South-Western Front, Colonel General Kirponos Commanding
At the headquarters of the South-Western Front, senior officers were desperately scrambling for any forces that they could place in the way of the advancing German 11th Panzer Division at Ostrog. There were no direct communications with General Lukin, who was commanding the fight at Ostrog from Shepetovka, so Colonel Bagramyan’s deputies reached him by routing the calls through Front’s headquarters in Kiev and by going through the military commandant of Shepetovka railroad station. This link, however, was intermittent and unreliable.
While Bagramyan was establishing communications with Lukin, Nikita Khruschev, the future Soviet premier, who was now more or less permanently at Kirponos’ headquarters, got on the phone with Moscow to request permission to temporarily delay full departure of Lukin’s Sixteenth Army until this situation was dealt with. He was unsuccessful.
Being stymied in their efforts to refit and reorganize their mechanized corps behind the infantry screen, Kirponos and his staff continued working on the renewed counterattack plans. The overall objective for all the four mechanized corps was to link up around Dubno and cut off and encircle the German armored spearhead. Staff officers were sent out to hand-deliver orders to the involved formations. Ominously, Front’s commissar Vashugin decided to follow them to familiarize himself with the situation up front. We already know the results of his encouragements from Ryabyshev’s and Popel’s descriptions of his visit.
Despite this being the fourth day of war, communications were still spotty. Bagramyan described the situation of controlling large numbers of troops in an information vacuum:
The hours of painful waiting dragged on. It seemed that the headquarters of the Fifth Army disappeared: not a single report. Headquarters of various mechanized corps were silent as well. How are they doing? Did they begin the offensive? I could not answer any of these questions posed by Chief of Staff of the Front. I sent out the most capable officers from the Operations Section. So far none of them came back yet…. Only General Astakhov was providing us with some information: his pilots can see where the fighting is the heaviest. However, they are having difficulty making sense of the situation from high altitude: there are no clearly defined front lines, instead some sort of a “layered cake” developed: ours and enemy units are intermingled. It goes without saying how difficult it is to direct troops dispersed over a huge territory.[52]
It is interesting to note that in the previous passage Bagramyan described the Soviet reconnaissance flights as being conducted at high altitude. This is a good illustration of German complete dominance of the air space above the battlefield, testament to effective German air defense and tactical fighter operations.
Only after the officers sent to the VIII and XV Mechanized Corps returned in the afternoon, the situation cleared up somewhat. They universally described difficulties imposed on the mechanized formations by the conflicted orders:
During the night, after receiving orders about pulling back, some divisions already left positions and, under cover of rear guards, began moving east. Then orders came in about returning and continuing the offensive in the same direction. Ryabyshev and Yermolayev barely had time to halt the retreating units, when new instructions came in: change direction of the attack.[53]
There was still no news from the northern wing of the attack:
Situation on the right flank continued to be unclear. We did not know results of Rokossovskiy and Feklenko corps’ attacks. Communications with Ryabyshev was intermittent, and we did not know if he took Dubno. [Lukin] also did not inform us if he was able to create a strong barrier to halt the enemy racing to take Ostrog.
In his memoirs, Bagramyan mentioned the previously described incident which occurred at Lieutenant General Ryabyshev’s headquarters. Bagramyan’s knowledge of the event was secondhand, possibly relayed to him by his liaison officer to the VIII Mechanized Corps: “Hot-tempered, energetic, [Vashugin] angrily berated [Ryabyshev] for delaying, and insisted that a mobile group be formed immediately.”[54]
No known memoirs exist about what transpired at the headquarters of the XV Mechanized Corps; however, Bagramyan writes: “[Vashugin’s] insistency was in vain. [XV Mechanized] Corps was heavily pinned down by constant enemy attacks and could not advance. Upset, Vashugin returned to Tarnopol.”[55] Knowing the extent of his rage displayed at Ryabyshev headquarters, where he at least obtained a small measure of compliance, it is easy to imagine the torrent of abuse and accusations that Vashugin must have heaped upon Colonel Yermolayev and the staff of XV Mechanized Corps’s headquarters.
After Zhukov departed Tarnopol for Moscow in the evening of June 26, Kirponos allowed himself to be swayed by Purkayev’s defensive strategy. A major factor in Kirponos’ decision-making was an incorrect belief that the German mobile group of forces would turn south from Dubno and Berestechko, with the goal of cutting off the Soviet armies in the Lvov pocket. This defensive posture is illustrated in the intelligence report issued by Kirponos’ staff at 2200 hrs the previous evening:
Radekhov-Brody direction. The enemy, deploying their… moto-mechanized group of forces in the area of Berestechko and the forward units in Dubno, Verba, Radzivilov, was attempting to widen the breakthrough in the direction of Brody-Tarnopol, but encountering fierce resistance of out units, was not successful.[56]
Another intelligence report, issued twelve hours later, recognized that German infantry divisions were being deployed in a defensive posture on the flanks of their mobile mechanized group.
Therefore, Kirponos was concentrating the XXVII Rifle Corps along the Zdolbunov-Kremenets line. Farther south, another rifle division, the 199th, belonging to the XLIX Rifle Corps, reinforced by three partially mobilized antitank brigades and the XXIV Mechanized Corps, was forming the second line of defense.
By the end of the day, the three Soviet armies holding the Lvov pocket, the Sixth, Twelfth, and Twenty-Sixth, remained mainly in their old positions. Only the Sixth, having to deal with a gapingly exposed right flank, gave up any territory of note to the Germans.
CHAPTER 11
Continue Mission, June 28
South-Western Front, Colonel General Kirponos Commanding
THE MORNING OF JUNE 28 found General Purkayev and Colonel Bagramyan scrambling for information about Potapov’s Fifth Army. Still out of communication with the Fifth Army, Colonel Bagramyan sent his deputy, Lt. Col. N. D. Zakhvatayev, to Potapov in order to get the most up-to-date information and evaluate the situation.
While the Sixth and Twenty-Sixth armies were still holding their own in Lvov pocket, a new player entered the scene against the Twelfth Army. Shortly before midnight, Hungarian troops crossed the Soviet border and were slowly moving forward under cover of intensive artillery barrages.
The situation at Ostrog was still unclear, and Kirponos positioned some of his reserves facing north approximately forty miles south of Ostrog. These reserves consisted of the XXIV Mechanized Corps, the 199th Rifle Division, three more-or-less mobilized antitank artillery brigades, and the 14th Cavalry Division. They were to intercept the possible German swing south from Ostrog. As usual, Purkayev disagreed with Kirponos, believing that the Germans would press on to Kiev as fast as possible. However, he was overruled by Kirponos, inadvertently reinforced in his belief by Zhukov, who acknowledged the possibility of German enveloping maneuver south of Ostrog.