The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  Not everything went entirely smoothly, however. One argument arose. At what hour should the German offensive begin? Von Brauchitsch, having just returned from talks with his field commanders, argued that the attack should coincide with sunrise, which on June 22 in East Prussia would be at 3:05 A.M. In accordance with von Brauchitsch’s view the decision was taken to start operations at 3 A.M. instead of 3:30 or possibly 4 A.M.

  The matter did not end there, however. Three A.M. on the Baltic shores of East Prussia would be virtually full daylight. Not so, farther south— there at 3 A.M. it would still be dark.

  The German attack forces had been divided into three groups: Army Group Nord, Army Group Center and Army Group Siid. The commanders of the Center and South wanted a later H-hour, 4 A.M. at the earliest. On June 20 the argument was still going on. Like so many military questions it was finally resolved by compromise. The jump-off was fixed for 3:30 A.M.

  The general objective of Operation Barbarossa, as outlined in Hitler’s draft of December 18, 1940, was to occupy Russia up to a line drawn from Archangel to the Volga, to crush it as a military power, and to turn Soviet territorial, agricultural and raw-materials resources to the use of the German war machine.

  The ultimate target was Moscow, but the plan did not call for direct frontal assault on the Soviet capital. Barbarossa provided that Moscow would be attacked only after the fall of Leningrad.

  Leningrad had a peculiar fascination for Hitler. In part this arose out of his view that the city was the mainspring and incubator of the ideology against which he was leading the holy Nazi crusade. Another source of his feeling was the ancient Teutonic mystique concerning the Baltic. For centuries the Germans had regarded the Baltic as their sea. Once they had controlled it through the militancy of the Teutonic knights and the cunning of the Hanseatic League. Hitler saw Leningrad not only as the birthplace of revolutionary Communism but as St. Petersburg, the fortress capital which Peter I built as the foundation for Russian power in the Baltic.

  Thus, in the original draft of Barbarossa, and in the variants of German military plans which would develop during the fateful summer of 1941, Leningrad and the Baltic became for Hitler an idée fixe, a preoccupation which never left him.

  Leningrad must be captured; the Baltic littoral must be secured; Soviet naval power must be destroyed; Kronstadt must be leveled. Then—and only then—would Hitler permit the assault on Moscow.

  Thus Hitler stipulated on the eve of the war that the first German objective was to drive straight across from East Prussia, liquidating the Soviet positions along the Baltic, eliminating the bases of the Baltic Fleet, annihilating the remnants of Soviet naval power and capturing Kronstadt and Leningrad.

  Then, having linked arms with the Finns, the Nazi armies would sweep down from the north while the main German forces closed in from the west. Moscow would fall in a gigantic pincers movement.

  The army group assigned to capture Leningrad, Army Group Nord, was commanded by Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, the senior German commander who had led the successful assault on the Maginot Line. Von Leeb, then sixty-five represented the Prussian old guard. He was no favorite of Hitler’s and, indeed, was cool to the Nazis. But he had proved an able commander in the takeover of the Sudetenland, and he won promotion to Field Marshal and the Knight’s Cross for his Maginot achievement.

  Von Leeb was given two armies, the Sixteenth commanded by Colonel General Ernst Busch, and the Eighteenth, commanded by Colonel General Georg von Kiichler. In addition, he had the 4th Armored Group led by General Hoppner and the First Air Fleet, commanded by Colonel General Keller. Von Leeb had at his disposal probably 29 divisions, including 3 armored and 3 motorized divisions, numbering more than 500,000 men.1 These forces mustered more than 12,000 heavy weapons, 1,500 tanks and about 1,070 planes. Von Leeb commanded roughly 30 percent of the forces which Hitler committed to Operation Barbarossa.

  According to the plan of operations, von Leeb was expected to capture Leningrad within four weeks, that is, by July 21.

  Von Leeb’s attack was designed as a double-pronged offensive. The Eighteenth Army had been concentrated close to the Baltic coast, with its main strength packed into a sixty-mile front from Memel, on the Baltic, to Tilsit on the south. It was to strike along the Tilsit-Riga highway, forcing the western Dvina at Plavinas, southeast of Riga, and then head dagger-straight northeast to Pskov and Ostrov on the distant southwest approaches to Leningrad. This thrust would cut communications between the Baltic states and the main Russian fronts.

  At the same time the Sixteenth Army, just to the south, was positioned east of Insterburg where von Leeb set up his headquarters. Its lines spread south almost to the Neman River. Its task was to smash east on a broad front to Kaunas, then drive northeast to the western Dvina and secure a crossing at Dvinsk (Daugavpils).

  Once these maneuvers were carried out, von Leeb would have flanked the whole center of the Russian defense system. He would be within striking distance of enveloping Leningrad from the south, the southwest and the west.

  The hammer of von Leeb’s drive was provided by the 4th Panzer Group* one of the finest armored forces in the Wehrmacht, commanded by Hopp-ner. The 4th Panzer was a powerful striking group. It was composed of two corps. One was the 56th, commanded by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, and including the 8th Panzer Division, the 3rd Motorized Division and the 290th Infantry. The second was the 41st Panzer Corps, commanded by General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, comprising the 1st and 6th Panzer divisions, the 36th Motorized Division and the 209th Infantry. The SS Death’s Head Division was to follow the Panzers in a mopping-up operation.

  The 4th Panzer Group was directly attachéd to Field Marshal von Leeb. It constituted an independent striking force, although its actions were carefully coordinated with the two field armies, the Sixteenth and Eighteenth.

  The task of von Manstein’s 56th Panzer Corps was to slash out of the flat pine forests north of Memel and east of Tilsit and head break-neck for Dvinsk, 175 miles to the northeast. His first objective was the Dubisa River bridges at Argala, fifty miles to the east. Von Manstein remembered the country well from fighting over it during World War I.

  At a few minutes after 3 A.M., June 22, his Panzers broke across the frontier with a rush which overwhelmed the weak resistance on the border. Soon the tanks encountered a pillbox system which slowed them a bit.

  Nevertheless, by 8 P.M. Sunday evening General Brandenberger, commanding the 8th Panzer Division, secured the two Dubisa River crossings at Argala, according to plan. The shattered Soviet forces had no time to destroy the bridges. Behind Brandenberger’s tanks the 3rd Nazi Motorized Division and the 290th Infantry had crossed the frontier by noon and were moving rapidly in the path cleared by the armor.

  The 41st Panzer Corps under General Reinhardt was to drive to the Dvina at Jekabpils (Jakobstadt), an old fortress town which was the midpoint between Riga and Dvinsk. The corps was held up temporarily by stiff resistance around Siauliai, but the Soviet units were quickly crushed.

  The armored forces moved with a rapidity which astonished even veteran commanders like von Manstein. By the twenty-fourth, his 56th Corps had seized the river crossings near Ukmerge (Wilkomierz), 105 miles inside Soviet territory and less than 80 miles away from Dvinsk on the main highway. By early morning of the twenty-sixth the Panzers were outside Dvinsk, and by 8 A.M. they had captured the two big Dvinsk bridges intact.

  The 3rd German Armored Corps under General Hoth, part of the Nazi Army Group Center, just to the south, drove to the Neman River so rapidly that it was able to capture the bridges at Alytus and Myarkin, forty miles south of Kaunas, before the Soviets could demolish them.

  This feat turned the Soviet Neman River line which protected Kaunas and made the fall of the city inevitable.

  Small wonder that Hitler’s Chief of Staff, Colonel General Haider, summing up the first hours of the Nazi attack, wrote in his operational diary:

  The offensive of our forces caught the ene
my with full tactical surprise. Evidence of the complete unexpectedness for the enemy of our attack is the fact that units were captured quite unawares in their barracks, aircraft stood on the airdromes secured by tarpaulins, and forward units, attacked by our troops, asked their command what they should do.

  We may anticipate even more influence from the element of suddenness on the further course of events as a result of the rapid movement of our advancing troops.

  In view of what had happened in the opening hours of the war Haider’s statement must be regarded as a marvel of understatement. The Nazi performance in the initial phase of the attack gave Hitler every reason for self-congratulation. He had taken his enemy once again completely by surprise. The pattern of the blitzkrieg, the lightning war, which first had been demonstrated in Poland, then refined in Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, was being spectacularly repeated. The optimistic forecasts that Russia would simply fall apart under a few weeks’ pounding by the Panzers and the Luftwaffe seemed on the verge of fulfillment. There was no one in the Führer’s headquarters in those exciting days who was likely to recall the ominous precedent of Napoleon’s Russian venture. Once again the genius of the Führer was being proclaimed by the triumph of his strategy and arms.

  * * *

  1 Some Soviet estimates make it 42 or 43 divisions, 725,000 men, 500 tanks, 12,000 weapons and 1,200 planes. Dmitri V. Pavlov, Leningrad v Blokade (Moscow, 1958), uses the figures 500,000 men and 29 divisions; the authoritative Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni (p. 37), says 29 divisions, including 3 tank, 3 motorized. A. V. Karasev, Leningradtsy v Gody Blokady (Moscow, 1959, p. 30), makes it 43 divisions, including 7 tank and 6 motorized, and 700,000 men. German sources give the figure of 28 divisions. (Orlov, op. eh., p. 40.)

  10 ♦ On the Distant Approaches

  THE GERMANS HAD SELECTED THE TILSIT-RIGA HIGHWAY as one of the main avenues of their thrust toward Leningrad. The highway crossed the Soviet-German border at a town called Taurage on the Ura River.

  Taurage held a central position in the shield which was being created by Colonel General F. I. Kuznetsov’s Special Baltic Military Command as a protection against any thrust toward Leningrad across the Baltic states. This command, set up after the absorption of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940, was supposed to hold back an attack hundreds of miles to the west of Leningrad.

  Despite its obvious importance, Taurage was garrisoned on the evening of June 21 only by special police border troops rather than by regular Red Army units. Some time during the evening a border patrol intercepted a letter which said the Germans planned to attack either Saturday night or Sunday morning. At about 2 A.M. June 22 Lieutenant Colonel Golovkin of the border force ordered his men to battle stations. They could plainly hear the noise of heavy machines, obviously tanks, across the river. It was a cool night and quiet except for the clank of heavy equipment on the German side where no lights were showing.

  At 4 A.M. came a roar like thunder. A shell smashed into the command post at Taurage, and a second knocked out the switchboard. Over a field telephone came a cry from a border sentry: “Osoka calling. Osoka calling. Germans have crossed the frontier. This is Osoka. It’s war. I see tanks/Many tanks.”

  The border guards blew up the bridge across the Ura but did not have the strength to offer much opposition. In the commandant’s office they were busy burning secret papers and getting the money out of the office safe. At about 2 P.M. the frontier guards managed to make their way to Skaudvile, about seven miles east of Taurage. Low-flying Nazi planes strafed them, and they fired back with pistols and machine guns. They had no antiaircraft weapons.

  Not until 4 P.M. did they get their first communication from the regular Red Army Command. It was a message from 125th Division headquarters, ordering them to set up roadblocks, to liquidate the Nazi “intruders,” to hold up disorganized units and soldiers and halt the spread of panic. The description of the Germans as “intruders” suggested that even twelve hours after the war had started the 125th Division commander was not sure Russia really was at war.

  The border guards did their best with the “intruders,” but “it wasn’t easy,” one survivor recalled.

  The weight of the Nazi attack was so heavy that it simply crushed many Soviet units in its path. This was the fate of the 125th Division. It was attacked by three German armored divisions of the 4th Nazi Panzers and three infantry divisions. It fell apart. Within hours it had no tanks, hardly any antiaircraft guns, little transport and was running out of hand grenades. Helplessly, it staggered back to the rear.

  The 125th Division was part of the Soviet Eleventh Army, which was commanded by Lieutenant General Vasily I. Morozov, a handsome, quiet, self-controlled, mustached officer of great experience. He had an able staff, headed by Major General Ivan T. Shlemin and Ivan V. Zuyev, a political commissar who had served in Spain.

  The Soviet Eleventh Army was one of three which made up the Baltic Military Command of Colonel General F. I. Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov was a very senior Red Army officer, but he had never seen active combat. His Chief of Staff was Lieutenant General P. S. Klenov and his Military Commissar was P. A. Dibrov.

  The Germans possessed a superiority over Kuznetsov of about three to one in infantry and two to one in artillery. In armor the two forces were roughly equal.2 However, the figures were deceptive. Kuznetsov had dispersed his troops widely through the whole Baltic area. Many units were 100 to 300 miles to the rear. Only seven divisions were in the frontier region, and most of them had only one regiment in line, the rest being in barracks and camps, 25 or 30 miles away. This reflected the general situation on the Western Front, where of a total of 170 Soviet divisions facing the Germans only 56 were in the first echelon on June 22.

  Not only were troops badly positioned (Stalin specifically had refused requests by Kuznetsov to concentrate his forces on the frontiers), but the fortified regions on the new state borders were far from complete—only 50 percent by one estimate. Many heavy forts were not due to be ready until 1942 or even 1943. A visitor on the eve of June 22 was shocked to find Baltic frontier works which supposedly had been finished but had no weapons in place except for a few gun positions fitted out for “show” to inspectors sent out from Moscow.

  Kuznetsov’s frontier commanders were excellently informed as to German forces concentrated across the border from their lines. Often they knew not only the numbers but the designations of the units and names of German commanders. But they could not obtain orders to position their troops properly to meet an attack.

  Nor did Colonel General Kuznetsov have any detailed plan of action in event of German attack. It was no accident that the very suggestion to set up plans to defend his Riga General Headquarters struck him as unthinkable. Like most commanders in the field, as well as the Supreme Command in Moscow, he was dominated by Stalin’s official doctrine that “war will be fought on alien territory with a minimum of bloodshed.” This thesis had been preached for years both in the military academies and in the Communist Party. The Soviet Army, the Soviet Government and the Soviet people had become accustomed to thinking that if war came their armies would strike quickly to the west and carry the attack to the enemy. Comparatively little attention had been given to defense tactics or to problems which might be encountered as a result of Nazi blitzkrieg tactics.

  Thus Colonel General Kuznetsov was by no means ready militarily or psychologically for the crisis which arose. Many—possibly half—of his officers were on leave. More than half the border units were understrength and had only a fraction of the arms and equipment called for by the table of organization.

  Almost all Kuznetsov’s tanks were old models—1,045 out of a total of 1,150. And 75 percent of these needed repairs. Three-quarters of his planes were five or more years old and almost unserviceable. Many guns had no mechanized transport, and most of them were not powerful enough to match the German artillery or German tanks. In the 12th Mechanized Corps 16 percent of the tanks were out of ser
vice, being repaired. In the 3rd Corps the percentage was 45. An authoritative estimate placed only five of the thirty divisions which saw service on the Northwest Front as fully equipped. The remainder were 15 to 30 percent below level in personnel and equipment.

  The new fortified system was not complete; the old installations in the Pskov-Ostrov area had been dismantled; the new airfields had not yet been finished and many old ones were being reconstructed. There was a shortage of shells, ammunition and spare parts. This situation prevailed throughout the Soviet Army.

  When Marshal A. I. Yeremenko took command of the 3rd Mechanized Corps, he found it had only 50 percent of its authorized tanks, mostly old T-26’s. He had hardly any new T-34’s, which became the work horses of World War II, and only two new KV 60-ton tanks, which were superior to anything the Germans possessed. The 7th Mechanized Corps, constituted on July i, had 40 of its rated 120 KV tanks and none of the rated 420 T-34’s. The Western Front entered the war with 60 percent of its allotted rifles, 75 percent of its mortars, 80 percent of its A A guns, 75 percent of its artillery, 56.5 percent of its tanks and 55 percent of its trucks. The ratios in Kuznetsov’s Special Baltic District were about the same.

  General Kuznetsov had available for the protection of Leningrad’s approaches two principal armies—the Eighth, commanded by Major General P. P. Sobennikov, and the Eleventh, commanded by Lieutenant General V. I. Morozov, and the understrength Twenty-seventh Army, commanded by Major General A. Ye. Berzarin. The Twenty-seventh Army was located east and north of the Dvina. The Eighth Army defended the coastal sector which was attacked by the Eighteenth German Army. The Eleventh Soviet Army was just to the south, where it met the brunt of assault by the German Sixteenth Army. The heaviest blow of the 4th German Panzers struck at the hinge of the Eighth and Eleventh Soviet armies.