It was Kamenshchikov’s wife who woke him. Perhaps it was her inexperience, she said, but she had never heard so many planes flying above a town at night. Her husband assured her that what she was hearing were manoeuvres. There had been lots of exercises lately. All the same he threw a coat over his shoulders and stepped outside to take a closer look. He knew at once that this was real war. The very air was different; humming, shattered, thick with sour black smoke. The town’s main railway line was picked out by a rope of flame. Even the horizon had begun to redden, but its glow, to the west, was not the approaching dawn. Acting without orders, Kamenshchikov went to the airfield and took a plane up to meet the invaders at once, which is why, exceptionally among the hundreds of machines that were parked in neat formations as usual that night, his was brought down over the Bialystok marshes and not destroyed on the ground.10 By midday on 22 June, the Soviets had lost 1,200 planes. In Kamenshchikov’s own western district alone, 528 had been blown up like fairground targets by the German guns.11
Unlike Kamenshchikov, Colonel-General Pavlov had never even gone to bed. There had been an awkward briefing with a few staff officers straight after the play and then, at one in the morning, he had been called to front headquarters for a telephone conversation. The man at the other end of the line in Moscow was the Soviet Defence Commissar, Semen Konstantinovich Timoshenko.12 He was calling to check the situation of the border troops. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘how is it where you are – quiet?’ Pavlov replied that there had been very considerable German activity at the front line, including a build-up of motorcycle regiments and special forces. ‘Just try to worry less and don’t panic,’ Timoshenko replied. ‘Get the staff together anyway this morning, because something unpleasant may happen, perhaps, but don’t rise to any provocation. If there is a specific provocation, ring me.’13
Pavlov later recollected that he spent the next two hours with his senior officers. One by one they reported on their troops, on the dismal problem of supplies and on their lack of readiness for battle. Some units had been dispersed on exercises, others needed stocks of fuel or ammunition, and all were more or less paralyzed by inadequate or poorly organized transport. The railways were still running to peacetime schedules, and almost every front-line regiment was short of motor vehicles. The army could not even requisition trucks, for there were almost no civilian vehicles in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Pavlov and his men were still busy with these questions at 3.30 a. m., the moment scheduled for the German land assault. Coincidentally, it was also the time when Timoshenko rang again. ‘He asked me what was new,’ Pavlov recalled. ‘I told him that the situation had not changed.’14 By then, a dozen cities in the borderlands had been engulfed in flames.
The Luftwaffe had flown high into Soviet territory earlier that night. At dawn they swept westwards to bomb a string of strategic cities, including Bialystok, Kiev, Brest, Grodno, Rovno and Kovno, as well as the Baltic ports of Tallinn and Riga. The land attack, the core of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, began just as the eastern sky began to lighten. At 3.15 a.m. on 22 June, the Soviet border guards in charge of the bridge over the river Bug at Koden were summoned by their German counterparts to discuss ‘important matters’. When they obediently appeared, they were machine-gunned by the advance guard of a German assault party. Arriving at the railway bridge at Brest, German sappers tore the crude explosives from its central pier and waved their men across.15 By 5.30 a. m., which, on Moscow time, was when the German Ambassador, von Schulenburg, delivered his declaration of war to Molotov, Pavlov’s command was under attack from thirteen infantry and five tank divisions, together with artillery and airborne cover.
Shock led to misreporting and confusion. Grodno was under such heavy air attack that the commander of the Soviet 3rd Army, Kuznetsov, had barricaded himself in a basement well before first light. But other messages talked of calm for a few hours more, and even, in the case of Golubev’s 10th Army, of a successful repulse of the German troops. By 7 o’clock, some officers were starting to report that they had lost contact with their men, that whole units had simply disappeared. As Pavlov would later tell his interrogators, ‘Kuznetsov informed me, with a tremble in his throat, that the only thing that was left of the 56th rifle division was its number.’16 The men may have been dead or captured, or, like those of the 85th division, they may simply have fled towards the south. Radio and telephone links were broken, messages and orders were not getting through. The answer was to send a trusted deputy to take control. That morning, Pavlov assigned Lieutenant-General Ivan Vasilevich Boldin to the 10th Army’s headquarters in the border town of Bialystok. He was to fly there straight away from Minsk.
Whatever doubts he may have had, Boldin learned the truth that afternoon. His light aircraft came under German fire before he even reached the border, and when he landed on a dirt strip outside Bialystok someone told him that parachutists had been sighted coming down nearby. The atmosphere, as he recalled later, was ‘incredibly hot and the air smelt of burning’. His main feeling, as he climbed into the one truck that the army had been able to requisition, was one of shock, of helplessness. The truck made slow progress through the bewildered lines of refugees. Most people were on foot, heading anywhere to get away from the noise and searing flames, but then came a small motorcade, led by a smart new ZIS-101. ‘The broad leaves of an aspidistra were protruding from one of the windows,’ Boldin observed. ‘It was the car of some local top official. Inside were two women and two children.’ Boldin looked at the group with undisguised disgust, suggesting tartly that they might have ditched the plant to make space for another human being. But as the women turned away in shame, a plane dipped low above the road and there were three cracks of machine-gun fire. Boldin managed to jump aside in time, although his driver was killed. In the ZIS-101 the women, the children and the driver were all dead. As Boldin recollected, ‘Only the evergreen leaves of the aspidistra were still sticking out of the window.’17
It would be evening before Boldin made contact with the 10th Army. Like all the frightened refugees, it had retreated from Bialystok that very day. Its new headquarters were in the birch woods to the east and consisted of two tents with a table and chairs. A shaken General Golubev told Boldin that all his divisions had sustained terrible losses. His light tanks, the elderly T-26s, had proved themselves good ‘only for firing at sparrows’. The Luftwaffe had targeted the army’s fuel dumps, aircraft and anti-aircraft guns. His men, he said, were fighting ‘like heroes’, but they were powerless against an enemy like this. The 10th Army, effectively, had been wiped out.18
The news was reported to Minsk as soon as a radio could be made to work. Pavlov would also learn that night that the 3rd Army had abandoned Grodno. Reports from Brest suggested that this city, too, was not likely to hold. The Germans had known exactly where to target their artillery and air strikes, beginning with the army’s command centres and then aiming for railways and factories.19 Pavlov responded with a stream of orders that read like a propaganda script. This was the Red Army, and it was not meant to retreat. Accordingly, the general ordered men he could not see or even contact to mount a bold counter-attack. The aim, as ever, was to push the Germans back behind the frontier and defeat them on their own soil.20 Weeks later, with his life in the balance, Pavlov would tell his interrogators that he was still thinking strategically at that stage, confident that Brest could be held and the tide of attack turned. But Boldin, who was ordered to mount an offensive on 23 June with forces that were either dead or hopelessly dispersed, considered that Pavlov was merely covering his back. He was rapping out the orders, Boldin thought, just to show Moscow that something was really being done. The culture of the purge, of empty gestures, lies and fear, was still alive and well.