Operation Teutonic

Operation Teutonic

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“I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even yet imagine?”​

Joseph Goebbels
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In chess, there is a concept called zugzwang (German, lit. “compulsion to move”), where the player is at a serious disadvantage by making any move from their present board position. Simply put, the rules of the game mean that the player cannot simply do nothing. But within those rules, there is nothing they can do except weaken their board position.

When a general inter-imperialist war failed to result from the German invasion and occupation of Poland, the Soviet Union was placed in a vice against Germany. The outcome of the summer and fall campaigns in 1939 had solidified a powerful network of client-states and allies for the Third Reich. Non-aggression and commercial agreements with France and the United Kingdom put significant raw material and finished goods at Germany’s disposal for the coming campaigns, all paid for by the plunder of Eastern Europe.

As priceless paintings, sculptures and gold finery found their way into the private collections of German, French and English aristocrats, a wealth of steel, oil, tungsten, machine tools, and technical data made its way into the hands of the German industrial cartels.

In terms of the main raw materials critical to industrial war economies, the Soviet Union was behind Germany in every category except oil. While the Soviets had made tremendous gains in both the quantity of raw material produced as well as the sophistication of manufactured goods in the 1930s, Germany maintained a healthy lead further compounded by her relatively free access to the world market.

In 1939, the last year of relative domestic normalcy, the Soviets produced 261.1 million tonnes of coal to Germany’s 504.8 million tonnes. For steel, it was 27.3 million tonnes versus 33.2 million tonnes. Aluminum, absolutely vital to the aircraft industry, the Soviets could muster 98 thousand tonnes of domestic production compared to 275 thousand for Germany. Similar disparities existed in the chemical industry and the production of explosives.

This is not to say the Soviet Union was utterly outmatched by Germany. The country was vast, the climate hindered the movement of men and materials overland, and the people were resilient. The Soviet industrial workforce was smaller than the total of German and conscripted foreign labor available to Germany, but the core of Soviet industry was more modern and rationally planned, while Germany was still in the transition from craft production to Fordist/Taylorist methods. Finally, there were the finer details of military leadership, troops, training, prepared defenses, manpower reserves, and mobilisation plans that will be covered in later sections. But in general the broad view is that the Soviet Union was at a disadvantage against Germany alone.

And Germany was not alone. While Hungary and Rumania were far smaller contributors to the Axis’s military might, their participation in the war greatly extended the front, and would prevent the Soviets from concentrating their efforts on Germany.

Finland and Italy were more significant. Finland is an outlier, not a full Axis member and still under a democratic republican government. But revanchist aims over the Soviet ultimatum for Karelia have convinced the government to align militarily with Germany now that the writing was on the wall. The Finnish military is significantly better equipped and prepared, and most importantly have some experience fighting the Soviets in the border conflicts of the late 1930s.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini has other ambitions, but is willing to sharpen his forces in battle against the Soviets as a preparation for the expansion of the Italian sphere in the Mediterranean. There is talk of territorial concessions and an Italian sphere of Influence in Turkey, but no concrete guarantees. Both Hitler and Mussolini are confident that they’re playing the other.

By contrast, the Soviets have only the three tiny Baltic states to count as allies in the immediate conflict zone. The rest of the Comintern was half a world away.

Soviet Defensive Preparations

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“Even the complete defeat of an enemy army, achieved at a particular moment, will still not bring final victory, in so far as the defeated units have behind them an economically and morally strong rear.”​

Mikhail Frunze
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Popular history depicts the Soviet leadership “asleep at the wheel” and totally oblivious to the German threat. This was not really true; the Soviet military establishment as well as Stalin regarded Germany as the primary threat from the Anschluss onwards, and major ongoing military preparations were underway.However, these preparations were undermined by the political realities of the post-Great Purge Soviet Union. With Stalin at his political zenith the whims of the despot weighed heavily on state policy. Stalin believed it would be foolish for Hitler to wage a protracted war in the east without the involvement of Britain or France. This would not only boost the military forces available, it would also secure his flank for the duration of the war. He further reasoned that Hitler would not have made such concessions in the non-aggression pact only to break it in barely a year.

There had been many reports to the contrary, but unfortunately Stalin mistrusted them and their sources. Intercepts and spy reports of Anglo-German diplomatic cables were not given the proper weight because, as Stalin reasoned, the UK would not surrender continental Europe to German domination because this went against centuries of proven British strategy.

Soviet forces were thus arrayed in a state of moderate readiness, preparing new defensive positions in the territory seized from Poland, or in their Baltic state allies. These new positions included concrete bunkers, earthworks, minefields, secure stores of fuel & ammunition, vehicle depots and airfields, designed with the goal of supporting offensive operations into German occupied territory by 1943.

Consequently, the build timetables did not align with the strategic reality. Time, labor and resources were spent on secure ammunition bunkers while basic defensive pillboxes and anti-tank ditches were incomplete, to say nothing of the more impressive fortifications that were supposed to defend the main trunk rail lines to Vilnius, Minsk and Kiev.

Soviet forces in the Western military districts had a standing strength of 2,540,000 men, plus 98,000 men from the militaries of the Baltic states. This constituted just under half of the mobilised troops of the Soviet Union. A manpower reserve of at least 14,000,000 men and women with some level of military training was available for mobilisation. We shall detail their disposition from North to South.

The Leningrad Military District covered a front from the far north in Murmansk to the eastern border of the Russian SFSR on the Gulf of Riga and thus would defend the Karelian Isthmus, the Kola Peninsula and the main trunk line between from the Finnish Army and German expeditionary forces. It had three field armies, the 7th Separate, 14th and 23rd, totalling fifteen rifle divisions. Two Mechanised Corps, the 1st and 20th, were in the process of forming, but were not prepared by the spring and summer of 1940.

The Baltic Special Military District had been established the previous Fall under the command of General Fyodor Kuznetsov, tasked with defensive preparations in the Baltic states and north-western Russia. Three Soviet armies, the 8th, 11th and 27th, plus an additional nine division equivalents from the Baltic states, would be deployed with their combat power oriented towards East Prussia, with a secondary line along the Baltic coast to prevent opportunistic naval landings. Tank forces were echeloned in depth from three tank divisions and two motor rifle divisions. These troops were predominantly equipped with older BT-7 tanks, though the first T-34 tanks were beginning to arrive in depots in Riga before the German invasion.

The Byelorussia Special Military District had been established following the annexation of the eastern voivodeships of Poland in 1939. Numerically, it was one of the most powerful Soviet formations, with a large concentration of mechanised and airborne assets. However, its defensive positions were the most tenuous, with most of them still under construction, and existing positions further east partially dismantled to provide material for new positions. Three armies (3rd, 4th and 10th) were lighter dispositionally that the average field army, but the troops were equipped with the most modern of available small arms and artillery, such as the SVT-38 rifle and the RPT-39 machine gun, both chambered in 7x51mm. However, the proliferation of older rifles and machine guns chambered in 7.62x 54mmR complicated the supply situation.

More importantly, the Byelorussian District had six of the new mechanised corps, for a total of twelve tank divisions and six motor rifle divisions. However, only one of these divisions, the 29th Tank Division, has completed the transition to the T-34. Most of the district’s 4000+ tanks were older BT-7s and T-26s. Training for all combat arms had improved readiness somewhat from the previous years, but the more technical branches (especially aviation) were hampered by the fearful attitude induced by the purges of the previous years, with many commanders afraid that the loss of aircraft in training accidents would bring charges of sabotage and counterrevolution.

In the fall of 1939, the Ukraine Military District had been reinforced and split in two. The northern half of Ukraine was now under the Kiev Special Military District, and by May 1940 it was the most powerful and modern command in the RKKA. It had four armies (5th, 6th, 12th and 26th), and eight mechanised corps. In addition to the well-reinforced field armies, the military district had an additional four rifle corps, one cavalry corps, and one airborne corps directly reporting to the front headquarters. Properly utilized, this could be either a potent reserve or counterattack force. However, the Kiev district had similar problems to its northern neighbor, with defensive positions still under construction. This was somewhat balanced by the higher readiness of tank and aviation assets, and the deployment of larger numbers of T-34 medium and KV-1 heavy tanks.

Its southern sister, the Odessa Special Military District, was the smallest of the districts in terms of land combat forces, but was also organisationally linked with the Black Sea Fleet. Most of its assets were under the organisational control of the 9th Army (Separate), with an additional three rifle corps directly reporting to the front. Naval assets linked included a single modernized Gangut -class battleship, Parizhskaya Kommuna , six cruisers and twenty destroyers. While unimpressive by the standards of the great powers, the Black Sea Fleet significantly outmatched the naval forces available to the Axis in 1940 due to Turkey’s current neutrality.

In spite of major warning signs of German military intentions, Soviet forces were in a very limited state of military readiness in May 1940. Stalin was preoccupied with avoiding any pretexts for war and had given standing orders to prevent anything that could be used as provocation. This meant no VVS reconnaissance flights near the borders, no troop patrols near the line of demarcation. In short, nothing to warn of an imminent attack.

The reasoning behind this was covered repeatedly in the Politburo minutes of the first half of 1940. Stalin wished to avoid creating any incident that could be used by Germany to portray the Soviet Union as the aggressor, and thus rally morale domestically for a “defensive” war, or be used to court the liberal states of the United Kingdom or France into militarily joining in a war against the Soviet Union. While these concerns were valid, they ultimately did not matter to Hitler’s strategic thinking against the Soviet Union.

Pointedly, Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels did absolutely nothing to fabricate an incident prior to Operation Teutonic, and the public statements of Hitler’s government, both for the domestic audience as well as translations prepared for foreign markets, were entirely honest about the war’s pre-emptive nature as a “war of extermination against Judeo-Bolshevism.”
German Offensive Plans

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“For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle…This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such ‘final solutions’ implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war.”​

Umberto Eco​

The planning for Fall Teutonische began in October 1939 with Hitler’s promulgation of the secret Führer Directive 19. The OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres , “Army High Command’) was tasked with developing a plan to invade and conquer the Soviet Union in a single violent campaign. This invasion would mobilise the bulk of the German military resources and potentially include contributions from new allies in Western Europe, as the initial directive noted.

In spite of this grandiose ambition, Hitler was determined to make it a reality. Initial planning by Generalleutnant Eric Marcks identified the basic operations objectives: the rapid encirclement and destruction of Soviet military forces north and south of the Pripet Marshes, followed by a rapid advancement through western Russia, with the goal of occupying all of the country west of a line stretching from Arkhangelsk in the Arctic to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. The operation would be conducted in three successive phases.

In the first phase, German mechanised forces, now grouped into army-level Panzergruppen formations, would make rapid sickle cuts into the Baltics, Byelorussia and western Ukraine. The main effort would be focused north of the Pripet Marshes, taking advantage of local infrastructure to speed the advance. A supporting attack would be made from Rumania into western Ukraine, with a smaller German involvement. Instead, Rumanian and Italian forces would be primarily responsible for this southern advance.

Once the encirclements were achieved, the slower infantry advancing at the speed of horse-drawn carts would begin battles of annihilation against the pocketed Soviet forces, to kill or capture as many of them as possible and prevent any breakouts. Initial planning anticipated using large numbers of Soviet POWs as forced laborers in Germany to maintain the war economy until victory was achieved. Indeed, the use of conscripted Polish labor was required to keep the industrial and agricultural economies sustained at the extremely high level of military mobilisation.

Once the Soviet army was destroyed in the frontier, planning anticipated that subsequent Soviet resistance would diminish. In the second phase, the front lines would be advanced to Leningrad, Smolensk and the Don River. In the final phase, the invaders would capture Moscow and advance to the A-A Line.

While plans would be refined, this basic template would remain the guideline for German military strategy in 1940. While the disposition and correlation of forces was very meticulously laid out, and the terrain of the immediate zone of operations intimately studied to maximize the speed of the tank advance and push “the Russian” into indefensible terrain, far less attention was paid to logistical matters.

Logistical matters within the German General Staff were a secondary consideration, fully subordinate to the other military branches. It was not their place to tell the High Command that it could not be done. Their job was to find a way to make the operation work by hook or crook. Nonetheless, serious objections were raised by logisticians in the General Staff, which OKH Chief of Staff Franz Halder overruled on the ground that the expected production plan for the 1940 year exceeded operational requirements, and the predicted shortfalls in fuel and ammunition supply would not not be a problem.

This was, to the misery and ruin of many a German landser , not the real issue. It was not merely that ammunition expenditure was higher than FY 1939 production, it was that the reserves and stockpiles would not be able to be delivered to soldiers at the frontlines.

German planners had believed that the low infrastructure in the Soviet Union would work more to their advantage than detriment. Due to the low availability of roads, especially all-weather ones, and limits on speed and loading of the railroads, Soviet forces would be unable to retreat or be resupplied effectively, while better railheads in East Prussia and occupied Poland would allow German forces sufficient means to complete the hard work of the campaign within reasonable resupply range. Subsequently, Soviet rail networks would be regauged to standard gauge and connected to the German lines by the Wehrmacht ‘s military engineers. Ports in the Baltics and Leningrad would be seized.

Operational plans gave little thought to the provision of food, putting it at a tertiary priority behind fuel & ammunition and operational reserves. The army would live off the land and the opinions of Soviet peasants did not matter, because they were all marked for death anyway. While presently Hitler wished to maintain more cordial relations with western Europe and excessive barbarity would harm that, the inevitable mass starvation caused by the confiscation of food and fodder was a non-concern. Once the Soviet Union was conquered, Generalplan Ost would mean the genocide of fifty to eighty percent of the populations, with the remainder to serve as helots for a new spartiate system of farming soldier-gentry.

However, German planners were largely in the dark about the last decade of economic development and urbanisation in the Soviet Union. A certain insurmountable problem would emerge: even if the ramshackle hodgepodge of purpose-built military trucks, civilian requisitions and foreign bulk purchases from French and British automakers could sustain the advance in the vastness of the Soviet Union, the fighting would despoil the infrastructure in the the occupied areas. And the further that German military advanced, the better Soviet infrastructure would be. German supplies would be bottlenecked by the Soviet Union’s poorest infrastructure, further ravaged by active fighting, while bottlenecks on Soviet forces would diminish the further the Germans advanced.

The German officer corps was institutionally predisposed to disregard such penalizing operational constraints as a cost of doing business. These hazards would be overcome through the relentless aggression of the infantry and armor, and a brazen willingness to meet peril with self-destruction. This disposition to murder-suicide had indoctrinated all levels of the military hierarchy into willing, enthusiastic participants of mass murder and slaughter; the only lesson learned from the pitiless bloodletting of the Great War was a belief that victory would only come through an even more ruthless slaughter.

Axis forces were organized into three army groups, with allied forces under German operational command. Army Group North, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock, was stationed in East Prussia on the Lithuanian frontier. Bock had two field armies, the Eighth and Sixteenth. Between them, they mustered nineteen regular infantry divisions in seven corps. In addition, Bock had Panzergruppe 4 , now an army level command boasting four panzer divisions and four motorised infantry divisions.

Army Group North was tasked with encircling and annihilating the Soviet forces on the frontier in concert with Army Group Centre immediately to its south. The immediate operational objective was to complete the occupation of Lithuania within six days. Subsequent drives would extend through Latvia and Estonia, with the first phase of the operation ending in mid fall by taking the city of Leningrad. Once this was achieved, North was to wheel southward to link up with Army Group Centre’s drive on Moscow, utilizing the highly developed Leningrad-Moscow transport corridor.

The main effort of Operation Teutonic would come from Army Group Centre, staged in occupied Poland. Generalfeldmarschall Günther von Kluge would command three oversized field armies, Third, Fourth, and Ninth, with twenty six regular infantry divisions augmented with increased artillery attachments on the corps and field army command level. An additional operation reserve of two corps (XII. and LI. Armeekorps) would be used to reinforce successes in the opening days of the operation.

Those operational reserves would be attached to Panzergruppe 2 and Panzergruppe 3 respectively during the initial assault. This mass of mechanized firepower, totalling twelve panzer and thirteen motorised divisions, would pierce Soviet lines north of the Pripet Marshes, cleaving between the gaps in Soviet field armies, encircling and destroying the bulk of the Byelorussian Military District’s forces. With the field cleared, the direct route to Moscow would be opened up for exploitation.

Army Group South, under Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Reichenau, would be a multi-national force opposite Soviet Ukraine. Whereas in the other sectors forces from other Axis states were relegated to rear area security duty, in the South major field formations from Hungary, Italy and Rumania would take a direct role in combating Soviet forces in concert with the Germans.

Army Group South would cover the largest frontage, and while on paper it was impressively large in terms of manpower, German assessments of the abilities of their allies would put Army Group South in a subordinate role for the operation, covering Army Group Centre’s southern flank as it exerted the main effort against the Soviets. After German panzers and the Italian mechanised corps achieved encirclements on the frontier, the army group would engage in battles of annihilation centred around Lvov and Odessa. The advance would then proceed furiously, to prevent Soviet forces from retreating beyond the Dnieper, which would serve as a formidable defensive barrier.

Drang Nach Osten

“There is only one task: Germanization of the East, and to treat the original inhabitants like Indians.…I intend to stay this course with ice-cold determination. I feel myself to be the executor of the will of History.”
Adolf Hitler​

Day One
Adolf Hitler had for seven years exceeded the expectations of the old German nationalists. He’d maneuvered himself to absolute power in Germany, crushed his rivals within the Nazi Party and continued to aggrandize Germany, always succeeding at the dangerous game of chicken he’d played with the liberal powers. The “Bohemian Corporal” had been underestimated by all the men dreaming wistfully for the old days of the Kaiserreich. And now with the Versailles diktat reversed, the country placed on a permanent war footing, and Germany’s sons and daughters churning through the cultural abattoir of Nazi indoctrination from womb to tomb, he had now set the country on a collision course with destiny.

The next task would be the Vernichtungskrieg , “war of annihilation”, with Judeo-Bolshevism. The first step on this path would be the extermination of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe, and the colonization of the land by Germans. The new trans-continental “Greater German Reich” would then extend this plan of extermination to the New World, cleansing it from the taint of degeneration brought by the Red May Revolution.

In the early morning hours of 15 May 1940, the die was cast. Luftwaffe fighters and bombers crossed the Soviet frontier before dawn. Their primary targets would be Soviet airfields and command centers in the frontier districts, but other bomber raids penetrated as far as the Kronstadt fortress near Leningrad and the Crimean Peninsula. In their wake, an invasion force of just over four million men had mustered to battle.

German heavy artillery pieces, including two titanic 80 centimetre Schwerer Gustav siege guns, pounded Soviet defensive works. Pioneer troops, assisted by fifth columnists, began raids against border troops and sabotaged Soviet communication lines.

These attacks, unparalleled in their ferocity, caught the Soviet defenders almost totally unprepared. NKO (Narodnyy Komissariat Oborony , “People’s Commissariat for Defense”) Directive No. 1 had warned the commanders of the border districts to ready themselves for a possible enemy attack (but make absolutely no provocative actions) less than twelve hours prior It may as well have been no warning at all.

Thousands of planes of the VVS (Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily, “Military Air Forces”) were laid out in neat rows on border airfields to guard against sabotage. They were sitting ducks to the German aviators. The most forward air fields were often rendered totally combat ineffective before their anti-aircraft batteries could even cough to life. Of the Soviet pilots who did make it into the air, they were always outnumbered and unprepared to face German pilots with years of combat experience.

The attack had paralyzed command and control at nearly every level. The information that did make its way up the chain of command was unreliable. Nonetheless, Stalin was awoken at 0815 Moscow time with news of the invasion. Having spent the previous night working characteristically late, the sleep deprived despot nonetheless quickly called a meeting of Sovnarkom and the military high command. Several directives were issued directing the armed forces to begin a general counteroffensive to “sweep the invaders from Soviet territory.” This was hopelessly naive, but nonetheless the commanders of the many military districts obeyed without question. No one yet knew the scale of the danger.

German and Axis forces meanwhile advanced rapidly, crushing the unorganized resistance. In Lithuania, Panzergruppe 4 had driven deep into the gap between the Soviet 8th and 11th Armies, steamrolling over the 4th Lithuanian Rifle Brigade. The German panzers advanced eighty kilometres. Food and sleep were forgone to sustain the advance well past dusk. Forces in the subsequent echelons widened the penetration corridor. Soviet forces mustered for battle as best they could, but many scores were defeated essentially unarmed in the panic, unable to even find a rifle, let alone prepare a defensive position before the enemy was upon him.

Further south near Bialystok, now part of the Byelorussian SSR, the situation for the 11th Army further worsened. Army Group Centre’s Panzergruppe 3 under General Hoth advanced rapidly, taking the crossings of the Neman River before anyone could think of dynamiting the bridges. 11th Army was now caught in a vise between two tank armies as the Luftwaffe continued to pummel them from uncontested clear blue skies.

Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 penetrated seventy-four kilometres from the start-line, taking Bug River crossings unopposed, and rapidly overrunning several forward supply points on the new Brest-Minsk transport corridor. The solid, well-graded roadbed, scheduled to be paved later this summer, provided an ideal surface for the movement of tanks and their supply trucks. While giddy with success, the Soviet defenders proved unexpectedly tenacious. Unplanned counterattacks began just before dusk, and in spite of local shortages of arms and ammunition, the Soviet forces attacked ferociously, at times clubbing landsers to death in their foxholes with trenching tools and wrenches, taking their Kar 98s and pressing on.

Nevertheless, these attacks petered out against organized German defense. But they proved to be a portent of the struggle to come. As Guderian wrote in his diary that evening, “I fear that we have underestimated the fighting spirit of the Russian.” Der Russe , “The Russian”, was the faceless monolith of racial-ideological conflict, and in the coming years this phrase would fill many writings about the war. Baltics, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Armenians, Kazakhs, etc., all the hundreds of nationalities in the Soviet Union, would become an undifferentiated “Asiatic” mass, a racial enemy to the Aryans.

If the initial attacks by Army Groups North and Centre had achieved resounding successes on the first day of Operation Teutonic, Army Group South was already encountering foreboding omens of the war to come. General Ewald von Kleist’s Panzergruppe 1 had advanced quickly at first, speeding towards the town of Brody on its mission to secure the crossings of the Bug River, and intersect the Lvov-Kiev transport corridor. But unlike its compatriots, these panzers quickly crashed into alert Soviet defenders. This resistance was soon crushed due to the superiority of fire and shock power the German formations possessed, but the further they advanced the more determined the resistance became.

Further south, the Italian Mobile Armored Corps pressed forward from Bessarabia, piercing through southern Ukraine towards the city of Voznesensk, cutting the primary rail arteries to Odessa before continuing to Kherson. The Rumanian Second Army would follow in support, investing the Soviet 9th Separate Army in the city of Odessa.

Soviet resistance, however, proved much more resilient than anticipated. The three Italian armored divisions and the attached 1st Rumanian Armored Division were stopped cold at 1315. Stuck on the barely serviceable roads due to the high rains the previous week, the armored column had smashed itself against a platoon of KV-1 heavy tanks of the 11th Tank Division.

The Soviet behemoths proved immune to the 47mm cannons of the Fiat M16/39 tanks; the quartet of Soviet tanks chewed through twenty Italian tanks and suffered no loss in the first engagement. With the road blocked, the Italian armor would be forced to wait for the infantry to assault the KVs, utilising the German produced 8.8cm Flak 36 anti-aircraft artillery as an ersatz heavy anti-tank gun to destroy them and dislodge the Soviet infantry rallying to them.

Domestically, both Hitler and Goebbels would give radio addresses on the subject. The public statements of the Nazi regime characterized the undeclared war of aggression as a pre-emptive attack to thwart the machinations of the “Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy”, and that this would begin a Pan-European holy war against communism. Hitler’s address very deliberately muddled the line between the ideological war and the racial war of annihilation. While the ambitions of mass murder and colonization in the East under Generalplan Ost were at this point an open secret, Hitler would not yet give any public creedence to this. But anyone who could read between the lines could deduce that Germany invaded the Soviet Union, not merely to change its regime or conquer its territory, but also to destroy its people.

Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop delivered diplomatic communiques to the British and French ambassadors, informing both of the beginning of a pre-emptive conflict against the Soviets, and expressing a desire to improve diplomatic and commercial relations with both. Both the Viscount Halifax and Daladier received these entreaties coolly. While the increased commerce would no doubt improve both government’s ability to fend off the growth of left-wing radicals, the political cost of friendship with Germany was already beginning to manifest.

By the evening of the 15th, several wildcat strikes had begun among British dockworkers loading cargo destined for Hamburg, Germany. Similar actions hit the French steel industry. While quickly resolved, these spontaneous actions by communist-sympathetic workers would only grow as the conflict continued.

Across the Atlantic, the UASR’s first khaki election had just drawn to a close. The new congress had begun its session the previous week, and Premier Foster was already planning his exit when he was awoken at 0207 Eastern Standard Time with news of the German invasion. Before he could even convene the Central Committee, the prepared war plans for the long anticipated German-Soviet War were already in motion.

The German Sicherheitsdienst would break into the American embassy in Berlin to find that the code machines had already been destroyed and the papers burned. As first light broke over the Atlantic Ocean, a general war alert was broadcast to all American flagged ships, directing all merchant vessels not already in convoy to make for the nearest neutral port and await instruction.

Day Two
If the first day of the war in the Baltics had been bad, the second was far worse. With Luftflotte 1 having achieved air supremacy, German bombers turned their attention from Soviet airfields towards Soviet defensive positions. These attacks paralyzed the maneuvers of the 11th Army in particular. The Panzers continued their penetrations further into the rear starting at dawn.

In spite of these difficulties, the Soviet troops began their planned counterattacks as ordered by Stalin. But the prewar planning was disastrously out of date, the troops unorganised and poorly prepared, and many of the specialised troops in the mobile groups were still learning their crafts. The massive expansion of the RKKA in the past three years would prove to be its fatal flaw; too few experienced soldiers, too little time to prepare the new men. Coupled with the effects of the Great Purge, the shortage of qualified officers was even greater. If only there had been more time.

General Kuznetsov committed two of his mechanised corps, the 3rd and 12th, into a two-pronged counteroffensive. With nearly eight hundred tanks available for the hasty Kaunas Counteroffensive, the two corps were well below full strength. But nonetheless, the BT-7s pressed the attack, aiming to blunt the German advance.

But unfortunately the weakness of this strategy became immediately apparent. The Soviet tankists were green, but they could fight savagely against German tankers and given the local superiority of numbers, might have triumphed by the weight of their assault. But battles are not merely a matter of tanks versus tanks.

Soviet tankers blundered into ambushes without proper reconnaissance, and without much in the way of air power, were driving into a thick fog of war. The German motorised infantry were well-prepared, with plenty of anti-tank and infantry field guns to augment the firepower of the tanks. By contrast, the poor coordination between the tanks and infantry in the Soviet mechanised forces resulted in tanks making unsupported attacks against entrenched infantry. And buttoned up tanks are essentially blind.

The withering hail of fire from German MG 34s may not physically harm the tank. But they will keep the crew buttoned up tight and deafened. If the anti-tank guns don’t get them first, they’ll hear the machine guns suddenly stop, only to find a ruddy-faced Bavarian nineteen-year old wrenching the hatch open to drop a grenade inside.

Further south, Army Group Centre’s offensive continued with similar ferocity. The Byelorussian Military District, now the Western Front, began its counteroffensive against AG Centre. Front-level mobile groups were ordered to engage the two armored spearheads, while the main rifle corps were to engage and smash the German infantry assaulting their positions.

These meeting engagements did cause significant damage to frontline German forces in the outset. Unfortunately, their hasty nature and the disorganised state of Soviet forces following the sucker punch they’d received the previous day meant it was impossible to sustain the tempo for long. Soviet mechanised forces either could not maneuver ahead of the German spearheads, or they shattered on impact. German tactical level counterattacks beginning in the afternoon often turned into routs for the exhausted Soviet troops.

With the German Fourth and Ninth Armies continuing to flow into the gaps punched in the Soviet lines by the panzers, the operational situation was quickly becoming desperate, though the Western Front’s commander, General of the Army Dmitry Pavlov did not yet know how bad it was. But he sensed the danger that he couldn’t see. His orders from Stavka left him just enough wriggle room to fight around that. The mechanised corps attached to the field armies were committed to the army level counteroffensive plans. But since the dawn of the previous day, the two mechanised corps directly attached to the Western Front HQ, the 17th and 20th, had been withdrawing eastward under his orders.

These soldiers were his best troops, with the highest proportion of modern tanks and the most training time with them. And Pavlov was looking for the right patch of ground to commit them for.

The adjacent Southwestern Front, under General Mikhail Kirponos, had alone chosen to bend before breaking, fighting a more elastic defense today with the realisation that the operational situation was untenable. The precious day of warning the Kiev Military District had, thanks to a German communist defector crossing the border on the 13th, had not won the frontier battles. But it had given the VVS a fighting chance, and gave just enough time to recognize the danger posed by the German tank armies.

Interpreting his orders more liberally, Kirponos chose to preserve his fighting strength with a fighting retreat, back towards the older Stalin Line, before sweeping the invaders. To achieve this, though, he’d have to stop the Panzergruppen racin through Ukraine. Their advance could be predicted with some accuracy; given the lingering effects of the rasputitsa in this region they’d hug close to the lone all-weather road, the main trunk line from Lviv to Kiev. With this in mind, Kirponos began preparing his counteroffensive, to meet the German tanks along the stretch of highway from Dubno to Zhytomyr. What armor he had and what was left of the VVS in western Ukraine would be committed to the operation, scheduled to begin on the 18th of May.

Further south, the Italian Mobile Armored Corps spent the day continuing to exhaust itself against the Soviet 11th Tank Division and the 84th Rifle Division pouring in to reinforce it. In spite of these notable successes in thwarting the enemy’s armored thrust, the total weight of Axis Forces have an overwhelmingly superior correlation of forces.

The quality of Rumanian and Italian formations varied considerably. But they and their commanders were prepared and well supported from the air, while much of the forces of the Soviet Southern Front were caught flat-footed and suffered heavy casualties. The strategy of elastic defense had mixed results, and with every sunny, cloudless day the mud dried further and the Luftwaffe pounded the Red Army further into the dirt.

Back in Moscow it was becoming apparent that the war was starting to slide out of control. The country is being mobilised for a total war. The American ambassador, Edouard Mass*, had brought news of the unanimous vote in the Congress of Soviets to declare war on the Axis. And with the declaration he brings the personal assurance of Workers’ Party Chairman Earl Browder that everything and anything will be made available to the Soviet war effort. These assurances do little to comfort Stalin, who is beginning to slip into a nervous breakdown.

The telegrams seldom bring good news. Even the crushing defeat of the Japanese near Changsha by the Soviet expeditionary force in China does little to improve the mood in the Kremlin. Nevertheless, Frunze and Zhukov have been recalled; they will leave for Moscow on the next transport planes.

Day Three
The blood-red sunrise over the Baltic states renewed the carnage. The early reports coming into General Kuznetsov’s headquarters bring no good news; yesterday’s tank battles had depleted the 3rd and 12th Mechanised far more than had been realised last night. 11th Army was in a vice and could not retreat. Nevertheless, he rolled the dice and committed the 65th Rifle Corps and the 3rd Separate Tank Brigade from the front reserve to the counterattack, shoring up the flagging tank troops. With the additional leverage, the 8th and 11th Armies can begin their withdrawal to the Dvina River.

The political situation in the Republic of Lithuania was fragile. Many of the supporters of the deposed dictator Antanas Smetona were enthusiastic about collaborating with the Germans, and the coalition government was on shaky ground. To avoid a capitulation, the Soviet military liaison ordered the government to evacuate to Moscow “until the danger passed.” As the civilian government began evacuation, NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria ordered the liquidation of political prisoners in the country, to destroy the raw material for an anti-Soviet collaboration government.

These mass murders were ultimately not useful, because the German occupiers had no use for Lithuanians of any sort, whether they were pro or anti Soviet. A decree of the Reichskanzlei issued at noon in Berlin had established the “Reichskommissariat Baltenland ” to fulfill the directives of Generalplan Ost. On ideological grounds, between 50 to 80 percent of the present inhabitants of the three Baltic republics and Byelorussia were to be systematically annihilated, with “potentially Germanisable” remnants to serve as helots for the “Baltic Germans” (a political category not strictly corresponding to the existing ethnic group) and German settlers.

The Kriegsmarine ‘s activity in the Baltic Sea picked up on this day. With air dominance secured, the surface ships were probing deeper into Soviet territorial waters for raiding and reconnaissance. Just after noon, the German light cruiser Emden attacked and sank the passenger liner Kamo as it departed the Gulf of Riga bound for Leningrad, its normal passenger complement of 600 ballooned by a large number of refugees. Over twelve hundred passengers and crew perished in the attack.

In the Byelorussian SSR, just after noon, the 17th Mechanised Corps joined battle against the German panzers. This meeting engagement near the town of Smarhon’ was a rare mutual surprise. 17th Mechanised was moving to its start position to begin a planned offensive the next day, and the German LVII. Armeekorps had broken down its defenses to resume its attack. Due to intelligence failure in the fog of war, the two formations bumbled into each other, both initially believing themselves to be facing a smaller foe and thus pressing the unprepared attack. Major General Mikhail Petrov had nearly twice as many tanks at his disposal and even as the day’s battle unfolded, felt supremely confident about using them.

Thus, in the first few hours of the engagement at Smarhon’, the Red Army had the upper hand. German troops were still largely unbriefed on the T-34 and KV-1 tanks and their abilities, and there had not yet been any identification and dissemination of tactics to counter them. Because they had sufficient frontal armor to resist the standard 5 cm anti-tank guns at normal fighting range, the initial German losses in armor and personnel was very high.

But the weaknesses of the Soviet tankers, their organization and their equipment revealed themselves as the battle wore on. The Soviet tankists were still novices and their officers quite green. The units were short on organic infantry support, and many of the tanks had arrived without their radios due to production bottlenecks.

As cloud cover dissipated, and the Germans were able to regroup with aerial reconnaissance and support, the tide shifted. The Panzer III could not engage head on effectively, but the better trained and more experienced German tankers could outmaneuver clumsily coordinated Soviet tanks. Infantry could swarm isolated tanks and ultimately even the mighty KV-1 could not withstand the firepower of the 8.8cm Flak 36.

General Pavlov realised shortly before dusk that the situation for the Western Front was teetering on the razor’s edge, and that now exhausted tankers were the only thing holding the jaws of Army Group Centre from snapping shut around almost his entire front. In spite of the day’s massive casualties, Pavlov ordered Petrov to continue the attack in concert with the other depleted mechanised corps. These continued concentric attacks on Panzergruppe 3 and Panzergruppe 2 to the south would be continued “to the last man if necessary” while the Western Front attempted to withdraw from the cauldron centred around Novogrudok.

In the Southwestern Front, the fighting continued at the same even-tempo waltz as the previous day. NKVD Internal Troops began implementing evacuation and sabotage policies in the Ukrainian SSR, focusing their efforts on the areas under the most immediate danger of German occupation. This scorched earth policy would begin with the evacuation or destruction of collective farms, their equipment and livestock in Western Ukraine. Additionally, many of the evacuated residences would boob-trapped to deny the invaders any refuge.

General Kirponos was finishing the preparations for the Rivne counteroffensive, now called Operation Mercury today, as the masses of T-34 and BT-7 tanks, SU-76 assault guns, and armored half-tracks moved into position. Four mechanised corps would be transferred to the operational command of the 6th Army for the operation. The 4th Mechanised Corps, under Major General Andrey Vlasov, would attack northward from the town of Derman, slicing into the flank of Panzergruppe 1 along the road from Dubno to Rivne. The 9th Mechanised Corps, under Major General Konstantin Rokossovsky would meet the German spearhead near Rivne, its northern flank covered by the 8th Mechanised Corps (led by Major General Dmitry Ryabyshev) joining the attack from the north. The 22nd Mechanised Corps, commanded by Major General Vasily Sokolovsky, would strike southward from Olyka.

These concentric attacks would be joined by the two rifle corps of the 6th Army and the remaining Frontal aviation assets, bolstered by the fighters, tactical bombers and attack aircraft released from the Stavka reserve to the Southwestern Front. As night fell and the final briefings were made, it was abundantly clear that the survival of the Southwest Front, and perhaps even the outcome of the war itself was on their shoulders. The rapid advance of the German panzers threatened to unhinge the entire defense of the front and cut off the withdrawal of the Red Army from its indefensible position in right-bank Ukraine.

After a day of hard fighting, the advance units of Army Group South, the Rumanian Fourth Army, reached the city of Odessa. This unhinging of the Soviet defensive flank finally gave the Italian Mobile Armored Corps the purchase it needed to push aside the Soviet 11th Tank Division, now reduced to ten percent effective strength from the relentless shelling and aerial bombardment. While the decisive breakthrough has not been achieved, and the Soviet 9th Separate Army continued to mount a tenacious defense outnumbered by the Axis coalition forces, the operational goal of investing Soviet forces in the city of Odessa was finally progressing.

9th Army’s acting commander, Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov, attempted to counterattack per Stavka’s orders. The 18th Mechanised Corps, supported by the 2nd Cavalry Corps, attempted to break through to the flanks of the Rumanian Third Army and drive to the Black Sea Coast, thereby isolating the Fourth Army for destruction. Chuikov had protested this order, but was overruled by Red Army Chief of Staff General Kirill Meretskov.

Fuel and ammunition shortages had made the plan dubious at best. The sucker-punch delivered by Luftflotte 6 on the first day of the campaign had obliterated the unhardened major stores for the Southern Front, and the chaos in the lines of communication had left the 9th Army in a difficult spot for supplies. Additionally, 18th Mechanised Corps had only been formed in February, and was totally unprepared for the task. Nonetheless, Chuikov complied, and the attack very quickly ran into trouble.

Shortly after dusk, the exhausted tankists, without effective infantry cover, were smashed in a backhand blow by the Rumanian 17th Infantry Division, and would have to withdraw back to their starting points through the night.

Day Four
A portent of the slaughter to come came in the morning of the 18th of May. The 11th Army, paralyzed by the pincer action of the German mechanized forces, was chopped in two as the 5th SS Panzer Division “Silberne Legion” cut south across through the 11th Army, separating 16th Rifle Corps from the rest of the army. Three Soviet rifle divisions (5th, 33rd and 188th) were now trapped in the Vilnius pocket, along with elements of the 12th Mechanised Corps.

The efforts to maintain the cordon and reduce the pocket, however, were already having their negative effect on Army Group North by that evening. The breakout attempts had begun almost immediately, and they paralyzed the whole 5th SS Panzer Division in a costly defensive action as line infantry slowly filtered in to maintain the cordon.

With its limb now wrenched free, and Army Group North now preoccupied with digesting its catch, the rest of 11th Army now pulled itself from the bear trap and could retreat to the Dvina River defense line with 8th Army.

In Byelorussia, Army Group Centre was after a much bigger prize. Hoth and Guderian’s panzers had taken heavy losses from Soviet tanks, but continued to press onwards. By now their aim was clear to everyone in General Pavlov’s staff: the two Panzergruppen would meet at Minsk, the capital of the Byelorussian SSR. Once they did, the lion’s share of the Western Front would be cut off. The remaining Soviet tanks would have to hold those jaws open as long as possible.

As the reports reached Moscow, Stalin was furious. He wanted Pavlov immediately recalled to Moscow for incompetence and sabotage, but Voroshilov managed to talk him down. Western Front was still evacuating and there was some hope that the forces could be saved.

Pavlov himself was not unaware of these machinations, and this is perhaps why as night fell he made the decision to remain with his forces and not withdraw until he could get the Western Front out of the pocket. Army Commissar 2nd Grade Nikolai Popel, the chief political commissar of the Western Front, had entrusted this information to Pavlov out of friendship and a desire to ensure he understood the gravity of the situation. And now that Pavlov’s deputy commander and chief of operations were both incapaciated, Pavlov decided to entrust deputy command to Popel, and ordered his evacuation.

The Luftwaffe over Byelorussia had on each successive day of the operation declared the war in the air successfully won, only to rise the next day to find more resistance than anticipated. Four days of a grueling sortie rate were taking their toll on men and machinery. And in spite of the literal thousands of Soviet planes that they had destroyed, many on the ground during the first day, Soviet fighters continued to scramble every day to face them.

Soviet Senior Lieutenant Aleksandr Pokryshkin becomes the first newly minted ace of the war today, forcing an overshoot by a Bf 109E and managing to trap his opponent into a losing energy fight over the city of Minsk. After winging the German after the overshoot, Pokryshkin slowly wore him down with tight maneuvers until he could bring the twin 12.7mm Brownings on target. After a concentrated fusilade, the Bf 109 burst into flames and plummeted to the earth. Such aerial victories were few and far between, and they were immediately seized upon by the All-Union Communist Party’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda.

In Western Ukraine, Operation Mercury kicked off just before dawn. NKVD stay-behind cadres launched a series of sabotage actions, the most effective of which was destruction of a oil tanker train stuck in the city of Rivne, which had ironically been bound for Germany as part of the Soviet-German commercial agreement in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As black smoke choked the sky and light failed at dawn, the Soviet 6th Army began its counterattack.

Eight Soviet tank divisions, four motor rifle divisions, and six rifle divisions began a concentric attack on Panzergruppe 1. They faced three German motorised corps (III, XIV and XLVIII) and army-level supporting assets; in sum seven panzer divisions (including the SS Leibstandarte division), and three motorised infantry divisions. This direct comparison does conceal other quantitative and qualitative matters, the most obvious of which is that Soviet tank and motor rifle divisions under the 1941 tables of organisation are significantly larger than their German counterparts. A Soviet tank division, for example, was made of four regiments of three battalions each, while the typical German panzer division was made of three regiments of 2-3 battalions each.

Equally important is that largely due to mechanical issues, the total force available to General von Kleist on 18 May was a lower percentage of full strength, with many German tanks and other fighting vehicles in the rear for maintenance after three full days of hard fighting. This was further exacerbated by the disposition of forces, with the panzergruppe echeloned along the major arterial corridors extending from the Ukrainianf frontier to the city of Rivne.

By contrast, the Soviet forces were organised and concentrated for their concentric attack on Panzergruppe 1 , and at a high operational strength, especially compared to other Soviet formations during Operation Teutonic. The mechanised forces of the Southwest Front were on balance the best trained and equipped, and had already been at a higher readiness when the war began. And while they had endured significant attrition from Luftwaffe attacks, they at least on paper had enough fuel and munitions amassed to achieve their operational objectives.

Thus, 3,070 Soviet tanks, including 875 T-34s, engaged 1,235 German tanks in the hitherto largest tank battle in history. With the German panzertruppen already given in their “Severity Order” and other general orders the imperative of holding all ground taken, and the Soviet tankers instructed to take the ground and destroy their foes at any price, the result could only be an absolute bloodbath.

Some echelons of Panzergruppe 1 were effectively entrenched, with dug-in infantry and concealed anti-tank guns screening the positions of the tanks and the approaches to lines of communication. But unlike in other sectors of the front, the Soviet tankists did not attack unsupported. As clumsy as the cooperation could be, the combined arms team of infantry, tanks, artillery and air power attacked in concerted fashion.

Major General Vlasov’s 4th Mechanised Corps, however, did manage to find a lucky patch of ground on its drive to Dubno, catching the 16th Panzer Division on the march as it repositioned forward to carry the weight of the next leg of the advance to Kiev. This meeting engagement on the German flank was like a hammer thrown through a plate glass window. Vlasov’s tankers rapidly sliced through the 16th Panzer, leaving a trail of burning Panzer IIIs and press-ganged Czechoslovak LZ vz 38s, and now threatened to cut off the whole of von Kleist’s vanguard.

Any other conceivable foe would have broken under the intensity of the Soviet assault. But the Wehrmacht clawed its way back to control of the tactical situation through the course of the day, as an ever increasing volume of German aircraft converged to support the desperate defense. Kleist was taken by surprise initially, but very diligently commanded his troops through the course of the battle. He worked in concert with the divisions under his command to organize short tactical counterattacks to hold important territory or to slow further Soviet advances.

As the sun set, the fighting continued well into the night in some sectors. On the whole, the first day of Operation Mercury was very promising for the Soviets, though the results were as of yet inconclusive. The town of Dubno had been liberated, and Soviet tanks had occupied many stretches of the road, blocking the easy transport of troops and supplies. The damp and muddy countryside did not deter the tanks of either army significantly, but the transit of trucks proved much more difficult. In terms of losses, it was the largest single day of tank losses yet incurred by the Wehrmacht , though German record keeping was quite liberal in recording equipment as only “partial” losses, and the true number of total losses would not be noticed until some weeks later.

In Odessa, Lt. Gen Chuikov calls off the counterattack. The 9th Army is increasingly outnumbered and outgunned by the arrival of new Rumanian, Italian and German forces to the front, and the state of the defense is too outmatched on the South Ukrainian lowlands to stop an offensive supported by air power and tanks. After repeated entreaties to Stavka, they finally give Chuikov permission to begin a withdrawal at 1435, back to more suitable defensive positions on the Southern Bug River.

While Chuikov feared that it was too late, with how short on supplies his command was running, he nonetheless began the withdrawal promptly. The two rifle divisions and the fortified region pinned in the city of Odessa are detached to a separate command, the Coastal Group, to hold the fortified city for as long as possible to effect the evacuation of civilians and industrial capacity from the city. An additional rifle division is promised to be shipped into the city from the Stavka reserve, but for right now Chuikov is not hopeful.

Day Five
The German offensive in the Baltic states continued, with Field Marshal von Bock ordering Panzergruppe 4 and the rest of Army Group North to bypass the Vilnius pocket and continue the offensive. The counterattacks by the trapped Soviet riflemen had been largely contained, and now he felt it would be possible to continue the cordon with the L. Armeekorps from the OKH Reserve.

Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies continued to advance, occupying the towns and cities of Lithuania in the wake of the retreat of the Northwest Front. The first organized mass slaughters of Jews, Romani and “communist elements” began in the afternoon. Not by the Schutzstaffel , but by the regular officers and enlisted of the Wehrmacht. Pursuant to their general orders, many thousands of Lithuanians are murdered today, with the assistance of collaboration groups.

The Soviet politician Sergei Kirov, currently serving as the Chief Political Commissar of the Northwestern Front, issued an edict from Stavka drafting the surviving members of the Lithuanian Army into service in the Red Army, an order countersigned by the civilian government of Lithuania. This order will soon be extended to the rest of the Baltic states, with the goal of keeping their civil, political and military leadership from capitulating at any price.

Plans to forcibly integrate the Baltic republics into the USSR are shelved indefinitely. The popular front governments-in-exile will instead deny legitimacy to German collaborator movements, and direct the continued resistance to the invaders by the “Home Army” networks.

The situation grows more desperate with every passing minute in Byelorussia. Panzergruppe 3 finished chewing up its opposition in the 17th Mechanised Corps by 1300. Many Soviet tanks lay abandoned or destroyed by their crews, with no fuel to evacuate. Hundreds more have been knocked out by anti-tank guns, sappers, or Hoth’s own panzers. Nonetheless, Hoth is impressed by the tenacity of Soviet resistance, even if it is ineptly organized and poorly led. He telegrams urgently to the OKW, asking for the newer PzKpfw III Ausf. F to be prioritized to his group.

But these new tanks are in hot demand, with German tankers urgently insisting that the tanks armed with the new 7.5 cm KwK 40 L/48 guns be prioritized to their commands all across the Eastern Front. Hitler is frustrated immensely by the bottlenecks in armored fighting vehicle production, and the repeated delays in development. Tank contracts have largely gone to the craft oriented heavy machinery industry. For right now, he can do very little aside from push the PzKpfw IV Nashorn breakthrough heavy tank into production. But as the advance elements of Panzergruppe 3 reach the northern outskirts of Minsk at dusk, Hitler promulgated an order to Minister for Armaments Fritz Todt to put tank production under the direct control of the Front Ford conglomerate for rationalization.

The Battle of Rivne continues with redoubled ferocity. The 1st SS Panzer Division “Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler” counterattacked with reckless abandon, working in concert with scattered pockets from the 16th Panzer, to begin pushing back Vlasov’s 4th Mechanised Corps. And while they were not any better in terms of leadership or skill, the men of the Waffen-SS had an abundance of ideological fanaticism that proved the important building blocks for their reputation.

The Soviet tankists didn’t give the ground back easily, but unfortunately the tank heavy formation was ill-suited for holding ground once taken. The chaos from the first day had begun to wear off, and the German panzertruppen gained some freedom of maneuver. Conversely, the Soviets were unable to sustain the cohesive, massed concentric attack of the previous day. If they had, they would have routed and overran the bulk of Panzergruppe 1.

Instead, the battle broke down into a sequence of smaller maneuvers, with much of the action being accomplished by task forces of company or battalion size. The Soviet 6th Army continued the offensive on this smaller scale, limited by attrition, fuel and ammunition, in a game of chess.

One notable sequence in this period of the battle is well known in military history and popular consciousness as “Lieutenant Vostokov’s* wild ride”. Senior Lieutenant Spartak Vasilyevich Vostokov, deputy commander of 3rd Company 1/18th Tank Regiment, 43rd Tank Division, had been sent with his company just after dawn to secure forward observation points near the city of Rivne. After smashing a German reconnaissance company, Vostokov’s company came under a concentric assault by a battalion sized kampfgruppe from the 13th Panzer division.

Unfazed by the danger, Vostokov ordered his T-34 to press on to favorable ground, knocking out two Panzer IIIs and a 38t in quick succession. From his defilladed position, Vostokov regrouped, destroying two 3.7 cm Pak 36s and scattering their infantry cover with high explosive rounds and machine gun fire. With retreat blocked by a numerically superior force, Vostokov pushed forward down a muddy game trail into the woods, hoping to loop back to safety.

This “wild ride” portion would take Vostokov’s lone tank behind enemy lines, searching for a safe route back to his lines. The woods were thick with German troops, and his tank was doggedly pursued, forcing Vostokov to push deeper into German lines.

Along the twisting country path, Vostokov and his crew of four tankists searched for a safe route through the German kampfgruppe. Their fight was near constant, with German tanks always hot on their heels they had little time to plan their flight. Nonetheless, in the next half hour the tank knocked out several supply trucks, a Sd.Kfz. 251 half-track and its mounted squad. The fugitive Soviet tank then bumbled into a German battalion field kitchen, driving the frightened cooks and bakers before it like moneychangers from the temple. In the rampage, Vostokov’s gunner machine-gunned anyone who put up a whiff of resistance while the driver trampled over field kitchen carts and smashed food stores.

Over the next three and a half hours, Vostokov and his crew managed to evade their pursuers through a mixture of skillful map reading, daring, and just plain luck. He would knock out three more enemy tanks and rescue a trapped squad of riflemen, who’d ride the rest of the way back to Soviet lines clinging to the hull in panic as German half-tracks and light tanks pursued them.

The carnage of tank combat around Rivne had defied General Kleist’s preconceptions. The Soviet tankists were as aggressive and ruthless as his own, and as his own headquarters is perilously close to the line of battle, he telegrammed Army Group South headquarters and the OKW that his army is in danger of being overrun.

Further South, the retreat of the 9th Separate Army to the Bug River is in danger of turning into a rout. The Italian Mobile Corps, now supported by independent Panzerjäger battalions, was now raiding into the 9th Army’s rear. While these penetrations were not as deep as those faced by the fronts further north, Chuikov now feared that an increased armor effort could shatter the cohesion of his army and turn the retreat into a rout.

The Soviet Black Sea Fleet had sortied from Sevastopol on the day of the invasion, and on the 19th began a coordinated naval and air attack on the important Rumanian port city of Constanța. Four destroyers and the heavy cruiser Voroshilov begin shelling the city’s dockyards and the incomplete positions of the German Tirpitz coastal battery. Simultaneously, Tupolev SB bombers dropped incendiaries and high-explosives on the city. Coordinated assaults on Rumanian Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe installations in the region began concurrently, though the timing of these attacks did not achieve maximum effectiveness.

It is thus far the VVS and Soviet Naval Aviation’s only relative success, having been pummeled in nearly every other theater. As the shelling continued and Rumanian littoral assets sortie to attack the Soviet ships, the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the battleship Parizhskaya Kommuna began her dash at flank speed to lend her 30 cm guns to the bombardment.

Parizshkaya Kommuna arrived after the Soviet destroyers have finished destroying or driving away the two Rumanian frigates and the flotilla of torpedo boats. The Soviet destroyer Storozhevoy has been badly damaged in the fighting and begins to withdraw as the Parizshkaya Kommuna opens up with her twelve guns.

The bombardment continued past midnight, wrecking the city’s port infrastructure and destroying several merchant ships in dock. The Soviet flotilla retreated into the night and began its journey back to Sevastopol.

Day Six
Following the final conclusion of negotiations with Germany, Finnish President Risto Ryti issued a declaration of war to the Soviet ambassador. In his speech to the parliament, Ryti promises a “patriotic war” to restore Finnish sovereignty to lands in Karelia ceded to the Soviet Union in the 1920 peace treaty as well as the result of cessions by his predecessor to avert war. The country has already been on a track to war mobilisation since the Soviets had begun stationing troops in the Baltics; secret negotiations between Finland and Germany had been ongoing since March.

Five minutes after the declaration is issued, Finnish troops of the Army of Karelia launch attacks on the Soviet 7th Separate Army defending the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia. The Soviets, presently in ongoing negotiations for a non-aggression pact with the Republic of Finland, are caught flat-footed by the attacks. The initial gains and casualties are modest on both sides, but the pressure placed by the Finns forces Stavka to cancel the transfer of the 23rd Army from the Leningrad Front to the Northwest Front.

Meanwhile, the Northwest Front is under continual assault from Army Group North. Defeatist actions by German-sympathizing Latvian reactionaries have hindered efforts to establish a concerted defense, and with news spreading among refugees of mass killings by German troops in Lithuania, many in Latvia begin to flee. While initially resistive, the Northwest Front begins utilizing this flight to aid in the evacuation of industrial capacity. Latvian workers and peasants are offered refuge in the Soviet Union in exchange for their help in moving or destroying infrastructure and industrial capacity that the Germans could seize for their own purposes.

Similar plans were being formed across the USSR. Today, a joint decision by the All-Union Presidium, the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolshevik) established the State Defense Committee, hereafter referred to as the GKO (Gosudarstvennyj komitet oborony) as an extraordinary organ of state power. The GKO would serve as a “war cabinet” with central control over all aspects of the war effort. One of its first edicts established the All-Union Evacuation Council, and directed all the member republics and oblasts to establish evacuation committees to coordinate the evacuation of Soviet citizens and industrial capacity.

These measures became all the more urgent when news reached Stalin’s desk at 1812 that Panzergruppe 3 and Panzergruppe 2 had met east of Minsk. Major elements of three Soviet armies (3rd, 10th and 13th) are now isolated in the Novogrudok pocket. Pavlov has evacuated far less than he’d hoped; some 500,000 soldiers are now encircled and isolated from resupply.

But the battle is far from over, and the Western Front’s headquarters is busy planning to breakout. And while the major transport lines are well defended by German motorised infantry, the speed of the thrust by the Panzer divisions means it is more of a net than a solid wall. Troops continue to leak through the lines through the night as the regular German infantry marches at breakneck pace to reinforce the cordon.

As Operation Mercury began its third day, General Kirponos was unaware of the disaster unfolding to his north. He orders 6th Army to commit the last of its reserve for the day’s operations, and finally send Panzergruppe 1 to its tomb.

What air power he had left at the start of the day was largely destroyed or rendered inoperable over the course of the day’s operations. Soviet tanks push onwards. By noon, the tanks of the 9th Mechanised Corps had linked up with the tanks of 8th Mechanised Corps east of Rivne, surrounding the 3rd Panzer Division. Vlasov’s 4th Mechanised had taken Dubno, and had begun fortifying an arc from Mlynow to Beresteczko to Brody. The 6th Rifle Corps advanced quickly to reinforce these positions under constant air attack. With the VVS effectively chased from the sky, the only security comes from towed and automotive anti-aircraft artillery, which continues to fill the sky with flak and tracer fire at the approach of any attack aircraft.

But now that Kirponos has Kleist pinned, he has to hold him. The Soviets cannot continue further offensive operations except at a small scale due to a lack of fuel, and resupply is occuring slower than expected. The tanks cannot hold ground effectively, and the movement of regular infantry to reinforce is happening slower than desired.

Kleist begins his breakout attempts in the afternoon. Against Hitler’s orders, he will be forced to pull back to Brody, within range of support from the Seventeenth Army. To do so, he will have to fight his way out of the clutches of numerous Soviet tank and motor rifle divisions. The retreat was a bloody affair, but the arteries needed to be reopened. Using superior coordination by the more experienced German commanders, their better radios, and air power, the panzertruppen work to isolate and destroy or otherwise bypass Soviet positions of strength. The strategy is largely successful. Using motorised infantry to hold the flank at Rivne, the tanks evade the immobilised jaws of the 8th and 9th Mechanised Corps, and are able to smash into the flanks of the 4th and 10th Mechanised Corps.

The lack of sufficient infantry coverage, shortages of fuel and ammunition, and the cumulative destruction of transport shatters the previously triumphant 4th Mechanised Corps. The retreat from Dubno and Brody only narrowly avoids becoming a rout thanks to Kleist pulling back.

The trapped 3rd Panzer Division, however, is unable to break out of its cordon. General Rokossovsky deflects the German counterattacks, and has preserved enough of his tempo to hold the ground and even begin tightening the noose after dusk.

The Separate Coastal Group endures a day of intense shelling and attacks from the Rumanian Fourth Army. Though heavily outnumbered, the Soviet soldiers put up a tenacious resistance. Well supplied and with control of the Black Sea, the defenders go into battle with good morale. The recently rehabilitated Brigadier General Georgy Samoilovich Isserson assumes command of the Separate Coastal Group today.

This is far from the kind of war that Isserson had theorised working under Tukhachevsky and Frunze, but he is an apt student of military science and adapts to the siege battle. The city’s population continues to be evacuated, save for critical workers and those reservists who have are being mustered into the ad hoc Odessa Rifle Division.

Day Seven
The American Joint Staff Mission arrived in Moscow on 21 May 1940. Headed by Lt. General Harry Haywood, the Joint Staff Mission was to represent the American military chiefs of staff to their Soviet counterparts and to directly liaison with the GKO. Haywood met with Stalin shortly after news of the failed counteroffensive by the 27th Mechanised Corps to relieve the Novogrudok pocket reached the Kremlin.

In their initial meetings, “the boss” was weary from lack of sleep and despondent over the military situation. Nonetheless, important groundwork was made on the first day. Haywood relayed the Revolutionary Military Council’s draft proposal for unity of Comintern command in each of the joint Theatres of Military Operations. As part of this process, a single combined Revolutionary Military Council would serve a combined chiefs of staff for both the Comintern Armed Forces. Each Theatre would be commanded by a military soviet with representatives from each of the present militaries, and be chaired by a single commander-in-chief.

These proposals were received coolly. What was of immediate interest was the promise of aid, and the scale surprised even Stalin. People’s Commissar for Defense Voroshilov presented an initial request that, however urgently the Red Army needed it, he felt was unreasonable: 50,000 trucks, 3,500 tanks, 2,000 combat aircraft, 150,000 tonnes of munitions, and 50,000 tonnes of high-octane aviation fuel. The Joint Staff Mission responded by effectively saying “Anything else you want?”

Haywood promised the delivery of a field-army equivalent expeditionary force by September, twenty fighter and attacker regiments, and military/civil engineering groups to continue to improve Soviet transport infrastructure and static defenses.

As this diplomatic tête-à-tête unfolded in Moscow, in the Baltic states the Northwestern Front continued its evacuation. Disorganised and now denuded of much of its heavy artillery and mechanised support, it was clear to Kuznetsov that the fighting retreat would have to continue until more suitable defensive terrain could be found.

Efforts to secure river defense lines had twice failed due to the rapidity of German armored advances, and what hope that he had of concentrating anti-tank artillery to blunt these spearheads had been lost in the retreat. Army Group North was capturing thousands of field guns, tanks, trucks and their munitions, and the Wehrmacht would have no shame in using them against the Soviets.

In Byelorussia, Army Group Centre has begun to tighten the Novogrudok cauldron to prevent the trapped Soviet armies from melting away into the densely wooded countryside. General Pavlov has been encouraging just that, ordering subordinate army, corps and division commanders to infiltrate German lines wherever possible and find their way to safety with whatever men they have.

Those that are unable to make the escape are ordered to establish partisan and sabotage commands. All war materiel that is not of immediate use is to be destroyed to prevent its capture. Road, rail and telephone lines are to be severed, bridges dynamited. This order extends down to local factory and kolkhozy committees, who are directed to take what they can carry into the hinterland and burn the rest.

In Northern Ukraine, Operation Mercury has reached its culminating point. While the husk of most of Panzergruppe 1 has pulled back lines held by the Eighteenth Army, the Soviet 6th Army was shattered. But Kirponos has his prize; the 3rd Panzer Division is hopelessly cut off. Though he expected a protracted fight to reduce the pocket, at dusk he receives an unexpected bit of good fortune when the division’s executive officer and now acting commander Generalmajor Vincenz Müller throws up the white flag

Panzergruppe 1 may have survived, but in terms of equipment and manpower losses it is effectively destroyed. Worse, it has endured the only significant failure in an otherwise highly successful campaign. OKW, at Hitler’s insistence, decides that if it wipes the name it may wipe the shame. Panzergruppe 1 is disbanded and its commander, Generaloberst Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, is dismissed from active service for his failure.

Further south, Odessa’s garrison is still holding against seven times their number in Rumanian and Italian troops. The German and Italian armies continue to advance in the wake of the withdrawal by the Southwest and Southern fronts, but with armored forces smashed the threat of encirclement has dissipated.

The World Revolutionary War

“How many songs have I left in me?​

Tell me, o cuckoo, and sing.​

To live in the city or hamlets?​

To lie as a stone, or burn like a star?”​

Victor Tsoi, “The Cuckoo”​

In the coming days and weeks, the Wehrmacht would renew its offensive with mounting ferocity. The OKW remains dead set on destroying the Soviet Union in a single campaign, giddy with success. The protracted battle to reduce the Novogrudok pocket would however be a portent of the war to come.

Army Group Centre expected the hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers isolated in central Byelorussia to fall into disarray and surrender quickly to the advance of the German infantry. What they would encounter was instead a determined, coordinated defense that would require two weeks of heavy fighting to fully close. Many thousands of Soviet soldiers would escape into the thick forests and marshlands and form the nucleus of a protracted partisan war in Byelorussia.

General Pavlov himself would die during the last week of the campaign, on the march as he marshaled what was left of his forces still in communication to attempt to exfiltrate the pocket. As the morning fog lifted on 1 June 1940, a Bf 109E of Jagdgeschwader 52 was returning from a sortie when its pilot spotted masses of khaki rushing across an open clearing. Though out of cannon ammunition, Lieutenant Günther Rall still had plenty of ammunition left in his two nose mounted MG 17. So he pushed into a shallow dive and delivered long, staggered bursts of fire across the clearing before continuing his flight home.

One of those 7.92mm bullets struck Pavlov in his lower abdomen, mortally wounding him. Unable to move on his own and not wishing to further burden his surviving men while knowing the shot through his gut would likely kill him after drawn out agony, General of the Army Dmitry Grigoryevich Pavlov asked for and received the coup de grace from his chief of staff.

In the final toll, Operation Teutonic was a crushing military, industrial and political blow to the Soviet Union. Within the first month of the advance, the Axis had occupied most of the land west of the Dvina and Dneiper Rivers and remaining Soviet forces west of this defense line were evacuating their untenable positions. The Red Army’s casualties numbered in the millions, including over 600,000 captured or killed in the Battle of Bialystok-Minsk. These casualties included not only hundreds of thousands of irretrievable losses on frontline Soviet soldiers in the Western TVO, but also hundreds of thousands of reservists captured while mobilising.

The losses in equipment were similarly devastating. The pre-war Soviet air force, the VVS, was almost completely destroyed, with 90 percent of its inventory destroyed or irreparably damaged. The largest tank arsenal in the world had been reduced to ashes in the bitter fighting, and with the evacuation of much of the Soviet military industry now in the direct line of German advances, they would not be readily replaced.

While a core of skilled tankists and their officers had emerged from Operation Mercury, the Red Army no longer had the resources for mass mechanised war even amidst the triumph over Panzergruppe 1. Stavka ordered the dissolution of all large tank and mechanised units, and their remnants would be reorganized into more easily coordinated brigades to be distributed piecemeal to support the infantry for the time being.

The German Army did pay considerably for the advance, but given the scale of the operation they achieved their aims at a discount. As the situation in Northern Ukraine against the Southwest Front showed, even a few days of extra preparation had caused considerable changes to the outcome of the operation. Without the suckerpunch, the number of dead and wounded on the Axis could have ballooned into the many hundreds of thousands.

With America and the rest of the New World Comintern at war with the Axis, it was perhaps Hitler alone in the upper echelons of the Nazi state that didn’t expect an immediate triumph by the end of the year. The OKW wished to continue rapid advances deep into Leningrad and Moscow beginning in July, with little consideration to the logistical issue beyond the standard go-getter can-do attitude. Army staff logisticians were expected to make it happen, by hook or crook, and the men in charge of the army in the field did not care to hear excuses, however reasonable.

The attitude in France and Germany had shifted dramatically since the massive Nazi propaganda reels depicting their triumph. At the outbreak of the war, the British press and elite had been jubilant that the Hitlerian St. George would quickly strikedown the Bolshevik serpent. But now having sown so gaily, the time was coming to reap the fruits of their labors: a German dominated Europe.

This shift in attitude was so pronounced that the British Admiralty in mid-June ordered a suspension of all longterm war plans with the UASR to instead refocus efforts to contain Germany with total access to all the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union. This shift would also continue with the 1940 Imperial Defence Conference beginning on 1 July 1940.

The Imperial Defence Conference had begun as part of continued efforts to achieve political and military cohesion between the British Empire and her Dominions, and had been initially spurred on by expectation of conflict with the UASR.

This meeting of political heads of governments and military leaders had now turned towards the beast on the continent they had created, and the need to reign it in, and unfortunately for the Viscount Halifax, this was far less of a concern to the Dominions. Dominions that had once been willing to cede more Imperial control to defense and foreign policy to deal with immediate threats, like Canada and Australia, were very far away from German spheres. South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts remained enthusiastic for the dream of the Imperial Federation, but the realpolitik was getting in the way. The big elephant in the room of the eventual Dominionization of the British Raj in India could torpedo all of this.

In the military conferences, much of the British Imperial Staff were in agreement that the German-Soviet War would be over within some months, and that the Soviets would inevitably capitulate after such a crushing blow. One of the lone notable defectors from this general opinion was Major General T.E. Lawrence, the famous adjutant of the Arab revolt and now a staff officer attached to asymmetric warfare plans for the defense of Canada.

Lawrence noted that every political indication had been given that the Soviet Union would fight until the bitter end. The UASR had already made its public commitment to continue the struggle against the Axis until complete and total victory, and had transitioned to a total war mobilisation. Lawrence argued that far from the common denigration of America as a country of provincial degenerates that had succumbed to revolution out of weakness and racial mongrelisation, he believed that the people of America, like their Soviet brothers, were earnest and dedicated people, and that “having spilled blood together to forge their International, they will not let it be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it.”

And when it came to blood spilled, few now could know that Germany had already dug its own grave. German conduct in previous wars, taken together with the display of unlimited barbarity in its occupied territory in the Baltics, Byelorussia and Ukraine, ensured that there could never be a surrender or negotiated settlement. Hitler had made the war into one of racial annihilation. Having invaded the Soviet Union not merely to seize its territory or resources but to destroy its people, surrender meant death.

While still legally bound by the 1929 Geneva Convention, which required signatories to abide by its dictates in any conflict with non-signatories, Germany very publicly used the fact that both the Soviet Union and UASR had rejected ratification over the requirement to racially segregate POWs to sanction German war crimes.

The murderous Nazi program of colonisation was just beginning, but every day meant mass killings, targetting Jews and the Komsomol youth movement with the greatest intensity. Millions of young men and women were being called up for service in the Red Army. And the Battle of the Atlantic would soon begin to prevent the flow of aid to the Soviet Union.

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*[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation