohesion.
[On 24th June, Halder, besides noting, "Interesting
historical coincidence that Napoleon also took Vilna on 24th June,"
also wrote (underlining the sentence), "New enemy heavy tank!"
The T 34 was issued to some armoured brigades in May 1941 and went
into action in the first week of the campaign. Not, as is sometimes
claimed, at the "relief of Moscow."]
When finally the 9th and 19th corps arrived from Zhitomir,
things were so critical that they, too, had to go straight into
action—at half the strength originally planned. The
inexperienced Russian tank crews, exhausted by four days on the march
and round-the-clock hammering by the Luftwaffe, were no match for the
confident veterans of the 1st Panzer Army, who knew how to
concentrate, when to disperse, the secrets of holding fire and
picking ground. Once again many of the Russian tanks broke down,
others floundered into German ambushes or lost their way. One
division followed its corps commissar into a swamp, and all the tanks
had to be abandoned.
Yet although the situation seemed desperate from the Russian side,
the Germans found their opponent's strength highly perplexing. "The
enemy leadership in front of A. G. South," Halder grumbled, "is
remarkably energetic, his endless flank and frontal attacks are
causing us heavy losses."
Again, on the following day, "One has to admit that the
Russian leadership on this front is doing a pretty good job."
At least, by his lavish expenditure of lives and machinery,
Kirponos was holding the southern front in being. But its days were
numbered, for north of the Pripet Marshes the Russian armies of the
centre were fast breaking to pieces. A general breakdown in
communications aggravated the fragmentation of the various commands.
Signals, radio, telephones, nothing functioned properly. Roads and
railways were raked by the Luftwaffe; some units had their
effectiveness reduced by as much as half while on the march.
Only the regional machinery of the
Osoaviakhim
functioned
with efficiency, continuing to churn out a mass of conscripts under
its mobilisation decrees. These wretched fellows, the cadres of 1919,
1920, 1921, with those of other years following on their heels, were
brought from all over Russia in slow-moving freight trains and dumped
as near the front as the Luftwaffe allowed. Out they clambered, in
their civilian clothes, holding their cardboard suitcases, and set
off on foot, toward mobilisation centres long since overrun.
In the huge no man's land of White Russia, which had a week, some
parts only a few days, of grace before falling to the enemy, those
fittest to command survived. A few commissars together with some Red
Army officers of courage and foresight struggled day and night to
form fresh units out of the unarmed reservists, wandering stragglers,
men on leave, and garrison brigades which littered the area.
Installations were demolished, dumps set ablaze, extempore fieldworks
thrown up, cattle and fowl slaughtered or driven east. Over the whole
scene brooded the "rear security detachments" of the NKVD,
machine gunners held ready "to check panic . . . and prevent
unauthorised withdrawal." On 28th June, Korobkov had been taken
back to Moscow and shot for cowardice. Pavlov was to follow him,
together with his Chief of Staff, Klimovski, and his signals
commander, Grigoriev.
As the frontier force withered in battle, new armies, under new
commanders, took shape in the interior. To speed their concentrations
the Russians made all the major rail lines west of the Dnieper
one-way traffic; only the engines went careering back to collect
their loads. This puzzled German intelligence.
Air reconnaissance shows enormous mass of rolling stock
accumulating in marshalling yards. Appears to be empty. Is this a
bluff?
Halder's reaction was typical of that of all Germans who came face
to face with the extraordinary Russian profligacy in battle. First,
exultation: the Germans counted heads, measured the miles of their
advance, compared it with their achievements in the West, and
concluded that victory was around the corner. Then, disbelief: such
reckless expenditure could not go on, the Russians
must
be
bluffing, in a matter of days they would exhaust themselves. Then, a
certain haunting disquiet: the endless, aimless succession of
counterattacks, the eagerness to trade ten Russian lives for one
German, the vastness of the territory, and its bleak horizon.
A German Colonel Bernd von Kleist, wrote:
The German Army in fighting Russia is like an elephant
attacking a host of ants. The elephant will kill thousands, perhaps
even millions, of ants, but in the end their numbers will overcome
him, and he will be eaten to the bone.
There were differences, too, in the manner of the fighting.
Manstein has described how, on the very first day, he was shown the
bodies of a German patrol which had been cut off, and "gruesomely
mutilated," and the Soviets' practice of "throwing up their
hands as if to surrender and reaching for their arms as soon as our
infantry came near enough, or ... feigning death and then firing on
our troops when their backs were turned." As early as 23rd June,
Halder had been complaining of the "absence of any large take of
prisoners," on the 24th that "the stubborn resistance of
individual Russian units is remarkable," on the 27th, again,
dissatisfaction at "the singularly small number of prisoners."
The fissures in Russian morale which were to open that autumn (and as
suddenly to be closed by German brutality and miscalculation) were
still far below the surface.
All this had been immediately apparent to the German infantry,
which was fighting at close quarters. But on the Panzer crews, riding
out on the armoured decks of their vehicles, the sun shone. For the
first few days it seemed almost like the summer campaign in the West,
as the undamaged villages slid beneath their tracks, the bewildered
population peering from windows and doorways. Soon, though, this
similarity began to fade. The first effects of the distance they were
travelling began to be felt. Many of the motorised divisions had been
re-equipped with captured French trucks, and these were starting to
break down on the poor roads. Spare parts had to be flown in as the
long trails that stretched west behind the armoured spearheads were
dangerously vulnerable to wandering bodies of "surrounded"
Russians. "In spite of the distances we were advancing,"
wrote a captain in the 18th Panzer Division, ". . . there was no
feeling, as there had been in France, of entry into a defeated
nation. Instead there was resistance, always resistance, however
hopeless. A single gun, a group of men with rifles . . . once a chap
ran out of a cottage by the roadside with a grenade in each hand . .
."
On 29th June, Halder, after summarising the day's progress in his
diary, concluded:
Now, for once, our troops are compelled to fight according to
their combat manuals. In Poland and in the West they could take
liberties, but here they cannot get away with it.
There is a note almost of smugness about this entry. It is as if
the dedicated graduate of the General Staff College was gratified to
see the rules of war beginning to assert themselves. But, "for
once . . ." For always. Had the Germans but known it, the first
(and, for their arms, the most spectacular) phase of the Eastern
campaign was already fading into memory.
The 30th of June was Halder's birthday, and at OKH the anniversary
was a happy occasion. On coming down to the breakfast room the Chief
of the General Staff found that it had been specially decorated. The
junior officers stood in a line and presented their compliments,
preceded by "the H.Q. Commandant, accompanied by a man from the
guard unit who brings a bunch of wild flowers." Halder read the
teleprints from army group headquarters and pronounced the news
satisfactory. The Russians were in full retreat, and Luftwaffe
reports from the southern front told of disorganised columns three
and four abreast. Of the total of two hundred aircraft shot down the
day before, the majority had been old types, TB 3 highwing bombers
dragged up from the training airfields of central Russia. It was
evident that the enemy was scraping the barrel.
It is nothing if not paradoxical to think of these precise and
immaculate staff officers, dressed this day in their best uniforms,
seated at a table with a clean cloth, exchanging formal pleasantries
with one another. These men were at the nerve centre of the German
war machine in the East. Each day they sifted reports which expressed
in cold print a fresh and enormous sum of human agony—men dying
of wounds and thirst, villages smashed and burning, animals
slaughtered, families separated and sent into captivity. They had
heard Hitler speak of his intentions toward the Russian people, his
rejection of the Geneva convention on prisoners of war, of the
"Commissar order," of his wish to "level"
Leningrad in order not to be embarrassed by the size of its
population. They knew, too, what Nazi occupation meant: they had all
fought in Poland and seen the revolting behaviour of the SD
detachments at close quarters; and there, no farther than the
ration-strength sheet on the wall, the movement orders in the daily
file, was confirmation that these same criminals were operating close
up behind their own soldiers. Yet such is the schizophrenic capacity
of the human mind that all this could be submerged with facility, and
like schoolboys, they set out to enjoy themselves at their
housemaster's birthday party.