Nothing further happened. Karbuk returned home and went to sleep. Meanwhile, to the north in the Third Army area there was a sudden and wild outbreak of shooting in the darkness. Tension, which had already been high in this forested border region, now manifested itself in gunfire, as German ‘Brandenburger’ soldiers from ZbV 800 dressed in Russian uniforms clashed with Soviet outposts they were attempting to infiltrate.(8)
Colonel Nikolai Yeryomin, a staff officer in the 41st Rifle Division, was awoken at 02.00 hours on Sunday, 22 June. He was concerned as he hurried from his small house in the camp. ‘Ever since I had been stationed here, near Lvov,’ he declared, ‘this was the first time the frontier guards had called me out at night.’ The summons appeared serious. Picking up the telephone, he heard a worried voice:
‘Comrade Colonel, this is the commandant of the Lyubycha-Krulevkaya sector speaking. All along the state boundary the posts of my sector are reporting unusual behaviour by the Germans. Troops and armour movement can be heard on their side. Our listening posts have discovered that infantry has been massing since dusk. We’ve never had such a situation and I decided to report to you. Will there be any instructions?’(9)
At the same time telephone lines between the staff of the Fourth Army and the Western Special Military District, and to some divisions, were reported cut. Despatch riders were sent out until contact was re-established at 03.30 hours.(10)
Ninety minutes before, the General Staff of the Red Army released Directive Number 1, which raised the defence posture of the western military districts. It tersely announced:
‘During 22. and 23.6.1941 a surprise attack by the Germans on the fronts of the Leningrad Military District, the Baltic, Western, Kiev and Odessa Special Military Districts is possible. Attack could be preceded by provocative actions.’
Troops were instructed not to react to provocations, which would enormously complicate the issue’. Nevertheless, all the districts were placed on the highest alert ‘in order to meet an eventual surprise attack from the Germans or their Allies’. Marshal Timoshenko, the People’s Commissar for Defence, the head of the Red Army, signed the order. During the night gun positions on the border were ordered to be camouflaged, and aircraft dispersed and also hidden before dawn. Troops were to occupy battle positions, disperse and camouflage themselves. Air defences were alerted in border areas, but not allowed to mobilise additional conscript soldiers. ‘Black-out’ measures were introduced at key objectives of military importance and in the cities. Timoshenko ended by stating: ‘no further measures are to be taken without special directives.’
The message was telegraphed throughout the night. It reached the Kiev Special Military District at 02.30 hours on 22 June. The commander of the Western Military District received a copy at about 03.30 hours. Relayed onward to army staffs, Fourth Army HQ in Kobrin near Brest was contacted at 04.15 hours.(11)
H-hour for the German assault was set for 03.15 hours.
Colonel Nikolai Yeryomin with the 41st Rifle Division near Lvov heard:
‘The hollow rumble of many aircraft engines, swelling and then dying down again, vibrated over the camp, approaching from the west and sinking in the east. There was no doubt that they were warplanes, and heavy bombers at that…’
Disturbed, Yeryomin sought to pass on this worrying information. ‘For some inexplicable reason,’ he related, ‘I could not contact headquarters.’ A pale dawn was already appearing in the east; Sunday, 22 June, the longest day of the year. Suddenly the teletape began to tick. ‘I reported the flight of the aircraft and the behaviour of the Germans on the frontier,’ he said. Back came the disappointing if not entirely unexpected response: ‘Do not fire. Carry on with your observations. I shall at once report to the Chief of Staff. Wait for instructions.’
What was he to do now? The field telephone rang. It was a call from the frontier sector. An urgent metallic voice announced:
‘Comrade Colonel, the Germans have opened fire along the entire front of my sector. They have crossed the state boundary. My posts are in action.’
It was four o’clock in the morning. Yeryomin recalled: ‘breaking the stillness, the reverberations of the first salvoes of gunfire reached us from the frontier’.(12)
Chapter 4
H-Hour 03.15
‘The East is aflame.’
Infantry medical officer, 22 June 1941
The River Bug… Brest-Litovsk
Gerd Habedanck, a war correspondent, moved forward with the 45th Infantry Division. Its objective was the Russian fortress at Brest-Litovsk.
‘We came from Warsaw through heat, dust and jam-packed roads to the Bug. We passed tracts of woodland bristling with vehicle parks, artillery batteries in villages and radio relay stations and headquarters staffs under tall fir trees.
‘Silently, absolutely silently we crept up to the edge of the Bug. Sand had been strewn across the roads so that our hobnailed boots made no sound. Assault sections already grouped moved along the road edges in mute rows. Outlines of rubber dinghies were discernible as they shuttled along, raised up against the light of the northern sky.’
Joining the battalion headquarters in an old bunker, part of the original western defences alongside the Bug, Habedanck looked across the river where, 100m away, Russians sat in similar casemates. What might they be thinking? ‘One could clearly hear them speaking on the other side,’ he observed, while ‘further within [the fortress] a loudspeaker sounded’.(1)
Rudolf Gschöpf, the division chaplain, had held a final service at 20.00 hours. He now watched the doctor and medical orderlies dig shelter-trenches alongside the forward dressing station of the IIIrd Battalion of Regiment 135. They presently retired to a small house nearby and chatted together, welcoming any distraction from the rising tension. At 02.00 hours they glanced with surprise at the passage of a Russian goods train, ‘certainly with goods as part of the German–Russian economic agreement of 1939’, puffing up clouds of steam into the night air as it crossed the four-span railway bridge into Germany. This incongruous reminder of peacetime was entirely at variance with the bustling activity around the heavy mortar that was being loaded in preparation outside their house.
‘On the other side in the citadel, inside the houses, the barrack objectives and casemates, all appeared to be sleeping unconcerned. The waters of the Bug lapped peacefully while a tepid night lay over territory where, in a few blinks of an eye, death and destruction would break out.’(2)
General Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 had been ordered to cross the Bug on either side of the Russian fortress at Brest-Litovsk. Because the border demarcation line between Germany and the Soviet Russian zone in Poland was the River Bug, the fortress defences (which had already been conquered by the Wehrmacht during the 1939 Polish campaign, and subsequently withdrawn) were split. The citadel on the outskirts of the city was occupied by the Russians, while the old outer forts on the west side were in German hands.
Before the invasion of Russia Guderian was aware that ‘the supreme German command did not hold uniform views about the employment of armoured forces’. Panzer generals wanted their armoured divisions at the forefront of the attack right from the start, to avoid the confusion of mixing tanks with slower foot soldiers. Other arms of the service were of the opinion that initial assaults should be spearheaded by infantry divisions after heavy artillery preparation. Tanks would then exploit after the infantry had broken through to a specified point. The fortifications of Brest-Litovsk might be out of date, but Guderian’s view was that ‘the combination of the Bug, the Muchaviec [rivers] and water-filled ditches made them immune to tank attacks’. Therefore an infantry corps was placed under command, one division of which, the 45th, was to assault Brest directly. Guderian concluded that:
‘Tanks could only have captured the citadel by means of a surprise attack, as had been attempted in 1939. The requisite conditions for such an attack did not exist in 1941.’(3)
The fortress of Brest had been built in 1842. It consisted o
f four partly natural and partly artificial islands situated at the confluence of the Bug and Muchaviec rivers. In the centre was the Citadel Island, surrounded concentrically by three others: the western Terespol Island (referred to subsequently in the text as West Island), the northern Kobrin Island (North Island) and the Cholmsker Island to the south (South Island). The central ‘keep’ or citadel was ringed by a massive two-storey wall, easily defensible with 500 casemate and cellar positions, which doubled as troop accommodation. These positions were also connected by underground passages. Inside the walls were numerous other buildings including the ‘white house’ officers’ mess and the garrison church. The thick outer walls provided good protection against modern artillery. The West, North and South islands provided an outer defence belt, which supplemented the citadel, with 10m high earthwalls. These were studded with bastions or old casement forts complete with towers, such as the Nordfort (North Fort) and Ostfort (East Fort) on the North Island. In all, some 6km of defence works ringed the fortress.
The objective, however, possessed an Achilles’ heel. It had been built originally for all-round defence. Following the 1939 Polish campaign, the fortress network was split by the demarcation line separating the German and Soviet zones of occupation. The most relevant section, the forward defences facing west, were already in German hands. Moreover, only three gates allowed access to the 6km defensive ring in keeping with the original defence concept, adding to the reaction time required to man the fortress in the event of an alert. Maj-Gen Sandalov, the Soviet Fourth Army Chief of Staff, calculated this might take three hours, during which time the defenders would be vulnerable to considerable casualties. Only 2km of the ring faced westwards, now the main direction of threat, with room for only one infantry battalion and a half battalion of border troops. It is likely that on the night of 21 June there were about seven battalions from the 6th and 42nd Soviet Rifle Divisions in Brest in addition to regimental training units, special units and some divisional artillery regiments.(4)
The fortress at Brest-Litovsk was built across four islands at the confluence of the Muchaviec and Bug rivers. Its all-round defence design was adversely affected by the haphazard establishment of the Russo-German demarcation line in 1939. Nine German infantry battalions conducted the break-in assault across the islands either side of the citadel and a further 18 advanced on their flanks. The northern prong with Regiment 135 attacked through West Island, and a battalion was soon cut off in the citadel while a further assault broke into North Island. Regiment 130 attacked Southern Island and bypassed the fortress further south of the River Muchaviec. Nine assault boats entered the river to the west to capture the five bridging points in successive coup de main operations. It was a microcosm of the coming experience on the eastern front. An operation anticipated to last one day did not cease until German forces had formed the Smolensk pocket, nearly half way to Moscow, almost six weeks later.
They would be directly faced by nine German infantry battalions with a further 18 operating on their flanks. XIIth Infantry Corps, under the command of Generalfeldmarschall Kluge’s Fourth Army, had been tasked to surround the fortress and clear a path for the vanguards of Panzergruppe 2. The inner flanks of the two Panzer corps forming it (XXIVth and XLVIth) were to be protected as they passed either side of the fortress. XIIth Infantry Corps intended to attack with three infantry divisions forward: 45th Infantry Division against Brest-Litovsk in the centre, with 31st Division left (north) and 34th Division right (south).
The 45th Division had three regiments (130th, 133rd and 135th) of three infantry battalions each. Its primary tasks were to capture the citadel, the four-span railway bridge over the Bug, five other bridges crossing the Muchaviec south of the town of Brest and secure the high ground 7–8km east of the town. This would open up the Panzer Rollbahn (main route) identified for Panzergruppe 2 to march eastwards towards Kobrin.
The division attack plan was based on two primary attack axes: north and south. The northern prong of a pitch-fork thrust was to attack across the West Island to the citadel, then through the North Island to the eastern side of the town of Brest. Two battalions from Regiment 135, supported by two armoured train platoons, were earmarked for this task. Meanwhile, the southern prong would assault south of the River Muchaviec across the South Island with Regiment 130. The five Muchaviec bridges were to be taken by an assault-pioneer coup de main force mounted within nine assault boats. One battalion was held as divisional reserve and the three battalions of Regiment 133 were to be held back as corps reserve. Nine light and three heavy batteries of the division’s artillery, supported by a group of nine heavy mortars and two 60cm siege guns would provide a pulverising five-minute preparatory surprise bombardment, before switching to nominated targets. The two flanking infantry divisions, the 34th and 31st, would also contribute to the initial barrage. A specialised, and until now secret, unit Nebel Regiment 4 (ZbV Nr 4) was to support the attack with newly developed Nebelwerfer multiple-barrelled rocket launchers. ‘Hardly a mouse would survive the opening bombardment,’ was the assurance given to the assault groups.(5)
There was no lack of confidence. Leutnant Michael Wechtler with the reserve regiment assessed that the operation would probably be ‘easy’, noting that the first day’s objective was set 5km east of Brest. Having viewed the fortifications from a distance, the corporate view was that it appeared ‘more like normal barracks accommodation than a fortress’.(6) This optimism is reflected in the fact that only two of nine battalions, or 22% of the infantry force, would be in direct contact with the enemy to deliver the first blow. Three others would, meanwhile, be deploying while four waited in reserve.
The 45th Infantry Division was a veteran formation of the French campaign, where it had lost 462 dead. Like many other infantry divisions massing on the frontier, the soldiers were optimistic and well rested. While billeted in Warsaw prior to the campaign, soldiers were given the opportunity to sightsee. Many took snapshots from open horse-drawn tourist carriages. Training had been pleasant. Crossing water obstacles had been the theme. Expertise in negotiating high riverbanks in assault formation and attacking old fortifications was practised. Conditions had been idyllic. Bathing trunks were worn during off-duty moments. Watermanship often deteriorated into high-spirited splashing and clowning with races between rubber dinghies. Inventive one-man rafts were pelted with rocks, soaking the grinning occupants. There was only mild conjecture over the purpose of the training.
As they left Warsaw for the 180km approach march to the assembly area, the band of Regiment 133 played. An initial downpour of rain soaked everyone, but spirits rose again when it was replaced by a continuation of the heat wave. The march was demanding but carefully managed in 40km stages, with bathing opportunities in the lakes en route. It ended 27km from the border, where the regiments were billeted in cosy village quarters. The last of the captured French champagne was consumed with gusto and final letters written home. Scheinwerfer (searchlight) units were formed by squads of men who had elected to shave their heads prior to the coming campaign (they were nicknamed ‘shiny-heads’). Final ‘squad’ photographs were snapped inside the heavily camouflaged wood bivouacs. Few of these groups, it was realised, would ever muster complete again. Then in the early hours of 22 June the soldiers moved up to their final assault positions.(7)
Shortly before 03.00 hours, Chaplain Rudolf Gschöpf stepped out of the small house in which he had been waiting. ‘The minutes,’ he remembered, ‘stretched out interminably the nearer the time to H-hour approached.’ Dawn was beginning to emerge. Only the routine noises of a peaceful night were apparent. Looking down to the river he saw:
‘There was not the slightest evidence of the presence of the assault groups and companies directly on the Bug. They were well camouflaged. One could well imagine the taut nerves that were reigning among men, who, in a few minutes, would be face to face with an unknown enemy!’(8)
Gerd Habedanck was abruptly awoken by the metallic whir of an alarm clock
inside his vehicle. ‘The great day has begun,’ he wrote in his diary. A silvery light was already permeating the eastern sky as he made his way to the battalion headquarters bunker down by the river. It was crowded inside:
‘A profusion of shoving, steel helmets, rifles, the constant shrill sound of telephones, and the quiet voice of the Oberstleutnant drowning everything else out. “Gentlemen, it is 03.14 hours, still one minute to go.”’
Habedanck glanced through the bunker vision slit again. Nothing to see yet. The battalion commander’s comment, voiced yesterday on the opening bombardment, still preyed on his mind.
‘It will be like nothing you have experienced before.’(9)
Air strike… First light
The pilot of the Heinkel He111 bomber kept the control column pulled backwards as the aircraft continued climbing. He glanced at the altimeter: it wavered, held, then continued to move clockwise past 4,500–5,000m. The crew were signalled to don oxygen masks. At 03.00 hours the aircraft droned across the Soviet frontier at maximum height. Below was a sparsely inhabited region of marsh and forest. Even had the rising throb been discernible from the ground, nobody would have linked it to an impending start of hostilities.
War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Page 8
