All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [93]
Such misgivings did not extend to most of Hitler’s young soldiers, still flushed with the triumphs of 1940. ‘We were uncritically enthusiastic, proud to be alive in times we regarded as heroic,’ wrote twenty-one-year-old paratrooper Martin Poppel. He thrilled to the prospect of fighting in the east: ‘Our destination is Russia, our objective is war and victory … We’re desperate to be involved in the great struggle … There’s no country on earth that exerts such magnetic attraction on me as Bolshevist Russia.’ The Germans struck from East Prussia into Lithuania, from Poland towards Minsk and Kiev, from Hungary into Ukraine. Almost everywhere, they smashed contemptuously through Soviet formations, destroying planes wholesale on the ground – 1,200 in the first twenty-four hours.
In the Baltic republics, the invaders were bewildered to be greeted as liberators, with offerings of flowers and food. During the preceding weeks, Beria’s NKVD had made tens of thousands of arrests and consequently millions of enemies among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. Retreating Russian troops faced harassment and sniper fire from local inhabitants. Many civilians fled into the wilds until Stalin’s forces were expelled. ‘These days bogs and forests are more populated than farms and fields,’ wrote Estonian Juhan Jaik. ‘The forests and bogs are our territory while the fields and farms are occupied by the enemy.’ He meant the Russians, and they were soon gone.
Latvians seized three towns from their Soviet occupiers before the Germans arrived; by the end of 1941 Estonian partisans claimed to have captured 26,000 Soviet troops. In Ukraine likewise, the Red Army suffered at the hands of local guerrillas as well as the Germans. Ukrainian Polish teenager Stefan Kurylak was among a host of his countrymen who welcomed the expulsion of the Russians. One of their last acts in his village beside the Dniester was casually to hack down his best friend Stasha, fifteen years old, who had incurred their suspicion. The Germans’ arrival prompted widespread celebration among Ukrainians on both sides of the Soviet border. ‘As there seemed no doubt as to who the victors would be,’ wrote Kurylak, ‘our people … began to cooperate in every possible way with the German “liberators” … Some … even raised right arms to them smartly in the Nazi salute.’
In the first weeks of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht achieved some of the greatest victories in the annals of war. Entire armies were enveloped and destroyed, notably at Białystok, Minsk and Smolensk. Stalin’s soldiers surrendered in tens and hundreds of thousands. Russian aircraft losses mounted daily. Twenty-year-old pilot Heinz Knoke, a dedicated Nazi, described the exhilaration of strafing: ‘I never shot as well as this before. My Ivans lie flat on the ground. One of them leaps to his feet and dashes into the trees. The remainder forget to get up again … Smiling faces all around when the pilots report. We have dreamed for a long time of doing something like this to the Bolshevists. Our feeling is not exactly 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.’
Ivan Konovalov, one of thousands of Stalin’s pilots surprised by dive-bombers on his airfield, wrote: ‘All of a sudden there was an incredible roaring sound. Someone yelled “Take cover!” and I dived under a wing of my plane. Everything was burning – a terrible, raging fire.’ Alexander Andrievich, a supply officer, came upon the remains of a Soviet unit shattered by air attack: ‘There were hundreds upon hundreds of dead … I saw one of our generals standing by a crossroads. He had come to review his troops and was wearing his best parade uniform.