In the evening of June 22, the bulk of the 41st Tank Division reached its staging area in the vicinity of Kovel. There were still no communications with the XXII Mechanized Corps or the Fifth Army. Whatever meager news Lieutenant Colonel Malygin could gather trickled in over the newly laid telephone line to the headquarters of Colonel Fedyuninskiy’s XV Rifle Corps at Lyuboml. The 41st Motorized Rifle Regiment belonging to Malygin’s division was by then fully engaged in fighting on the border and was barely holding the gap between the 45th and 62nd divisions of the XV Rifle Corps.
Several hours later, Colonel Pavlov rejoined the main body of the 41st Tank Division with the remains of the tank battalion that was left behind to assist Alyabyshev. This tank battalion was one of the very first Soviet armored formations to engage the Germans in World War II. For a time, they helped hold Vladimir-Volynskiy, but at a steep price. Out of fifty T-26 tanks, almost thirty were destroyed. While advancing in support of Alyabyshev’s infantry, the light-skinned T-26s were severely mauled by German antitank artillery. Battalion commander, Maj. A. S. Suin, wiping away blood from a minor head wound, described to Malygin and other staff officers how some tanks were put out of commission even by fire of heavy machine guns. Lacking means to recover damaged vehicles and ceding the ground to the enemy, all the disabled vehicles of Suin’s battalion were irretrievably lost. Neither Pavlov nor Suin knew yet that Vladimir-Volynskiy, for which their men paid so dearly, was lost in the late evening after their departure.
As darkness descended over Vladimir-Volynskiy, bursts of automatic weapon fire and sporadic explosions still ripped the night. Here and there, isolated groups of border guards were holding out in basements of their destroyed block houses. Some bunkers of the fortified region grimly hung on for days, waiting for relief that would not come. Border Guard Outpost #13 under Lt. A. I. Lopatin held out for eleven days and died to the last man.
SOKAL DIRECTION
On General Alyabyshev’s left flank, the 124th Rifle Division, under Maj. Gen. F. G. Suschiy, was responsible for roughly twenty-four miles of the border. The bulk of its units was stationed over twenty-five miles away to the east, behind a small town called Sokal. This tiny town, located on the east side of Western Bug River, was approximately eight miles from the border. The river, following the border in 87th Rifle Division’s sector, veers off southeast in that of the 124th, with less than ten miles of ground between the river and the border. This small land bridge gave the German advance the chance to pick up steam before coming into contact with Soviet field forces around Sokal.
Racing through the thinly held border and bypassing resisting bunkers, forward elements of four German infantry divisions captured Sokal before the Soviet forces could set up effective defenses there. Red Army units, hampered by German air strikes, clashed in a series of meeting engagements east of Sokal with rapidly advancing German infantry, closely supported by the 11th Panzer Division. Major General Crüwell’s 11th Panzer Division went into action around 1000 hours and, with a reconnaissance battalion in the lead, quickly pushed east. Despite sporadic fire from isolated Soviet pockets of resistance, the division made good progress.
The Soviet resistance was rapidly collapsing as the 11th Panzer Division expanded its front and was more of a nuisance than a serious threat. As Sergeant Alfred Höckendorf from the 4th Company of the 15th Panzer Regiment rode his scout motorcycle through the field of tall wheat, a wild artillery shot came from nowhere, rendering the motorcycle a total loss. For a short time, Sergeant Bergander and his panzer stayed behind with Höckendorf and his disabled machine. However, Bergander had to resume the advance, and Sergeant Höckendorf remained alone. From time to time, disoriented and dispirited Soviet soldiers in ones and twos chanced upon the German sergeant. A few shots from Höckendorf, taking cover behind the wreck of his motorcycle, were usually sufficient to convince the Russians to drop their weapons. By the time a German search party located Höckendorf, he was guarding a group of forty Red Army prisoners.[8]
Soviet divisions holding this sector of the border were inadvertently deployed in a sort of checkerboard formation. The spaces between the forward-most divisions were to be occupied by the supporting divisions upon mobilization. In fact, the 135th Rifle division of the XXVII Rifle Corps, part of Fifth Army’s reserve, had been on the march since June 20, aiming to take up positions between its sister 87th and 124th divisions. However, when Germans struck at dawn of June 22, the 135th Rifle Division was still over sixty miles away from the border.
By the end of June 22, the ever-present German mobile reconnaissance units found unguarded gaps between the 87th and 124th Rifle Divisions and their neighbors north and south. Quickly exploiting these openings, while pinning the Soviet divisions from the front, German follow-on echelons began flowing around their flanks. Nightfall on June 22 found the two Soviet divisions surrounded on three sides and out of touch with each other, their neighbors, and higher command. The forward elements of the 15th Panzer Regiment belonging to 11th Panzer Division, when halted for the night at 2300 hours, were actually behind the positions of the 124th Rifle Division, approximately twenty miles into Soviet territory, west of Stoyanov. This Soviet division was in especially bad shape. Two of its rifle regiments, when pushed back from their garrisons in small towns of Tartakov and Poritsk, lost their regimental depots and virtually all their supplies there.
KOVEL DIRECTION
North of the XXVII Rifle Corps, the XV Rifle Corps under Col. Ivan Fedyuninskiy also found itself pressed hard.[9] However, not being astride main axis of German invasion, two divisions of the XV Rifle Corps were in a relatively stable position. Nonetheless, an undefended gap of over ten miles developed on its left, southern, flank between its 62nd Rifle Division and the 87th Rifle Division of the XXVII Corps.
Opposing Fedyuninskiy’s corps and advancing close behind rolling artillery barrages, Landsers from the German 56th Infantry Division crossed the Soviet border at 0315 hours. Ferried across the Bug River in rubber boats and rafts, German assault parties captured intact the bridges south of Vlodava, and the main body of their division flowed across these vital bridges. Spear-headed by the advance elements, German XVII Army Corps began developing its attack along the Lyuboml-Kovel axis.
As the first German soldiers were splashing into the Bug River, Colonel Fedyuninskiy was smoking at the window of his apartment in Kovel. Looking at dark spires of a small Gothic cathedral, he was tired, but could not sleep. There was a lot to think about. An unpleasant sound of telephone interrupted Fedyuninskiy’s worried reverie. His immediate superior, commander of the Soviet Fifth Army, Maj. Gen. Mikhail Potapov, was on the other end of the line. With tension in his voice, Potapov ordered Fedyuninskiy to return to his headquarters and stand by for Potapov’s call.[10] With a sinking feeling, Fedyuninskiy did not wait for a staff car to pick him up and practically ran to his nearby headquarters. On the way there Fedyuninskiy could hear sounds of explosions coming from the border.
9
In a curious incident, when Ivan Fedyuninskiy was appointed to command the XV Rifle Corps in April of 1941, his expected promotion to Major-General had not come through yet. As the result, Colonel Fedyuninskiy was in charge of several major-generals in his corps, including his second-in-command and his division commanders.