Inferno - Max Hastings [95]
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. A 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 riverside village 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 Bialystok-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. But his soldiers were fleeing in the opposite direction. He stood there forlorn and alone, while the troops flooded past. Behind him was an obelisk, marking the route of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.” The deputy political officer of the 5/147th Rifles led his men into action shouting, “For the Motherland and Stalin!” and was among the first to fall.
In brilliant sunshine, German troops in shirtsleeves rode their tanks and trucks in triumphant dusty columns across hundreds of miles of plains, swamps, forests. “We were following Napoleon’s invasion route,” Maj. Gen. Hans von Griffenberg wrote later, “but we did not think that the lessons of the 1812 campaign applied to us. We were fighting with modern means of transport and communication—we thought that the vastness of Russia could be overcome by rail and motor engine, telegraph wire and radio. We had absolute faith in the infallibility of Blitzkrieg.” A panzer gunner wrote to his father, a World War I veteran, in August 1941: “The pitiful hordes on the other side are nothing but felons who are driven by alcohol and the threat of pistols at their heads … a bunch of arseholes … Having encountered