by John Keegan
In reality, Stalin was as surprised as any subordinate by the unleasing of Barbarossa, and persisted in refusing to face facts even as the German attack units moved to their start-lines. When Timoshenko, Defence Commissar, and Zhukov, chief of staff, arrived at the Kremlin on the evening of Saturday, 21 June, with news that the Germans had cut the telephone lines into Russia and that a German deserter had brought news that the offensive would begin at four o’clock next morning, Stalin replied that it was too early to issue a warning order. He mused, ‘Perhaps the question can still be settled peacefully. . . . The troops of the border districts must not be incited by any provocation, in order to avoid complications.’ Implacably Zhukov confronted him with a draft directive for preparatory measures and, after insisting on some minor amendments, Stalin signed.
However, the directive did not order mobilisation nor fully alert the border troops to the danger in which they stood. In any case, it reached them too late. Even as the Leningrad, Baltic, Western, Kiev and Odessa military districts began to man their defences, the German offensive was upon them. Mass air raids and a gigantic artillery bombardment fell upon airfields and fortified zones. Behind this wall of fire the German army in the east, the Ostheer, moved to the attack.
Its three masses – Army Groups North (Leeb), Centre (Bock) and South (Rundstedt) – were each aligned on one of the historic invasion routes which led into European Russia, towards Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev respectively. The first followed the coast of the Baltic, through territory Germanised by Teutonic knights and Hanseatic traders for 500 years; from it came many of the families which had officered the Prussian and German armies throughout their history. Manstein and Guderian, who were to win Hitler his greatest eastern victories, descended from landowners of those parts; Stauffenberg, who was to fail by the narrowest of margins to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944, was married to a woman born at Kovno on the river Neman. The second route was that followed by Napoleon in 1812, running through the ancient, formerly Polish cities of Minsk and Smolensk. The third, demarcated by the crest of the Carpathian mountains in the south and separated from the northern and central routes by the huge freshwater swamp of the Pripet, ‘the Wehrmacht hole’, as the Germany army would call it, since no military operations were possible within the 40,000 square miles it covered, led into the black-earth country of the Ukraine, Russia’s wheatbowl and the gateway to the great industrial, mining and oil-bearing regions of the Donetz, the Volga and the Caucasus.
The Pripet Marshes apart, no natural barrier stood between the Germans and their objectives on any of these routes. They are crossed, it is true, by several of Russia’s enormous rivers, notably the Dvina and the Dnieper, but rivers, as the French had discovered in their much more defensible country the previous year, offer little obstacle to aggressively led armies, less still if the armies are mechanised and supported by airpower. In the vast spaces of the steppe, the Russian rivers were mere interruptions in country ideally suited for armoured advance. The sparsity of the road and rail network, and the spring and autumn floods which liquefy Russia’s dirt roads, were better protection. However, the Germans had deliberately chosen high, dry summer for their onslaught, while the Russians, by crowding the bulk of their standing army into the narrow frontier zone behind the thin and incomplete belt of fortifications called the Stalin Line, liberated the Wehrmacht from dependence on a road network to make rapid ground into their rear. The shallowest of penetrations would suffice to put the Russian ‘fronts’ (as their army groups were designated) between the Panzers’ jaws; thereafter they could be devoured almost at leisure by the columns of marching infantry following in the tanks’ wake.
Strongest in armour and committed to the largest encirclement mission was Army Group Centre, whose spearheads were Panzer Groups 3 and 2, commanded by Hoth and Guderian. Its orders were to encircle as much of the Russian army in White Russia as possible, hack or hug it to death, and then press forward to secure the ‘land bridge’ between the headwaters of the Dvina and Dnieper rivers by which the Minsk-Smolensk road passes to Moscow. Its attack was prepared by the aircraft of Second Air Fleet, which on the morning of 22 June destroyed 528 Russian aircraft on the ground and 210 in the air; by the end of the day, across the whole front of the attack, the Red Air Force had lost 1200 machines, a quarter of its front-line strength.
Hoth’s and Guderian’s Panzers were simultaneously pressing through the Stalin Line. Brest-Litovsk, the frontier fortress city in which the Germans had dictated peace twenty-three years earlier, was isolated on the first day; V. S. Popov, commanding the XXVIII Rifle Corps, described its fortress as ‘literally covered all over with uninterrupted artillery and mortar fire’. For a week it was to be defended heroically by the survivors of its garrison; but their sacrifice was irrelevant. By the time it fell it had been by-passed and the German spearheads were ranging far to its east.
Bock, commanding Army Group Centre, was nevertheless misled by the tenacity of the Brest-Litovsk defenders to believe that they were covering the withdrawal of neighbouring Russian defenders towards the Dnieper-Dvina ‘land bridge’. On 24 June he accordingly put it to OKH that his Panzer groups should abandon their mission to close their first set of pincers around Minsk, 200 miles from their start-line, and proceed immediately towards Smolensk. Halder, not yet accustomed to the headless-chicken behaviour of Soviet troops at this – for them – almost leaderless stage of the war, and fearing that Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 might press too deep and get cut off, refused. Hoth therefore turned inwards on 24 June. As he did so, Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 began to feel the pressure of Russian troops deflected southwards by Hoth against his flank, apparently seeking to escape into the Pripet Marshes where, by Halder’s estimation, they might form a ‘stay behind’ army and menace the German follow-up forces as they advanced to consolidate the ground the Panzers had won. Accordingly he ordered Fourth and Ninth Armies to destroy these fugitives trapped between Hoth’s and Guderian’s extending pincers as fast as their infantry formations could be brought forward.
By 25 June, therefore, Army Group Centre was fighting no less than three encirclement battles: one, the smallest in scale, around Brest-Litovsk; one in the salient of Bialystok, the most senseless of the frontier meanders in which Stalin had marooned the Red Army; and one at Volkovysk. Twelve divisions were surrounded at Bialystok and Volkovysk; by 29 June, when Army Group Centre’s infantry had released the Panzer groups for a further advance, a fourth encirclement battle – threatening the destruction of another fifteen divisions – was in progress around Minsk.
These battles, moreover, were being fought with a brutality and ruthlessness not yet displayed in the Second World War, perhaps not seen in Europe since the struggle between Christians and Muslims in the Ottoman wars of the sixteenth century. Not only did many encircled Russians, unlike all but the most intransigent Frenchmen, fight with the tenacity of despair; they were attacked by the Germans with a pitiless ferocity that no Norwegian, Belgian, Greek or even Yugoslav soldier had yet had to face. Hitler had set the tone of the campaign. In an address to his generals on 30 March 1941 he had warned:
The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion; the struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of making war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but . . . I insist that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law . . . will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.
The Soviet Union had indicated on 20 August 1940 its desire to accede to the Hague Convention – which since 1907 had regulated the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants in war – but the
approach was tentative: after 22 June 1941, therefore, its soldiers were protected by none of the Hague or Geneva provisions which spared those of signatory powers from mistreatment. As a result, it was not only commissars who were subjected to ‘special treatment’; as Professor Omar Bartov has shown, the anti-Bolshevik indoctrination of the Wehrmacht’s members, many of whom in 1941 had grown up under Nazism, resulted in the arbitrary massacre of prisoners from the start of the campaign. The commander of XLVIII Panzer Corps, for example, was obliged to protest to his soldiers only three days after the campaign had begun that ‘senseless shootings of both prisoners and civilians have taken place. A Russian soldier who has been taken prisoner while wearing a uniform, and after he put up a brave fight, has the right to decent treatment.’ Five days later he was forced to circulate the corps again: ‘Still more shootings of prisoners and deserters have been observed, conducted in an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manner. This is murder.’ But his strictures were fruitless. So common did the mistreatment of Russian prisoners become at the very outset of Barbarossa that by early 1942 another German formation, the 12th Infantry Division, was warning its soldiers that Red Army men were ‘more afraid of falling prisoner than of a possible death on the battlefield. . . . Since November last year . . . only a few deserters have come over to us and during battles fierce resistance was put up and only a few prisoners taken.’ This was not surprising; word of how the enemy treats prisoners circulates with lightning rapidity inside any army. It is news equalled in importance only by that of the survival rate for wounded in the army’s own hospitals – but with this difference: poor prognosis for the wounded discourages soldiers from fighting hard, while bad treatment of captives has the opposite effect. During the course of the Second World War, the Wehrmacht took 5,700,000 Russians prisoner; of these 3,300,000 died in captivity, the majority in the first year of the campaign, victims above all of the lack of provision the Wehrmacht had made for feeding, housing and transporting such myriads. The result, succinctly summarised in a document circulated inside the Grossdeutschland Division in April 1943, was ‘a stiffening of the enemy’s resistance because every Red Army soldier fears German captivity’.
Systematic maltreatment was, however, a secret to which Germans alone were privy in June and July 1941. While their Russian opponents fought doggedly, they made little effort to beat a fighting retreat out of encirclement, in part because their commanders feared the consequences of ordering any withdrawal – their conditioned fear of Stalin would shortly be validated by the institution of summary executions for dereliction – in part because they lacked the means of escape. The German infantry divisions were themselves having great difficulty in catching up with the Panzer spearheads once they launched themselves into the blue; at this stage Barbarossa was following a pattern whereby armoured divisions lunged forward at fifty miles a day, pausing only to deal with resistance or take in supplies, while the plodding infantry laboured behind across the steppe at twenty miles a day or less. Between 22 June and 28 July, for example, the 12th Infantry Division marched 560 miles, an average of fifteen miles a day, all under broiling sun and the weight of 50 lb of equipment, ammunition and rations per man. This marathon greatly exceeded in distance the march on Paris made by von Kluck’s infantry in August 1914; it seems probable that the exhausted Landser were sustained in their agonising trek, which bloodied feet and wore shoulders raw, only by the knowledge that the Panzers were winning the battle ahead of them. The encircled soldiers of the Red Army had no such spur. Commanded by generals paralysed by fear of Stalin’s disfavour and the NKVD’s execution squads, denied any prospect of living to fight another day, they commonly hunkered down in the pockets the Panzers drew around them and awaited the end which would follow when their last rounds were expended.
By 9 July those in the Minsk pocket had capitulated to Army Group Centre, but its two armoured groups, now reorganised as the Fourth Panzer Army under the dynamic (and strongly Nazi) General Günther von Kluge, were already pressing far beyond Minsk to complete a fourth encirclement at Smolensk. This pocket, in which the Dnieper-Dvina ‘land bridge’ lay, contained by 17 July some twenty-five Russian divisions, centred on Vitebsk, Mogilev and Smolensk itself, the largest concentration of Russian numbers the Germans had yet corralled. Since Army Group Centre’s infantry formations on the Minsk-Smolensk axis lay anything up to 200 miles behind its Panzer spearheads at this date, Bock, who was determined to ‘clean up’ his front in the shortest possible space of time, was now obliged to commit his valuable Panzer and motorised (soon to be renamed ‘Panzergrenadier’) divisions to close combat. A cordon of tanks, half-tracks and dismounted truck-borne infantry, diverted from the Panzer drive down the Moscow road, was therefore strung round Smolensk between 17 and 25 July and drawn ever tighter around the trapped Russians until, on 5 August, all resistance came to an end.
By then, however, Bock had grasped that his difficulty in closing the ring was due not simply to the resistance of the Russians within but also to a determined effort from without to reinforce and resupply the trapped divisions. The Dnieper-Dvina gap, while it had remained open, had been used as a ‘land bridge’ in reverse, to carry troops and ammunition westward as fast as it could be sent by the high command. On 10 July the high command had been reorganised, as Stalin, recovering from the initial paralysis imposed by Blitzkrieg, recognised how inappropriate to war was the existing machinery. He had recently assumed the formal title of head of government; on 10 July he created the post of Supreme Commander, to which he had the Supreme Soviet appoint him on 7 August. The State Defence Committee (GKO), consisting of Stalin, Voroshilov, Beria, Molotov (Commissar for Foreign Affairs) and Malenkov (Stalin’s deputy in the party), had been set up on 30 June; directly subordinate to it was the Stavka (Operations Staff), which when reorganised on 10 July included Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov from the party and Timoshenko, Budenny, Shaposhnikov and Zhukov from the army. The General Staff, extended to oversee all branches of the armed forces, was subordinated to the Stavka on 8 August. By then Stalin occupied all the highest appointments in the Soviet state – Chairman of the GKO, Defence Commissar and Supreme Commander – and directly controlled all the rest. This self-elevation entailed risk. The odium of defeat now attached immediately to his person. However, so desperate was Russia’s situation, after less than two months of war, that Stalin must have accepted he could not survive the consequences of further disaster. Victory alone could save him.
The carrot and the stick
There was almost no shift or expedient at which Stalin would not grasp in this supreme crisis of the Soviet state to assure its survival – as well as his own. In September he decreed the creation of new units of ‘Guards’, quintessential symbols of the ancien régime; in 1917 Guards officers had had the skin stripped from their hands in revolutionary hatred of the white gloves they had traditionally worn. Now Stalin decreed that regiments, divisions, even armies which resisted the Germans most stoutly should add ‘Guards’ to their titles. New distinctions were meanwhile created for heroes and victors, named after the generals who had fought Napoleon: the Orders of Kutuzov and Suvorov. Old distinctions of rank were soon to be revived, including the ‘shoulder boards’ which had been torn from officers’ uniforms in 1917. Even the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, persecuted and vilified for two decades, was suddenly restored to esteem as the servant of ‘Mother Russia’, a matriarch resurrected by the autocrat who had violated her children without pity in the era of collectivisation and the purges.
But with the carrot went the stick. The ‘dual authority’ of the commissars was restored on 16 July; on 27 July an order sentencing nine senior officers to death was read out to all officers and men. The condemned included the signals officer of the Western Front and the commanders of the Third and Fourth Armies and of the 30th and 60th Rifle Divisions. Others were shot in secret, or simply committed suicide rather than face the executioners of the NKVD; its ‘Special Sections’ (how terrible a meanin
g did ‘special’ acquire in the Second World War – ‘special leader’, ‘special command’, ‘special treatment’, all spelt death to the defenceless and disfavoured) were deployed in the rear of the fighting units to shoot deserters and menace with machine-guns those who even thought of quitting their posts.
