Soviet Storm. WW2 in the East - Operation Barbarossa. Episode 1. StarMedia. Babich-Design

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Spring 1941. Nazi Germany dominates Europe. Poland and France have been occupied.
Only the British Commonwealth fights on.
Hitler now turns east to the Soviet Union,
where Nazi dreams of a new land empire are to be fulfilled.
Episode 1 - Barbarossa
April 1941. In a field in western Ukraine, a satisfied Soviet pilot
counted bullet holes in the aircraft he’d just shot down.
The twin-engined German aircraft had civilian markings.
But the military bearing of the pilots was obvious.
The smell of burning plastic was further cause for suspicion.
It came from a smouldering pile of photographic film,
which the Germans had hurriedly tried to destroy.
In the spring of 1941 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies.
But everyone knew it could not last.
German reconnaissance aircraft, flying 33,000 feet above the Soviet Union,
usually passed unnoticed. But on 15th April 1941,
engine trouble forced one Junkers 86 to lose altitude.
It was quickly intercepted and shot down.
Under interrogation, the Junkers pilots said they’d lost their way
flying to Krakow in German-occupied Poland. It wasn’t very convincing.
They’d been shot down near Rovno, more than 200 miles from Krakow —
deep inside the Soviet Union.
The pilots were from the elite ‘Rowel’ high-altitude reconnaissance squadron.
They had been secretly photographing Soviet territory for months,
in preparation for the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
Ten days later, a top-secret report arrived in Moscow from Major General Tupikov,
the Soviet military attaché in Berlin.
His report made two conclusions. “Number One —
The Germans are planning war with the Soviet Union. Number Two —
They plan to attack soon — definitely before the end of the year.”
In the spring of 1941, neither Tupikov nor other Soviet agents
could say exactly when the German invasion would come.
Stalin’s best spy, Richard Sorge,
had claimed that the invasion would begin around March,
after the harvest was sown. Then, he said the end of May.
When that passed, he said the second half of June.
The reports from Soviet agents were confused and contradictory.
In short, no one in Moscow was certain if or when the Germans would invade.
In later years it was rumoured that the German invasion plans were on Stalin’s desk
almost as soon as they were signed. But in reality, no such plans were stolen.
Masses of information was received from the Soviet intelligence network.
But only a few reports received proper analysis.
Many valuable ones got lost in the Soviet bureaucracy.
5 months earlier, in December 1940, Hitler had issued Fuehrer Directive 21.
It ordered German forces to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union –
codename: Operation Barbarossa.
Now, German troops were streaming eastwards,
taking up position along the Soviet frontier.
Hitler would later claim that the Red Army had been massed along the border,
poised to invade Germany. Thus he claimed Operation Barbarossa
was a pre-emptive strike — a legitimate act of self-defence.
But this was classic Nazi propaganda. Hitler wanted others,
particularly in the neutral countries, to believe his invasion was justified.
But few were fooled.
In private, Hitler was more candid about his reasons for invading the USSR.
“It is only the possibility of Russia entering the war”, he said,
“that now gives the English hope. If that hope is ruined,
the English would have to make peace.”
Operation Barbarossa was an ambitious invasion plan,
relying on the blitzkrieg tactics that had proved so effective against the French
and British the previous year.
The attack was to be spearheaded by 4 Panzer Groups.
Their tank and motorised infantry divisions would seek to make rapid advances deep
into enemy territory, leading to the encirclement
and destruction of enemy armies on the frontier.
The four panzer groups were commanded by generals von Kleist…
Hoepner… Guderian… and Hoth.
The ultimate goal was the capture of Moscow, and the whole of European Russia.
German strategists believed that their military superiority
would lead to victory in 3 to 4 months.
For the invasion, German forces were divided into three formations.
Army Group North was to advance towards Leningrad…
Army Group Centre towards Moscow…
and Army Group South towards Kiev and the Donets Basin.
Army Groups North and South each had one panzer group.
Army Group Centre had two, including Third Panzer Group commanded by Hoth.
Colonel-General Herman Hoth had distinguished himself
in the campaigns against Poland and France.
He was 56 years old, and referred to affectionately
by his soldiers as “Papa” Hoth.
Unlike Russia, where many senior officers had been killed in political purges,
Germany could call on a wealth of experienced commanders.
Most Soviet generals were in their 40s. In contrast, Guderian was 53...
Hoepner 55... and von Kleist 60.
Panzer Group command staffs arrived at the Soviet frontier during the winter of 1940.
At first only staff officers and signals troops were sent.
The tanks were not to arrive until the very eve of the attack.
By keeping his tanks in the west,
Hitler wanted it to look like he still planned to invade Britain,
and prepared only defensive operations in the east.
And so an invasion army quietly assembled on Russia’s doorstep.
In 1941, the Wehrmacht was at the height of its power.
Its divisions had been brought to full strength.
Morale was high after victory in the west.
The last few months had been spent in intensive training
for blitzkrieg operations.
In contrast, the Red Army was dispersed across the Soviet Union,
with many of its units still at peacetime strength.
The forces at the border spent much of their time listening to political lectures.
It would take two or three weeks of redeployment to properly reinforce them.
And there was little preparation for defence — after all,
the Red Army always expected to attack.
Furthermore, Stalin was in no rush to fight a war against Nazi Germany.
He knew the Soviet Union was not ready.
In 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had signed an alliance.
But Stalin harboured no illusions.
Intensive military construction was under way in the USSR.
The Red Army had grown from strength of one and a half million troops,
to five million. In the summer of 1941,
Soviet armed forces were still in the midst of reorganisation and expansion.
Fortifications were still being built, airfields overhauled, and new units formed.
Until these preparations were complete,
Stalin was desperate to stave off any conflict with Hitler’s Germany.
But the reports from Soviet intelligence were becoming more ominous.
In early June 1941, the Germans started moving armoured
and motorized divisions towards the frontier.
This no longer looked like preparations for a defensive operation.
8 days before the invasion, the Soviet state news agency, TASS,
printed a report in one of its newspapers.
It read, “In the British and foreign press in general,
there are rumours circulating about an imminent war
between the Soviet Union and Germany.
Soviet official circles believe that these rumours are absolutely groundless.”
It was an invitation from Stalin to Hitler
to settle their differences through negotiation.
But in reply, there came only deathly silence.
Stalin finally ordered reinforcements sent to the frontier.
Even now, three days after the TASS message,
Soviet spy Richard Sorge reported:
“The invasion has been delayed until the end of June.”
Stalin hoped once more that war could be put off.
But it was too late: the invasion was now less than one week away.
On 22nd June the Red Army was formed in three echelons,
stretching from Poland to the Dnieper River.
Most Soviet troops were only just beginning to move west to face the Nazi threat.
In contrast German forces were massed on the frontier, ready to strike.
At the start of the invasion,
in the Baltic republics 21 Soviet divisions would face 34 German divisions.
In Byelorussia, 26 Red Army divisions faced 36 German divisions.
In Ukraine 45 Soviet divisions would meet 57 Wehrmacht divisions.
The Red Army was outnumbered, and although it had more tanks and aircraft,
they would prove to be of little value.
On 21st June, German high command transmitted the signal “Dortmund”.
It confirmed Operation Barbarossa for the next morning.
Tanks, armoured vehicles and trucks moved to jumping-off positions.
That evening, German officers summoned their men,
to read them a proclamation from Adolf Hitler to his troops.
It declared, “The fate of the German Reich is now in your hands.”
In the days to come, German soldiers were to be guided by directives such
as those from General Hoepner:
“Your struggle must pursue the objective of turning today’s Russia into ruins,
and must be carried out with extreme severity.”
But not all soldiers wanted to be part of this so-called “crusade for civilization”.
Sapper Alfred Liskow, a secret communist, made for the border.
He crossed the Bug River, and surrendered to Soviet border guards.
Stammering with excitement, he told them that at dawn the next day,
the Nazis would attack.
Before the sapper was dry his words were on their way to Stalin.
Similar information came from a Soviet agent in the German Embassy, Gerhard Kegel.
On the morning of 21st June he reported that the war would begin within 48 hours.
In the Kremlin, General Zhukov, Marshal Timoshenko and General Vatutin
managed to persuade Stalin that action was needed.
A directive placed all troops in a state of readiness,
but with a warning that the Germans may be trying to provoke them.
The orders reached front line units just after one o’clock in the morning.
In Minsk, General Pavlov, Commander of the Byelorussian Military District,
arrived at his headquarters in the middle of the night.
Waiting for him was a report from the town of Grodno near the frontier. It read,
“Ammunition has been distributed. We’re taking up defensive positions.
Commander of the 3rd Army, Vasiliy Kuznetsov.”
Vasiliy Ivanovich Kuznetsov had been conscripted to fight in the First World War.
He later rose to command a rifle regiment in the Russian Civil War.
When the Second World War began, he was 47 years old,
and would endure its hardships from the first day, to the very last.
The warnings about an invasion didn’t surprise Kuznetsov.
His troops had been listening to the roar of engines
from across the border for many hours. It could mean only one thing.
The first Germans to cross the border were from the Brandenburg Regiment,
an elite German special forces unit.
With a mixture of trickery, stealth and surprise,
the German commandos secured key bridges across the Bug River.
The Luftwaffe was already airborne.
They were heading for major Soviet cities in the west,
and airfields identified by German air reconnaissance.
The Soviet Air Force, its aircraft parked in neat rows,
had no idea of what was about to hit it. As German pilots made their final approach,
they were the first to see the sun rise on that fateful day.
At 4am their bomb doors opened… and destruction rained from the sky.
Russia's Great Patriotic War had begun.
Dawn on the 22nd June 1941. Soviet airfields were under attack.
One squadron commander, Captain Berkal, was quick to act,
ringing the alarm and getting his men into the air as fast as possible.
Where Soviet fighters did manage to get airborne,
they found the unmanoeuvrable German dive bombers were easy prey.
Mlynuv airfield in Ukraine became a graveyard for German bombers.
Here the German Edelweiss squadron lost 7 aircraft.
But these were token victories in a disastrous day for the Red Army Air Force.
Some airfields survived the first German strikes.
But then the Luftwaffe hit them again, and again.
In the course of five or six German air raids,
most Soviet air bases in the west had been put out of action.
In the air, although the Soviets had many good combat aircraft,
their pilots lacked the combat experience of the Messerschmitt fighter-pilots.
Major General Kopets, Air Commander of the Western Front,
made an aerial inspection of the damage to his airfields.
After landing, he shot himself.
By the end of the first day, the Soviet Air Force had lost 700 aircraft
in Byelorussia, half its strength.
In Ukraine, 300 planes were lost — one sixth.
And in the Baltic, about a hundred planes, or one tenth.
The first German onslaught was overwhelming.
The Red Army Air Force had been decimated.
It would be many months before it was able to play its part effectively in the war.
German ground troops began their advance at 4.15 am.
Hoth’s tanks advanced between 50 and 70 km on the Baltic front,
capturing key bridges at Alytus and Merkine.
Hoth wrote: “All three bridges across the Niemen River were captured intact.
This was completely unexpected.”
German generals quickly began to dream of the great prize.
Hoth recalled: “Everyone longed to get on the road to Moscow as soon as possible.”
For the moment, Hoth’s panzer group attacked in the direction of Vilnius.
The aim was to envelope Soviet armies in Byelorussia from the north.
But not everything went according to plan for the Germans on the first day.
At one point on the frontier in Byelorussia,
events took an unexpected turn for both sides —
at the 19th century Russian fortress of Brest.
The fortress was supposed to have a garrison of just one battalion.
But units from two Soviet divisions, totalling about 7,000 soldiers,
were stationed here when the invasion began.
On the morning of 22nd June the fortress came under sustained air and artillery attack.
Many soldiers took shelter within its walls,
where they became trapped by the bombardment.
The Germans had expected the fort to be taken in just a few hours.
But instead a bloody siege began which was to last several days.
The fortress garrison defended every inch of ground,
fighting on in small isolated groups — some of them refusing to surrender.
After four days the Germans had captured the outlying fortifications.
The Red Army garrison retreated to the citadel.
400 survivors, led by Major Gavrilov, fought off 7 or 8 attacks a day.
On 29th June the Germans began a two-day assault on the fortress,
and finally captured the citadel.
By now the defenders were running out of food and water. But still they fought on.
It was a full month after the invasion
when the Germans finally captured Major Gavrilov.
The doctor who treated him recalled that he was almost unconscious with exhaustion,
without even the strength left to swallow.
But an hour before, Gavrilov had been fighting furiously,
throwing grenades that killed and wounded several Germans.
Despite the heroic resistance of Major Gavrilov and his men,
it was simple enough for Guderian’s panzer group
to bypass the Brest Fortress and cross the Bug River.
One advantage held by the Red Army seemed to lie in their huge number of tanks.
They had about 10 thousand tanks in the western military districts.
But for Red Army light tanks like the T-26 and BT-7,
it was to be a very short, and very bloody war.
The T-26’s front armour was just 15 millimetres thick.
The BT-7’s was not much better at just 22 millimetres.
Both were extremely vulnerable to German guns.
What’s more, their 45 millimetre guns weren’t powerful enough
to pierce the armour of modern German tanks except at point-blank range.
The poor design of Soviet shells
meant many simply shattered on contact with German armour.
For the Red Army, the first tank battles were a terrible shock.
On the second day of the war,
Red Army tanks met a German panzer division near Pruzhany. (PROO-SHAN-NYE)
The battle turned into a massacre.
More than a hundred T-26 tanks were destroyed in just a few hours of combat.
On the third day of the war, in a battle near Voynitsa,
about 150 T-26 tanks were destroyed.
The next day, Soviet T-26 tanks counterattacked near the town of Pošilé,
in the Baltic. (PORSHH-EE-LAY)
At the start of the day the Soviet 28th Tank Division had 130 tanks.
By its end, just 50 remained.
The pride of the Red Army lay wrecked and smoking across the German invasion route.
The German army had 4,000 tanks and self propelled guns for the invasion of Russia.
Half of them were the virtually obsolete Panzer I and II light tanks.
Only 1,400 of them were the new Panzer 3 and Panzer 4 tanks.
Each German panzer division had 200 tanks
and more than 2,000 command and support vehicles.
A Soviet tank division had almost twice as many tanks, but fewer support vehicles.
Events would prove that the Germans had got it right.
Without enough support vehicles to keep them supplied with fuel,
ammunition and spare parts, hundreds of Soviet tanks
would be abandoned en route to the battlefield.
German tank crews went into combat convinced of their own superiority.
But a nasty surprise lay in store.
German tanker Gustav Schrodek of the 11th Panzer Division was in action near Radekhov.
He recalled: “We sent the first shell into them. It struck the turret.
The second shot was another hit. But the lead enemy tank kept advancing.
What was going on?! We had always joked that all we had to do was “spit”
at a Russian tank, and it would blow up!”
Other reports began to arrive of a new model of Soviet tank
that seemed to be immune to German guns.
Near Raseiniai, these new Soviet heavy tanks shrugged off multiple hits,
before bursting into the German position and crushing guns, trucks and vehicles.
The only effective way to stop these monsters
was with the powerful 88mm antiaircraft guns.
The new Soviet tanks were called T-34 and KV-1.
They were names German soldiers would come to dread.
As fighting raged along the frontier, Kuznetsov’s 3rd Army near Grodno
was the only one that managed to bring artillery
to bear on the advancing German troops.
Kusnetsov’s troops fought the German 9th Army to a standstill.
German General Ott wrote: “Stubborn resistance by the Russians
has forced us to fight by the rule-book once more.
We could afford to take certain chances in Poland and in the West, but not now.”
Kuznetsov was also the first Soviet commander
to launch an armoured counter-attack.
The Soviet 6th Mechanized Corps had almost 1,000 tanks,
including 350 of the new T-34s and KV-1s.
The decision on where to counter-attack had to be made very quickly.
When a concentration of German tanks was reported near Grodno,
where Kuznetsov’s Third Army was fighting,
General Pavlov decided that that was the place to strike.
It was a catastrophe. The 6th Mechanized Corps was virtually wiped out.
Most tanks ran out of fuel or broke down,
because supply depots had been destroyed by air attack.
When the remaining tanks were encircled by the Germans,
the crews blew up their vehicles and retreated.
It also became clear that there was only German infantry near Grodno.
So while the 6th Mechanized Corps made its doomed counterattack,
Hoth’s panzers advanced unhindered on Vilnius.
German control of the air meant Soviet commanders in Byelorussia
had no access to air reconnaissance. So largely working in the dark,
Pavlov estimated that he faced only one or two German tank divisions.
But on the third day of the war,
a German reconnaissance unit was ambushed near Slonim.
After the battle a German staff officer’s map
was found and sent to Pavlov’s headquarters.
After one glance at the map, Pavlov realised his terrible mistake.
Instead of one or two tank divisions, the whole of Guderian’s Second Panzer Group —
five panzer divisions and 2 motorised infantry divisions,
was advancing on Minsk and Bobruisk.
All of Pavlov’s forces were about to be encircled.
Pavlov immediately ordered all his troops to retreat eastwards, but it was too late.
Guderian’s panzers burst into Slonim,
blocking the only good road from Białystok back to Minsk.
In Byelorussia’s landscape of marshland and dense forest,
controlling a single road like this could be decisive.
Other lines of retreat simply didn’t exist.
German panzer groups seemed to be advancing at will.
Their commanders tried to find weak points in the enemy line, and burst through them,
moving fast and threatening the enemy with encirclement.
To maintain momentum they simply bypassed areas of stubborn resistance.
These were dealt with by infantry divisions that followed in their wake.
Armoured cars and motorised infantry in trucks
and motorcycles accompanied the panzer columns.
Reconnaissance units led the way, and were the first to engage the enemy.
Finally, close co-operation with Luftwaffe ground attack aircraft made this,
in 1941, an unparalleled offensive force.
Guderian and Hoth, commanding 2nd and 3rd Panzer Groups,
were advancing on Moscow. But now they received new orders —
Minsk was the new priority. Both generals were outraged,
they saw Moscow as the grand prize.
But both reluctantly diverted their tanks towards Minsk,
to help complete the encirclement of Pavlov’s doomed army.
Minsk had been bombed since the first day of the war.
From its ruins, huge columns of black smoke rose, obscuring the sun.
Now Hoth's tanks were approaching to seal its fate.
First they would have to fight their way through a line of Soviet fortifications.
But when one of Hoth’s divisions broke through the line,
it was immediately counterattacked and its forward units cut off.
Hoth’s panzer group, as he later described,
had to “break though Soviet fortified positions situated on the highway,
amidst heavy fighting”.
But the tried-and-tested tactics of the Wehrmacht now proved their worth.
A German tank platoon normally deployed in a V-formation,
with its two prongs facing the enemy.
This allowed German tanks to attack on a narrow front —
50 or 60 tanks across 1000 metres.
In 1941, a Soviet division’s orders stated that anti-tank guns
should be spread evenly along the front.
This meant 50 German tanks would only face between 5 and 10 anti-tank guns.
The German tanks overwhelmed these guns by weight of numbers,
then turned right and left to attack the rest of the line from the side and rear.
What made the situation even worse for Soviet troops was their inadequate weaponry.
Their staple 45 millimetre antitank gun could only penetrate the front armour
of German tanks at very close range.
Using superior tactics and weaponry,
the Germans broke through the Red Army defences around Minsk
after two days of fighting.
As German trooped entered the city, Dmitry Pavlov,
Commander of the Soviet Western Front, could only watch helplessly as the trap closed.
Like British and French generals before him, Pavlov,
had been overwhelmed by the speed and fury of the German blitzkrieg.
But he did get one important decision right.
As soon as he saw the German plans for encirclement,
he ordered a retreat to the east as fast as possible.
It gave many soldiers a fighting chance of escape.
It was with that hope that his men now fell back towards Minsk.
But for most, there was to be no salvation.
One week after the German invasion of the Soviet Union,
more than 300,000 Soviet soldiers were encircled around Bialystok and Minsk.
Some Red Army units were able to fight their way out of the pocket
through lightly-held German positions to the southeast.
Others, including the remnants of Kuznetsov’s 3rd Army,
tried to make their way back to Soviet lines through the swamps and forests.
The rapid German advance meant Red Army lines were now far to the east.
Most would spend weeks walking through the forests before they reached their own lines.
Around Białystok and Minsk, the many thousands
who did not make it out faced death or captivity.
They fought on, launching desperate counterattacks
in a bid to escape the encirclement.
They inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy.
But finally, two weeks after the invasion, resistance in the pocket came to an end.
290,000 Soviet soldiers entered captivity, a fate from which few would return.
General Pavlov, Commander of the Western Front,
his Chief of Staff Major General Klimovskikh,
and Commander of the 4th Army General Korobkov, and several other officers,
were all arrested on charges of cowardice and criminal incompetence.
Under NKVD interrogation Pavlov denied his guilt,
citing the enormous difficulties he had faced. But Stalin needed scapegoats.
The trial’s outcome was never in doubt. They were all sentenced to death.
Pavlov was shot on that same day by the secret police.
To the south in Ukraine, the Red Army’s South-Western Front
managed to evade mass encirclements in the first week of the war.
The Germans advanced between 150 and 170 kilometres,
before the disaster at Minsk forced the Red Army to pull back to the Dnieper River.
German High Command was in high spirits following these early victories.
Surely, it was thought, the Russians can’t survive the loss of so many men,
tanks and aircraft. Soviet collapse had to be just around the corner.
Franz Halder, Head of the German General Staff, wrote,
“It would be no exaggeration to say that the war against Russia
has been won in the first 14 days.”
The Germans’ next objective was Smolensk… But this would not be so straightforward.
For a start, German forces had been concentrated
for the early battles on the frontier.
Now their forces were spread out from the Baltic to southern Ukraine.
Secondly, Soviet reserve armies had begun to reach the battlefield.
They played no part in the early fighting,
but now stood ready on the banks of the Dnieper and the Dvina.
Guderian and Hoth’s panzer groups started rolling east once more.
Their mission was to advance far ahead of the main force and join up east of Smolensk.
But soon Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group came under attack
from fresh Soviet armies arriving from the east. After ferocious fighting,
Guderian was forced onto the defensive.
Soon Hoth also had to switch to defence.
A Soviet counterattack forced his men to give up Velikiye Luki.
It was the first Russian city to be recaptured from the Germans.
The speed of their advance had left the German panzer groups isolated.
Not until the main force of the German army caught up could their advance resume.
Army Group North had also run into trouble.
The assault on Novgorod had ground to a halt.
Moreover, the German 8th Panzer Division became encircled near the city of Soltsy,
and had to fight its way out.
A German officer recorded in his diary,
“We have no sensation of entering a defeated country, as we had in France.
Instead we have resistance, permanent resistance, no matter how hopeless it is.”
By August the Red Army had somehow managed to stabilise the situation.
A front line was re-established,
allowing thousands of stragglers to catch up with the retreating army.
After struggling through forests and marshes for a month,
the remnants of Kuznetsov’s army finally reached their own lines.
There were many such stragglers trekking east in the summer of 1941,
in groups of a dozen, to a thousand or more.
Meanwhile Guderian was preparing a fresh assault on Moscow.
On 21st August his units were at their start positions near the city of Starodub.
But the same day Hitler issued a directive that shocked his army group commanders.
General Halder would describe it as the decisive moment of the entire campaign.
Army Group Centre was refused permission to advance on Moscow.
Instead, Hoth was ordered north to reinforce the assault on Leningrad.
Guderian was ordered south to assist the encirclement of Soviet troops in Ukraine.
Guderian immediately flew to Berlin to demand an audience with Hitler.
In person, he forcefully made his case that now was the moment to strike at Moscow.
In his memoirs Guderian wrote:
“I pointed out the serious consequences that would surely arise
if operations in the south dragged on too long. If that happened,
then it would be too late to assault Moscow that year.”
Hitler and the Army High Command remained adamant.
Summer was already drawing to a close as Guderian’s panzer group struck south,
against the flank of the Soviet South-Western Front.
If he could reach the German-held bridgeheads across the Dnieper River,
the Red Army forces defending Kiev would all be trapped.
After his escape from the Minsk encirclement,
General Kuznetsov had been put in command of the 21st Army.
His troops were right in the path of Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group.
The Soviet High Command had to make a choice:
to fight it out along the Dnieper River, and risk further massive encirclements
if the line was breached — or retreat further east
to buy their troops some breathing space.
In the end, it was decided the Dnieper was too strong a position
to abandon without a fight.
A close watch was kept on the German panzer divisions.
But in August, they seemed bound for Moscow.
The main threat to the South-Western and Southern Fronts
seemed to be from von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group,
far to the south on the lower reaches of the Dnieper.
By August 1941, the Red Army was chronically short of tanks.
Its mechanized units had been annihilated in the opening battles of the campaign.
Kuznetsov’s 21st Army, for example, had just 16 tanks remaining.
Kuznetsov’s weakened 21st Army was brushed aside by Guderian’s troops,
as they smashed their way towards Lokhvitsa — 125 miles east of Kiev.
Guderian was about to cut off all the Soviet troops defending the Ukrainian capital.
It seemed high time to order the troops of the Soviet South-Western Front into retreat.
But the Soviet High Command hesitated,
waiting for the latest information from the front.
The Germans meanwhile strengthened their bridgehead over the Dnieper River
near the city of Kremenchuk.
There they built an enormous floating bridge half a mile long.
Von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group raced to Kremenchuk at full speed.
The tanks crossed the Dnieper under the cover of darkness and rain,
and joined up with Guderian’s forces at Lokhvitsa.
The Soviet High Command had hesitated too long.
All troops of the South-Western Front in the Kiev area were now trapped.
For the Red Army the unfolding disaster at Kiev set a bleak record –
it was the largest encirclement in the history of warfare.
An estimated 532,000 troops were encircled at Kiev.
Only 15 to 20,000 would escape.
The fighting in the Kiev pocket dragged on until the end of September.
The Red Army’s chronic shortage of tanks was revealed
by how many were captured at Kiev — just 50.
Meanwhile German Army Group Centre,
having been stripped of Guderian and Hoth’s tanks,
fought off large-scale Soviet counter-attacks near Smolensk.
In these desperate battles the Red Army Guards units were born.
For the bravery shown amidst heavy fighting around Yelnia,
the 100th Rifle Division was awarded the title of 1st Guards Rifle Division.
General Hoth later wrote: “We sustained heavy casualties,
especially amongst the junior officers.
The losses were higher than during previous attacks,
and were only partially recovered through replacements.”
According to the German General Staff’s timetable,
the Soviet Union was supposed to collapse in just one more month of fighting.
But to exhausted German units on the frontline,
their final objectives seemed more and more remote.
The Red Army was also desperate. With the encirclement of so many troops at Kiev,
the Soviet High Command was forced to throw every available unit into the front line.
And now, with the final crushing of the Kiev pocket,
Guderian, Hoepner and Hoth’s panzer groups once more turned towards Moscow.
Of these panzer generals, Guderian would be removed from command in just a few months.
Hoepner would be dismissed by Hitler “for cowardice and disobeying orders”.
Only Papa Hoth would keep his job.
Meanwhile offensives near Moscow… battles around Stalingrad…
and a return to Byelorussia, all lay in store for General Kuznetsov.
In 1945, his men would lead the attack on Berlin,and on the Reichstag itself.
And on 1st May 1945, soldiers of the 150th Division of General Kuznetsov’s
3rd Assault Army — Aleksey Berest, Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria —
would hoist the hammer and sickle over the Reichstag.
But for now, the war was just three months old.
And in a few days, the Battle for Moscow would begin.