Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (5 page)

The sun set behind the horizon, large and red. And still from amid the grain came the voices, despairing, anguished, or softly dying away: "Stretcher! Stretcher!" The medical orderlies hurried into the fields with their stretchers. They gathered in the bloody harvest. The harvest of one day, of one regiment. It was a big harvest.

In the area of Army Group North concentrated artillery-fire preceded the attack on only a few sectors. For the most part the first wave of infantry, together with assault sappers, rose silently from their dugouts among the crops along the frontier of Soviet-occupied Lithuania shortly after 0300 hours. Shrouded in the morning mist, like phantoms, the tanks moved forward out of the woods.

The men of 30th Infantry Division, from Schleswig-Holstein, were in position south of the Memel. They had no water obstacles to overcome on their first day. The sapper platoon of their advanced detachment, under First Lieutenant Weiss, crept up to the barbed wire. For days they had been observing every detail. The Russians patrolled the wire only intermittently. Their defences were farther back, along some high ground.

Softly. Softly . . .

The wire-cutters clicked. A post rattled, Quiet—listen. But there was no movement on the other side. Keep going. Faster. Now the passages were clear. And already men of 6th Company were coming up on the double, ducking as they ran. Not a shot was fired. The two Soviet sentries stared terrified down the carbine-barrels and raised their hands.

Keep going.

The observation towers on Hills 71 and 67 stood out black against the sky. There the Russians were established in strong positions. The German troops were aware of it. And so were the gunners of the heavy group of 30th Artillery Regiment waiting in the frontier wood behind them. The Russian machine-guns opened up from the tower on Hill 71. These were the first shots fired between Memel and Dubysa. Immediately the reply came from the well-camouflaged heavy field howitzers of 2nd Battalion, 47th Artillery Regiment, in position behind the regiments of 30th Infantry Division on the road from Trappenen to Waldheide. Where their motar-bombs burst there would be no grass growing for a long time.

Assault guns forward! Ducking behind the steel monsters, Weiss's advanced detachment was storming the high ground. Already they were inside the Soviet positions. The Russians were taken by surprise. Most of them were not even manning their newly built, though only partly finished, defences. They were still in their bivouacs. These were Mongolian construction battalions, employed here on building frontier defences. Wherever they were encountered, in groups or platoon strength, manning those defences, they fought stubbornly and fanatically.

The German troops were beginning to realize that this was not an opponent to be trifled with. These men were not only brave but also full of guile. They were masters at camouflage and ambush. They were first-rate riflemen. Fighting from an ambush had always been the great strength of the Russian infantry. Forward pickets, overrun and wounded, would wait for the first German wave to pass over them. Then they would resume fighting. Snipers would remain in their foxholes with their excellent automatic rifles with telescopic sights, waiting for their quarry. They would pick off the drivers of supply vehicles, officers, and orderlies on motor-cycles.

The 126th Infantry Division, from Rhine-Westphalia, fighting alongside the men from Schleswig-Holstein, also learned a bitter lesson from the tough Soviet frontier troops. The 2nd Battalion, 422nd Infantry Regiment, suffered heavy losses. Parts of a Soviet machine-gun picket had hidden themselves in a cornfield and allowed the first wave of the attack to pass by. In the afternoon, when Captain Lohmar unsuspectingly led his battalion from reserve positions to the front, the Russians in the crops suddenly opened up. Among those killed was the battalion commander, among the seriously wounded was his adjutant. It took an entire company three hours to flush the four Russians out of the field.

They were still firing when the Germans had got within ten feet of them, and had to be silenced with hand-grenades.

On the northern flank, immediately on the Baltic coast, in the small corner of Memel territory, was General Herzog's Masurian 291st Infantry Division. Its tactical sign was an elk's head—in token of the division's Masurian home. At the moment when, 500 miles farther to the south, Second Lieutenant Zumpe stormed over the railway bridge of Brest, Colonel Lohmeyer, with an advanced detachment of 505th Infantry Regiment, pushed through the forward pillbox-line of an utterly surprised Soviet frontier position. Under cover of the morning mist the Russians withdrew quickly. But Lohmeyer gave them no respite: he pressed on hard, and by nightfall of the first day he had reached the Latvian- Lithuanian frontier. On the following morning the 505th took Priekule. After 34 hours Lohmeyer and his regiment were 44 miles deep in enemy territory.

In the area of General von Manstein's LVI Panzer Corps, in the wooded country north of the Memel, there was not much room for large-scale operations. That was why only the 8th Panzer Division and 290th Infantry Division were earmarked for the first thrust across the frontier. The forward line of pillboxes had to be pierced. And it had to be pierced quickly. The corps was scheduled to drive 50 miles right through the enemy on the first day, without stopping,

without regard to anything else, with the object of capturing intact by a surprise stroke the big road viaduct across the Dubysa valley at Ariogala. If they failed in this the corps would be stuck in a deep and narrow river valley, and the enemy would have time to re-form. But most important of all, any idea of a surprise stroke against the important centre of Daugavpils (Dvinsk) would have to be dropped.

The companies of 290th Infantry Division suffered heavy casualties even while crossing the frontier stream—above all in officers. Second Lieutenant Weinrowski of the 7th Company, 501st Infantry Regiment, was probably the first soldier killed by the bullets of Soviet frontier guards up in the north during the first minute of this war. The burst came from a pillbox camouflaged as a farm cart. But the Russian frontier troops were unable to halt the German attack. The llth Company of 501st Regiment led the assault ahead of the spearheads of 8th Panzer Division, clearing tree-trunk obstacles under Russian fire, sweeping through the wood, past a small village. First Lieutenant Hinkmann, the company commander, was killed. Second Lieutenant Silzer ran forward. "The company will take orders from me!" They reached the Mituva, a small river. They captured the bridge and, as instructed, established a bridgehead.

Presently General Brandenberger's 8th Panzer Division drove up. General von Manstein, the GOC, was accompanying the division in his command tank. "Keep going!" he urged them. "Keep going!" Never mind about your flanks. Never mind about cover. The Ariogala viaduct must be captured. And Daugavpils must be taken by surprise.

Manstein, a bold but coolly calculating strategist, knew very well that this gamble of a war called Operation Barbarossa could be won only if the Germans succeeded in knocking the Russians out during the very first weeks of the attack. He knew what Clausewitz knew before him: this vast country could not be conquered and occupied. At best it might be possible, by risky surprise strokes, by swift and hard blows at the military and political heart of the country, to overthrow the regime, to deprive the country of its leadership, and thus to paralyse its vast military potential. That was the only way in which it might be done—perhaps. Otherwise the war would be lost that very summer.

But unless it was to be lost during the very first eight weeks of the 1941 campaign, Leningrad had to fall quickly, Moscow had to fall quickly, and the bulk of the Russian forces in the Baltic and in Belorussia had to be outmanoeuvred, smashed, and captured. And so that this could be done, the Panzer corps had to drive on regardless of everything, aiming their blows straight at the great nerve centres. And that, in the area of this particular Army Group, meant that Leningrad must fall. But to get to Leningrad the Daugava had to be crossed first, and it was against that river that Manstein's LVI Panzer Corps and, to the left of it, General Reinhardt's XLI Panzer Corps were pressing forward. And in order to get across this mighty river without a dangerous delay, the bridges across it at Daugavpils (Dvinsk) and Jekabpils had to be captured intact. But these bridges lay 220 miles behind the frontier. That was the situation.

At 1900 a signal was received at 8th Panzer Division headquarters from its advanced units: "Ariogala viaduct taken." Manstein nodded. All he said was: "Keep going."

The tanks were moving forward. The grenadiers were riding through clouds of hot dust. Keep going. Manstein was executing an armoured thrust such as no military tactician would have thought possible. Would his corps succeed in taking Daugavpils by surprise? Would he be able to drive straight through strongly held enemy territory for a distance of 230 miles and yet take the bridges across the Daugava by a surprise stroke?

That this tank war by the Baltic was not going to be a light-hearted adventure, no easy Blitzkrieg against an inferior enemy, was painfully clear after the first forty-eight hours.

The Russians, too, had tanks—and what tanks! The XLI Panzer Corps, operating on the left wing of Fourth Panzer Group, was the first to make this discovery.

On 24th June, at 1330 hours, Reinhardt arrived at the command post of 1st Panzer Division with the news that 6th Panzer Division had encountered very strong enemy armour on its way to the Daugava, at a point east of Raseiniai on the Dubysa, and was involved in heavy fighting. Over 100 super-heavy Soviet tanks had come from the east to meet XLI Panzer Corps, and had clashed first of all with General Landgraf's 6th Panzer Division. No one suspected at that time that Raseiniai was to become a name in military history. It marked the. first great crisis on the German northern front, a long way behind the spearhead of Manstein's Panzer corps.

1st Panzer Division therefore moved to relieve the 6th. Laboriously the tanks struggled forward along soft sandy or marshy tracks. The day was full of minor skirmishes, and the next morning began with an alarm. A Soviet tank attack with super-heavy armoured giants had overrun the 2nd Battalion, 113th Rifle Regiment. Neither the infantry's anti-tank guns, nor those of the Panzerjägers, nor the guns of the German tanks, were able to pierce the plating of these heavy enemy monsters. German artillery had to depress their barrels into the horizontal, and eventually halted the enemy attack by direct fire from open positions. Only because of their greater speed and their more skilful handling were the German tanks able to stand up to their heavy Soviet opponents. By using every trick in the book, especially good fire discipline and efficient radio communications, the tank companies succeeded in throwing the enemy back two miles.

The Soviet tanks which made this astonishing appearance were the as yet unknown types of the Klim Voroshilov series, the KV-1 and the KV-2, of 43 and 52 tons respectively.

An account by the Thuringian 1st Panzer Division describes this tank battle:

The KV-1 and -2, which we first met here, were really something! Our companies opened fire at about 800 yards, but it remained ineffective. We moved closer and closer to the enemy, who for his part continued to approach us unconcerned. Very soon we were facing each other at 50 to 100 yards. A fantastic exchange of fire took place without any visible German success. The Russian tanks continued to advance, and all armour- piercing shells simply bounced off them. Thus we were presently faced with the alarming situation of the Russian tanks driving through the ranks of 1st Panzer Regiment towards our own infantry and our hinterland. Our Panzer regiment therefore about-turned and rumbled back with the KV-ls and KV-2s, roughly in line with them. In the course of that operation we succeeded in immobilizing some of them with special-purpose shells at very close range —30 to 60 yards. A counter-attack was launched and the Russians were thrown back. A protective front was then established at Vosiliskis. Defensive fighting continued.

For several days a critical battle raged on the Dubysa between the German XLI Panzer Corps and the Soviet III Armoured Corps, which had thrown into battle 400 tanks, most of them super-heavy ones. Colonel-General Fedor Kuz-netsov was employing his crack armoured units, including the 1st and 2nd Armoured Divisions.

These heavy Soviet tanks were protected by 80-mm. plating all round, reinforced in some places to 120-mm. They carried a 7-62- or 15-5-cm. long-barrel gun as well as four machine-guns. Their speed over open ground was about 25 miles per hour. The greatest headache at first was their armour-plating: one KV-2 bore the marks of over seventy hits, but not a single one had pierced the armour. Since the German antitank guns were useless against these tanks an attempt had to be made to immobilize these giants first by firing at their tracks, and then by tackling them with artillery and ÄA guns, or blowing them up at close range by high-explosive charges of the sticky-bomb type.

The battle was decided in the early morning of 26th June. The Russians attacked. German artillery had taken up position on high ground among the tank regiments and was firing point-blank at the Russian tanks. The German regiments then mounted a counter-attack. At 0838 hours the 1st Panzer Regiment linked up with advanced units of 6th Panzer Division. The Soviet III Armoured Corps was smashed.

These two German Panzer divisions, together with 36th Motorized Infantry Division and 269th Infantry Division, between them destroyed the bulk of the Soviet armoured forces in the Baltic countries. Two hundred Soviet tanks were wrecked. Twenty-nine super-heavy KV-1 and KV-2 monsters, built by the Kolpino works in Leningrad, were left gutted on the battlefield. The road to Jekabpils on the Daugava was now free also for XLI Panzer Corps.