These orders completely nullified the fifty-mile road march westward accomplished by majority of Ryabyshev’s corps on this day. Now the VIII Mechanized Corps had to move seventy-five miles to northeast.
Popel bitterly thought about worn-out men and equipment, used-up fuel, and combat vehicles that broke down and had to be abandoned by the side of the road due to lack of recovery means. But he kept his thoughts to himself, more concerned how to best break the news to his men.
In order to meet the new time schedule, the VIII Mechanized Corps was forced to depart almost immediately, practically without any rest. They would have to retrace their steps back from Sambor to Drogobych to Striy, then north to Nikolaev and Lvov.
By 2300 hours the corps was on the move again. The road from Sambor to Drogobych again became choked with men and machines. The 12th Tank Division led off, then the 34th Tank, followed by 7th Motorized Rifle Division. While the 12th Tank Division moved off around 2300 hours, the rear-most units of the 7th Motorized Rifle did not get under way until dawn. The long column kept telescoping onto itself, in spurts of stop-and-go in the accordion fashion familiar to most military men. The soldiers in units towards the end of the long column could at least catch quick catnaps in their vehicles.
IX MECHANIZED CORPS
Working in his office right through the last night of peace, commander of the IX Mechanized Corps, Konstantin K. Rokossovskiy, was still awake when a duty officer knocked on his door at 0400 hours.
In an unconscious gesture which became his habit, Rokossovskiy rubbed his jaw. Four years earlier, in 1937, Rokossovskiy was swept up in the horrible wave of purges that all but swamped the Red Army. Arrested for close association with the discredited and executed Marshal Blukher, Rokossovskiy had undergone severe beatings at the hands of NKVD interrogators, and all of his teeth were knocked out. Now the fiery general of Russo-Polish ancestry sported a mouthful of metal teeth. After three years of incarceration, in May 1940 Rokossovskiy was freed, reinstated in rank, first appointed to command a cavalry corps, and, later, the IX Mechanized Corps, still in process of being formed.
The duty officer handed Rokossovskiy a message from headquarters of the Fifth Army: he was to immediately open the secret operational packet. The message was signed by the deputy chief of operations section of the Fifth Army. This was very irregular, since only two people were allowed to give this order: Stalin or Marshal Timoshenko.[11] Instructing the duty officer to authenticate the message through either the headquarters of the Fifth Army, the Kiev Special Military District, or the Defense Ministry, Rokossovskiy called together his senior officers.
The duty officer soon reported that communications were out; neither Moscow, Kiev, nor Lutsk were answering. On his own initiative, Rokossovskiy opened the secret packet. He was directed to bring his corps to combat readiness and deploy in the direction of Rovno, Lutsk, Kovel. Rokossovskiy immediately ordered general alert. The IX Mechanized Corps was still in its peacetime garrisons, spread out in the areas of Novograd-Volynskiy and Shepetovka, and it took time to pull the units together. While his divisions were getting on the way, Rokossovskiy’s staff officers hurriedly, but calmly, were preparing orders and dispositions for individual units.
Although the people were getting organized smoothly, the problems with equipment were immediately apparent. Only limited amounts of fuel, ammunition, and vehicles were on hand. Rokossovskiy ordered storage depots opened and necessary supplies and equipment distributed. After the war, Rokossovskiy ruefully recalled how he was almost thwarted in this endeavor by the supply officers. Unwilling to take responsibility for opening the emergency stores depots, the supply officers demanded Rokossovskiy’s personal signatures for every action. Rokossovskiy later joked that he never signed his name as much as he did on this first day of war.[12]
Chief of staff Maj. Gen. A. G. Maslov, was constantly trying to establish contact with higher headquarters. Around 1000 hours he succeeded in talking for a few minutes with the headquarters of the Fifth Army in Lutsk. A harried staff officer on the other end of the line told Maslov that Lutsk was being bombed for the second time; there were no reliable communications and no news of what was going on at the border.
Around 1100 hours Novograd-Volynskiy was overflown by a group of German bombers. Again, on his own authority, Rokossovskiy ordered his air-defense artillery to open fire, but no German aircraft were knocked down. This particular enemy flight apparently was on the way somewhere else, and the city was spared bombing for a time.
At 1400 hours, the IX Mechanized Corps set off toward Lutsk along three separate routes. Traveling along the southern route was the 131st Motorized Rifle Division under Col. N. V. Kalinin, a former cavalry officer. Wheeled vehicles were worth their weight in gold, and Rokossovskiy, again acting on his own authority, took almost two hundred trucks from the district’s reserve at Shepetovka and gave them to Kalinin.[13] Severely overloading his transport and having some of his infantrymen ride onboard tanks, Kalinin managed to get his division completely mounted and on the road. Being fully mobile, Kalinin’s division began making good time and moved ahead of the rest of the corps.
Kalinin later lamented that he should have attempted to split his division along two roads to facilitate movement.
The 489th Motorized Rifle Regiment under Lieutenant N. D. Sokolov was the first one to leave camp. The columns moved off along one road. The division immediately spread out to the length of 15–20 miles. By the time the leading units reached Rovno, the tail of the column was just leaving Novograd-Volynskiy. This clearly was a mistake. The march to Lutsk, of course, needed to be accomplished simultaneously along two roads. Then we would have arrived in Lutsk much sooner.[14]
Following Kalinin’s unit was the 35th Tank Division under Maj. Gen. N. A. Novikov and 20th Tank Division under Col. V. Chernyaev, also traveling along one road each and experiencing similar congestion problems. Colonel Chernyaev was in temporary command of the 20th Tank Division, while its permanent commander, Col. Mikhail Katukov, who himself only took command of this division in early June, was sick in a hospital. Katukov was to catch up to his division within a week, still feeling effects of his illness. He rose to distinction during the war, commanding the 1st Tank Army during the Battle of Kursk, and was awarded the rank of marshal in 1959.
As many other memoirists, Rokossovskiy mentioned a recurring fact appearing in practically all memoirs of the first days of war: an almost total lack of presence by Soviet Air Force. Most of these memoirists mentioned that the majority of the Soviet aircraft that they saw were either burning on the ground or scrambling from the airfields being bombed. Rokossovskiy ovskiy remembered encountering several Soviet airfields where burned and destroyed aircraft were lying almost wingtip to wingtip.[15]
Riding in his staff car, Rokossovskiy sadly observed long columns of his infantrymen struggling alongside the roads in intense heat, walking through clouds of dust and carrying on their backs all their personal equipment and extra ammunition. The men resembled the pack mules, hauling machine guns, mortar tubes, and plates and ammunition for them.
Each of his two tank divisions contained a motorized infantry regiment. However, these regiments were “motorized” in the name only. They were still very early in the formative stages. Being called “motorized,” Rokossovskiy’s infantry regiments did not have draft horses or wagons assigned to them while possessing roughly 30 percent of their assigned wheeled vehicles. Therefore, his men had to trudge toward the front under the weight of their equipment. During the first day of the war, the men of the two motorized infantry regiments of the tank divisions covered almost thirty miles, laboring under the weight of their equipment in the stifling heat. The tank divisions were forced to slow down in order not to outrun their infantry.