Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [79]
The Russian figures are largely estimates, as Russia has continually been shy of releasing material. They seem to have had about 200 divisions, of which 158 were in the west and facing the German attack; the rest were still in the Far East on guard against the Japanese; later on, the arrival of these battle-tried units was a major factor in stemming the German tide. They had forty-six motorized or armored brigades; at this time Russian armor was not organized on a divisional basis, and these brigades worked out at about twenty-two or -three divisions. All told there were probably 2,300,000 soldiers in European Russia. Of their roughly 6,000 aircraft, most types were obsolete or inferior to their German counterparts. On the other hand, they may have had as many as 10,000 tanks, the best of which came as a very rude surprise to the Panzers.
On the night of June 21-22, 1941, the entire German Army crouched in its jump-off positions, like a cat ready to spring. The Russians remained determinedly unconcerned, and German soldiers in position along the Neimen watched the last Russian trains chugging over the bridges, pathetically fulfilling Stalin’s bargain with Hitler, bringing supplies of strategic materials to Germany. The Russians were concentrated in depth along the frontier, ripe for the deep envelopment tactics the Germans were going to employ, and completely unaware of the danger in which they lay. Later on, their retreat—for those who survived to make it—was billed as Stalin’s plan to draw the invader deep into Russia and destroy him, but their initial dispositions belied this; they were caught absolutely flatfooted. Democratic governments are not the only ones taken by surprise.
At 0300 on the morning of the 22nd, the front opened up with a flash and a roar. Guns lighted the sky from the Baltic to the Black Sea; it was as if the sun were rising in the west. Tanks lurched across the frontier, and the Luftwaffe droned overhead, on its way to Russian airfields where the planes were lined up in neat rows, ready to be bombed and strafed in the first light of dawn. The Russian units on the frontier were swamped, tumbled out of their huts and holes before they even knew they were at war. As the sun climbed the eastern sky, the battle that was to be over in eight weeks, the battle that was to be the culmination of Adolf Hitler’s life and the justification of his philosophy, the battle that ended in the ruins of Berlin some two hundred weeks later, began at last.
Wherever they could, the Russians fought. Fierce and tenacious fighters, expecting little mercy and giving none, units rallied and tried to pull themselves together. But they had not extensively fortified Poland or the Baltic states; the speed of the Germans was so great that there was little to rally around. In many places, the chain of command simply collapsed, and the Russian high command appeared completely stunned by the attack and its viciousness. While some formations held hard and either fought their way clear or faded into the forests to continue their battle, others milled helplessly about, bombed and strafed, then shelled by passing tanks, until they fell before the advancing infantry. Within the first few days it looked as if the Germans were well ahead of their own predictions, and the war would soon be won.
Army Group North, advancing toward Leningrad, had no trouble clearing the Baltic states; they reached the Dvina by the end of the month, and by the first week of July they were on native Russian soil. Only as they neared Leningrad itself did they begin to slow down, with their tanks and their supply system both overextended. Army Group Center made fantastic progress, surrounding and taking a quarter of a million prisoners west of Minsk. They rolled on toward Smolensk, where they took another quarter of a million. Time and again the Panzers slashed through weak Russian lines and encircled thousands of still-fighting