War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (18 page)

After the crust of Russian resistance was broken by the infantry, on the frontier the Panzers began to clatter through the breaches and penetrate the hinterland. Their passage was not totally unimpeded. ‘I found myself on the Eastern Front encountering what seemed to be a different and terrible race of men,’ declared Hans Becker,
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a Panzer crew man with the 12th Panzer Division. ‘The very first attacks involved sharp, fierce fighting.’

Seventh Panzer Division achieved an initial deep penetration. Border defences were weak in relation to what had been reported by intelligence, ‘and enemy artillery never emerged in any consequential strength’. By 12.45 hours on the first day the bridge spanning the River Neman at Olita was captured intact, falling victim to a determined swiftly advancing vanguard. The bridgehead was immediately counter-attacked by Russian heavy tanks supported by infantry and artillery. During this first tank-on-tank battle of the Russian campaign, 82 Soviet tanks were shot into flames.
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Karl Fuchs, a tank commander in Panzer Regiment 25, wrote home:

‘Yesterday I knocked off a Russian tank, as I had done two days ago! If I get in another attack, I’ll receive my first battle stripes. War is half as bad as it sounds and one thing is plain as day: the Russians are fleeing everywhere and we follow them. All of us believe in early victory!’
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Olita village burned furiously. Numbers of German tanks smouldered along the roads leading into it. Rubber treads on road wheels formed miniature flaming hoops. Many had turrets blown clean away. All had been picked off during the advance by dug-in Russian tanks. Seventh Panzer Division almost immediately burst out of its bridgehead on the other side of the River Neman, but Oberst Rothenberg, the commander of Panzer Regiment 25, was to call the engagement ‘the hardest battle of my life’.
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The weather on this first attack day was, as the 7th Panzer Division official history declared:

‘… particularly favourable for fighting, and over the following days. It was dry, the sun shone, roads and tracks were easily negotiable, and even the terrain off roads and paths, normally swampy, had dried out and was drivable for both tracked and wheeled vehicles.’
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Gefreiter Erich Kuby summed it up with some irony in his diary: ‘This is truly Hitler war weather,’
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he declared. The official history of the 20th Panzer Division, also with Panzergruppe 3 under Generaloberst Hoth, commented on the impact the heat was having on accompanying marching infantry regiments, which traversed considerable stretches on the first day, some as far as 50km. Assessments of Soviet strength on the border proved exaggerated. Three hundred prisoners, including 20 officers and 10 lorries, were captured on 22 June. Deeply rutted sand tracks caused unexpectedly high levels of fuel consumption. Shortages resulted when wheeled fuel tankers found they were unable to keep up in the hot sandy conditions. Columns began to stretch out. ‘The long slow division line snaked along dry shifting tracks in the summer heat,’ recorded the division history, ‘raising clear dust-cloud outlines, offering a promising target for enemy bombers.’ Six air attacks fell on these lines of erratically moving vehicles on the first day alone.
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‘We were not bothered at all by the Red Air Force,’ remarked Leutnant Michael Wechtler. His men, lying in reserve with Regiment 133, awaited the call forward to Brest-Litovsk. They basked in the sun in an open meadow seemingly oblivious to air attack, awaiting further orders.
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Leutnant Heinz Knoke, a Bf109 fighter pilot flying with JG52, had already attacked his early morning Russian headquarters objective. Total surprise was achieved:

‘One of the huts is fiercely blazing. Vehicles have been stripped of their camouflage and overturned by the blast. The Ivans at last come to life. The scene below is like an overturned ant-heap, as they scurry about in confusion. Stepsons of Stalin in their underwear flee for cover in the woods.’

Five or six more strafing runs were conducted over the camp and headquarters. Light Flak began to open up and was immediately suppressed. ‘An Ivan at the gun falls to the ground,’ Knoke observed, ‘still in underwear.’

His flight arrived back at Suwalki fighter base at 05.56 hours, managing a turn-round within 40 minutes before returning to their previous objective, guided ‘by the smoke rising from the burning buildings’. After systematically raking the target the wing was refuelled and rearmed again; this time it took 22 minutes. By the end of the day Knoke saw that:

‘Thousands of Ivans are in full retreat, which becomes an utter rout when we open up on them, stumbling and bleeding as they flee from the highway in an attempt to take cover in the nearby woods. Vehicles lie burning by the roadside after we pass. Once I drop my bombs on a column of heavy artillery drawn by horses. I am thankful not to be down there myself.’

By 20.00 hours Knoke’s squadron was flying its sixth mission of the day. The Luftwaffe, the most modern arm of the Wehrmacht, had many technically trained young Germans in its ranks. They had, in the main, been educated by a National Socialist regime extolling the virtues of modern technology and racial purity. Air attacks as a consequence were pursued with pitiless ferocity. Knoke admitted:

‘We have dreamed for a long time of doing something like this to the Bolshevists. Our feeling is not one of hatred, so much as utter contempt. It is a genuine satisfaction for us to be able to trample the Bolshevists in the mud where they belong.’
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A Luftwaffe Unteroffizier based at Lyon wrote home the day following the invasion. His pragmatic comments are tinged with similar racist overtones. ‘Yesterday we stood close to the map and thought through all the possible contingencies we could face.’ Identifying the problems, they mockingly concluded: ‘It would be better if we’re never stationed with the General Staff.’
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ll jaded the NCO’s reasoning process. ‘Everything that belongs to Jewry stands on one front against us. The Marxists fight shoulder-to-shoulder with the big financiers as was the case in Germany in 1933.’ Surprise at the invasion announcement was tinged with a degree of quiet optimism. ‘Who would have thought that now we would be up against the Russians,’ he declared, ‘but if I recall correctly, the Führer has always done the best he could.’
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The efficacy of this statement was borne out by an increasing realisation of the success of the pre-emptive air strike. Flights of gull-winged Stuka dive-bombers were at that moment peeling off, sirens wailing into the attack. Junkers Ju87B Stukas were the main providers of close air support to the army. Leutnant Hans Rudel had by the evening of the first day ‘been out over the enemy lines four times in the area between Grodno and Volkovysk.’ His targets were large numbers of tanks together with supply columns that the Russians were bringing up to the front. ‘We bomb tanks, Flak artillery and ammunition dumps supplying the tanks and infantry,’ he wrote.
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War correspondent Hans Schaller described the cockpit view of just such a dive-bombing attack. Observing a Stuka flight below, he described how:

‘They are just changing their course. I cannot hear them above the noise of my own machine; they seem to be flying quietly and noiselessly above the landscape like sharp-eyed birds of prey, eager to claim their victim. One of the dive-bombers is already leaving the formation! The machine tilts to one side, begins to dive and plunges down through a milky wall of cloud towards the objective, hurtles down steeper and steeper. Stands on its head, dives almost perpendicularly and now the tension of the pilot has reached its climax.’
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This mode of attack, although not precision bombing, was the most accurate that technology could achieve at the time. Pilots laboured under uncomfortable G-force pressures varying from 4g to 12g for one to six seconds depending how the pilot levelled from his dive.
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Hauptmann Robert Oleinic, a Stuka training instructor, explained:

‘A dive speed of 480kph placed enormous strain on the system. The dive brake set at this speed prevented the machine from breaking up in the air, enabling the pilot to get it under control again. The pressure while levelling out was so intense that pilots occasionally experienced a temporary misting sensation that could last a few seconds. That meant for a moment he blacked out.’
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Leutnant Rudel commented on the cumulative physical strain dive-bombing had upon Stuka pilots during the opening weeks of the Russian campaign. Take-off was at 03.00 hours in the first few days with the final landing often after 22.00 hours. ‘Every spare minute,’ he stated, ‘we stretch out underneath an aeroplane and instantly fall asleep.’ When scrambled, ‘we hop to it without even knowing where it is from’. Prolonged stress caused them to go about their business ‘as though in our dreams’.
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Soviet Air Force reports were soon referring to impending catastrophe. Third Army Air Force commander informed his Western Front higher command that:

‘At 04.00 hours on 22 June 1941 the enemy attacked our airfields simultaneously. The whole of the 16th Bomber Regiment was put out of action. The 122nd Fighter Regiment suffered heavily, the 127th Fighter Regiment to a lesser extent.’

A paralysis of command and control developed. Frantic requests for information were despatched. The report continued:

‘I request that you report where the 122nd and 127th Fighter Regiments have been transferred and give us their call signs and wave numbers. I request that you reinforce us with fighters for the fight against the air enemy.’
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Fourth Soviet Army reported similar setbacks. ‘The enemy is dominant in the air; our aviation regiments are suffering great losses [of 30–40%].’
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The staff of the Soviet Tenth Army was told by the 9th Air Division that by 10.29 hours all its fighters at Minsk had been destroyed. At 10.57 hours, 28 minutes later, the 126th Fighter Regiment in the same division asked permission to destroy its logistic stocks at Bielsk and retreat so as to evade likely capture. Bielsk, the staff ominously noted, was 25km inside the border.
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Soviet Air Force units were mauled as they took-off from runways. At Bug near Brest-Litovsk a single Soviet fighter squadron attempting to ‘scramble’ was bombed while still in motion on the ground. Flaming wrecks skidded into each other in a fiery mêlée and were left to burn out on the airfield boundaries. Reckless courage displayed by Soviet bomber crews to stem the onslaught was to no avail. ‘It seemed to me almost a crime to allow these floundering aircraft to be attacked in tactically impossible formations,’ commented Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring commanding Luftflotte 2. On the second day he described how ‘one flight after another came in innocently at regular intervals, as easy prey for our fighters’. His final caustic comment was: ‘It was sheer “infanticide”.’
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Hauptmann Herbert Pabst from Stuka Geschwader 77 saw a Soviet air raid on his base shortly after returning from a sortie. Black mushrooms of smoke suddenly burst up from the airfield boundaries with no warning. Six twin-engined enemy machines could be observed making a wide curving turn away, heading for home. Simultaneously two or three minute dots, German fighters, were sighted converging rapidly.

‘As the first one fired, thin threads of smoke seemed to join it to the bomber. Turning ponderously to the side, the big bird flashed silver, then plunged vertically downwards with its engines screaming. As it crashed a huge sheet of flame shot upwards. The second bomber became a glare of red, exploded as it dived, and only the bits came floating down like great autumnal leaves. The third turned over backwards on fire. A similar fate befell the rest, the last falling in a village and burning for an hour. Six columns of smoke rose from the horizon. All six had been shot down!’

Pabst added: ‘They went on coming the whole afternoon’, but all were knocked out. ‘From our airfield alone we saw 21 crash and not one got away.’
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The German pre-emptive air strike hit 31 airfields during the early morning hours of 22 June. Sorties thereafter were directed against suspected Soviet staff headquarters, barracks, artillery and bunker positions and oil depots. Defending Soviet fighters tended to keep their distance, turning away after an initial burst of fire. Leutnant Rudel was clear the Russian ‘Rata’ J15 was inferior to the German Bf109s. Whenever they appeared, ‘they are shot down like flies,’ he reported. Heinz Knoke claimed on 22 June there was ‘no sign of the Russian Air Force the entire day’. Therefore, ‘we are able to do our work without encountering opposition’.
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The reason was clear. By the end of the first morning the Soviets had lost 890 aircraft, of which 222 were shot down in the air by fighters and Flak and 668 destroyed on the ground. Only 18 German aircraft failed to land after the initial attacks. By that night the Soviets had lost 1,811 aircraft: 1,489 on the ground and 322 shot down. German losses rose to only 35.
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Between 23 and 26 June the number of Soviet airfields attacked reached 123. By the end of the month 4,614 Soviet aircraft were destroyed at a cost of 330 German. Of these 1,438 were lost in the air and 3,176 caught on the ground. Total Luftwaffe air supremacy had been achieved. Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring recalled the ‘reports of enemy aircraft destroyed in the air or on the ground totalled 2,500; a figure which the Reichsmarschall [Goering] at first refused to believe!’ Pilot reports by the very nature of the mêlée of air combat were prone to exaggeration. ‘But when [Goering] checked up after our advance, he told us our claim was 200 or 300 less than the actual figure.’
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In fact the claims had been underassessed by some 1,814 aircraft.