In the center, the Soviet attack on the Fourth Army had originally been intended to hold it in place long enough to allow the encirclement operation to develop. As on the flanks, Russian preponderance in strength proved so great—in places, a single German battalion confronted two Soviet divisions—that the enemy almost immediately achieved deep penetrations. The most serious occurred at Orsha along the main Moscow-Minsk Rollbahn. Facing the collapse of his center, even the normally compliant Busch on the evening of the twenty-fourth unsuccessfully requested permission from Hitler for a general withdrawal. The next day, in a typically halfhearted fashion, Busch ordered some units to retreat, which merely left the rest in an exposed and untenable position. General Kurt von Tippelskirch, the acting commander of the Fourth Army (Heinrici was on leave), took matters in his own hands and ordered all units in the Dnieper bridgehead to withdraw. Busch became enraged when he heard of this action and directed the units to retake their old positions. Tippelskirch, however, parried Busch’s unrealistic order and, temporarily at least, saved some troops from immediate destruction by directing “all front units that had not been attacked to remain in their positions until attacked and forced back by the enemy.” By this time, even Busch had succumbed to reality. On the twenty-sixth, he flew to Berchtesgaden to try to convince Hitler of the brewing disaster. The Führer, however, simply restated his determination to hold Orsha and Mogilev, an order that had long been outrun by events. By this time, Soviet forces not only had crossed the Dnieper but were racing toward the Berezina, which they reached on the twenty-seventh, effectively blocking the line of the Fourth Army’s retreat. Even as German units now began to struggle westward through the enormous forests and swamps of Belorussia, harassed all the way by partisans and enemy air attacks, Soviet armored units raced westward, in a mirror image of 1941, to close the pincers at Minsk.15
On the twenty-eighth, as it dawned on the OKH that the Soviet goal was the encirclement of Army Group Center, even Hitler seemed finally to recognize the enormity of the catastrophe, sacking the hapless Busch, and replacing him with Model. What the latter, although eminently qualified, was to do in the face of a front shattered along a 360-mile width and with Soviet forces already 100 miles to the west, was another matter. That same day, Hitler had drawn another meaningless line on the map and demanded that it be held at all costs. In addition, he ordered that “no yard of ground be given up without a fight” and that the retreating forces—the Ninth Army, smashed to bits; the largely encircled Fourth Army; and the Third Panzer Army, with only one corps left of its original three—should withdraw as slowly as possible to the halt line. Not satisfied with this foray into an illusory world of German strength and Soviet weakness, the Führer also demanded that the Russian spearheads be cut off and the situation reversed in a series of “rapid, hard counterstrikes.”16
Even as on the twenty-ninth Russian planes pounded the key bridge across the Berezina at Berezino in an attempt to block the Fourth Army’s main line of retreat, the OKH made ready two units, the Fifth and Twelfth Panzer Divisions, for Hitler’s counterattack. On the thirtieth, the Twelfth Panzer, dispatched from Army Group North, launched a relief attack in the direction of Bobruisk with its forty-four Panzer IIIs and IVs, achieving some success through sheer audacity and surprise. Striking from Marina Gorka, it managed on 1 July to drive a small corridor through Soviet lines and link up with a force attacking out of the Bobruisk pocket, through which perhaps thirty-five thousand of the trapped Germans managed to escape before enemy forces pinched off the corridor. In the meantime, the Fifth Panzer, with a force of fifty-five Pz IVs and seventy Pz Vs (Panthers), supplemented by a heavy tank battalion of twenty Pz VIs (Tigers), had detrained at Borisov, north of Berezino and astride the main Moscow-Minsk highway. Its task was nothing less than to close the sixty-mile gap between the Third Panzer Army and the Fourth Army, in the process destroying Soviet units already to the west. Although it managed in a few days of hard fighting to destroy almost three hundred enemy tanks, its tactical successes did little to alter the balance of forces since on this front alone the Soviets had begun the battle with over eighteen hundred tanks. At best, the operation served only to delay the Russian advance for a few hours since enemy tank commanders quickly learned not to engage the Germans, simply bypassing the defenders by finding alternate routes to the west.17
As the Fifth and Twelfth Panzer Divisions fought desperately to stabilize the situation, scenes of gruesome horror played out at Berezino, where, just as in 1812, hordes of men, vehicles, and equipment were ensnared in a chaotic picture of destruction, panic, and despair. Pounded from the air, men desperately pushed across the river in the hope of reaching safety at Minsk, sixty miles to the west. The Russians, however, were bound to win any race to that city. On 2 July, advance Soviet units bypassed Minsk on the north and, the next day, aided by forces arriving from the south, seized the city against virtually no resistance. As the Fourth Army struggled westward, then, it found itself cut up into three smaller pockets within the larger encirclement based on Minsk. The liquidation of these pockets, however, was much more costly and time-consuming than the Soviets had expected. Driven by extreme fear at the prospect of being taken prisoner, large numbers of Landsers, so-called Ruckkämpfer (rear fighters, i.e., those fighting to get back), struggled mightily against huge obstacles to fight their way back to German lines that had been formed to the west of Minsk. Normally in small groups, but sometimes as individuals, these Ruckkämpfer, confronted by dense forests and disease-ridden swamps, with no food, and hunted relentlessly by partisans bent on revenge, trekked back in a strange odyssey of courage and determination.18
Despite these strange heroics, however—and Ruckkämpfer continued to straggle in through the end of October—in the period from 22 June to 10 July the Soviets had shattered Army Group Center. In roughly three weeks, some 250,000 Germans had been lost and twenty-eight divisions destroyed or so weakened that they were no longer fit for combat. Soviet losses, too, had been surprisingly high, with the most recent estimates from Russian sources citing a figure of over 440,000 casualties between 22 June and the end of July, of whom almost 100,000 were killed. Still, when Model assumed command of Army Group Center, “one could not have imagined a greater crisis,” as Hitler admitted a month later. Not only had the army group been ripped to shreds, but both Hitler and the OKH had received reports in the first half of July of disturbing signs of dissolution among the troops, many of whom simply fled in disorder to the west. Model, tough, energetic, talented at improvisation, and seemingly without nerves, recognized the gravity of the situation: not only did the army group face destruction, but the enemy also aimed to keep moving beyond Minsk. In early July, he sought to slow the Soviet advance with delaying actions at Molodechno and Baranovichi, but the grim fact was that over a third of the front could not be manned. In view of the shocking disparity in strength and his inability to form a linear defense, Model now made a daring decision. Since his forces were too weak for defense, he decided to make a virtue of necessity and slow the enemy advance through a series of swift, mobile counterattacks, a sort of hit-and-run defense. As with other such actions, it was tactically successful—in roughly a month, the Fifth Panzer Division, for example, destroyed almost five hundred enemy tanks and assault guns—but could not solve the larger problem.19