The Second World War (38 page)

Army Group South, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt, advanced into Ukraine. Rundstedt was soon supported by two Romanian armies eager to take back Bessarabia from the Soviets. Their dictator and commander-in-chief, Marshal Ion Antonescu, had assured Hitler ten days before: ‘
Of course I’ll be there
from the start. When it’s a question of action against the Slavs, you can always count on Romania.’

Stalin, having drafted a speech announcing the invasion, told Molotov to read it on Soviet radio at noon. It was broadcast over loudspeakers to the crowds in the streets. The foreign minister’s wooden delivery ended with the declaration: ‘Our cause is just, the enemy will be smashed, victory will be ours.’ Despite his uninspiring tone, the people as a whole were outraged by this violation of the Motherland. Vast queues of volunteers immediately formed at recruiting centres. But other, less orderly queues also developed, with the panic-buying of tinned or dried foods and the withdrawal of money from banks.

There was also a strange sense of relief that the treacherous attack had released the Soviet Union from the unnatural alliance with Nazi Germany. The young physicist Andrei Sakharov was later greeted by an aunt in a bomb shelter during a Luftwaffe raid on Moscow. ‘
For the first time in years
,’ she said, ‘I feel like a Russian again!’ Similar emotions of relief were also expressed in Berlin that at last they were fighting ‘the real enemy’.

Fighter regiments of Red Army aviation, with inexperienced pilots in obsolete machines, stood little chance against the Luftwaffe. German fighter aces soon began to clock up huge scores, and referred to their easy kills as ‘infanticide’. Their Soviet opponents felt psychologically defeated even before encountering their enemy. But, although many pilots avoided battle, a longing for vengeance began to grow. A handful of the bravest simply rammed a German aircraft if they got a chance, knowing that there
was little hope of fastening on to its tail to shoot it down.

The novelist and war correspondent Vasily Grossman described waiting for the aircraft of a fighter regiment to return to an airfield near Gomel in Belorussia. ‘
Finally, after a successful attack
on a German column, the fighters returned and landed. The commander’s aircraft had human flesh stuck in the radiator. That’s because the supporting aircraft had hit a truck with ammunition that blew up at the very moment when the leader was flying over it. Poppe, the commander, is picking the mess out with a file. They summon a doctor who examines the bloody mass attentively and pronounces it “Aryan meat!” Everyone laughs. Yes, a pitiless time–a time of iron–has come!’

‘
The Russian is a
tough opponent,’ wrote a German soldier. ‘We take hardly any prisoners, and shoot them all instead.’ When marching forward, some took pot-shots for fun at crowds of Red Army prisoners being herded back to makeshift camps, where they were left to starve in the open. A number of German officers were appalled, but most were more concerned about the lack of discipline.

On the Soviet side, Beria’s
NKVD massacred
the inmates of its prisons near the front so that they would not be saved by the German advance. Nearly 10,000 Polish prisoners were murdered. In the city of Lwów alone, the NKVD killed around 4,000 people. The stench of decomposing bodies in the heat of late June permeated the whole town. The NKVD slaughter prompted Ukrainian nationalists to begin a guerrilla war against the Soviet occupiers. In a frenzy of fear and hatred, the NKVD massacred another 10,000 prisoners in the areas of Bessarabia and the Baltic states, seized the year before. Other prisoners were forced to march eastwards, with NKVD guards shooting any who collapsed.

On 23 June, Stalin set up a supreme command headquarters, giving it the old Tsarist name of the Stavka. A few days later, he entered the commissariat of defence, accompanied by Beria and Molotov. There they found Timoshenko and Zhukov attempting in vain to establish some sort of order along the enormous front. Minsk had just fallen. Stalin peered at the situation maps and read some of the reports. He was clearly shaken to find that the situation was even more disastrous than he had feared. He cursed Timoshenko and Zhukov, who did not hold back in their replies.
‘Lenin founded our state
,’ he was heard to say, ‘and we’ve fucked it up.’

The Soviet leader disappeared to his dacha at Kuntsevo, leaving the other members of the Politburo bewildered. There were mutterings that Molotov should take over, but they were far too frightened to move against the dictator. On 30 June, they decided that a State Committee for Defence with absolute power had to be set up. They drove out to Kuntsevo to see
Stalin. He looked haggard and wary when they entered, clearly believing that they had come to arrest him. He asked why they had come. When they explained that he had to lead this emergency war cabinet, he betrayed his surprise, but agreed to take on the role. There have been suggestions that Stalin’s departure from the Kremlin was a ploy in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible to encourage any opponents within the Politburo to reveal themselves, enabling them to be crushed, but this is pure speculation.

Stalin returned to the Kremlin the next day, 1 July. Two days later he made his own broadcast to the Soviet peoples. His instincts served him well. He surprised his listeners by addressing them as ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters’. No master of the Kremlin had ever addressed his people in such familial terms. He called upon them to defend the Motherland in a scorched-earth policy of total warfare, evoking the Patriotic War against Napoleon. Stalin understood that the Soviet peoples were far more likely to lay down their lives for their country than for any Communist ideology. Knowing that patrotisim is shaped by war, Stalin perceived that this invasion would revive it. Nor did he conceal the gravity of the situation, even if he did nothing to acknowledge his part in the catastrophe. He also ordered a people’s levy–
narodnoe opolchenie
–to be set up. These militia battalions of ill-armed cannon-fodder were expected to slow the German panzer divisions, with little more than their bodies.

The terrible suffering of civilians caught up in the fighting did not enter Stalin’s calculations. Refugees, driving the cattle from collective farms in front of them, tried in vain to stay ahead of the panzer divisions. On 26 June, the writer Aleksandr Tvardovsky saw an extraordinary sight from his carriage window when the train halted at a wayside stop in Ukraine. ‘
The whole field
was covered with people who were lying, sitting, swarming,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They had bundles, knapsacks, suitcases, children and handcarts. I had never seen such huge quantities of household things that people took with them when leaving home in haste. There were probably tens of thousands of people in this field… The field got up, started moving, advanced towards the railway, towards the train, started knocking on the walls and windows of carriages. It seemed capable of tipping the train off the rails. The train began to move…’

Hundreds if not thousands died in the bombing of the cities of Belorussia. Survivors fared little better in their attempts to escape eastwards. ‘
After Minsk began to burn
,’ a journalist noted, ‘blind men from the home for invalids walked along the highway in a long file, tied to one another with towels.’ Already there were large numbers of war orphans, children whose parents had been killed or lost in the confusion. Suspecting that some of them were used for spying by the Germans, the NKVD treated them with little compassion.

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 Bia
ystok 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.