At the same time telephone lines between the staff of the Fourth Army and the Western Special Military District, and to some divisions, were reported cut. Despatch riders were sent out until contact was re-established at 03.30 hours.(10)
Ninety minutes before, the General Staff of the Red Army released Directive Number 1, which raised the defence posture of the western military districts. It tersely announced:
‘During 22. and 23.6.1941 a surprise attack by the Germans on the fronts of the Leningrad Military District, the Baltic, Western, Kiev and Odessa Special Military Districts is possible. Attack could be preceded by provocative actions.’
Troops were instructed not to react to provocations, which would enormously complicate the issue’. Nevertheless, all the districts were placed on the highest alert ‘in order to meet an eventual surprise attack from the Germans or their Allies’. Marshal Timoshenko, the People’s Commissar for Defence, the head of the Red Army, signed the order. During the night gun positions on the border were ordered to be camouflaged, and aircraft dispersed and also hidden before dawn. Troops were to occupy battle positions, disperse and camouflage themselves. Air defences were alerted in border areas, but not allowed to mobilise additional conscript soldiers. ‘Black-out’ measures were introduced at key objectives of military importance and in the cities. Timoshenko ended by stating: ‘no further measures are to be taken without special directives.’
The message was telegraphed throughout the night. It reached the Kiev Special Military District at 02.30 hours on 22 June. The commander of the Western Military District received a copy at about 03.30 hours. Relayed onward to army staffs, Fourth Army HQ in Kobrin near Brest was contacted at 04.15 hours.(11)
H-hour for the German assault was set for 03.15 hours.
Colonel Nikolai Yeryomin with the 41st Rifle Division near Lvov heard:
‘The hollow rumble of many aircraft engines, swelling and then dying down again, vibrated over the camp, approaching from the west and sinking in the east. There was no doubt that they were warplanes, and heavy bombers at that…’
Disturbed, Yeryomin sought to pass on this worrying information. ‘For some inexplicable reason,’ he related, ‘I could not contact headquarters.’ A pale dawn was already appearing in the east; Sunday, 22 June, the longest day of the year. Suddenly the teletape began to tick. ‘I reported the flight of the aircraft and the behaviour of the Germans on the frontier,’ he said. Back came the disappointing if not entirely unexpected response: ‘Do not fire. Carry on with your observations. I shall at once report to the Chief of Staff. Wait for instructions.’
What was he to do now? The field telephone rang. It was a call from the frontier sector. An urgent metallic voice announced:
‘Comrade Colonel, the Germans have opened fire along the entire front of my sector. They have crossed the state boundary. My posts are in action.’
It was four o’clock in the morning. Yeryomin recalled: ‘breaking the stillness, the reverberations of the first salvoes of gunfire reached us from the frontier’.(12)
Chapter 4
H-Hour 03.15
‘The East is aflame.’
The River Bug…
Brest-Litovsk
Gerd Habedanck, a war correspondent, moved forward with the 45th Infantry Division. Its objective was the Russian fortress at Brest-Litovsk.
‘We came from Warsaw through heat, dust and jam-packed roads to the Bug. We passed tracts of woodland bristling with vehicle parks, artillery batteries in villages and radio relay stations and headquarters staffs under tall fir trees.
‘Silently, absolutely silently we crept up to the edge of the Bug. Sand had been strewn across the roads so that our hobnailed boots made no sound. Assault sections already grouped moved along the road edges in mute rows. Outlines of rubber dinghies were discernible as they shuttled along, raised up against the light of the northern sky.’
Joining the battalion headquarters in an old bunker, part of the original western defences alongside the Bug, Habedanck looked across the river where, 100m away, Russians sat in similar casemates. What might they be thinking? ‘One could clearly hear them speaking on the other side,’ he observed, while ‘further within [the fortress] a loudspeaker sounded’.(1)
Rudolf Gschöpf, the division chaplain, had held a final service at 20.00 hours. He now watched the doctor and medical orderlies dig shelter-trenches alongside the forward dressing station of the IIIrd Battalion of Regiment 135. They presently retired to a small house nearby and chatted together, welcoming any distraction from the rising tension. At 02.00 hours they glanced with surprise at the passage of a Russian goods train, ‘certainly with goods as part of the German–Russian economic agreement of 1939’, puffing up clouds of steam into the night air as it crossed the four-span railway bridge into Germany. This incongruous reminder of peacetime was entirely at variance with the bustling activity around the heavy mortar that was being loaded in preparation outside their house.
‘On the other side in the citadel, inside the houses, the barrack objectives and casemates, all appeared to be sleeping unconcerned. The waters of the Bug lapped peacefully while a tepid night lay over territory where, in a few blinks of an eye, death and destruction would break out.’(2)
General Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 had been ordered to cross the Bug on either side of the Russian fortress at Brest-Litovsk. Because the border demarcation line between Germany and the Soviet Russian zone in Poland was the River Bug, the fortress defences (which had already been conquered by the Wehrmacht during the 1939 Polish campaign, and subsequently withdrawn) were split. The citadel on the outskirts of the city was occupied by the Russians, while the old outer forts on the west side were in German hands.
Before the invasion of Russia Guderian was aware that ‘the supreme German command did not hold uniform views about the employment of armoured forces’. Panzer generals wanted their armoured divisions at the forefront of the attack right from the start, to avoid the confusion of mixing tanks with slower foot soldiers. Other arms of the service were of the opinion that initial assaults should be spearheaded by infantry divisions after heavy artillery preparation. Tanks would then exploit after the infantry had broken through to a specified point. The fortifications of Brest-Litovsk might be out of date, but Guderian’s view was that ‘the combination of the Bug, the Muchaviec [rivers] and water-filled ditches made them immune to tank attacks’. Therefore an infantry corps was placed under command, one division of which, the 45th, was to assault Brest directly. Guderian concluded that:
‘Tanks could only have captured the citadel by means of a surprise attack, as had been attempted in 1939. The requisite conditions for such an attack did not exist in 1941.’(3)
The fortress of Brest had been built in 1842. It consisted of four partly natural and partly artificial islands situated at the confluence of the Bug and Muchaviec rivers. In the centre was the Citadel Island, surrounded concentrically by three others: the western Terespol Island (referred to subsequently in the text as West Island), the northern Kobrin Island (North Island) and the Cholmsker Island to the south (South Island). The central ‘keep’ or citadel was ringed by a massive two-storey wall, easily defensible with 500 casemate and cellar positions, which doubled as troop accommodation. These positions were also connected by underground passages. Inside the walls were numerous other buildings including the ‘white house’ officers’ mess and the garrison church. The thick outer walls provided good protection against modern artillery. The West, North and South islands provided an outer defence belt, which supplemented the citadel, with 10m high earthwalls. These were studded with bastions or old casement forts complete with towers, such as the Nordfort (North Fort) and Ostfort (East Fort) on the North Island. In all, some 6km of defence works ringed the fortress.