Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

Soon after, Stalin left the Kremlin for his dacha at Kuntsevo, outside Moscow. Only at 9:15 that evening did he finally dictate “Directive No. 3,” which ordered the Red Army not only to “hold firm” and “destroy” the enemy but also to cross the Soviet frontier in pursuing the foe. The problem was that, by that time, the Red Army was already in headlong retreat.

IT HAD NOT TAKEN LONG THAT MORNING FOR SOVIET FORCES TO realize that the German attack was not a mere provocation. Swiftly overrun in its forward positions, the Red Army was being slaughtered where it stood, outgunned and outfought by an enemy who was better equipped, better trained, and better led. On average, it has been calculated, a Red Army soldier died every two seconds that day. In the chaos of the attack, entire units simply disappeared, consumed in the maelstrom of explosions, buried in destroyed buildings, and crushed into the sunbaked earth.

At the end of the first day, the remains of the 10th Army regrouped at its new headquarters. A few hours earlier, it had consisted of six infantry divisions, six armored divisions, two cavalry divisions, and three artillery regiments; now its stragglers possessed little more than two tents, a few tables, and a telephone. Others had even less. As one Soviet commander would later confess, “The only thing that was left of the 56th Rifle Division was its number.”

The Red Air Force, meanwhile, had been destroyed on the ground, with few pilots even getting airborne to engage the Germans. On the first day alone, the Luftwaffe claimed to have destroyed nearly 1,500 Soviet aircraft. It was almost certainly an underestimate. As Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant would write a couple of days later, “The ease of our victories along the whole front came as a surprise to both Army and Luftwaffe. Enemy aircraft were parked in neat rows on their airfields and could be destroyed without difficulty.” When he received the news, Stalin was incredulous: “Surely the German air force didn’t manage to reach every single airfield?” he asked his minions. The affirmative response sent him into an impotent rage.

For Soviet ground forces it was a similar story. Despite the tenacity and bravery of its soldiers, the Red Army was, for the most part, simply overwhelmed. Already at the end of that first day—as Stalin was finally calling on his troops to throw out the invaders—some German spearheads were over fifty miles beyond the former frontier. Isolated pockets of Soviet resistance were surrounded and neutralized, as German armored columns swept eastward, penetrating deep into the rear areas, disrupting communications and support efforts, in a classic demonstration of blitzkrieg. After two days, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, Vilnius, fell to the Germans; a week after that the Latvian capital, Riga, the Byelorussian capital, Minsk, and the western Ukrainian city of L’vov (the former Polish Lwów) had also fallen. By that time, some German units had already advanced over 250 miles from their starting positions. Already, almost all the lands gained under the pact had been lost. The Soviet Union, it seemed, was being engulfed.

One of the only sources of optimism for Stalin in those opening days was the performance of his new breeds of tanks, the T-34 and the heavier KV. Although fewer than 1,500 of these models were available to the Red Army in June 1941, they came as an unwelcome surprise to German forces, which had grown accustomed to enjoying battlefield superiority. Wehrmacht antitank crews quickly discovered that their weapons, especially the standard 37-mm gun, were ineffectual against them; one crew claimed to have hit a T-34 twenty-three times without destroying it. Panzer crews, meanwhile, were similarly alarmed to note that the main gun of the new Soviet tanks was highly effective and could inflict serious damage to their vehicles before they were even within range. As one German account recalled, “The KV-1 and KV-2 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.” Unsurprisingly, German field commanders soon began to speak of “tank terror” among Wehrmacht troops. Yet, despite such fears, the Axis advance was scarcely halted: there were too few T-34s and KVs to make a serious difference on the battlefield, and too few of those available had crews experienced or trained enough to exploit their temporary advantage.

Some of the strongpoints that briefly offered resistance were the fortifications of the Molotov Line, such as at Kunigiškiai in Lithuania and Rava-Russkaya near L’vov. A German field report that summer would record troops encountering 68 artillery casemates, 460 antitank emplacements, and 542 machine-gun installations, the majority with accompanying bunkers and antitank earthworks. Although overwhelmed, the defenses of the Molotov Line were clearly not just a paper tiger. A similar, if more antiquated, example was the fortress at Brest, the town where the Nazis and the Soviets had jointly paraded to mark their conquest of Poland in 1939. Built in the mid-nineteenth century by the town’s then Russian occupiers, the fortress was a formidable construction, once considered impregnable. Spread across the confluence of the river Bug and a tributary to the west of the town, it formed a huge complex of barracks, ravelins, moats, and casemates, with walls five feet thick and space for a garrison of up to 12,000 soldiers.

Ironically, the sector of the German front facing Brest was under the command of General Heinz Guderian, who had taken the salute with the Soviets there in September 1939. “I had already captured the fortress once, during the Polish campaign,” Guderian wrote in his postwar memoir. “I now had the same task to perform a second time, though in more difficult circumstances.” As he recalled, “The fortifications at Brest were out-of-date, but the [rivers] and water-filled ditches made them immune to tank attack.” Such was Guderian’s concern about the fortress that he asked for an infantry corps to be placed under his direct command for the crucial assault.

The Germans attacked the fortress on the morning of June 22. Subjected to a massive artillery bombardment from the outset, followed by an infantry advance and finally an aerial assault, its 7,000-strong Red Army garrison fought bravely, with around 2,000 Soviet soldiers paying with their lives, while others held out for a week, finally succumbing on June 29. One Red Army officer, Major Pyotr Gavrilov, even managed to avoid capture, hiding out in the fortress’s cellars, until he was finally apprehended on July 23, a full month after the beginning of Barbarossa. Remarkably, he would survive the war.

By that time, Guderian was already 250 miles to the east, narrowly avoiding another uncomfortable reminder of recent history. In mid-July, his 2nd Army was near the towns of Zhlobin and Rogachev in eastern Byelorussia when it faced an unsuccessful counterattack by the Soviet 25th Mechanized Corps, under the command of Major General Semyon Krivoshein, with whom Guderian had shared a platform in Brest in 1939. Although neither appears to have realized it, the two were probably no more than a few kilometers apart across the battlefield. One must assume that Krivoshein’s earlier invitation to Wehrmacht officers to “visit him in Moscow” after the defeat of the British no longer stood.

In fact, reminders of the Nazi-Soviet Pact were all around. Considering the extent of the German-Soviet economic relationship in the opening phase of World War II, that connection inevitably played a significant role in the Barbarossa campaign. As we have seen, it is sometimes wrongly suggested that Soviet supplies made the decisive contribution to the German campaign in the west in the summer of 1940—that the Panzers racing for the French coast near Abbeville were “running on Soviet fuel.” As much as this contention does not fit the Nazi offensive of 1940, it fits that of 1941 much better: German tanks racing to take Minsk or encircle Kiev were to some extent dependent on Soviet oil supplies—one in every eight of them was indeed running on Soviet fuel.