Georgij Karbuk explained the dilemma presented to defending Red Army infantrymen. ‘The worse thing,’ he said ‘was the shortage of water’. Machine guns needed constant cooling to avoid jamming from hot expanded metal working parts producing friction. Lying alongside these same guns were the wounded, dying of thirst.
‘Now what’s the most important? Keeping the machine gun intact in order to rescue these people? If a machine gun went down, so indeed, did the whole group. All around, lay the wounded and dying, parched, thirsting for water. Families! Children! How many were dying of thirst! And nearby only a few steps away, two rivers.’(6)
Progress in German eyes appeared equally illusory. ‘Only now,’ wrote Generalfeldmarschall von Bock in his diary on 25 June, ‘has the citadel at Brest fallen after very heavy fighting.’(7) Yet the following day an insultingly huge explosion rocked the massive edifice that once housed the Communist Officer School. Pionier Battalion 81 had blasted its metre-thick massive brick side-wall with a prepared charge. Out were taken 450 dazed prisoners. The final impediment to the reduction of the North Island remained the Ostfort. All approaches to it were driven back with withering bursts of accurate machine gun fire. The men of 45th Division concluded ‘the only option left was to oblige the Russians to give up through hunger and especially thirst. All other means were to be employed to accelerate this process of wearing him down, such as constant harassing fire with heavy mortars, preventing movement in trenches or houses, using direct tank fire, employing megaphone appeals to surrender or by throwing in surrender notices.’
The lack of water was virtually unsupportable for the defenders. Sister Katschowa Lesnewna witnessed ‘how one of the nursing sisters from our ward was shot on the riverside meadow because she wanted to fetch water. I saw it with my own eyes. We could not recover the body. She lay there in the grass for eight days.’ Any conceivable ploy to wear down defenders was employed. Georgij Karbuk said:
‘The Germans set up huge searchlights on their bank and illuminated our side, turning night into day. Every bush was lit up, and if any of us attempted to go down to the river, even to fetch a tin can full of water, he was immediately taken out. Many of us ended up lying there.’(8)
The siege was now approaching its sixth day. A Russian deserter admitted that resistance, centring on the Ostfort, held some 20 officers and 370 men from the 393rd Anti-aircraft Battalion of the Soviet 42nd Rifle Division. They possessed a quadruple-barrelled AA machine gun, 10 light machine guns, 10 automatic weapons, 1,000 hand-grenades and plenty of ammunition and food. They could be expected to fight on. ‘Water was short, but was extracted from boreholes in the ground.’ There were women and children in the fort. ‘The core of the resistance,’ it was reported, ‘appeared dependent upon a major and a commissar.’(9) Despite the round-up of several thousand prisoners the day before, German casualties rose inexorably. With them came an increasingly bitter frustration with the failure to end such pointless resistance.
Two incongruous-looking armoured vehicles were driven up by Panzer Platoon 28. One was a French Somua tank taken in the previous French campaign, the other a Russian tank captured in this one. Two other platoon tanks had already broken down. Nevertheless, both vehicles began systematically to shoot up loopholes, embrasures and windows in and around the Ostfort. ‘The Russians became much quieter,’ the division report observed, ‘but still no sign of success.’ Mopping up continued but was inconclusive. The Germans became perplexed and enraged at incredible acts of resistance performed by snipers who ‘fired ceaselessly from the most amazing and impossible hiding places, from beneath dustbins and rubbish heaps’. They were winkled out in detail, but through it all ‘firing from the Ostfort was always discernible’.(10)
Grigori Makarow, a Soviet soldier, recalled attacks mounted on 27 June by a ‘troop of German chemical weapons’. They assaulted with tear gas. The defenders had sufficient gas masks but, as Makarow pointed out:
‘They were too big for the small children. We wound them a few times at the top to tighten them up so the gas would not get in, but for one woman whose child was only a year and a half old, it was too late. He suffocated in the gas.’(11)
Such harrowing experiences served only to temper and add ferocity to resistance.
Ever more lethal combinations were employed against stubborn strongpoints. Helmut Böttcher, a German assault engineer attached to a flamethrower section, considered himself an ordinary soldier. The barbarous offensive capability he employed was perfectly normal to him, even if it makes uncomfortable reading to modern social democratic rather than totalitarian audiences. ‘I was 19 years old,’ he said, and ‘have often thought about it, being labelled a murderer, but in war one is a hero.’ Moreover, in war the bizarre becomes the norm. Böttcher’s childhood was difficult but not remarkable. A product of the depression years, he said, ‘at 14 years old one could say I was thrown out of home, and eventually sought a different type of experience through military service.’ He had volunteered ‘for this and that, but not for the flamethrowers. I was ordered to do that.’ Army life offered new and different opportunities, and he tried them ‘like many others’. Employment as a flamethrower operator at Brest-Litovsk was a disturbing experience. He rationalised it, saying:
‘It is awful to think of such a job, but I should point out that flamethrower operators were never allowed to surrender. They were immediately shot.’
It was not an easy weapon to handle. Strapped to the operator’s back was a cumbersome tank of inflammable liquid weighing over 21kg. This contained an adhesive mixture of viscous fuel which on spraying was designed to enmesh the victim in flame. The strength of the wind and its direction could transform it into a double-edged weapon which was, in any case, highly vulnerable to enemy fire. The operator needed to be part of a team protected by escorting infantry. Böttcher explained:
‘The equipment itself produced a flame about 30m long at a temperature of 4,000°C. When one came up to an angled trench system the flame could be directed around corners, of course liquidating anything in there.’
The inflammable fuel was launched by compressed gas through a nozzle incorporating an igniter to produce a spray of flame against which there was absolutely no defence. Each tank carried sufficient for 10 single-second bursts of fire. They sucked out the oxygen in confined bunkers, scorching and collapsing lungs in cumulative pressure waves of intense heat. ‘Most were burned immediately or at least blinded,’ admitted Böttcher. ‘These things were dreadful.’(12) Even today, in the preserved ruins of Brest-Litovsk, bunkers remain scarred by the characteristic starred-effect of molten stone. Black or dark red, they resemble a form of lava paste. Georgij Karbuk, a Russian in Brest at the time, remembered:
‘The Germans deployed flamethrowers. They simply poked the nozzles into cellar windows and held them there. They avoided actually penetrating the cellars themselves. They held them there and burned everything. Even the bricks melted. Others threw grenades into cellars where families were hiding.’(13)
The sun bore down mercilessly throughout the sixth day of the siege. Most of the citadel and North Island had been cleared but the Ostfort tower still held out. Russian dead, swelling grotesquely in the blistering heat, were tipped into ditches and covered with lime and earth, to alleviate the stench. In the River Bug shallows, German dinghies were reaping a similar dreadful harvest of swollen German dead bodies snagging among the reeds. There seemed no limit to the interminable suffering experienced by the Russian defenders. ‘Everything burned,’ explained Katschowa Lesnewna, a surgical sister, ‘the houses, even the trees, everything burned.’ The condition of the wounded became increasingly criticaclass="underline"