Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (8 page)

The third day of Brest dawned.

As the sun's rays penetrated the smoke they fell upon an old and wrecked Russian anti-aircraft position. Amid the rubble was Lance-Corporal Teuchler's machine-gun party, belonging to Second Lieutenant Wieltsch's platoon. A painful rattle came from the gunner's throat. He had been shot through the lung and was dying. The machine-gun commander was sitting up stiffly, his back against the tripod. He had been dead for hours. Lance-Corporal Teuchler was lying shot through the chest, slumped over his ammunition-box. The sun on his face brought him round again.

Cautiously he rolled over on his side. He could hear agonized voices. He saw a muzzle flash from a casemate some 300 yards away every time a wounded man sat up or tried to crawl behind cover. Snipers! It was they who wiped out Teuchler's party.

At noon a strong assault detachment of 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment, broke through from the Western Island to the citadel church. The trapped German troops were freed; Lance-Corporal Teuchler was found. But the relieving units got no nearer to the officers' mess.

The eastern fort on the Northern Island was likewise still holding out. On 29th June Field-Marshal Kesselring sent in a Stuka Geschwader against it.

[Unit consisting of 3 Gruppen, usually 93 aircraft.]

But the 1000-pound bombs had no effect. In the afternoon 4000-pounders were dropped. Now the masonry was shattered. Women and children came out of the fort, followed by 400 troops. But the officers' mess was still being stubbornly defended. The building had to be demolished piece by piece. Not one man surrendered.

On 30th June the operations report of 45th Infantry Division recorded the conclusion of the operation and the capture of the fortress. The division took 7000 prisoners, including 100 officers. German losses totalled 482 killed, including 40 officers, and over 1000 wounded, of whom many died subsequently. The magnitude of these losses can be judged by the fact that the total German losses on the entire Eastern Front up to 30th June amounted to 8886 killed. The citadel of Brest therefore accounted for over 5 per cent, of all fatal casualties.

A story such as the defence of the citadel of Brest would have received tremendous publicity in any other country. But the bravery and heroism of the Soviet defenders of Brest remained unsung. Up to Stalin's death the Soviets simply took no notice of the heroic defence of the fortress. The fortress had fallen and many soldiers had surrendered—that, in the eyes of the Stalinists, was a disgrace. Hence there were no heroes of Brest. The chapter was simply expunged from military history. The names of the commanders were erased.

But in 1956, three years after Stalin's death, an interesting attempt was made to rehabilitate the defenders of Brest. The publicist Sergey Smirnov published a little book entitled
In Search of the Heroes of Brest-Litovsk.
The reader discovers that the author had to go to a lot of trouble to track down the heroes who had survived the hell of Brest: they were all living inconspicuously, because fifteen years after the battle and ten years after the end of the war they were still being regarded as suspect and dishonoured. Smirnov writes:

We have in Russia about 400 survivors of the battle of the citadel of Brest. Most of them were seriously wounded when the Germans took them prisoners. It must be admitted that we have not always treated these men as we should have done. It is no secret that the people's enemy Beria and his henchmen encouraged an incorrect attitude to former prisoners of war, regardless of the manner in which these men became prisoners or how they bore themselves while in captivity. That is the reason why we have not so far been told the truth about Brest-Litovsk.

And what was that truth?

Smirnov found it on the walls of the casemates. There, scratched with a nail into the plaster, he read: "We are three men from Moscow—Ivanov, Stepanchikov, and Shuntyayev. We are defending this church, and we have sworn not to surrender. July 1941." And below we read: "I am alone now. Stepanchikov and Shuntyayev have been killed. The Germans are inside the church. I have one hand-grenade left. They shall not get me alive."

In another place we read: "Things are difficult, but we are not losing courage. We die confidently. July 1941."

In the basement of the barracks on the Western Island there is an inscription: "I will die but I will not surrender. Farewell, native country." There is no signature, but instead the date, 20.7.41. It appears therefore that individual groups in the dungeons of the citadel continued resisting until the end of July.

In 1956 the world was at last told who commanded the defence of the citadel. Smirnov writes: "From combat order No. 1, which has been found, we know the names of the unit commanders defending the central citadel: Troop Commissar Fomin, Captain Zubachev, First Lieutenant Semenenko, and Second Lieutenant Vinogradov." The 44th Rifle Regiment was commanded by Petr Mikhaylovich Gavrilov. Commissar Fomin, Captain Zubachev, and Second Lieutenant Vinogradov belonged to a combat group which broke out of the fortress on 25th June, but they were intercepted on the Warsaw highway and wiped out. The three officers were taken prisoners. Vinogradov survived the war. Smirnov found him in Vologda, where, still unrecognized in 1956, he worked as a blacksmith. According to his account, "Commissar Fomin, before the break-out, put on the uniform of a private soldier who had been killed; but he was identified in the POW camp by another soldier, denounced, and shot. Zubachev died in captivity. Major Gavrilov survived his captivity although, seriously wounded, he had resisted capture by throwing a hand-grenade and killing a German soldier."

It was a long time before the heroes of the citadel of Brest were recorded in Soviet history. They have earned their place there. The manner in which they fought, their perseverance, their devotion to duty, their bravery in the face of hopeless odds—all these were typical of the fighting morale and powers of resistance of the Soviet soldier. The German divisions were to encounter many more such instances.

The stubbornness and devotion of the defenders of Brest made a deep impression on the German troops. Military history has but few examples of similar disdain for death. When Colonel-General Guderian received the reports on the operations he said to Major von Below, the Army High Command's liaison officer with the Panzer Group, "These men deserve the highest admiration."

The first battles of encirclement-Why were the Soviets taken by surprise?—Stalin knew the date of the attack—The "Red Chapel" and Dr Sorge-Precursors of the U-2-Stalin and Hitler at poker—General Potaturchev is taken prisoner and is interrogated.

THE material and moral consequences of every major engagement," Field-Marshal Count Moltke wrote over eighty years ago, "are of such far-reaching character that as a rule they create an entirely changed situation."

Military experts agree that this dictum is valid to this day, and certainly applied in 1941. It is not known whether Stalin had read Moltke, but he acted in accordance with his thesis. He realized that on the Central Front disaster was staring him in the face because something decisive was lacking—a bold organizer, a tough, experienced commander in the field, a man who could by ruthless improvisation master the chaos caused by Guderian's and Hoth's advancing tanks.

Where was there such a man?

Stalin believed he had found him in the Far East. And he did not hesitate a minute to entrust to him the salvation of the Central Front.

At the moment when Second Lieutenant Wieltsch was bursting into the citadel of Brest, when Manstein was crossing the bridge of Daugavpils, and Hoth's tanks were racing towards the historic gap of Molodechno, from where Napoleon after his disastrous retreat from Moscow informed the world that the Grande Armée had been destroyed but the Emperor was in excellent health—at that moment, at the railway station of Novosibirsk, 900 miles east of the Urals, the Stationmaster and the quartermaster of the Siberian Military District were running along the platform at which the trans-Siberian express stood. They were looking for a certain special compartment. At last they found it.

The Stationmaster stepped up to the open window. "Comrade General," he said to the broad-shouldered man in the compartment, "Comrade General, the Defence Minister requests you to leave the train and continue your journey by air."

"Very well, very well," said the general. The quartermaster dashed up the steps into the carriage to bring out the general's luggage.

The date was 27th June 1941. It was a hot afternoon. The platform was packed with milling uniformed crowds. Outside, in the station square, a loudspeaker was blaring. It was relaying a recruiting appeal from the Siberian Military District command.

The general, escorted by the quartermaster and the station-master, pushed his way through the crowd of men called up for service and now waiting for their trains to their respective garrisons. The general's name was Audrey Ivanovich Yere-menko. He was wearing the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He had come from Khabarovsk, where until a week before he had commanded the First Far Eastern Army. In the Soviet High Command he enjoyed the reputation of being a tough commander of great personal courage, a brilliant tactician, and an absolutely reliable member of the Communist Party. He was a veteran of the Red Army, one of Trotsky's old guard, who had gone over to the Red Army as an NCO and gone through the entire campaign against the Whites. In this campaign he had earned his commission as an officer.

On 22nd June, the day war broke out, shortly after noon, General Smorodinov, the Chief of Staff of Army Group Far East, had rung up Yeremenko in great excitement: "Andrey Ivanovich, the Germans have been shelling our towns since early morning. The war has begun."

Yeremenko describes the scene in his memoirs:

As a man who had dedicated his life to the military profession I had frequently thought about the possibility of war, in particular about the way in which it might start. I had been convinced that we would always be able to discern the enemy's intentions in good time, and would never be taken by surprise. But now, listening to Smorodinov, I realized instantly, we had been taken by surprise. We had been utterly unsuspecting. All of us— soldiers, officers, the Soviet people. What a disastrous failure of our intelligence service!

But Smorodinov did not give Yeremenko time for meditation. He was passing on to him definite orders. One: the First Far Eastern Army was to be put on full alert. "That means an attack is threatening here too—by the Japanese?" Yeremenko asked, startled.

Smorodinov put his mind at rest. The alert, he explained, was a precautionary measure. There were no indications that the Japanese intended to attack. Indeed, the High Command's assurance on this point was clear from the second order, which instructed Yeremenko to leave for Moscow at once to take up a new command.

Lieutenant-General Yeremenko did not know what awaited him. He did not know that from all the marshals and generals Stalin had chosen him, the lieutenant-general from the Far East, to save the Central Front. Stalin considered him to be the very man he needed—a master of improvisation, a Russian Rommel, familiar with the problems involved in commanding large formations. His First Far Eastern Army had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for its excellent state of training. He seemed the obvious choice of a new iron broom for the wavering Western Front. If anyone could save the desperate situation there it was Yeremenko with his strong arm and unshakable belief in Stalin.

Certainly the situation on the Bialystok front was desperate enough. Three Soviet infantry divisions—the 12th, the 89th, and the 103rd—had not only offered no resistance to the Germans, but when their political commissars had tried, pistol in hand, to make the troops fight the troops had shot them and had then melted away. Most of them had been only too glad to go into captivity. It was this particular incident that had shaken Stalin. The situation required a very hard man.

Yeremenko had left Khabarovsk by the trans-Siberian express on the same day—22nd June. Anxiously he counted the hours he would have to spend en route. The man whom Moscow had chosen as the saviour of the Central Front was to make his journey by train! At last some one evidently thought better of it, and that was why he was snatched from the train at Novosibirsk.

Yeremenko drove straight to the headquarters of the Siberian Military District. But they had no news for him there from the front. As always in such circumstances, rumours were rife and were being spread even by senior officers. The Germans, they said, had been knocked on the head. General Pavlov's tanks had already moved forward from the

famous Bialystok bend and were clearing the road to Warsaw for the infantry. Captain Gorobin, who had only recently been transferred to Novosibirsk from the staff of the First Cossack Army, said with a wink, "The maps we had there covered the territory all the way to the Rhine—and every single division was marked on them." There was optimism in Novosibirsk. On 26th June the communiqué announced: "The enemy has taken Brest," but no one took the news very seriously. Brest?
Nichevo
—surely Brest was somewhere in Poland!

Two hours later Yeremenko climbed into a twin-engined bomber and took off for Moscow. He had 1750 miles to cover. There were four intermediate stops for refuelling, overhaul, and rest. Russia is a big country. Some 2200 miles from Novosibirsk battles were raging on the Western Front. Yet Novosibirsk was only about half-way between Brest- Litovsk and Vladivostok.

While Yeremenko sat in his bomber on that 28th June, flying towards Omsk some 2600 feet above the dark
tayga,
over the huge Siberian plain with its boundless fields of wheat, over the cheerless industrial landscape around Sverdlovsk, towards the Urals, the man against whom he was to measure his skill was standing in his armoured command vehicle barely fifty miles south-west of Minsk, the Belorussian capital.

Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, commanding Second Panzer Group, had just sent a signal to Colonel Freiherr von Liebenstein, Chief of Staff of the Panzer Group: "The 29th Motorized Division, at present engaged on a broad front against Russian break-out attempts 110 miles south-west of Minsk in the Slonim-Zelva area, is to wheel round as soon as possible for a thrust towards Minsk-Smolensk."

As Guderian's order arrived at the headquarters of the Panzer Group in the ancient Radziwill château at Nieswiez, Bayerlein and Liebenstein, Guderian's Chief of Operations and Chief of Staff respectively, were bending over their map-tables, swiftly sketching in the latest situation. Their headquarters had been moved into the château only that morning. Two gutted Russian tanks were still lying by the bridge. Their story was being told throughout the Panzer Group.

During the night of 26th/27th June General Nehring, commanding 18th Panzer Division, was looking for the headquarters of his Panzer regiment. In his open armoured car he cautiously drove up to the château. A German Mark III tank was covering the approach to the bridge. Nehring ordered his driver to pull up, some forty yards from the tank. He hailed it. At that moment he heard the clank of tracks. Nehring stood up and shone his flashlight to the rear. He froze with shock. Two light Russian tanks of the old T-26 type stood close behind him, their machine-guns pointing forward.

"Break away half right!" Nehring hissed to his driver. He let in his clutch and roared off. But the German tank had noticed that there was something amiss. Within a second the first shell came from its 5-cm. gun. A second and a third followed at once. Not a single burst of machine-gun fire came from the Russian tanks.

Now the Soviet tanks were lying outside the château of Nieswiez, smoke-blackened witnesses to a general's strange adventure. Inside the Radziwill château, up on the third floor, another curious souvenir hung on the wall—a photograph of a hunting party in 1912. The guest of honour in the centre was Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Liebenstein and Bayerlein at once realized the idea behind Guderian's signal. The campaign on the Central Front had reached a decisive phase. The first major success was beginning to show in outline: the 17th Panzer Division, the spearhead of the units wheeling towards Minsk from the south, had reached the city. In the north Colonel-General Hoth with his Third Panzer Group had formed the northern enveloping arc and, with General Stumpffs 20th Panzer Division, had penetrated into Minsk on 26th June. Hoth's and Guderian's Groups were therefore linking up. This meant that the huge pincers which the Fourth and Ninth Armies had formed round the Bialystok bend had now closed. The pocket, in which 4 Soviet Armies were caught, with 23 divisions and 6 independent brigades between Bialystok- Novogrodek and Minsk, was being sealed up. Four Armies—half a million men. The first gigantic battle of. annihilation on the Eastern Front was unrolling, a battle of annihilation rarely equalled in military history. It was typical of Guderian's strategic grasp that he did not get intoxicated with the victory that was taking shape, that he was not yielding to the temptation to collect a few hundred thousand prisoners. He knew that it was no part of an armoured formation's duties to act as beaters, or to guard the sides of a pocket, or shepherd processions of prisoners. All these were tasks for the infantry. The fast troops had to Keep moving, exploiting their opportunity. They must advance over

the Berezina. And then over the Dnieper. Always moving, towards the first great strategic objective of the campaign— Smolensk.

That was why Guderian wanted to detach Major-General von Boltenstern's 29th Motorized Infantry Division from the defensive operations on the southern side of the pocket near the little river Zelvyanka and to both sides of the township of Zelva, where the Russians were trying to break out, and to employ it instead for the northward thrust towards Smolensk. But the 29th Motorized Infantry Division, known as "the Hawks" from its divisional tactical sign, was deeply involved in defensive fighting against desperate Soviet break-out attempts on a 40-mile sector along the edge of the great bulge. The Russians hoped to force a way through at this point, to tear open a gap to escape from the pocket. Again and again they had assembled in the thick forests and then, supported by tanks and artillery, charged against the thinly held lines of the German division.

South-west of the village of Yeziornitsa they made a cavalry charge straight into the machine-gun fire of the motor- cycle battalion and the machine-gun battalion of 5th Regiment, and, amid shouts of "Úrra! Úrra!" time and again re- formed in battalion and regiment strength. Near Zelva they penetrated into the forward positions of the reconnaissance detachments. The German 15th and 71st Infantry Regiments, from Kassel and Erfurt, were ceaselessly in action. The battalions of 15th Infantry Regiment, in particular, had a difficult time. The 5th Company was in position just over a mile outside the little town of Zelva, which was crammed full with Russians. Again and again they swept up against the German positions with their unnerving cries of "Urra!"—companies, battalions, regiments.

The picture was one that made the German troops' imagination boggle. The Russians were charging on a broad front, in an almost endless-seeming solid line, their arms linked. Behind them a second, a third, and a fourth line abreast.

"They must be mad," said the men of 29th Division. Mesmerized they stared at the earth-brown-uniformed wall of human bodies, of men pressed close together, approaching at a steady trot. Their long fixed bayonets were held rigidly in front of them—a wall bristling with lances.

"Urra! Urra!"

"This is murder," groaned Captain Schmidt, the commander of 1st Battalion. But then what else is war? If this gigantic storm was to be smashed and not just forced to the ground they would have to wait for the right moment. "Wait for my order to fire!" he commanded. The wall was still getting nearer. "Úrra! Úrra!"