War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (16 page)

Leutnant Kremer’s amphibious
coup de main
force of mixed infantry and assault pioneers from Regiment 130 and Pionier Battalion 81 had barely manhandled their nine assault boats into the water when they were engulfed by the same hurricane of fire that was plastering the opposite bank. A carpet of crackling detonations spurted multiple geysers from the river intermingled with fountains of mud and huge clods of damp earth which were ejected into the pale sky. Bitter-smelling clouds of grey cordite smoke wafted along the riverbank in the deathly calm that followed. Four of the nine boats were a complete wreck, floundering and settling in shallow water.

Bodies began to snag among the reeds lining the riverbank. Wounded soldiers shrieked for assistance. Hermann Wild, attacking upriver, remembered losing his close friend Muller to this unexpected strike. ‘I had spoken with him only five hours before the assault,’ he said: ‘Even then he was already troubled by a premonition of impending death.’
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Now he would never speak to him again. German artillery, likely the newly employed secret Nebelwerfer multi-barrelled mortar Regiment, had dropped short: 20 men were dead or hideously mutilated.

Kremer reorganised the survivors. Delays and the mind-cloying shock of the artillery strike stifled momentum, but they continued with the mission. Five surviving assault boats motored eastwards along the River Muchaviec toward the first bridge objective. To their left rose the imposing two-storey-high walls of the citadel fortress. Before long a storm of scything, splashing fire spat out from its dominating walls. Two more boats riddled with holes were swamped in the vicinity of the north bridge linking the West Island to the citadel. Survivors struggled ashore to the Citadel Island where they were to remain pinned down for two days. Leutnant Kremer had lost two-thirds of his force in the first few hundred metres. He rallied the surviving three boats and pressed onward toward the first two bridges. These were secured by 03.55 hours, jointly supported by a landward attack pressed home by the
‘Stosstrupp
Lohr’, also from Regiment 130. Leutnant Lohr’s group fired from the riverbank while Kremer’s remaining trio of vulnerable boats carried on. The third ‘Wulka’ bridge was captured at about 05.10 hours. Kremer was elated. He insisted on raising a swastika flag over the bridge, his final objective, to mark the accomplishment of the mission that had cost his force so dearly. Lohr advised him not to expose himself but Kremer recklessly persisted. As the flag was raised the hapless officer violently jerked backwards, mortally wounded, struck in the head by a single sniper’s bullet.
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The northern axis of the 45th Infantry Division’s attack made good progress. The IIIrd Battalion, having penetrated thick bushes and barbed wire on the high banks of the West Island, pushed on through parkland dotted with buildings burning furiously from the artillery bombardment. The 37mm PAK (anti-tank) guns were manhandled along by crews spearheading and supporting the advance. Presently the pronounced landmark of the Terespol tower, already considerably holed by shellfire, came into view as did also the tall two-storey walls enclosing the citadel. Shortly after 04.00 hours German troops penetrated this inner bastion utilising a dead ground approach enabled by the low north bridge. The flow of the German advance parted either side of the garrison church inside the walls. The northern prong had already pierced the fortress’s keep.

Meanwhile the southern fork of the division’s advance had gained swift admittance to the South Island via the south gate. German machine gun posts were established on the high earth walls that overlooked the island to cover the advance to the Tsar’s Gate, the southern bridge entrance to the citadel. Hermann Wild’s gun crews tore hands and bruised limbs manhandling their 37mm antitank guns onto heavy-duty rubber dinghies. ‘The marshy approaches to the river made it difficult,’ he said, ‘but on the other side it was even worse!’ Terrain east of the River Bug was a morass of water-filled ditches and swamp. ‘In places the anti-tank guns sank up to their axles in mud,’ complained Wild. ‘We were pushed extremely hard to keep the momentum of the advance going.’

Lines of straining infantrymen pulled the PAKs over the high banks and down into the South Island. The wide ‘camp road’ through the middle was strewn with a carpet of leaves and branches scythed down by artillery fire. As they trundled their guns north along this route they passed groups of Russian corpses strewn at the road’s edge. Many wore underclothes or were only partially dressed. ‘The first Russian prisoners came up,’ Wild remembered. ‘They had very few or practically no clothes on at all. One could see they had been totally surprised!’
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Soon the 37mm guns were in action against light Russian armour.

Further to the south-east the IIIrd Battalion, bypassing the town of Brest, was winding its way around knocked-out obsolete Russian tanks. Counter-attacks by these and light amphibious tanks had either bogged down in the marshy ground or were destroyed by guns. Back at division headquarters, situation reports passed on by these lead units indicated clear success.

Timofei Dombrowski, a Russian machine gunner, excitedly described how ‘again and again huge volumes of fire’ engulfed his unit. ‘The Luftwaffe from above, and at ground level everything that an army had at its disposal – mortars, machine guns – and all at the same time!’ The implication of all this was sinisterly clear.

‘We were positioned directly along the line of the Bug, and we could see the complete advance on the other side, and immediately grasped what that meant. Germans – it was war!’
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There were normally 8,000 Soviet soldiers stationed in the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, but only 3,500 were present at the time of the attack. It was a weekend, Sunday morning in peacetime, and many soldiers were on leave.
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The fortress was a small community in its own right. Next to the barracks and magazine was a school, a kindergarten and hospitals. Families lived alongside the soldiers. Nikitina Archinowa, the wife of a Russian officer in the
Ostfort,
remembered:

‘Early in the morning I was woken up with my children by a terrible noise. Bombs and shells were exploding. I ran barefoot with my children into the street. We only had the opportunity to throw on a coat, and what a dreadful scene outside. The sky above the fortress was full of aircraft dropping bombs on us. Totally distracted women and children were rushing about looking for a place to hide from the fire. Before me lay the wife of a lieutenant with her young son; both had been killed.’
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The animated rhetoric and suppressed excitement characterising these postwar interviews with Russian eyewitnesses give some indication of the shock, surprise and fear activated by the sudden and unexpected German attack. A Russian policeman at Brest railway station, Nikolai Yangchuk, stated:

‘At 04.00 hours when the German artillery began to fire from behind the Bug, we all reported, as ordered, to the station. Lieutenant Y. gave the orders to distribute weapons and defend the station.’

They moved down to the Bug bridge and saw German troops were bearing down on them. ‘A great avalanche with no start or finish.’ These men appeared lethally bent on their destruction. ‘They had their sleeves rolled up, hand-grenades stuck in belts and machine pistols hanging from their necks or rifles at the ready.’
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Dombrowski, defending on the river line, declared: ‘some of our people ran away faced with this mass attack’.
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Wassilij Timovelich, a Russian engineer, accounted for the apparent ease with which the outer Soviet defences were overrun. ‘Our fortifications were very well built,’ he explained, modelled on their Maginot and Siegfried line predecessors. ‘But the bunkers were not finished, and had yet to be occupied by their military crews.’ The transfer of the Russian border westward into the Polish–Soviet occupation zone in 1939 negated much of the effectiveness of the original Russian frontier defences. Repositioning was still going on. ‘Only 14 cupolas were enclosed by fortifications,’ Timovelich estimated, ‘and patrolling soldiers made certain nobody went inside. But,’ he logically asked, ‘who would want to do so? This was a border area!’ The sector was not on alert. ‘Troops were seldom inside the bunkers,’ because there was no need; consequently, ‘we slept in tents in the summer’. These tents dotted around the defence belt were overrun in the initial German rush. Many of the sleeping soldiers within were killed before they even realised they were at war. Surprise was complete. ‘Soon an intense rate of fire’ raked the unsuspecting bivouacs ‘and bullets went whizzing through the tents. There were many direct hits,’ Timovelich explained. ‘Tents were riddled and human bodies flung out.’ The defenders, confused and befuddled by sleep, had scant opportunity to defend themselves. Nikolai Yangchuk echoed this view:

‘We had too few rifles. A reinforcement of one thousand men suddenly arrived and they were sent into battle. “Don’t we get any rifles?” they asked. “Get to the front,” they were told. “You will find some weapons there”.’

There was no alternative but to move forward and lie in the trenches. ‘There they waited until someone was killed,’ Yangchuk soberly testified, ‘before they got their rifles.’
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The initial German assaults profoundly shocked the garrison. Grigori Makarow, a driver in a Soviet infantry division, said:

‘I felt in the first moments what war meant. All around me were dead and wounded friends and dead horses … German infantry came from the railway and began to penetrate into the fortress.’

Georgij Karbuk in Brest town said that ‘after a few hours the first tanks drove through the town, followed by motorcycle troops, then the infantry’.
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The Panzers were beginning to move.

The 45th Infantry Division sent a stream of optimistic situation reports to XIIth Corps headquarters. At 04.00 hours, 45 minutes into the attack, it was claimed: ‘Thus far, still no enemy resistance’. A number of bridges were secured: the key railway bridge and another bridging the southern entrance to the citadel. Yet ‘still there was no noteworthy enemy resistance’. At 04.42 hours ‘50 prisoners of war were picked up dressed only in shirts, because they had been surprised while asleep’. Momentum built up, additional bridges and fort emplacements fell into German hands. Three hours after H-hour, XIIth Corps was informed ‘that the division believes it will soon have occupied the North Island’. Resistance was becoming more apparent with ‘enemy armoured attacks between the bridge and the citadel’ but the situation was in hand. Within five hours bypassing Panzer spearheads announced good progress, supported by effective Stuka dive-bombing attacks on ‘Rollbahn 1’, the main axis of advance.

At 08.35 hours, however, a more sober appraisal admitted that, ‘there was still hard fighting going on in the citadel’. By 08.50 hours XIIth Corps began to realise that the 45th Infantry Division thrust into Brest was not mirroring the pace of flanking formations bypassing the built-up area. It was decided to commit the corps reserve – Infantry Regiment 133 – to alleviate a situation where ‘thus far two battalion commanders and a company commander have been killed, with one regimental commander seriously wounded’. By 10.50 hours the pessimism was more pronounced. ‘The fighting for the Citadel is very hard – many losses,’ it was reported. ‘We are going to try and lay smoke on the objective.’ The attack against the citadel was bogging down.
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Gefreiter Hans Teuschler crossed the River Bug as part of the second wave with the 10th Company, Infantry Regiment 135. His unit advanced through the West Island ‘without noticeable difficulty’ across gardens, through isolated enemy positions, and soon reached the inner Citadel Island. They crossed over the bridge dominated by a huge gate, the entry to the inner keep of the fortress. Directly opposite was a long extended building with four great gates ‘which were defended by Soviet machine gunners and riflemen who had now overcome the first shock of surprise’. Fighting began in earnest. Each gate had to be grenaded into submission. ‘The square in front’ of the building, Teuschler observed, ‘was cloaked in thick smoke, punctured by fresh shell bursts and covered with rubble, which at least offered some possibility of cover.’ Attacks by light Russian armour were beaten off. The 10th Company advanced to a further gate where other assault groups and battalion support elements were assembling, concentrating for the next phase of the attack. They filed onward, picking their way around the massive garrison church. III/IR135 was now deep within the citadel and on the point of achieving its objective.
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To its left I/IR135, forming the other prong of the northern attack axis, had traversed the North Island and was attempting the break into the citadel from the east. The southern advance was doggedly clearing routes through the South Island and bypassing the town of Brest even further south. The pitchfork thrust into Brest-Litovsk had impaled itself deeply into the enemy’s defences on both axes. All indications suggested that the harm inflicted was mortal. No suggestion of any setback was apparent to XIIth Corps commander until 11.00 hours; 45th Infantry Division staff were, however, expressing misgivings within three to four hours of H-hour.

‘It soon became clear between 05.30 hours and 07.30 hours that the Russians were bitterly fighting especially hard behind our forward attacking companies. Infantry operating with the 35 to 40 tanks and armoured cars based inside the citadel began to form a defence. The enemy brought his sharp-shooting skills to bear, sniping from trees, rooftop outlets and cellars in multiple engagements, which soon caused us heavy losses among officers and NCOs.’
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