It took some four hours for situation reports to get out. Third Soviet Army HQ in Grodno, north-west of Bialystok, called the Western Special Military District Chief of Staff:
‘From 04.00 hours, there were aviation raids of three to five aircraft each every 20 to 30 minutes. Grodno, Sopotskin, and especially army headquarters were bombed. At 07.15 hours Grodno was bombed by 16 aircraft at an altitude of 1,000m. Dombrovo and Novy Drogun are burning. There are fires in Grodno. From 04.30–07.00 hours there were four raids against the Novy Dvor airfield by groups of 13 to 15 aircraft. Losses: two aircraft burned, six were taken out of action. Two men were seriously and six lightly wounded. At 05.00 hours the Sokulka airfield was subjected to enemy bombing and machine gunfire. Two men were killed and eight wounded.’(15)
Back at Suwalki air base in Poland, Stuka dive-bombers and Messerschmitt Bf109s converted into fighter-bombers were lining up and jockeying for position in the half light of dawn. Leutnant Heinz Knoke remembered the general alert for all Geschwader sounded at 04.00 hours. ‘Every unit on the airfield is buzzing with life,’ he recalled. With all the activity came an increasing awareness of the scale of this operation. ‘All night long,’ Knoke declared, ‘I hear the distant rumble of tanks and vehicles. We are only a few kilometres from the border.’ Within one hour his squadron was airborne. Four fighter aircraft in Knoke’s Staffel, including his own, were equipped with bomb-release mechanisms. They had practised for this mission weeks ahead. ‘Now there is a rack slung along the belly of my good “Emil”, carrying 100 2.5kg fragmentation bombs,’ he declared. ‘It will be a pleasure for me to drop them on Ivan’s dirty feet.’
The objective was a Russian headquarters situated in woods to the west of Druskieniki; it was to be a low-level pass. As they skimmed treetops ‘we noticed endless German columns rolling eastwards’. As he looked up, he observed bomber formations ‘and the dreaded Stuka dive-bombers alongside us, all heading in the same direction’.(16)
Kesselring’s Luftflotten, using the ambient light of dawn, were now flying in formation, intent on delivering the main blow following the initial spoiling attacks. The first strikes were made by 637 bombers and 231 fighters penetrating Soviet airspace shortly after first light. Their objectives included 31 airfields.(17)
Arnold Döring, the Luftwaffe navigator flying in formation with KG53, flew over the River Bug frontier at 04.15 hours. Pilots and crew clinically went about their business.
‘Quite relaxed, I made a few adjustments to our course. Then I looked out of the window. It was very hazy down below, but we could make out our targets. I was surprised that the antiaircraft guns had not yet started up.’(18)
The formation started its bombing run. All along the Eastern Front from the North Cape to the Black Sea, waves of Kesselring’s four Luftflotten crossed the border and immediately went into the assault. Stuka dive-bombers descended shrieking onto more easily identified targets, while medium bombers carried on to more distant objectives. Fighter-bombers bombed and strafed Soviet airfields. ‘We could hardly believe our eyes,’ reported Hauptmann Hans von Hahn, commander of the 1st Staffel of Jagdgeschwader (JG) 3 operating against the Lvov area to the south. ‘Row after row of reconnaissance planes, bombers and fighters stood lined up as if on parade.’(19)
Döring’s Heinkel He111 lifted as it dropped its bombs. Down below, the navigator observed:
‘Smoke clouds, flames, fountains of earth, mixed with all sorts of rubble shoots into the air. Blast it! Our bombers had missed the ammunition bunkers to the right. But the lines of bombs continued along the length of the airfield and tore up the runway. We’d scored two hits on the runway. No fighters would be able to take off from there for some time.’
Other bomber groups would soon unleash their bombs over the same target. He glanced back, ‘as we climbed again’, and ‘I could see that about 15 of the fighters on the runway were in flames as well as most of the living quarters.’ They set course back to base. This had been their first bombing mission. ‘We’d been so successful,’ he reported ‘that there was no longer any need to carry out the second raid we had planned on the airfield.’(20)
These early morning successes were not achieved without loss. In Poland, Siegfried Lauerwasser, a combat cameraman, was filming aircraft as they returned to their bases. ‘That’s how it started,’ he stated, running the film for television after the war. Within a few hours it became apparent some crews were missing. It was ‘a great surprise,’ he said, ‘when we were told “so and so” had not returned, and we waited’. They were not coming back. ‘What a shock. Comrades, friends, human beings gone – with unknown fates – people you had lived with for days and months together.’(21) This was to be an often repeated experience.
The most devastating pre-emptive strike in the short history of air warfare was gathering momentum.
The shortest night of the year…
H-hour
Leutnant Heinrich Haape, medical officer of III/IR18, stood with his battalion commander, Major Neuhoff, and Adjutant Hillemanns on the crest of a small hill on the south-eastern border of East Prussia. They were peering into the darkness ahead, trying unsuccessfully to pick out recognisable features on the pitch-black Lithuanian plain stretching before them. Five minutes remained to H-hour.
‘I glanced at the luminous dial of my wrist watch. It is exactly 3 a.m. I know that a million other Germans are looking at their watches at the same time. They have all been synchronised.’
Haape was sweating slightly. This was more from ‘the awful tenseness of these fateful minutes’ rather than the sultry night. He noticed:
‘A man lights a cigarette. There is a barked command and the glowing end drops earthward, sparks on the ground, and is stamped out. There is no conversation; the only sounds the occasional clink of medal, the pawing of a horse’s hoofs, the snort of his breath. I imagine I can see a faint blush in the distant sky. I am eagerly searching for something on which to fix my eyes and divert my thoughts. Dawn is breaking. In the east the black sky is greying. Will these last seconds never tick away? I look again at my watch. Two minutes to go.’(1)
The shortest night of the year was nearing its end. Although at ground level all was shrouded in a murky darkness, the sky was taking on a distinctly lighter hue.
Erich Mende, an Oberleutnant in the 8th Silesian Infantry Division, remembered a last-minute conversation with his commanding officer shortly before going into action. ‘My commander was twice as old as me,’ he said ‘and had already fought the Russians as a young Leutnant on the Narwa front in 1917.’