Awakening the bear

Abstract

Indecisive border battles and the surfacing of strategic dissent The war on Germany's eastern frontier began at 3.15 a.m. on 22 June 1941 with powerful artillery bombardments at the points of main concentration along the front. The barrage was soon followed by the advance of panzer and motorised divisions with the Luftwaffe poised to strike Soviet airfields at first light. The largest military operation in history was underway. Aiding the German advance, Soviet deployments in their first strategic echelon opposite Army Group Centre were set well forward, with only the most rudimentary of prepared defences and, owing to Stalin's intransigence, received no warning of the impending invasion until it was literally underway. Compounding the problem, the strategic deployment of the Soviet 3rd, 10th and 4th Armies, which according to pre-war Soviet plans were to absorb an initial German blow, were heavily concentrated in the west of the Belostok salient largely between the joint armoured thrusts of 2nd and 3rd Panzer Groups, thus greatly facilitating their encirclement. Not surprisingly therefore, in the early hours of 3rd Panzer Group's surge eastward, forward units reported ‘only very weak or no enemy contact’. Luftwaffe reconnaissance counted just one enemy artillery battery in its path. Before the end of the day Hoth's panzer group was on the Neman River with captured bridges at Olita and Merkine. The penetration of the Soviet front, Halder suggested, had already won the panzer group freedom of operational manoeuvre. Yet, in spite of its success, the panzer group's war diary includes the observation: Where the enemy appears he fights tenaciously and courageously to the death. Defectors and those seeking to surrender were not reported from any positions. The struggle, as a result, will be harder than those in Poland and the Western campaign. In similar fashion the commander of the XXXXIII Army Corps in Kluge's 4th Army, General of Infantry Gotthard Heinrici, wrote home to his family on 24 June that the Soviet solder fought ‘very hard’. Heinrici then concluded: ‘He is a much better soldier than the Frenchman. Extremely tough, devious and deceitful.’