War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (8 page)

Occupying Europe and garrisoning the flanks and rear of the proposed invasion led to the identification of commitments which the German General Staff assessed would require the army to field 208 divisions by June 1941. There were other agencies also competing for the army’s increasingly scant resources of manpower and equipment. Goering’s Luftwaffe expanded its ground combat capabilities after the fall of France. On 3 December 1940 Hitler directed the creation of a parachute corps using the army’s 22nd Infantry Division as an air-land nucleus. Two months before, 4,500 army paratroopers and 20,000 rifles and pistols were absorbed. British bombing raids over the Reich required the army – on Hitler’s insistence – to turn over 15,000 Flak guns and 1,225 officers in the summer of 1940 to Luftwaffe air defence. On 8 November 1940 Hitler further ordered the expansion of the Waffen SS from two and a half to four divisions, and the SS Regiment ‘Leibstandarte’ to a full brigade. This prompted army officers to complain the SS were a ‘wandering arsenal’ led by men who had never seen combat, and that these weapons would be better served by ‘Third Wave’ conscripted divisions of World War 1 veterans. At the end of August 1940, Hitler ordered the army to release 300,000 metal workers back into the armaments industry. To expand to 180 divisions, the army drafted the age groups of 1919, 1920 and 1921. They began basic training in August 1940. They would finish one month prior to the Russian campaign.
⁽⁸⁾

Hitler’s instructions to double the number of motorised divisions was virtually unachievable. In May 1940 there were 10 Panzer divisions; this was expanded to 19 by June 1941. Tank numbers in individual divisions were halved to achieve the reorganisation. Obsolete PzKpfwIs and PzKpfwIIs were recalled because German tank production was still very low, at under 200 per month. Instead of fielding a Panzer division with 324 tanks as in 1939, the 1941 divisions invading Russia were to number about 196 tanks (in reality, due to serviceability, between 150 and 200). Creating 10 new tank divisions required the army to remove more lorries from the infantry; even so, one Panzer division was solely equipped with captured French vehicles. The German infantry would therefore march even more short-handed than before. Some divisions were totally reliant upon captured Czech and French artillery and anti-tank guns. There was no standard organisation for the swiftly raised infantry motorised divisions. These were basically rifle regiments (equivalent to modern weak brigades) with two battalions of lorried infantry and one of motorcycles; sometimes there was a mechanised battalion riding in armoured half-tracks.

Rapid expansion diluted quality. The German infantry of 1941 differed little from that of 1939. Practically none of the reforms suggested at the end of the French campaign were carried out. The Panzer divisions were more numerous, had more medium tanks – PzKpfwIIIs and IVs – but were weaker than their 1939 counterparts. Delivery of new vehicles within the reorganisation phase continued right up to the very last moment, some even to the assembly areas preceding ‘Barbarossa’. Leutnant Koch-Erbach, a company commander in the 4th Panzer Division, took delivery of his 37mm anti-tank guns mounted in half-tracks ‘shortly before 22 June 1941’.
⁽⁹⁾
The SS Panzergrenadier Brigade ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ started the campaign with 2,325 vehicles of which 240 were captured. Over 1,200 vehicles were to break down quickly due to lack of replacement parts.
⁽¹⁰⁾
The 20th Panzer Division had been obliged to occupy its assembly area in East Prussia in May 1941 short of many vehicles. Replacements arrived, according to the official unit history, ‘in parts, and initially only a few days before the start of the attack’.
⁽¹¹⁾
The logistic system was straining to cope, and the campaign had yet to start.

The 98th Infantry Division had been demobilised after the French campaign and then reconstituted in February 1941. Training began in earnest, ‘but “what is to happen to the 98th Division?” was a question that occupied everyone’. Moreover it appeared that the ‘industrial holidaymakers’ – those temporarily demobilised – had forgotten much ‘during the interim period’.
⁽¹²⁾
It demonstrated that German soldiers were ordinary men. As in all armies, soldiers were subject to and (reluctant, even if they wished, to resist) peer pressure. Conscript soldiers were positively discouraged from being independently minded. The system operated as teams to be effective
en masse.
This was a factor of training. The soldiers for their part did not want ‘to stick their neck out’. So nobody was going to debate the Commissar Order. The German soldier believed in his superior officers and the Führer, who had already demonstrated economic, diplomatic and, more recently, military prowess. If they were to invade the Soviet Union, well, the Führer knew his business and had it in hand. Soldiers were comfortable with
Befehl und Gehorsam
(law and order) and the ‘soldierly’ concept of duty. His officers were confident that, in spite of the difficulties confronting him, the individual German soldier was innately superior to his Soviet counterpart.

The 120 German divisions poised on the border of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 represented potentially the most lethal striking force yet seen in the history of warfare. They were in terms of technology and tactical proficiency far superior to their opponents and were to attack with the benefit of surprise and timely concentration of force. In ideological commitment they possessed a fervour and enthusiasm that would never again be matched by succeeding German armies. The cream of German youth was going to battle: 75% of the Wehrmacht’s total field army and 61% of its air force. Oberleutnant Dr Maull, the battalion adjutant of Infantry Regiment 289, was awarded the Iron Cross just before he departed for Russia. He wrote to his wife:

‘I have always striven through personal example to achieve the ideal. Such standards have never been more necessary than in the army today. I am totally prepared, ready above all else, to face what is coming!’
⁽¹³⁾

What was to transpire was to alter the map of Europe for decades to come.

‘There was no information…’

Within the Soviet hinterland the Russian Army was on the move. Lines and lines of tanks stood motionless on railway flatcars waiting in open fields near the frontier area. Some 4,216 wagons loaded with ammunition were threading their way towards the frontier network; 1,320 trainloads of lorries puffed and hissed their way towards border objectives. The LXIIIrd Rifle Corps, 200th and 48th Rifle Divisions were still in transit as were many other units in the middle of June. A huge consignment of maps alone filled 200 railway wagons in the Baltic, Western and Kiev Special Military Districts. Possibly the largest-scale train movement in Russian history was under way, much of it unnoticed by German reconnaissance, all of it moving westward.
⁽¹⁾

About 170 Soviet divisions were within operational distance of western Russia, from a total of perhaps 230–240 divisions under arms, but not all at war strength.
⁽²⁾
These belonged to the First Strategic Echelon; 56 were already deployed directly on the frontier and 114 further back. Ten Soviet armies were located within four Military Districts running north to south (see p.55). To the north was the Baltic Special Military District with the 26 divisions of Eighth and Eleventh Armies, which included six armoured divisions. Next in line south were Third, Tenth and Fourth Armies, belonging to the Western Special Military District. It had 36 divisions, of which 10 were armoured. The Kiev Special Military District with Fifth, Sixth, Twenty-sixth and Twelfth Armies had 56 divisions, of which 26 were armoured. To the south was the Odessa Special Military District with a further 14 divisions including two armoured. Behind these forces to the north lay the Leningrad Military District with the Fourteenth, Seventh and Twenty-third Armies. They faced a proposed new German front of 1,800km stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

On Friday, 13 June 1941, Moscow radio broadcast an unusual and incongruous TASS report which was printed in the Communist Party organ the next day. It stated:

‘The rumours of Germany’s intentions to tear up the [
Russo-German Non-Aggression
] pact and to undertake an attack on the USSR are without any foundation [
and are
] clumsy propaganda by forces hostile to the USSR and Germany and interested in an extension of the war.’
⁽³⁾

On the day this communiqué was issued, 183 Soviet divisions were in transit. Between 12 and 15 June orders were given to the western military districts to move all divisions stationed within their interiors closer to the state frontier. The entire First Strategic Echelon of 114 divisions began to concentrate directly in the border belt; an additional 69 divisions belonging to the Second Strategic Echelon began preparations and movement in secrecy and under cover towards the western frontier. Maj-Gen N. I. Biryukov, the commander of the 186th Rifle Division stationed in the Ural Military District, recalled:

‘On 13 June 1941 we received a directive of special importance from District Staff according to which the division must move to “a new camp”. The address of the new quarters was not communicated even to me, the division commander. Only when passing through Moscow did I learn that our division was to be concentrated in woods to the west of Idritsa.’
⁽⁴⁾

All the divisions of the Ural Military District received similar orders. The first elements of the 112th Rifle Division began moving by rail. Then the 98th, 153rd and 186th Divisions started to move. All troop movements were conducted in secret. Similar redeployments simultaneously took place within all the internal military districts of the Soviet Union, inside the Kharkov, North Caucasian, Orel, Volga, Siberian and Archangel Military Districts. A total of eight complete armies was thereby formed.
⁽⁵⁾
Five immediately and secretly moved to the Ukraine and Belorussia. The operation took up the entire spare capacity of the national rail system to achieve it and even this was insufficient for a concurrent simultaneous move of all armies. Soon some 860,000 reservists were crammed inside railway wagons on the move. Colonel I. Kh. Bagramyan, the head of the Kiev Military District operational department, recalled the frantic activity required to take the XXIst Rifle Corps under command. Its one mountain and four rifle divisions numbered 48,000 men. They undertook a gruelling 16,000km rail journey from the Far East. ‘We had to provide quarters for almost a whole army in a short time,’ he said. ‘At the end of May echelon after echelon started to arrive.’ Resources were stretched to the uppermost.

The whole of the First Strategic Echelon of the Soviet Army was being secretly reinforced. Activity on the frontier zone was not concerned solely with digesting the arrival of these large reinforcing formations; much regrouping along frontier districts also took place. Under the guise of changing summer camps, units drew closer to the frontier. The 78th Rifle Division in the Kiev Special Military District ‘on the pretext of training exercises’ according to the district official history ‘was moved out to the state frontier’. Colonel Bagramyan recalls the instruction to move all five of his district’s rifle corps to the border on 15 June, stating ‘they took with them everything necessary for active operations.’ In the Odessa District, Maj-Gen M. V. Zakharov, the Ninth Army Chief of Staff, oversaw the movement of the 30th and 74th Rifle Divisions on the same day. They ‘assembled in woods to the east of Bel’tsy under the pretext of training exercises’.
⁽⁶⁾

There is some controversy over possible Soviet offensive intentions in the summer of 1941. One view, based upon the massive rail deployment of troops under way, totally absorbing the rail network and to the possible detriment of the harvest, was that Stalin foresaw a full concentration of Soviet troops on the frontier by 10 July. Prior to the Russo-German Non-Aggression Pact, only divisions and corps had existed in Soviet frontier districts. Between August 1939 when it was signed and April 1941, the number of armies on the Soviet western border increased from none to 11. Three more arrived during May together with five airborne corps. Stalin could have assembled 23 armies and more than 20 independent corps if Hitler had not invaded on 22 June.
⁽⁷⁾

Whatever the outcome of the debate, what is clear is that the Soviet build-up of forces on the western frontier by June 1941 was following a distinct and planned development. Third Soviet Army in the Grodno region, following reinforcement by the XXIst Soviet Rifle Corps, had an army boundary only 80km wide, with seven rifle divisions with an average divisional frontage of only 6.6km, when 10km might be considered normal. Apart from being the strongest unit compared to its sister formations along the western border, it had, unusually, a self-sufficient independent tank brigade in addition to its mechanised corps.

This army was clearly configured in an offensive stance. In essence Third, Tenth and Fourth Soviet Armies, numbering 36 divisions with 10 armoured, did present a possible offensive threat to East Prussia. Tenth Army’s air force units were located near the border, while all the logistic bases and camps of the entire Western Special Military District were located well forward. Ten million litres of petrol were cached forward in Brest-Litovsk alone,
⁽⁸⁾
directly on the new German/Russian demarcation line.

Part of this apparent Soviet offensive stance is explainable by the practicalities and difficulties of deploying Soviet forces from the interior to the west, compared to the German build-up, capable of more rapid achievement because of the denser road and rail network on their side of the border. Soviet military doctrine from the 1930s considered that future conflict would involve armies numbering millions of men. Offensives need not necessarily await the complete mobilisation of these millions. There should be troops on the frontier, able to enter enemy territory on the first day of war. These would disrupt enemy mobilisations while covering their own. Marshal of the Soviet Union M. W. Tukhachevski, instrumental in formulating this doctrine before his execution during the Stalinist purges, advocated ‘invasion armies’ stationed near the frontier. These forces should cross the border immediately following mobilisation. Mechanised formations ought to be deployed within 50–60km of the belt to enable this. Factors such as these were influencing the form-up and deployment of the First Strategic Echelon near the border, well under way by June 1941.