Antony Beevor: Stalingrad

One historian has pointed out that although ‘the Wehrmacht should not be regarded as a homogeneous entity’, the degree to which its different elements were ‘willing to participate in a war of extermination against the Soviet Union, be it as an anti-Russian, anti-Bolshevik, or anti-Jewish crusade, is an area of research that needs to be pursued’. Prince Dohna, with the 60th Mechanized Infantry Division, was ‘shocked by my own callousness’, when he reread his diary many years later. ‘Today it seems impossible to understand that I could have allowed myself to have been caught up unprotesting in this megalomania, but we were dominated by the feeling of being part of a tremendous war machine, which was rolling irresistibly to the east against Bolshevism.’

At 3.15 a.m. German time, on 22 June, the first artillery barrages began. Bridges over rivers were seized before the NKVD border guards reacted. The guards’ families, who lived at the frontier posts, died with them. In some cases, demolition charges had been removed earlier by silent raiding parties. German commando groups from the ‘Sonderverband Brandenburg’ (named after their barracks on the edge of Berlin) were already to the rear of Russian frontier units, cutting telephone lines. And since late April, small teams of anti-Communist Russian and Ukrainian volunteers had been infiltrated with radio sets. As early as 29 April, Beria had been informed of three groups of spies caught crossing the border with radio sets. Those taken alive, had been ‘handed over to the NKGB for further interrogation’.

The first sign of dawn on 22 June appeared ahead of the infantry on the eastern horizon as point units facing water obstacles clambered into assault boats. Many infantry regiments, as they advanced the last few hundred yards to their start lines, could hear waves of bombers and fighters approaching from behind. Gull-winged Stukas, flying at a lower altitude, were off in search of tank parks, headquarters and communications centres behind the lines.

A Red Army engineer officer at 4th Army headquarters was awoken by the sound of massed aero engines. He recognized the sound from the Spanish Civil War, in which he had served as an adviser. ‘The bombs were falling with a piercing shriek,’ he recorded. ‘The army headquarters building we had just left was shrouded in smoke and dust. The powerful blasts rent the air and made our ears ring. Another flight appeared. The German bombers dived confidently at the defenceless military settlement. When the raid was over, thick black pillars of smoke billowed up from many places. Part of the headquarters building was in ruins. Somewhere a high-pitched, hysterical female voice was crying out.’

The main Luftwaffe effort was directed against the Red Army’s aviation regiments. Pre-emptive sorties over the next nine hours destroyed 1,200 Soviet aircraft, the vast majority on the ground. Messerschmitt pilots could hardly believe their eyes when, banking over aerodromes, instantly recognizable from photoreconnaissance, they glimpsed hundreds of enemy planes neatly lined up at dispersal beside the runways. Those which managed to get off the ground, or arrived from airfields further east, proved easy targets. Some Soviet pilots who either had never learned aerial combat techniques or knew that their obsolete models stood no chance, even resorted to ramming German aircraft. A Luftwaffe general described these air battles against inexperienced pilots as infanticide.

The panzer divisions, with the engines of their tanks and half-tracks running, heard little except through their headphones. They received the order to advance as soon as the infantry had secured the bridges and crossings. The task of the panzer formations was to cut through and then encircle the bulk of the enemy’s army, trapping it in a Kessel , or cauldron. This is how the Wehrmacht planned to destroy the Red Army’s fighting strength, then advance virtually unopposed on its three major objectives: Leningrad, Moscow and the Ukraine.

Army Group North under Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb was primarily responsible for the advance from East Prussia into the Baltic States to secure the ports, and then on to Leningrad. Army Group Centre under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock was to follow Napoleon’s route to Moscow once it had encircled the main concentrations of the Red Army in its path. Brauchitsch and Haider were deeply disturbed, however, when Hitler decided to weaken this central thrust, in order to bolster what they saw as subsidiary operations. The Führer believed that once he seized the agricultural wealth of the Ukraine and the Caucasian oilfields, the Reich’s invincibility was guaranteed. Army Group South under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, soon supported on his right by a small Hungarian army and two Romanian armies, was entrusted with this task. The Romanian dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, had been delighted when told of Operation Barbarossa ten days before its launch. ‘Of course I’ll be there from the start’, he had said. ‘When it’s a question of action against the Slavs, you can always count on Romania.’

On the anniversary of Napoleon’s proclamation from his imperial headquarters at Wilkowski, Hitler issued a long justification of the breakdown of relations with the Soviet Union. He turned the truth inside out, claiming that Germany was threatened by ‘approximately 160 Russian divisions massed on our frontier’. He thus started the ‘European crusade against Bolshevism’ with a shameless lie to his own people and to his own soldiers.

Seldom had an attacker enjoyed such advantages as the Wehrmacht in June 1941. Most Red Army and frontier units, having been ordered not to respond to ‘provocations’, did not know how to react. Even beyond the twelfth hour, Stalin still desperately hoped for a last chance of conciliation and was reluctant to allow his troops to strike back. An officer entering the office of Colonel-General D. G. Pavlov, the commander of the central front, heard him yelling in nervous exasperation down the telephone as yet another front-line commander reported German activity on the border: ‘I know! It has already been reported! Those at the top know better than we!’

The three Soviet armies stretched out along the frontier on Stalin’s orders never stood a chance and their tank brigades behind were destroyed by air attack before they had a chance to deploy. The great eighteenth-century citadel of Brest-Litovsk, the town where the Kaiser’s general staff had inflicted such a humiliating Diktat on Lenin and Trotsky in 1918, was surrounded in the first few hours. Army Group Centre’s two panzer groups, commanded by Generals Hoth and Guderian, surrounded large Soviet forces in two rapid encirclements. Within five days their forces had joined up near Minsk, some 200 miles from the border. More than 300,000 Red Army soldiers were trapped and 2,500 tanks destroyed or captured.

In the north, striking out of East Prussia across the river Niemen, the Fourth Panzer Group smashed through the Russian line with ease. Five days later, General von Manstein’s LVI Panzer Corps, advancing almost fifty miles a day, was nearly halfway to Leningrad and had secured the crossing of the river Dvina. This ‘impetuous dash’, Manstein wrote later, ‘was the fulfilment of a tank commander’s dream’.

The Luftwaffe, meanwhile, had continued to annihilate Red Army aviation. By the end of the second day of fighting, it had increased its score to two thousand aircraft destroyed. The Soviet Union could build fresh aircraft and train new pilots, but that immediate ‘infanticide’ of aircrew crushed morale for a long time. ‘Our pilots feel that they are corpses already when they take off,’ a squadron officer admitted to a commissar fifteen months later at the height of the battle of Stalingrad. ‘This is where the losses come from.’