The 900 Days (18 page)

On June 21 Colonel General Kuznetsov came down from his Baltic field headquarters near Panevezys, about three hours’ drive due north of Kaunas. He was disturbed about the orders Morozov had given for moving troops into border positions. Moscow was insisting again that nothing be done which might be interpreted by the Germans as a provocation. It was this fear, not worry over the concentration of Nazi divisions, which preoccupied the Kremlin.

“Aren’t you carrying out your concentrations along the frontier too openly?” Kuznetsov asked. “Don’t you think they are going to smell this out on the other side of the line? If they do, there will be unpleasant consequences.”

“We’ve done everything possible,” said General Shlemin, Morozov’s Chief of Staff, “to assure that our movements will not be noticed.”

“I hear,” Kuznetsov said, “that ammunition is being provided to the troops.”

“That’s correct.”

“Well,” said Kuznetsov, “be careful with it. One accidental shot from our side may be used by the Germans as an excuse for a provocation.”

“We understand,” General Shlemin replied. “Our people have been strictly cautioned.”

The tall, dignified Kuznetsov and the small, shaven-headed Shlemin stared at each other a moment. Then Kuznetsov nervously pulled on his gloves, muttering, “What a muddled situation . . . fantastically muddled . . .”

He strode off to his car, sat there a moment as though about to say something more, then slapped his hand on his knee and drove off.

Major Agafonov hurried ahead with his work at Fort No. 6. He labored all day and into the evening Saturday, June 21. He was too busy to attend one of the many meetings held that night in almost every Eleventh Army unit by a special team of political commissars, sent out by the Central Political Administration of the Red Army in Moscow. This team was instructed to carry out seminars throughout the Eleventh Army, assuring the troops that war with Germany was not imminent. The exercise had been ordered to dampen down the vigilance and “militancy” of the Eleventh Army.

Major Agafonov worked well past midnight. There was nothing new from the frontier, all quiet as far as he knew. He finally got his telegraph, radio and telephone positions manned and connected.

It was nearly 3
A.M.
when he and General Shlemin started for their barracks to get a little rest. They ran into Colonel S. M. Firsov, chief of engineers for the Eleventh Army. Firsov was angry. He had obtained from the Baltic Military District a shipment of about ten thousand mines, which he proposed to emplace along the frontier, protecting areas of possible German tank assault. He had started on Saturday laying out the mine fields. But the chief of engineers of the district, Major General V. F. Zotov, had ordered him to halt.

“Apparently,” he said with a grim smile, “I’m in too much of a hurry.”

Firsov put the blame on Zotov. Actually, the orders came from higher up and were part of the effort by Moscow to “cool” the Eleventh Army and the Baltic Military District in hopes of averting a German attack.

Few hopes could have been more vain. Within two hours Agafonov was routed from his sleep. He raced to the command post, deep in the interior of Fort No. 6. Every telegraph, telephone and wireless receiver was jangling: “The enemy has opened strong artillery fire. . . . The enemy is attacking our forward positions. . . . Artillery fire on our positions. . . . German tanks are attacking. . . . We are beating off a German infantry assault. . . .”

One telephone operator threw up his hands. “Comrade Major! I quit! Everyone is swearing at me, threatening me with arrest. ... I don’t know what to do.”

The training camp at Kasly-Rudy was under air attack. General Shlemin made his first report to Colonel General Kuznetsov at Baltic headquarters: “All units are occupying defenses along the frontier line. All along the line the enemy has opened fire. . . .”

A radio operator reported: “No contact with the 128th Division.” This was serious business. Major Agafonov set to work to restore communications. Finally a brief flash came in from the 128th Division: “German tanks have surrounded headquarters.” Nothing more. General Shlemin attempted to get through to the 5th Tank Division near Alytus, a key crossing of the Neman River just north of the 128th Division position. The radio operator tried again and again: “Neman! Dunai calling. Alytus! Alytus! Alytus! Dunai calling!” But Alytus did not answer. Nor did it answer for the rest of the night. A courier was sent by car to Alytus, forty miles away. He did not return.

General Morozov grew more and more concerned.

“German tanks are advancing on Alytus,” he said. “If they seize the bridge there, they will turn the flank of our army.”

He was pondering the situation when Lieutenant Colonel Soshalsky entered the room. He walked up to Morozov and whispered hoarsely, “Vasily Ivanovich, the Germans have broken into the children’s camp. The children—”

“What about the children?” Morozov asked, his tone still hopeful.

“I can’t tell you,” Soshalsky cried. “The children . . . the tanks.”

Major Agafonov’s children were in that camp. So was Morozov’s daughter, Lida.
⁴

Still no word from Alytus.

At 6.
P.M.
the evening of June 22 Major Agafonov himself set out to try to reach Alytus. A few miles out of Kaunas he met a blue tourist bus bringing back twenty commanders from a vacation in the countryside. No point in going any farther, they told him. Alytus was occupied by the Germans.

It was, indeed. Four armored and four infantry divisions, including nearly five hundred German tanks, forming the 3rd Nazi Tank Group of Army Group Center, had smashed across the Neman, splintering the 128th Rifle Division and badly bruising the 126th. The 5th Soviet Tank Division, moving up to protect Alytus, was caught in motion and found itself cut off and surrounded. The blow crushed the hinge between the Eleventh Army and the Central Front and threatened to isolate the Eleventh Army from its neighbor to the north, the Eighth Army. Before nightfall on Sunday, June 22, the Germans had secured excellent crossings of the Neman River at Alytus and a few miles farther south at Myarkin.

The fate of Kaunas was sealed. By the time Major Agafonov got back to Fort No. 6 he found that headquarters was being shifted to Kaisiadorys, about twenty miles to the east. He had two hours to tear out his installations. Before morning a new system must be operating from Kaisiadorys. He proposed shifting over to wireless, but this was forbidden. The Germans had captured the staff of the 128th Division, including the commander, General Aleksandr Zotov. Presumably they had captured the Soviet ciphers. Wireless was to be used only in the direst necessity. The 5th Tank Division had still not been heard from, and the whole of the 16th Corps was retiring to Jonava, twenty miles northeast of Kaunas. The city was being abandoned without a battle. Left behind were the families of the army men, Major Agafonov’s among them.

The German attack caught the Soviet Air Force in the Special Baltic Military District on the ground. It was, in the words of Lieutenant General P. P. Sobennikov, Commander of the Eighth Army, virtually destroyed in the first two or three hours of war. Lieutenant General P. V. Rychagov, Air Commander of the Baltic District, was ordered to Moscow and shot. Lieutenant General of Aviation Kopets, Chief of the Soviet Bomber Command, committed suicide June 23. He had lost 800 bombers to a handful by the Germans. In the first day of war the Western and Special Kiev Military Districts lost half their air strength. Soviet losses to 1:30
P.M.
on June 22 were put at 800 by Haider. At that hour the Nazis had lost 10 planes. The total Soviet loss on the first day was 1,200 planes—900 on the ground and 300 in combat.

The speed and impact of the German assault had a catastrophic effect on communications within the Baltic Command. Before noon on June 22 General Kuznetsov had lost contact with almost all his forward units. Reinforcements were headed for fronts which no longer existed and were wiped out by German armor scores of miles from where the enemy was supposed to be found. The closer to the frontier, the worse the situation.
⁵

The Germans had little difficulty in overpowering individual Soviet units which they encountered near the frontier. Most of the troops had neither instructions nor battle plans. All they could do was fight back with any weapon that was at hand.

At many points in the first hours of war the only opposition was put up by the paramilitary frontier police, the NKVD Border Guards, whose nominal commander was Lavrenti P. Beria, Stalin’s sinister chief of secret police.

This was the case in the region just north of Memel, where the Germans crossed the frontier, advancing toward Palanga, key to the Nazi push up the Baltic coast to the port of Libau.

By 6
A.M.
Palanga, defended only by the 12th Border Guards, was in flames and battle was raging in the streets. By 8:45
A.M.
the 12th Border Guards reported Palanga had fallen and they were retreating.

At noon the 24th and 35th companies of the 12th Guards had been driven back along the road toward Libau. Up to this time—after eight hours of heavy combat—no regular Red Army units had come to the aid of the border forces. The reason is quite clear. They had simply been wiped out. Soviet historians trying to reconstruct the battle have little to work with. Destruction of the units was so complete that not even their operational journals have survived.

Libau was the second largest port in Latvia. This was the port which the Baltic Fleet Commander, Admiral Tributs, considered indefensible because of its closeness to East Prussia and from which all major fleet units had been withdrawn shortly before the German attack. Colonel General Kuznetsov had reluctantly assigned the 67th Division to defend the city only a few days earlier. Major General N. A. Dedayev of the 67th had two regiments— the 56th and 281st—and a scattering of sailors and coastal artillery at his command.

Not until June 21, less than twenty-four hours before the attack, had Major General Dedayev’s artillery commander, Colonel Korneyev, sat down with his naval counterpart, Captain Kashin, and worked out the coordinates for the artillery defense of Libau.
⁶

Acting on his own and largely because of nervousness engendered by reports from naval intelligence, Major General Dedayev on the evening of the twenty-first ordered those units of his 67th Infantry which were not engaged on construction work (most of his troops were so employed) out of their barracks on military exercises. Three battalions moved from town to the banks of the Barta River and set up a camp. General Dedayev spent most of the evening driving about Libau and its military installations, trying to convince himself that all was in order. Returning to headquarters in late evening he heard that Captain Mikhail S. Klevensky, the Naval Commander, had received a warning from the Baltic Fleet Headquarters of possible action that night.

Dedayev listened to the 11:30
P.M.
news from Moscow. There was nothing special. The Spassky chimes played the Internationale. Not until 3
A.M.
did a message come through from Colonel General Kuznetsov at Baltic Military Headquarters, alerting all units to occupy forward positions with full field ammunition, prepared for action, but to avoid provocations and not to open fire on overflights of Nazi planes.

General Dedayev went straight to the naval base and spent an hour with Captain Klevensky, working out a triple system of defense lines around Libau. It was the first time they had sat down to work out a joint defense plan. On his way back to headquarters Dedayev heard the drone of planes. It was three waves of JU-88’s coming in from the sea.

No one fired on them. They swung over the city, suddenly dove, dropped their bombs and zoomed away. Only then did the ack-ack guns protecting Libau open fire.

General Dedayev checked the reports from all his units. It was obvious that the Nazis were driving hard toward Libau. He telephoned General Berzarin of the Twenty-seventh Army, his commander in chief. Berzarin’s answer was curt. Dedayev was on his own. The Germans were attacking on the whole frontier. Hold on with what you have. Fight to the last man.

The General sighed. He would do what he could. But the odds were very long.

The situation of the Eighth Army was even worse. Lieutenant General P. P. Sobennikov had received the alert from Colonel General Kuznetsov so tardily that many Eighth Army units found themselves being attacked by German armored units even before they knew that war had started.

Sobennikov’s 48th Infantry Division, commanded by Major General P. V. Bogdanov, moving toward the frontier from Riga, early Sunday morning was marching in parade order behind its band in the region of Raseinyai. Martial music filled the air. Suddenly, “not knowing that war had started,” the 48th Infantry was hit by German attack bombers. A little after noon the division was attacked near Erzhvilkas by German armor which had broken through at Taurage. The 48th Infantry had nothing but rifles and hand grenades with which to fight. At 10
P.M.
Bogdanov advised headquarters that he had lost 60 to 70 percent of his forces and had run out of ammunition.

One of Sobennikov’s heavy artillery units, advancing to the front by rail, at dawn on Sunday morning witnessed an attack on the Soviet airdrome at Siauliai. The artillerymen saw the German planes, watched the bombs fall and fires break out, but thought it was all a training exercise.