Su-6/7

Tu-7/Pe-8

The Soviet air force, or VVS (Voenno Vozdushniye Sily) had to overcome enormous obstacles to succeed in World War II. After the 1917 revolution, the USSR was far behind western Europe in its military technology, particularly aviation. During WWI the Russians relied heavily on foreign contractors, especially the French, and were completely reliant on others for engine production. Lenin’s new country refused to be dependent on the capitalist Europeans and sought to establish their own aviation industry. Thus in 1918 the TsAGI, or Central Institute of Aerodynamics, was created. This was a massive leap into research, design and production and in late 1920 all 5 Soviet aeronautical firms were dynamically expanded. In 1928 Stalin set forth the aviation industry’s first “5 Year Plan,” which became a time for future legends to shine—names like Polikarpov, Tupolev and Yakolev. By the 1930s the VVS had gone from one of the worst air programs to one of the best. The fruits of the Soviet air program even saw action in the Spanish Civil War with the Polikarpov I-16 fighter and Tupolev SB-2 bomber. Ironically, the VVS that was so revolutionary in its reorganization hit a wall by the time war began and little had improved when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941. Newer planes had been designed but they were not out of the testing phase and their mass production was unavailable. The result was an unmitigated disaster, with the VVS nearly becoming extinct at the hands of the more experienced and better equipped Luftwaffe. The harsh winter of 1941-1942 may have very well saved the Soviets because German air operations were restricted and over 600 engine and airframe factories were transplanted entirely to Siberia and the Urals. This put them out of range of the German attacks and gave the Soviets some breathing room to keep churning out aircraft. Production was severely for impacted for months, but the production lines soon recovered in both quality and quantity. 1941 was a tragedy, 1942 was a transition, and 1943 was a triumph: in 1943 an estimated 35,000 airplanes and 49,000 engines were built. Throughout the war, the Soviet Union produced an estimated 125,000 aircraft. This could not have been possible without the Allies’ contributions, especially the United States, who sent the Soviet air program $500 million in equipment and materials along with 15,000 airplanes. The Soviets still preferred to be self-reliant but the substantial amounts of aid allowed them to concentrate on other areas of production and remove Nazi Germany from eastern Europe.

Soviet aircraft prefixes before 1941:

ARK—arctic

BB—short-range bomber

DB—long-range bomber

SB—medium bomber

TB—heavy bomber

I—fighter

KOR—carrier plane

PS—transport

U or UT—trainer

Soviet aircraft prefixes after 1941:

Il—Ilyushin

La—Lavochkin

LaGG—Lavochkin-Gorbunov

MiG—Mikoyan-Gurevich

Pe—Petlyakov

Po—Polikarpov

Su—Sukhoi

Tu—Tupolev

Yak--Yakolev

Major General of Tank Troops M.I. Potapov, commander of the 5th Army

In the middle of July the German front ran true along a north-south line from the mouth of the Dniester, on the Black Sea, to Narva, on the Estonian frontier. But in the centre the reversed S of two gigantic salients bulged ominously. The Panzer groups of Army Group Centre, advancing on Moscow to the north and south of the Minsk highway, had already passed the longitude of Smolensk. But to their right the Russian 5th Army still held its forward positions in the Pripet Marshes[1]. In this way there was an extra "front" of over 150 miles which lay against the exposed flanks of Army Group Centre, and of Rundstedt's left wing as it approached Kiev. The Russian salient, although giving the appearance of mass, was in reality a fragmented hodgepodge of defeated units, stragglers, men without equipment, tanks without fuel, guns without ammunition. But this was not apparent from the large-scale war map at Rastenburg, and the Germans simply did not dispose of the men to probe the area in sufficient strength to find out. And so the Russian presence, poised (as it seemed) over its supply routes, acted as a brake on the freedom of the army groups to either side. Meanwhile, as the days passed with them undisturbed, the Russians were exploiting to the full that extraordinary gift of improvisation which was to succour them on so many occasions during the campaign.

Under Major General Potapov they were busy restoring cohesion to their shattered brigades, laying the foundations of the Partisan movement, and operating vigorously with their cavalry—the only mobile arm left to them in any strength.

The 5th Army and the units gathered around it were the largest concentration operating in the German rear, but there were many others still in vigorous action, even though (unlike the 5th Army) they were completely cut off from the main front. The garrisons at Orsha and Moailev, great numbers of wandering infantry—some as far west as Minsk and Vilna—the whole stretch of the Baltic coastline up to the west of Tallinn, the continued resistance of all these "pockets," lent force to the arguments of those who believed that the Wehrmacht was being dangerously overextended.

With the intention of restoring concentration and asserting at the same time a strict priority of objectives, OKW had issued, on 19th July, Directive No. 33. This opened with a reminder that although the Stalin Line had been pierced along its whole front, ". . . the liquidation of important enemy contingents caught between the mobile elements of the Centre will take a certain amount of time." The directive went on to complain that Army Group South had its northern wing immobilised by the continued resistance of the Soviet 5th Army and by the defence of Kiev. Therefore ". . . the object of the immediate operation is to prevent the enemy from withdrawing important forces beyond the Dnieper and to destroy them."

To this end:

(a) The Soviet 12th and 6th armies are to be crushed by a concentric attack of Army Group South;

(b) The inner wings of an Army Groups South and Centre are to inflict the same treatment on the Soviet 5th Army;

(c) Army Group Centre is to push only its infantry toward Moscow. Its mobile elements which are not engaged to the east of the Dnieper [i.e., against the Soviet 5th Army] are to assist the advance of Army Group North against Leningrad by covering the right flank and destroying communications with Moscow;

(d) Army Group North is to continue its advance on Leningrad when the 18th Army has established contact with the 4th Panzer Army, and when the right flank of the latter has been made completely secure by the 16th Army. The Estonian naval bases are to be seized, and the enemy is to be prevented from withdrawing his forces from there into Leningrad.

This was clear enough. What the directive amounted to was a halt order to Army Group Centre (to "push on" with infantry meant nothing over these distances) while the flanks were secured.

The fact was that OKH and OKW alike were taken aback by the continued strength of the Russian armies. From the distance of their headquarters the weird convolutions of the front line, the reports of resistance so far behind their own deep salients, the mounting activity of the Partisans, all this had an air not simply of unorthodoxy but of menace. Army Group Centre was by far the strongest of the four, and with it the Russian front was to have been rent in twain. Yet in spite of its headlong advance and the brilliant victories of encirclement it had achieved, the enemy had maintained co-ordination, and his resistance seemed as tough as it had been at the start of the campaign. There is a uniformity about their accounts of the fighting at this time which illustrates the Germans' surprise at finding an enemy who continued to resist long after he had been surrounded.

The Russians did not confine themselves to opposing the frontal advance of our Panzer divisions. They further attempted to find every suitable occasion to operate against the flanks of the wedges driven in by our motorised elements, which, of necessity, had become extended and relatively weak. For this purpose they used their tanks, which were as numerous as our own. They tried especially to separate the armoured elements from the infantry which was following them. Often they found that they in their turn were caught in a trap and encircled. Situations were sometimes so confused that we, on our side, wondered if we were outflanking the enemy or whether he had out-flanked us.

Plan Barbarossa called for the destruction of all Soviet forces west of the Dnepr, a task the Wehrmacht had yet to achieve. This was why on 12 August the OKH ordered Rundstedt's army group to destroy all Soviet forces between Zaporozh'e and the mouth of the Dnepr to trap the Southern Front's 9th, 18th and Coastal Armies against the Black Sea. In addition, northwest of Kiev, Potapov's 5th Army hung like a sword of Damocles over the flank of Reichenau's Sixth Army, on the one hand preventing it from seizing Kiev and on the other threatening Army Group Centre's right flank.

Some idea of what might have been achieved under better Soviet leadership can be gauged from the exploits of the 2nd Cavalry Division, which had found a weakly held sector of Reichenau's flank and started out on a foray southwest of Kiev. Fortune smiled on these bold horsemen, and they managed to avoid the attentions of the Luftwaffe for over a week. In that period the 2nd Cavalry roamed the marshy length of the Teberev, one of the tributaries of the Pripet, falling upon isolated units of German infantry, who were marching along in close order toward a "front" they believed to be forty miles to the east. On the last day of August the Russian cavalry had another stroke of luck, surprising the map depot of the 6th Army while it was in evening bivouac at a village just off the main highway from Korosten to Kiev. One of the Germans who survived has described the scene:

We had no proper sentries . . . just a few men strolling about with their rifles slung over their shoulders, as the whole of 16th Motorised was meant to be between us and the Russians. There was quite a lot of fraternisation with the villagers; I remember that some of them had never seen a lemon before. Then the inhabitants began to withdraw to their houses ... we thought this seemed peculiar, and soon the village was empty of Russians.

A short time afterwards there was the sound of horses, and ... a dust cloud to the south. Some people said that it was a supply column for one of the Hungarian divisions.

Then they were upon us ... like an American film of the Wild West. . . sturdy little horses riding at a gallop through our camp. Some of the Russians were using sub-machine guns, others were swinging sabres. I saw two men killed by the sword less than ten metres from me ... think of that, eighty years after Sadowa! They had towed up a number of those heavy, two-wheeled machine guns; after a few minutes whistles began to blow and the horsemen faded away; the machine gunners started blasting us at very close ranges with enfilade fire . . . soon tents and lorries were ablaze and through it the screams of wounded men caught in the flames ...

[1] In regards to this area:
I quote from: “Army Group Center – The Wehrmacht in Russia 1941-1945” by Werner Haupt. [page 10]:
“The large area of 125,000 square kilometres is flat in the south, while the northern ridges fall off sharply. The northern land bridge – the so-called “gate to Smolensk” – offers the most favourable line of communications to central Russia.

The plain in the north around Vitebsk and Polozk is hilly. The lakes here are drained by the Duena, which forms a natural boundary to the north.

The southern plain, on the other hand, is almost flat and consists of 50% marsh and moor. This characteristic of the terrain is especially noticeable in the Pripet Marsh. Here the ground is water-tight, forming a permanent marsh that marks the border with the Ukraine.”

Leopold Trepper

The Soviet border guards were captured semi clothed as they stumbled half-awake out of their barracks. The German Army Propagandakompanien (PR) photographers caught the dazed look on their shocked faces as they stood with hands raised in the watery spring dawn.

They were the victims of Stalin's willful determination not to believe the evidence of his intelligence services and the warnings from Britain that an attack was impending. Prime Minister Winston Churchill contacted Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador in Moscow, in mid April with a message for Stalin:

"Following from me to M. Stalin, provided it can be personally delivered by you: "I have sure information from a trusted agent that when the Germans thought they had got Yugoslavia in the net - that is to say, after March 20 - they began to move three out of the five Panzer divisions from Rumania to southern Poland. The moment they heard of the Serbian revolution this movement was countermanded. Your Excellency will readily appreciate the significance of these facts."

Churchill was careful to conceal that this "sure information from a trusted agent" came from ULTRA signals intercepts. It was top grade intelligence.

In the months preceding the attack Stalin and Lavrenti Beria, his sinister chief of the NKVD secret police, had received numerous indicators that an attack was in the offing. However his deep suspicion of the West led him to believe that these might be part of a plan to entrap the USSR in a war with Germany, a country with which he had signed the Russo-German Pact on August 23, 1939.

In Germany and Western Europe the Rote Kapelle - Red Orchestra (the code name given by the Abwehr) - the German counter espionage organisation to the largest Soviet spy ring and resistance organisation, had been providing information to the USSR from 1938. However, in the spirit of the Russo-German Pact, Stalin had stood it down in 1939. It was reactivated following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 and by 1942 had some 100 radio transmitters forwarding information to the USSR.

The driving force behind the Rote Kapelle was Leopold Trepper, a Polish Jew who based himself in Belgium and made contact with dissident Germans. The most important of these were Harro Schulze-Boysen, grandson of Admiral von Tirpitz, and Arvid Harnack, nephew of a celebrated theologian, whose wife Mildred was American.

In the Far East a brilliant but eccentric Communist agent Richard Sorge had from February 1941 been warning the Russians that the attack was in the offing.

Among the other indicators of an impending attack on the ground was the Otto-Programme or Otto Programme, "Otto" standing for Ost or East. It was the code name for the development between October 1,1940 and May 10, 1941 of road and rail links through Eastern Europe to the borders of the USSR in preparation for Unternehmen Barbarossa. In 1941 the German troop strengths began to change on the Soviet German border. In early March 1941 there were 34 divisions, by April 23 this figure had risen to 59 and finally by June 5 there were 100 divisions in the East.

On June 21 a young German Communist named Korpik slipped away from his unit's concentration area in Poland and crossed the border into the USSR in order to warn them of the impending attack. Writing of the incident after the war, Nikita Kruschev, the then leader of the USSR, reported that on Stalin's orders Korpik was shot as an agent provocateur.

During the wartime months of 1941 the Soviet Union found itself at the edge of an abyss. Indeed, until the battle of Stalingrad the likelihood of defeat remained very high. Although the war was a disaster for the peoples of the Soviet Union for its entire duration, the first year and a half proved to be the most difficult. The shattering defeats of this period gave rise to questions about Stalin's responsibility for this catastrophe and about the role played by the structural deficiencies of the Soviet system. None of Stalin's other actions evoked so many pointed discussions in the former Soviet Union as did his leadership in the war, since literally everyone was affected by the nearly total ruination of the country and the death of tens of millions of people.

In the scholarly literature four reasons are usually advanced to explain the colossal failures of the initial period of the war with Germany. The unsuccessful wager on the appeasement of aggression, which found expression in the non-aggression pact with Germany, is particularly emphasized among Stalin's mistakes. A second reason is the extremely low quality of Stalin's military leadership. Stalin did not take into account information from Soviet intelligence on the imminent attack, or warnings from the English and US governments about German military preparations. Without bearing in mind the speed of the German advance deep into Soviet territory, Stalin ordered troops only to attack or to hold their positions. The sole result of this was that approximately...

3.9 million Soviet servicemen were taken prisoner during the first seven months

...of the war, a figure greater than the number of troops the Germans had thrown against the Soviet Union. The third reason for failures was the cumbersome, overcentralized system of administration of the armies, which destroyed local initiative at every level of the chain of command: those commanding armies and divisions were afraid to make independent decisions even when extreme situations arose. Finally, a number of historians have suggested that a fundamental reason for the defeats in the early period of the war was the unwillingness of the people (and above all, Red Army men) to defend Soviet power. In support of this thesis they adduce data on the huge number of Soviet prisoners of war and the friendly attitude toward the Germans on the part of the civilian population in territories that the Wehrmacht occupied. Also mentioned is the regime's clearly expressed lack of confidence in the loyalty of Soviet prisoners of war, who over the course of the entire war were denied the right to defense.

In the Soviet Union the concept of a Soviet prisoner of war, with an acknowledged legal status, did not exist. In the opinion of a number of historians, there is no more eloquent testimony to the regime's lack of confidence in the viability of its own handiwork than such an attitude toward Soviet citizens who had fallen into captivity.

Following this logic, some historians are inclined to see Hitler's inability to exploit the favorable situation and use the dissatisfaction of the Soviet people as one source of Stalin's eventual success, along with Stalin's highly effective policy, which was able to use Russian patriotism and simultaneously depend on the mighty repressive apparatus.

Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) constitute one of the major groups that fell victim to Nazi German mass violence. For territories under German military occupation, the Department of Military Administration, Quartermaster General in the Supreme Command of Ground Troops (OKH) was in charge of Soviet POWs, whereas in Germany and areas under German civil administration, responsibility lay with the General Administration of the Armed Forces under the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). Prior to the attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941, German military authorities had decided that international law would not apply to Soviet POWs (unlike Polish, French, or British prisoners), with minimal provisions made for their shelter, food, transport, and medical supplies. Later Soviet proposals that both sides act in accordance with the Hague and Geneva Conventions were refused by Germany. On OKW instructions, most Soviet POWs were not registered by name in the camps in Soviet areas under German military occupation (Durchgangslager, or Dulags), and consequently no lists were passed on from these camps to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Following the German invasion, huge numbers of Red Army soldiers were captured, especially in July, September, and October 1941. Crammed into camps of up to 100,000 men, poorly fed, often without housing or sanitary provisions, the prisoners soon suffered from debilitation. Certain groups of military personnel were denied POW status: On Adolf Hitler's instruction, the OKW issued its "commissar order" on June 6, 1941, according to which political officers in the Red Army were shot in 1941 and 1942. Other groups killed by German troops included Soviet soldiers shot on the battlefield although they had surrendered, alleged Jews, in many camps so-called Asians, women in the Red Army, and in some camps Soviet officers. Orders for these killings originated from platoon to army command levels. More than 100,000 prisoners were handed over to the SS and police in 1941 and 1942; very few survived. In addition, an undetermined number of Soviet POWs, believed to be in the six-digit range, were shot by military guards because of their fatigue during marches or when unloading trains that had transported POWs. In certain German-occupied Soviet areas, Soviet military stragglers were killed instead of being taken prisoner, as were most Soviet partisan fighters. The Germans arbitrarily interned Soviet civilians in several POW camps in 1941.

The German capture of large numbers of prisoners in similarly short time periods had not led to mass deaths in the German campaign against France in 1940. The majority of Soviet POWs died as a result of the deliberate undersupply of food, consequent starvation, frost, and hunger-related diseases. Prior to attacking the USSR, German authorities had planned the killing of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in "food-deficient" regions and in urban areas through starvation and a policy of brutal occupation. Racist and anticommunist, that scheme was to make good the overall German food deficit and to relieve the critical shortage of supplies for troops at the Eastern Front, perceived as crucial for the success of the giant military campaign. Thus, the plan was backed and co-initiated by the military. As military supplies always took priority, Soviet POWs became one of the specific groups targeted for extinction.

In October 1941 food rations particularly for Soviet POWs considered "unfit for labor" were significantly reduced. On November 13 the German Quartermaster- General Eduard Wagner stated, "Soviet POWs unfit for labor in the camps have to die of starvation" (Notes of the Chief of Staff of the 18th Army, quoted in Streit, 1997, p. 157). In many camps those "fit for labor" were separated from those deemed unfit. Yet as guards often mistreated both groups equally and prisoners were worked to exhaustion with insufficient food, this intended distinction scarcely made any difference and initially fit prisoners perished, too. Death figures shot up to 2 percent daily, especially in the German-occupied Soviet and Polish territories. Nearly two out of three million Soviet POWs had died by the end of 1941. Measures to reduce the mortality rate, adopted from December on, only succeeded in the spring of 1942. However, hard labor, poor rations, and bad treatment continued to take their toll until 1945. Orders by the German leadership were countered with brutality, violence, or gross neglect on the ground. Military and economic considerations, racism against Slavs, Jews, and so-called Asians, and anticommunism were at the core of interrelated motives.

In total, out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs, about three million died in German captivity, almost exclusively at the hands of the German military. Serious calculations, based on the interpretation of fragmentary German documents, range from "at least" 2.53 million to 3.3 million (Streit, 1997), with death figures revised downward for camps inside Germany on the basis of German records discovered in Russia and Germany in the late 1990s. Adding to their suffering, Soviet POWs returning to the USSR encountered collective suspicion and many were imprisoned without proper trial, as about a million had been forced or agreed under pressure to work for the German army, with hundreds of thousands fighting for the German army or SS under arms.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Streim, A. (1981). Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener im "Fall Barbarossa." Heidelberg, Germany: C. F. M端ller.

Streit, C. (1978/1997). Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941-1945, 4^th edition. Bonn, Germany: Dietz.

Streit, C. (2000). "Soviet Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Wehrmacht." War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941-44, eds. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann. New York: Berghahn.

A story such as the defence of the citadel of Brest would have received tremendous publicity in any other country. But the bravery and heroism of the Soviet defenders of Brest remained unsung. Up to Stalin's death the Soviets simply took no notice of the heroic defence of the fortress. The fortress had fallen and many soldiers had surrendered-that, in the eyes of the Stalinists, was a disgrace. Hence there were no heroes of Brest. The chapter was simply expunged from military history. The names of the commanders were erased.

But in 1956, three years after Stalin's death, an interesting attempt was made to rehabilitate the defenders of Brest. The publicist Sergey Smirnov published a little book entitled In Search of the Heroes of Brest-Litovsk. The reader discovers that the author had to go to a lot of trouble to track down the heroes who had survived the hell of Brest: they were all living inconspicuously, because fifteen years after the battle and ten years after the end of the war they were still being regarded as suspect and dishonoured. Smirnov writes:

We have in Russia about 400 survivors of the battle of the citadel of Brest. Most of them were seriously wounded when the Germans took them prisoners. It must be admitted that we have not always treated these men as we should have done. It is no secret that the people's enemy Beria and his henchmen encouraged an incorrect attitude to former prisoners of war, regardless of the manner in which these men became prisoners or how they bore themselves while in captivity. That is the reason why we have not so far been told the truth about Brest-Litovsk.

And what was that truth?

Smirnov found it on the walls of the casemates. There, scratched with a nail into the plaster, he read: "We are three men from Moscow-Ivanov, Stepanchikov, and Shuntyayev. We are defending this church, and we have sworn not to surrender. July 1941." And below we read: "I am alone now. Stepanchikov and Shuntyayev have been killed. The Germans are inside the church. I have one hand-grenade left. They shall not get me alive."

In another place we read: "Things are difficult, but we are not losing courage. We die confidently. July 1941."

In the basement of the barracks on the Western Island there is an inscription: "I will die but I will not surrender. Farewell, native country." There is no signature, but instead the date, 20.7.41. It appears therefore that individual groups in the dungeons of the citadel continued resisting until the end of July.

In 1956 the world was at last told who commanded the defence of the citadel. Smirnov writes: "From combat order No. 1, which has been found, we know the names of the unit commanders defending the central citadel: Troop Commissar Fomin, Captain Zubachev, First Lieutenant Semenenko, and Second Lieutenant Vinogradov." The 44th Rifle Regiment was commanded by Petr Mikhaylovich Gavrilov. Commissar Fomin, Captain Zubachev, and Second Lieutenant Vinogradov belonged to a combat group which broke out of the fortress on 25th June, but they were intercepted on the Warsaw highway and wiped out. The three officers were taken prisoners. Vinogradov survived the war. Smirnov found him in Vologda, where, still unrecognized in 1956, he worked as a blacksmith. According to his account, "Commissar Fomin, before the break-out, put on the uniform of a private soldier who had been killed; but he was identified in the POW camp by another soldier, denounced, and shot. Zubachev died in captivity. Major Gavrilov survived his captivity although, seriously wounded, he had resisted capture by throwing a handgrenade and killing a German soldier."

It was a long time before the heroes of the citadel of Brest were recorded in Soviet history. They have earned their place there. The manner in which they fought, their perseverance, their devotion to duty, their bravery in the face of hopeless odds-all these were typical of the fighting morale and powers of resistance of the Soviet soldier. The German divisions were to encounter many more such instances.

The stubbornness and devotion of the defenders of Brest made a deep impression on the German troops. Military history has but few examples of similar disdain for death. When Colonel- General Guderian received the reports on the operations he said to Major von Below, the Army High Command's liaison officer with the Panzer Group, "These men deserve the highest admiration."

General Karabichev, then Inspector of Engineers, was strictly forbidden during his tour of inspection in the Brest area at the beginning of June 1941 to visit the most forward frontier fortifications. Stalin did not wish to create a war atmosphere among the frontier troops; he wanted to avoid anything that looked like war preparations-either to his own troops or to Hitler's intelligence service. Therefore, in spite of the obvious German troop concentrations, the Soviet frontier troops were not on a proper combat-footing; no long-range artillery was in position for use against German reserves beyond the frontier, and no plans existed for heavy-artillery barrages. The consequences of Stalin's disastrous theory were terrible. One striking illustration was the action and destruction of the Soviet 4th Armoured Division.

Major-General Potaturchev, born in 1898-i.e., forty-three years old in the summer of 1941- with his hair and moustache cut Ă  la Stalin, was one of the first Soviet generals in the field to be taken prisoner. Potaturchev was in command of the Soviet 4th Armoured Division at Bialystok, the spearhead of the Soviet defences at a crucial point on the Central Front. The Soviet High Command thought highly of him. He was a member of the Party, the son of a small peasant from the Moscow area. As a lance-corporal under the Tsar he had gone over to the Red Army, and had advanced to the rank of general commanding a division. His story is of considerable interest:

"On 22nd June, at 0000 hours [Russian time-i.e., 0100 German summer time], I was summoned to Major-General Khotskilevich, GOC VI Corps," Potaturchev wrote in the deposition he made on 30th August 1941 at the headquarters of the German 221st Defence Division. "I was kept waiting because the General had himself been summoned to Major-General Golubyev, the C-in-C Tenth Army. At 0200 hours [i.e., 0300 German time] he came back and said to me, 'Germany and Russia are at war.' 'And what are our orders?' I asked. He replied, 'We've got to wait.' "

An astonishing situation. War was imminent. The C-in-C of the Soviet Tenth Army knew it two hours before. But he would not, or could not, give any orders other than "Wait!"

They waited two hours-until 0500 German time. At last the first order came down from Tenth Army. "Alert! Occupy positions envisaged." Positions envisaged? What did that mean? Did it mean that the counter-attacks they had rehearsed in many manoeuvres should now be launched? Nothing of the sort. The "positions envisaged" for the 4th Armoured Division were in the vast forest east of Bialystok. There the division should go into hiding-and wait.

"When the 10,900-strong division moved off, 500 men were missing. The medical detachment, with an establishment of 150 men, was 125 men short. Thirty per cent, of all tanks were not in working order, and of the rest several had to be left behind for lack of fuel."

That was how a key unit of the Soviet defensive line-up in the Bialystok area moved into action.

But no sooner had Potaturchev got his two tank regiments and his infantry brigade moving than a new order came down from Corps: the tank and infantry units were to be separated. The infantry was ordered to defend the Narev crossing, while the tank regiments were to hold up the German formations advancing from the direction of Grodno.

This order reveals the utter confusion in the Soviet Command. An armoured division was being torn apart and used piecemeal instead of being employed as a whole, frontally or from the flank, in a counter-attack. The fate of Potaturchev and his units was typical of the Soviet collapse in the border area. First they were battered by German Stukas. Admittedly, they did not lose many tanks, but the troops were badly shaken. Nevertheless Potaturchev reached his prescribed line. But then things began to go wrong for him. The advancing German armoured spearheads did not attack him, but thrust past him and cut him off. Potaturchev tried to evade encirclement. His companies got into a muddle, they were caught by German armoured forces, and smashed one by one. The infantry brigade suffered the same fate.

By 29th June Stalin's famous 4th Armoured Division was only a heap of wreckage. The password was "Every man for himself." They sought salvation in the big forest. In twos and threes, at most in handfuls of twenty or thirty men, infantry, artillery, and tank troops made for the woods. The few armoured cars of the 7th and 8th Tank Regiments which had escaped destruction hid out during the day and at night rolled towards the forest of Bialowieza. The vast forest was their only hope.

On 30th June General Potaturchev and a few officers broke away from their men. They intended to make their way on foot to Minsk and fight their way through from there to Smolensk. Potaturchev walked until his feet were sore, and, because he did not want to be seen on the roads as a shambling, bedraggled general, he got some civilian clothes from a farm.

Nevertheless, he was intercepted by the Germans near Minsk and put in a POW cage. There he revealed his identity to the officer of the guard.

By the end of the twentieth century, estimates of the total Russian war dead were still being revised upward. Most historians had agreed on a figure in the region of around 20 million civilian war dead (including 1 million in Leningrad alone), but recent Russian estimates vary between nearly 17 million and 24 million. The figures for military losses (including as many as 4 million Soviet prisoners of war, who either died in captivity or were murdered on their return to the Soviet Union) tend to be more consistent, at just over 8.5 million. The figures for material losses are equally staggering: 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages almost totally destroyed, 65,000 kilometers of railroads wrecked, as well as countless millions of livestock killed or confiscated and hospitals, libraries, and museums wrecked and looted. The great eighteenth-century palaces at Pavlovsk and Pushkin were reduced to blackened shells, and many of ancient Russia's glorious churches were burned and bombed.