Leningrad

Most of all, Germany had the advantage of surprise. When Soviet frontier guards woke to the sound of exploding shells in the early hours of 22 June, many had not yet even received Stalin’s reluctant order of less than three hours earlier to go on to full alert. Flabbergasted and afraid to take the initiative, junior officers wired for orders: ‘We are being fired upon!’ ran a typical appeal, ‘What shall we do?’ The air force did not have time to mobilise either: Luftwaffe pilots were astonished to find Soviet aeroplanes lined up, uncamouflaged, on forward airfields, and even those that managed to take off proved easy targets. ‘The Russian was well behind our lines’, wrote a Finnish air ace of one, ‘so I held my fire, though I am not at all sure that I could have brought myself to finish off such a lame duck. . His inexperienced flying suggested that he could have hardly been more than a duckling.’ In all 1,200 planes were destroyed at sixty-six bases in the first day of the war, three-quarters of them on the ground.27 For the rest of the year the Germans had complete air superiority, and were able to strafe and dive-bomb as much as their resources — still depleted by the Battle of Britain — allowed. The fact that the air raids on Leningrad did not begin until early September was due to delay in repairing airfields that the Luftwaffe had itself earlier bombed, and the city would have been far more badly damaged had it not been for its hundreds of searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and ‘listeners’ — the acoustic devices, shaped like giant gramophone horns, that tracked the approach of what were often the same bomber crews who had blitzed London twelve months earlier.

With numbers, leadership, surprise and air superiority all on its side, Army Group North advanced at astonishing speed. Though Leningraders did not know it, three days into the war von Leeb’s Panzer groups had already overrun most of Lithuania, and the following day they seized a bridgehead across Latvia’s River Dvina, a line the tsarist armies had held for two years in 1915–17. ‘It is unlikely I will ever again experience anything comparable to that impetuous dash’, von Manstein wrote in his (notoriously selective) memoirs; ‘It was the fulfilment of every tank commander’s dream.’ In Lithuania and Latvia, most of whose citizens rejoiced to see the Soviets pushed out, women handed the German cavalrymen bunches of flowers and nationalist militias joined in the fighting and the lynching of Jews.

As the German attack sped forward, the Red Army’s communications broke down. Shouted telephone calls were cut off mid-sentence; staff-cars dodged between smoking villages in search of command posts. Orders, when they arrived at all, bore no relation to reality, telling officers to deploy forces that no longer existed, or to defend points already far in the German rear. Typical was the experience of the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment. Like other border units, it was not part of the regular army but came within the sprawling security empire of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD. The outbreak of war seems to have taken the regiment completely by surprise. At ten o’clock on the morning of 22 June it was travelling along the road from Vilnius northwards to Riga when it was suddenly dive-bombed by German Stukas. ‘The town of Siauliai burned’, the regiment reported, and ‘the German planes dealt brutally with the refugees and troops moving along the road. From this it became clear that war had begun.’ The regiment took shelter in a wood, where a courier reached it with orders to proceed urgently to Riga, where ‘disturbances’ had broken out. On arrival, the regiment found the city in the grip of a rising by anti-Soviet Latvian partisans, who had set up machine-gun posts in church towers, attics and behind the top-floor windows of the city’s Art Nouveau apartment buildings. Red Army and NKVD headquarters, the offices of the Latvian Communist Party and the railway station were all under attack. Rallying the local garrison, the regiment ‘engaged the fifth columnists in hard fighting. Incoming fire from windows, towers or bell-towers was answered with fire from machine guns and tanks.’ It shot 120 ‘scoundrels seized from amongst the fifth columnists’ out of hand, and also took out reprisals against civilians: ‘Before the corpses of our fallen comrades the personnel of the regiment swore an oath mercilessly to smash the fascist reptiles, and on the same day the bourgeoisie of Riga felt our revenge on its hide.’