However, even with the eleventh hour approaching, the Soviet dictator still resisted full mobilization and consented only to bringing the armed forces to alert status. Shortly after midnight, a terse directive was transmitted from Moscow to all the Soviet military districts lying along the western border:
21st June 1941
Directive to the Military Councils of Leningrad Military District, Baltic Military District, Western Special Military District, Kiev Special Military District, Odessa Military District
Copy to: People’s Commissar of the Navy of the USSR
1. During 22nd–23rd of June, 1941, a sudden German attack is possible along the fronts of Leningrad Military District, Baltic Military District, Western Special Military District, Kiev Special Military District, and Odessa Military District. The attack may be preceded by provocations.
2. Mission of our forces—not to fall for any provocations, possibly leading to serious consequences. At the same time, forces of Leningrad, Baltic, Western, Kiev, and Odessa military districts are to be at full combat readiness to meet the possible sudden attack by Germany or its allies.
3. I order:
• During the night of June 22, 1941, to secretly occupy the firing positions of fortified regions along the state border.
• Before dawn on June 22, 1941, to disperse and thorough camouflage all aircraft along the field airfields, including army-level aviation.
• All units to be brought up to full readiness. The forces are to be kept dispersed and concealed.
• Air defense is to be brought up to full readiness without calling up additional round-out personnel. Prepare all measures for blackout of cities and important objects.
• Do not take any other measures without specific instructions.
On the crucial night when the above directive was transmitted to Kiev Special Military District, both the district headquarters and headquarters of the Fifth Army were on the move. An earlier directive, received on June 19, ordered these higher headquarters to relocate their operations to their respective field command posts.
The command element of the Fifth Army departed its headquarters in Lutsk after 0100 hours on June 22, headed by its chief of staff, Maj. Gen. D. S. Pisarevskiy. A skeleton crew stayed behind with the army commander Maj. Gen. Mikhail I. Potapov to continue operations until the alternate post came on line in the woods surrounding Byten collective farm, roughly forty miles northeast of Lutsk. When the alert directive was received in Lutsk around 0230 hours, the convoy bearing Pisarevskiy and the rest of headquarters personnel was just reaching their destination near Byten and was out of touch with Lutsk. With the war being an hour away, General Potapov had no means to reach his command element.
Potapov personally made calls to headquarters of the four corps comprising his Fifth Army, while a duty officer was tasked with calling the army-level support units. The already mentioned XV and XXVII Rifle Corps were deployed directly along the border. Their subordinate units were located anywhere from five to forty miles east of it on roughly north-south axis. The two mechanized corps of the Fifth Army, the 9th and 22nd, were spread out over a significant distance along the west-east axis to the border. The XXII Mechanized Corps was the closest, with its 41st Tank Division being just six miles from the border in Vladimir-Volynskiy. The rest of the corps was over ninety miles east in Rovno. The other mechanized corps, the IX, was farther east, centered on the town of Novograd-Volynskiy, over 150 miles from the border.
Potapov’s direct superior, Col. Gen. M. P. Kirponos, was in a similar situation, moving his command post forward from Kiev to Tarnopol. Almost a month earlier, on May 27, 1941, the Soviet General Staff issued orders to all western border districts’ headquarters to begin building field command posts with all haste.[15] Despite these instructions, when Timoshenko’s orders arrived on June 19 to move Kiev Special Military District’s command element to Tarnopol, no such command post was yet prepared. Until Kirponos and his entourage descended on Tarnopol on June 21, the small garrison where his new command post was to be set up was occupied by some minor Soviet rear-echelon unit. It was unceremoniously moved on, and feverish work began bringing the command post to a working condition.
Kirponos and his staff moved in two elements. The first element, carrying the district commander and senior personnel, plus some communications equipment, moved by train in the morning of June 21. They were followed by the rest of headquarters personnel and more equipment in the evening of the same day, moving in a truck and bus convoy commanded by the chief of operations section, Col. Ivan Kh. Bagramyan.
In the early morning of June 22, Kirponos’ new command post was not yet fully functional. Thus, commander of the strongest Soviet military district was limited to several telephone lines, routed through the civilian telephone exchanges, and a teletype machine. There were several radio stations set up around Tarnopol, belonging to units garrisoned there, but the use of radio was expressly forbidden until the start of combat operations.[16]
A small staff of several cipher clerks and communications officers was left behind in Kiev to handle all communications traffic until the command post in Tarnopol was set up by the end of June 22. This skeleton crew received Moscow’s directive around 0100 hours. After being deciphered, it was then encoded again and forwarded to Tarnopol, were it had to be decoded once more. After Kirponos; his chief of staff, Major General Purkayev; and district’s commissar, Nikolay N. Vashugin; evaluated the orders, they were encoded yet again and forwarded down to armies.
This constant conversion of instructions in and out of code resulted in loss of precious time. Notification of first-echelon armies was uneven at best. The Fifth Army received this directive by 0230. However, the Twelfth and Twenty-Sixth armies were notified only around 0400 hrs, when it was already too late. The Sixth Army was not informed of the above directive at all; its commander, Lt. Gen. I. N. Muzychenko sounding an alert based on reports from his own forward troops and border guard outposts. This interim alert order did not filter down to a majority of individual corps and divisions, which had to go directly from peacetime to wartime footing without even a minimal notification period by their commanders.
A major factor in the breakdown of Soviet military communications were pinpoint strikes directed specifically at communication facilities. Up to a week prior to the invasion, small units of German commandos and activated cells of anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist OUN organization had been infiltrating the Soviet territory. Now these units struck at vital and vulnerable Soviet installations, adding chaos and confusion behind the Red Army lines. Paramount among these targets were Soviet communications centers. Pending mobilization orders, the Soviet military communications were routed through the civilian telephone and telegraph installations. Now, the German commandos and Ukrainian saboteurs struck at these virtually unguarded soft vital targets, almost instantly blacking out Soviet communications at the main thrust of German invasion. Since the use of military radios were expressly forbidden until the official mobilization orders, and these orders came too late, the loss of regular telephone and telegraph lines left a significant portion of the forward Red Army commands deaf and mute.