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.’
It was not enough. Though demoralised and disorderly units of the retreating Eighth Army arrived in the city on 30 June, five days later the Soviets were forced to abandon Riga, retreating north into Estonia. The operation was a mess: Riga’s railway bridge was blown up before all the Soviet troops had crossed; among those left behind was another border guard regiment, of which no further news was heard — as the 5th Motorised’s report tersely puts it, ‘since the officers and staff of the 12th Border Detachment did not emerge from the battle, no documentation survives’. On 10 July orders arrived from Zhdanov to stand fast at the River Navast, which the Germans had in fact already crossed. After a vicious two-hour battle, the Red Army withdrew in disorder to the town of Vykhma. ‘In front of Vykhma there was literal butchery. As if drunk, the infuriated fascists strove to break out of Vykhma, but with fire and bayonets the fighters and commanders of the 320th Rifle Regiment and the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment held down the enemy.’ By this time not much of the 5th Motorised can have been left, because it was ordered to put itself under the command of another regiment in the same division, to retake its positions at Vykhma and to ‘turn back, if necessary with fire, deserters’. It was an impossible demand: strafed ‘incessantly’ by German fighters, fleeing soldiers and civilians jammed the roads.28
While the Soviets bloodily exited Riga, to the east Reinhardt’s panzers broke through the old ‘Stalin Line’ at Ostrov, on the pre-1940 Estonian — Soviet border. Here the Balts’ whitewashed farmsteads and tidy fields gave way to Russia proper — an undrained, undyked landscape of alders, willows and reed beds, of scrubby birches and silver-weathered wooden cabins, their potato patches and haywire picket fences hidden behind stands of hogweed and rosebay willowherb. On 8 July Reinhardt took the fortress and forty churches of the little medieval city of Pskov, a vital road and rail junction on the route east. Again, the Soviets blew up a vital bridge before all their retreating troops had crossed: 206 out of 215 machine guns were abandoned and stranded soldiers had to swim, clinging to floating logs. In seventeen days the Wehrmacht had advanced an extraordinary 450 kilometres, not only overrunning the whole of the recently acquired and dubiously loyal Baltics, but entering the Russian heartland and threatening Leningrad itself.29
In the city, few fully understood the approaching danger. It wasn’t for want of trying. ‘Waking up’, wrote the young mother Yelena Kochina, ‘we rush to our radios, and wash down the bitter pills of the news bulletins with cold leftover tea.’ ‘The thirst for information’, Lidiya Ginzburg remembered, ‘was fearful. Five times a day people would drop whatever they were doing and race to the loudspeaker. They would fall on anyone who had been a yard nearer the front line than they had, or to a government office, or any source of news.’30
The authorities did their best to keep the public in the dark. The Soviet Information Bureau, created three days into the war and known as Sovinform, was the only body authorised to issue communiqués. It kept its twice-daily reports deliberately vague, talking about fighting ‘in the sector’ of particular cities, and anonymous ‘population points N’ having been won or lost. (This convention dated back to the nineteenth-century novel. Gogol’s Dead Souls, for example, opens with a carriage driving through the gates of an inn in ‘the provincial town of N’.) Rather than admit defeats, it picked out barely credible incidences of individual heroism — what the war correspondent Vasili Grossman contemptuously called ‘Ivan Pupkin killed five Germans with a spoon’ stories. Major defeats were not reported until several days after the event. Fighting ‘in the Pskov sector’ was not reported until 12 July, four days after the city had fallen, and it was still being referred to as a ‘battleground’ twelve days later, after which it simply dropped out of the news.31