‘There was not the slightest evidence of the presence of the assault groups and companies directly on the Bug. They were well camouflaged. One could well imagine the taut nerves that were reigning among men, who, in a few minutes, would be face to face with an unknown enemy!’(8)
Gerd Habedanck was abruptly awoken by the metallic whir of an alarm clock inside his vehicle. ‘The great day has begun,’ he wrote in his diary. A silvery light was already permeating the eastern sky as he made his way to the battalion headquarters bunker down by the river. It was crowded inside:
‘A profusion of shoving, steel helmets, rifles, the constant shrill sound of telephones, and the quiet voice of the Oberstleutnant drowning everything else out. “Gentlemen, it is 03.14 hours, still one minute to go.”’
Habedanck glanced through the bunker vision slit again. Nothing to see yet. The battalion commander’s comment, voiced yesterday on the opening bombardment, still preyed on his mind.
‘It will be like nothing you have experienced before.’(9)
Air strike…
First light
The pilot of the Heinkel He111 bomber kept the control column pulled backwards as the aircraft continued climbing. He glanced at the altimeter: it wavered, held, then continued to move clockwise past 4,500–5,000m. The crew were signalled to don oxygen masks. At 03.00 hours the aircraft droned across the Soviet frontier at maximum height. Below was a sparsely inhabited region of marsh and forest. Even had the rising throb been discernible from the ground, nobody would have linked it to an impending start of hostilities.
Kampfgeschwader (KG) 53 had taken-off in darkness south of Warsaw, steadily climbing to maximum height before setting course to airfields between Bialystok and Minsk in Belorussia. Dornier Do17-Zs from KG2 were penetrating Soviet airspace to the north toward Grodno and Vilnius. KG3, having taken-off from Demblin, was still climbing between Brest-Litovsk and Kobrin. The aircrew scanning the darkened landscape below for navigational clues were hand-picked men, with many hours’ night-flying experience. These 20–30 aircraft formed the vanguard of the air strike. The mission was to fly undetected into Russia and strike fighter bases behind the central front. Three bombers were allocated to each assigned airfield.(1)
They droned on towards their targets. Below, the earth was shrouded in a mist-streaked darkness. Pin-pricks of light indicated inhabited areas. Ahead, and barely discernible, was a pale strip of light emerging above the eastern horizon. There was little cloud. Only 15 minutes remained before H-hour.
Behind them, in German-occupied Poland, scores of airstrips were bustling with purposeful activity. Bombs were still being loaded and pilots briefed. Aircraft engines burst into life, startling birds who flew off screeching into the top branches of trees surrounding isolated and heavily camouflaged landing strips.
Leutnant Heinz Knoke, a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf109 fighter pilot based at Suwalki air force station near the Russian frontier, watched as groups of Junkers Ju87 Stuka dive-bombers and fighter planes from his own unit slowly took shape in the emerging twilight. There had been rumours of an attack on Russia. ‘That appeals to me,’ he confided to his diary that night. ‘Bolshevism is the archenemy of Europe and of western civilisation.’ Orders came through earlier that evening directing that the scheduled Berlin-Moscow airliner was to be shot down. This created quite a stir. His commanding officer took-off with the headquarters flight to execute the mission, ‘but they failed to intercept the Douglas’.
Knoke had spent the earlier part of the night sitting in the mess discussing the likely course of events with other pilots. ‘The order for shooting down the Russian Douglas airliner,’ he wrote, ‘has convinced me that there is to be a war against Bolshevism.’ They sat around waiting for the alert.(2)
‘Hardly anybody could sleep,’ recalled Arnold Döring, a navigator with KG53, the ‘Legion Condor’, ‘because this was to be our first raid.’ Aircrews had been up since 01.30 hours, briefing and preparing for a raid on Bielsk-Pilici airport. The aerodrome was thought to be full of Soviet fighter aircraft. As they hurried ‘like madmen’ about the airfield, attending to last-minute preparations, they were aware of ‘a glare of fire and a faint strip of light that signalled the approaching day’. Although these aircraft were not part of the vanguard force, already airborne, they still faced the difficulty of taking-off and forming up in the dark. ‘So many things went through my mind,’ Döring recalled. ‘Would we be able to take-off in darkness, with fully laden machines, from this little airfield, where we’d only been a few days?’
The Luftwaffe was confident with its task but, inevitably on the eve of combat, there was nervous trepidation. Hans Vowinckel, a 35-year-old bomber crew member wrote to this wife:
‘I have not quite said what I truly feel, and really wish to say. Already there is insufficient time off to write. You will come to understand later why this is the case. So much remains unsaid. But basically I think you know exactly what I want to say!’(3)
Planning for this crucial air strike, which aimed to guarantee the requisite air superiority needed to support the ground force attack, had been going on at the Gatow Air Academy near Berlin since 20 February 1941. Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, the commander of Luftflotte 2, was given overall command of the Luftwaffe forces earmarked for ‘Barbarossa’. Hitler, convinced of the innate inferiority of the Soviet Union had been ‘stunned’ by early reports presented on the Red Air Force.(4) Luftwaffe Intelligence (Ic) reports assessed the total strength of the Red Air Force to be 10,500 combat aircraft, of which 7,500 were in European Russia and 3,000 in Asia. Only 50% of these were reckoned to be modern. The number of aircraft they might expect to encounter over the front, not including transport and liaison assets, was estimated at 5,700. Some 1,360 reconnaissance and bomber types and 1,490 fighters were believed to be operational. These could be reinforced during the first half of 1941 by 700 new fighters. These formed part of a modernisation and re-equipment programme which would also update 50% of the bomber fleet but not increase its overall numbers. In support, the Red Air Force could depend on 15,000 fully trained pilots, 150,000 ground personnel and 10,000 training aircraft.(5)
The Luftwaffe, by contrast, on 21 June had 757 bombers operational from a total of 952, 362 of 465 dive-bombers, 64 Messerschmitt Bf110 Zerstörer fighters (the Bf110 Zerstörer, or destroyer, was a heavy fighter) and 735 of 965 conventional fighters, in addition to reconnaissance, sea, liaison and transport types.(6) Despite the Soviet superiority – they had three or four times the number of Luftwaffe aircraft – Luftwaffe staffs assessed overall enemy combat effectiveness would be much smaller. Because of the size of the operational area to be overflown and scepticism over Russian training and command and control capabilities, it was thought the Soviet air divisions would not to be able to mount joint operations with their ground forces. Luftwaffe General Konrad briefed Halder, the German Army Chief of Staff, selectively on the Red Air Force. Fighters were rated inferior to Luftwaffe variants and were described as ‘fair game for German fighters’ – as were the bombers. Red Air Force training, leadership and tactics were belittled. Halder commented in note form that Soviet leadership skills were ‘hard and brutal, but without training in modern tactics, and mechanical, lacking adaptability’.(7)