The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  For all the work that filled almost every hour of day and night, the minds of Panteleyev and his fellow officers could not shake off the remorseless question: What had happened at the front and why had the retreat been so sudden and so deep?

  * * *

  1 When Operational Alert No. 1 was received in Kingisepp after midnight on June 22, Ma) or Pavlovsky asked his commander, General Eliseyev, whether something might have miscarried with the Germans. Eliseyev sharply replied: “Do you understand what you are saying? Get hold of yourself. Words are not sparrows.”

  2 The figure of 5,000 in the 1939–41 period is given in Istoriya VOVSS, Vol. I. Red Star used the same figure for the eleven months before the war (May 14, 1965). (V. V. Platonov, Eto Bylo Na Buge, Moscow, 1966, p. 24.)

  3 Shkirpa got a cool reception at the Wilhelmstrasse when he reported these developments later in the day of June 23. He was dressed down for not consulting the Foreign Office, and German anger was not ameliorated when he plaintively noted that he had sent a memorandum June 19 outlining the whole plan. In the end the Germans did not permit independent or puppet governments to be set up in any of the Baltic states. (Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–45, Series D, Vol. XIII.)

  4 Drozd died in an unusual accident in the winter of 1941–42. Driving on the ice from Kronstadt to Leningrad, his car fell into a bomb hole and he drowned. (Kuznetsov, Oktyabr, No. 8, August, 1968, p. 170.)

  16 ♦ The Red Army Retreats

  TO MANY—IF NOT MOST—LENINGRADERS, LULLED BY YEARS of propaganda about Soviet military might, it seemed certain that within a few days the Red Army would turn the tables on the Nazi invaders and begin to drive them back toward the frontiers of the Third Reich. This seemed a plausible conclusion from the stories which were published by Leningradskaya Pravda, quoting shot-down pilots as saying the German soldiers did not want to fight, that the German workers had set fire to Nazi naval stores at Kiel and that Finnish troops were deserting to the Red Army lines rather than carry out orders given them by their commanders.

  Even the Leningrad military had no sense of the colossal disaster which was beginning to unfold. General Dukhanov discovered this a couple of days after the outbreak of war when talking with Colonel G. V. Mukhin, chief of the Leningrad Infantry Academy, a fine officer and a man soon to add his name to the honor roll of Leningrad’s defenders.

  Dukhanov was shocked to find that Mukhin imagined that the tide would soon turn along the frontier. Mukhin had not been able to grasp from reading the official communiqués that the German armies were already one hundred miles within the Soviet borders. The truth was that by the evening of June 23 the redoubtable 4th Nazi Panzers had blasted an eighty-five-mile wedge between the Soviet Eighth and the Soviet Eleventh armies. By June 25 Nazi units were ninety miles inside the Baltic Military District (the name had now been changed to the Northwest Front) in the direction of Dvinsk and 150 miles inside Russia in the direction of Vilnius and Minsk. No one in Leningrad knew this. Not even the command in the General Staff building. The press continued to stress that German proletarians in the Nazi Army would rise against Hitler and aid a Soviet victory and that the spirit of the German Army had been crushed. Some factory papers even treated the war as a joke, and as late as July the magazine Leningrad printed a poor limerick treating the whole thing as a kind of gigantic prank.

  If confusion was profound in Leningrad, it was almost total at the High Command in Moscow. It had prevailed since the start of the war. On the evening of June 22 orders were issued at 9:15 P.M. to all front commands to launch an immediate counteroffensive to drive the Germans back inside Germany. The Baltic Command, acting in coordination with the Western Front, within twenty-four hours was to drive the Germans across the border to the region of Suwalki. Only a headquarters completely at sea could have issued such an optimistic order.1

  Unreal as were these instructions, General Kuznetsov attempted to carry them out—with one change. He shifted the direction of the operation from Suwalki to Tilsit. A war game based on an offensive toward Tilsit had been carried out recently, and his commanders were familiar with the terrain. Moreover, he had issued orders for an attack toward Tilsit ten hours earlier and could not countermand them. The shift toward Tilsit meant there would be no cooperation with the Central Front offensive, but he did not seem to have thought of that.

  The operation was doomed to failure. There wasn’t time to prepare, there was little air strength, artillery was out of ammunition and had no motive power, and tanks were short on fuel. Kuznetsov had only tenuous communication with his armies, and his armies had little connection with their divisions.

  An heroic attempt by Sobennikov’s Eighth Army was made to carry out the counteroffensive. But the hastily collected tank force of the Eighth Army collided head on with the 4th Nazi Panzers. Most of the precious Soviet armor was destroyed.

  One unit involved in the desperate action was the 28th Soviet Tank Division, commanded by Colonel (later Army General) Ivan D. Chernya-khovsky, a talented armored specialist. He got his orders while his forces were moving headlong toward the front. He had time for neither reconnaissance nor preparation. With his 55th Tank Regiment already involved in a fire fight with the German 1st Tank Division, Chernyakhovsky decided to try to advance toward Siauliai with the aid of the remnants of the 125th Rifle Division.

  He attacked at 10 P.M., June 23, and drove the Nazis back three miles. A company of Nazi motorcyclists was wiped out on the Kaltinenai-Raseinyai road. Just to the north the Soviet 2nd Tank Division attacked a Nazi tank column advancing along the Tilsit-Siauliai highway.

  The battle developed rapidly into the first large armored encounter on the Northwest Front, ranging over an area of about forty miles from Kaltinenai to Raseinyai. Nearly 1,000 tanks took part. The 2nd Soviet Tank Division wiped out more than 40 Nazi tanks and 18 guns near Skaudvile. But before the day was over the 2nd Division had been surrounded by the 41st German Motorized Corps. With the support of the 12th Soviet Mechanized Corps, it fought its way out with terrible losses.

  Chernyakhovsky’s 28th Division started June 25 with 84 tanks, mostly old ones. By nightfall it had lost all its armor. It was no longer an armored division, merely a shell of shattered combat units. Moscow hastily yanked the crack 21st Armored Group out of the Stavka pool and ordered it to try to hold the north bank of the western Dvina (supposedly about seventy-five miles to the rear of the fighting line).

  The 21st Armored was commanded by Army General D. D. Lelyushenko, a tough and experienced tank officer. Lelyushenko had organized this corps in the spring of 1941 and had chosen very good officers. Nikolai I. Voikov, a man with great theoretical background as well as combat experience, commanded his 42nd Tank Division. The 46th Tank Division was commanded by Vasily A. Koptsov, who had won his spurs in tank actions against the Japanese at Khalkin-Gol. He was one of the best young commanders in the Red Army. The commander of the 185th Motorized Division was Pyotr L. Rudchuk, whom Lelyushenko had known as far back as the Civil War days when both served in Budyonny’s famous First Cavalry Army.

  Lelyushenko’s force was well trained and comparatively well armed, although he had only 97 old tanks instead of the 400 new KV’s and T-34’s which were due to be issued..2 When war broke out, Lelyushenko recalled with bitterness a conversation he had had a month earlier with Lieutenant General Yakov N. Fedorenko, chief of the Armored Forces Administration of the Red Army. Fedorenko assured him that his corps would get its full quota of tanks by 1942.

  “And if war comes?” Lelyushenko asked.

  “The Red Army has enough strength without your corps,” Fedorenko replied.

  Lelyushenko had been in Moscow for staff consultations on June 22. He was immediately ordered back to his corps, which was stationed to the southeast of Dvinsk (Daugavpils). He rejoined his troops June 23. That day he received 96 antitank guns, but when his units were twice attacked by German bombers, he could not reply as he had no antiaircraft guns, and suffered serious losses in muniti
ons, fuel and personnel. On June 24 he got two battalions from the Armored Academy, equipped with old BT-7 tanks, and reorganized his forces so that each tank division had 45 tanks and included motorized units and artillery as well. On June 25 the corps was again heavily bombed, but late in the day obtained some antiaircraft guns. Two JU-87’s were shot down. One of the German aviators said he had seen a Nazi tank column only ten to fifteen miles southwest of Dvinsk.

  Timoshenko ordered Lelyushenko to advance his corps into the Dvinsk region in an effort to keep the Germans from occupying Dvinsk and crossing the Dvina River. At 4 P.M. on the twenty-fifth Lelyushenko was moving toward Dvinsk under heavy Nazi air attack.

  As the tanks rumbled into the little town of Dagda, fifty miles east of Dvinsk, Lelyushenko saw a sight he long remembered—a little girl lying beside the road, her leg broken by a bomb blast, covered with blood. The child was conscious and cried again and again for her mother. The General ordered his adjutant to rush the youngster to a medical unit.

  It was June 27 before Lelyushenko managed to get within striking distance of Dvinsk. His forces were dispersed in broken forest thickets about twenty miles northeast of Dvinsk when Lieutenant General Sergei D. Akimov, second in command to Colonel General F. I. Kuznetsov of the Northwest (Baltic) Front, appeared. Akimov was tired, dusty and sunburned. He looked as though he had not slept for many days. He brought desolate news. He had been given a pick-up force, made up of local volunteers and the 5th Paratroop Corps, and told to hold Dvinsk until Lelyushenko’s 21st Corps arrived. The German 8th Tank Division had thrown him out. As he had just reported to Kuznetsov: “Our attack was smothered. Individual units penetrated the city from the north and northwest, but when the enemy’s reserves appeared, they were t,hrown out. The reason for our failure lay in our absence of tanks, insufficient artillery (we had only six guns) and weak air cover.”

  General Akimov advised Lelyushenko that his 21st Corps was being subordinated to the Twenty-seventh Army under Major General Berzarin, who was now in chargé of a fifty-mile front covering the western Dvina from Livani to Kraslava.

  With Akimov’s weary assent, Lelyushenko proposed that he try to drive the Germans from Dvinsk and establish a protective line on the north side of the Dvina along a ten-to-twelve-mile front.

  Early on the morning of the twenty-eighth Lelyushenko launched his attack. By 7 A.M. his advance guard had broken into the village of Malinovka, seven miles north of Dvinsk, and an hour and a half later the 46th Division, with some air support, entered Dvinsk. Hand-to-hand and house-to-house fighting broke out. The Soviet tanks closed in on Manstein’s 56th Corps and even rammed the enemy machines.

  The Nazis fought desperately. Hundreds of bodies strewed the streets around the burning tanks and blasted guns. The commander of the German 8th Tank Division, General Brandenberger, took cover with his staff in a fort on the southern outskirts of Dvinsk.

  Soviet losses were heavy. The commander of the Soviet 46th Tank Division, the brilliant young Vasily Koptsov, was wounded fighting in the center of the town but continued to direct his forces.

  Soon the Soviet machines began to run out of fuel and ammunition. The 42nd and 185th divisions were badly needed to bolster the 46th, but they were held up by Nazi bombing. Lelyushenko turned direction of the Dvinsk righting over to Akimov and raced off to the 42nd and 185th. He found the 42nd had run into the leading units of the 121st Division of the Sixteenth German Army near Kraslava on the western Dvina about twenty-five miles due east of Dvinsk.

  Lelyushenko radioed the 42nd in an improvised five-word code, “Grach [nickname for commander] Hurry Hit Dag [for Dvinsk],” and signed it “Lorn” (for Lelyushenko).

  Lelyushenko managed to get both the 42nd and 185th into action along the western Dvina, cutting off and encircling several German units. About 400 soldiers of the 3rd German Motorized Division were wiped out and 285 prisoners were taken. A detachment under A. M. Goryaunov was sent across the western Dvina and knocked out a company of infantry and 35 vehicles of the 56th Panzer staff.

  But the Germans brought in heavy reinforcements and by evening, after air preparation, methodically began to cut the Soviet forces to bits. Lelyushenko decided to pull back to a chain of lakes running from Rushoni to Dridza about thirty miles northeast of Dvinsk.

  The experiences of the Eighth Army under General Sobennikov were being duplicated by the Eleventh Army commanded by the very able Lieutenant General V. I. Morozov. If anything, Morozov’s difficulties were even worse.

  Having lost Kaunas in the first hours of war, General Morozov had pulled his headquarters back to Kaisiadorys, twenty miles to the east. With the German armored force across the Neman River, the question was what steps Morozov might take to halt them. He called his military council into session on the night of June 24–25 to consider the situation. There were, he said, two possibilities. He might move northwest to attack the German 4th Panzers, driving northeastward on the highway toward Dvinsk. Or he could attack to the southwest and try to re-establish connections with the Western Front command.

  After outlining the two possibilities he paused.

  “Comrade Commander,” one of his subordinates intervened, “why did we give up Kaunas without a battle?”

  Morozov explained patiently that if the Eighth Army had been able to hold the east bank of the Neman River, they would have fought to the end to save Kaunas. But once the Germans had secured bridgeheads across the river, to hold on to Kaunas would simply have meant they would fall into Nazi encirclement.

  At that point Morozov was summoned to the VC high-security wire to take a call from General Kuznetsov at Northwest Front headquarters. He returned a few minutes later, hardly recognizable. His face was stone. His eyes glowed in their deep sockets. He looked at no one but went to the map and picked up the pointer. He hunted about a moment, then pointed to Kaunas.

  “There,” he said, carefully avoiding all eyes. “From the area of Jonava we will attack Kaunas and then East Prussia. That is the order of the Defense Commissariat.”

  “And what about our plan?” asked General Shlemin.

  “We have no answer on our plan,” Morozov muttered. Then, seeming to gather all his strength, he said, “Comrades, the order from headquarters permits no discussion. All members of the Military Council must return immediately to their troops.”

  The orders for the counterattack had been issued by Colonel General Kuznetsov at a meeting of the Military Council of the Northwest Front at 3 A.M., June 25.

  The counterattack was carried out by Major General M. M. Ivanov of the 16th Rifle Corps. It was extremely difficult for him to get in touch with his units, inform them of the orders and get elementary information about the German dispositions. Nonetheless, he made the attempt. The remnants of his 23rd and 33rd rifle divisions advanced along the Jonava highway toward Kaunas, and the 5 th Rifle Division drove in from the east. Some units got to the outskirts of Kaunas, but not in strength. They were hurled back in disorder, and for all practical purposes the 12th Corps ceased to exist. Major General V. F. Pavlov of the 23 rd Division was killed. So was the deputy commander of the 33rd Rifles, Commissar Silantyev.

  Worse was to follow. Almost immediately the Eleventh Army lost contact with Colonel General Kuznetsov. It was not to be restored for days.

  With the capture of Soviet ciphers by the Germans and the interference of Nazi transmitters on Soviet frequencies, Major Agafonov became extraordinarily nervous about the security of communications. His fears were intensified when he got a call on the radiotelephone for General Morozov and Commissar Zuyev just as a Nazi plane began to circle over their Jonava headquarters. Suspecting a Nazi trick, Agafonov refused the call, saying that Morozov and Zuyev had moved to another spot. The plane then disappeared.

  Soon another message came in on the radiotelephone. It was from Kuznetsov’s chief of staff. Agafonov wasn’t to be fooled a second time. “Who are you calling?” he snapped back. “You know very well we don’t have any Zuyev here.”3r />
  The connection was broken. Fatally—for this call was genuine. It was being made by Kuznetsov’s orders. The Commanding General was also nervous about the security of communications. He had received a telegram from Morozov demanding reinforcements and sharply criticizing Kuznetsov for “passivity.” He didn’t think this sounded like Morozov’s style. It might be a Nazi fake. Even when his aides insisted that under the conditions in which the Eleventh Army was fighting a commander might lose his temper, Kuznetsov insisted on verification. It was his effort which was rebuffed by Agafonov.

  That was the end of communications between the Eleventh Army and headquarters. Thereafter the remnants of Morozov’s command straggled back through the Baltic marshes in small, disorderly units, only vaguely in touch with their commanders.

  The destruction of the Eleventh Army exposed the flanks of the Eighth Soviet Army to the north and the Third Soviet Army to the south, leaving them easy prey to the German Panzers. No Soviet force remained in the Kaunas-Vilnius area capable of handling the German threat.

  Contact between Sobennikov’s Eighth Army and Morozov’s Eleventh Army had vanished, and General Kuznetsov of the Northwest Front had little idea of what was going on at the front. Fearful of using wireless for communications, not knowing where his units were located, General Kuznetsov had no notion of where to send munitions and fuel supplies. Most of the armored and mechanized units were out of fuel. By the morning of the fourth day of war, Soviet military historians concede, the situation on the Northwest Front was critical.

  General Kuznetsov himself had lost all command of events. An officer who had known him at the Frunze Military Academy hardly recognized him. Another old friend said he was “woefully changed.” At the academy he had been neat, clean-shaven, impeccably groomed. He was weary now, dirty, rumpled, his face pale, his eyes red-rimmed. He gave orders testily and threatened his subordinates with court-martial if they were not fulfilled.