‘On the forward edge of the Flak position was the half-constructed tripod of a heavy machine gun. Behind it lay its gunner, mortally wounded, gasping with a severe gunshot wound to the lung. His eyes were glazed over and he groaned with pain and thirst. “Have you anything to drink Kamerad?” he asked me. I passed him my canteen with difficulty. To my right the machine gunner sat bolt upright, unmoving. There was no response when I spoke to him. In the immediate vicinity a sad concert of cries from the helpless wounded could be heard from all sides. “Medic, medic. God in Heaven, help me!” The sniper had been particularly effective in his work.’
Teuschler, nearing the end of his strength, weakly struggled to extricate himself from the top of an uncomfortable ammunition box, upon which he had fallen backwards after being shot. ‘My chest felt as heavy as lead,’ he admitted, ‘and my shirt and tunic were soaked in blood’. He placed a field dressing on his chest to ‘build up a crust’ to match that which had congealed over the exit wound on his back, where he had lain on the box. His senses, dulled by shock, barely enabled him to complete the process. But having achieved it ‘he felt himself rescued and began wandering through a wonderful dream world’.(27) He was delirious. All the time the sun beat mercilessly down.
At 13.50 hours Generalleutnant Schlieper, the commander of 45th Infantry Division, on the North Island observing the faltering attack from a vantage point in Infantry Regiment 135’s sector, resigned himself to the inevitable. The citadel would not be taken by infantry attack alone. Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, the commander of Army Group Centre, had visited the XIIth Corps Command Post 40 minutes before, and came to the same conclusion. At 14.30 hours it was decided to withdraw the 45th Division vanguard elements who had already penetrated the citadel. The move would have to be conducted under the cover of darkness. Once a clear combat demarcation line had been established, the Russian garrison could be reduced by systematic and directed artillery fire. Commander Fourth Army confirmed the decision. The division log explained the reasoning:
‘He did not want any unnecessary casualties; traffic on the “Rollbahn” and railway line already appeared possible. Enemy interference to this should be prevented. In general, the Russians should be starved out.’(28)
It was a depressing start to the campaign for 45th Division: 21 officers and 290 NCOs and men had been killed in the first 24 hours.(29) This represented two-thirds of the entire losses suffered during the preceding six-week French campaign.
The XIIth Corps requested additional support from self-propelled guns and flamethrowers. Mopping up was unlikely to be achieved by artillery alone.
Across the River Bug, the decisions being enacted at headquarters had no impact upon the intensity of the fighting raging in and around the citadel as dusk settled. The outline of the garrison church was barely discernible, shrouded by the dust and smoke of battle. Some 70 German soldiers, still holding Russian prisoners, were cut off. There was radio contact, but intermittent. Fresh salvoes of artillery fire howled over the headquarters and began to flash and crackle in the dying light. This appeared no easy task.
‘Only 1,000km as the crow flies to Moscow’
‘Thank God! It’s started up again!’ wrote a Wochenschau newsreel cameraman on his calendar.(1) The tension of the previous weeks had broken at last. ‘It appears that we brutally surprised the Russians early this morning,’ confided 28-year-old Ulrich Modersohn in a letter to his mother. Modersohn, serving with Army Group South, described how:
‘It was never possible for him to muster any worthwhile resistance. Our artillery and Stuka fire must have been pure hell for him. By midday assault bridges were across the Bug and ready. Now our troops are rolling over into Russia. This afternoon I saw how the earth shook and the sky hummed… Everything is following the set plan.’(2)
First-day impressions recorded by soldiers reveal elation at the extent of success and atmospheric descriptions of conflict often just out of sight. Robert Rupp, a Berlin school teacher in civilian life, wrote: ‘The thunder of artillery woke us at 03.15 hours. 34 batteries are firing.’ He was observing the River Bug border from the edge of a wood 7km away:
‘Soon villages were burning and white Very flares climbed high. The front raged like a lightning storm. Grey stripes climbed up into the sky if Flak fired and dispersed slowly. An aircraft fell burning to the ground. The sky, which to begin with was red and clear, became tinged with purple and green. A huge smoke-cloud stood behind the low base-line silhouette of the ground and turned slowly to the right. I tried to sleep a little but managed only a doze.’(3)
Oberleutnant Siegfried Knappe observed the infantry assaults that advanced following the pause in the opening artillery barrage in the Army Group Centre sector:
‘As the infantry moved forward, the morning darkness was filled with the sounds of shouting, the crack of rifle shots, the short bursts of machine guns, and the shattering crashes of hand-grenades. The rifle fire sounded like the clatter of metal-wheeled carts moving fast over cobblestone streets. Our infantry overran the barbed wire the Russians had erected on each side of their no-man’s land and stormed the guard towers and pillboxes the Russians had built immediately beyond the death strip.’
Short bitter fire-fights took place with an enemy who often stood his ground even though surprised. ‘Our men took as prisoners those Russians who surrendered and killed those who resisted,’ commented Knappe. A bottle-neck of retreating Russian soldiers was decimated at a bridge in Sasnia, the objective, by Stuka dive-bomber support. Knappe, a veteran of the French campaign, confronted with the sight of the first dead bodies, declared: ‘although I was no longer shocked by the sight, I had not become accustomed to it either.’ The advance rolled irresistibly eastwards. Knappe’s unit, the 87th Infantry Division, was preceded by Panzer formations. ‘We took Sasnia and Grajewo the first day,’ he declared, ‘and then started the long road to Moscow.’(4)
Progress was evident along the entire 3,000km front. Curizio Malaparte, an Italian war correspondent with Army Group South standing on the banks of the River Prut, watched the advance of a mechanised division near Galatz.
‘The exhausts of the Panzers belch out blue tongues of smoke. The air is filled with a pungent, bluish vapour that mingles with the damp green of the grass and with the golden reflection of the corn. Beneath the screaming arch of Stukas the mobile columns of tanks resemble thin lines drawn with a pencil on the vast green slate of the Moldavian plain.’
He was held up for two hours as the column rumbled by. ‘The smell of men and horses gives way to the overpowering reek of petrol,’ he remarked. Traffic control at crossroads was conducted by groups of ‘stern, impassive Feldgendarmen’ (military police). Lorried infantry followed the tanks. ‘The men sat in strangely stiff attitudes; they had the appearance of statues.’ The open trucks filed by, raising huge columns of dust, which settled upon the weary infantrymen hunched in the back. ‘They were so white with dust,’ observed Malaparte, ‘they looked as if they were made of marble.’(5)
Leutnant Alfred Durrwanger, commanding an anti-tank company in the 28th Infantry Division attacking from East Prussia near Suwalki, said: ‘When the battle began, we found the Russians surprised, but not at all unprepared.’ His men crossed the Soviet border with a sense of foreboding. ‘There was no enthusiasm,’ he declared, ‘not at all!’ The prevailing atmosphere ‘was rather a deep feeling of the immensity of that enterprise, and the question immediately arose: where and at which place would there be an end to the operations?’(6)