Free Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 by Paul Carell Page A

not hesitate a minute to entrust to him the salvation of the Central Front.
At the moment when Second Lieutenant Wieltsch was bursting into the citadel of Brest, when Manstein was crossing the bridge of Daugavpils, and Hoth's tanks were racing towards the historic gap of Molodechno, from where Napoleon after his disastrous retreat from Moscow informed the world that the Grande Armée had been destroyed but the Emperor was in excellent health—at that moment, at the railway station of Novosibirsk, 900 miles east of the Urals, the Stationmaster and the quartermaster of the Siberian Military District were running along the platform at which the trans-Siberian express stood. They were looking for a certain special compartment. At last they found it.
The Stationmaster stepped up to the open window. "Comrade General," he said to the broad-shouldered man in the compartment, "Comrade General, the Defence Minister requests you to leave the train and continue your journey by air."
"Very well, very well," said the general. The quartermaster dashed up the steps into the carriage to bring out the general's luggage.
The date was 27th June 1941. It was a hot afternoon. The platform was packed with milling uniformed crowds. Outside, in the station square, a loudspeaker was blaring. It was relaying a recruiting appeal from the Siberian Military District command.
The general, escorted by the quartermaster and the station-master, pushed his way through the crowd of men called up for service and now waiting for their trains to their respective garrisons. The general's name was Audrey Ivanovich Yere-menko. He was wearing the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He had come from Khabarovsk, where until a week before he had commanded the First Far Eastern Army. In the Soviet High Command he enjoyed the reputation of being a tough commander of great personal courage, a brilliant tactician, and an absolutely reliable member of the Communist Party. He was a veteran of the Red Army, one of Trotsky's old guard, who had gone over to the Red Army as an NCO and gone through the entire campaign against the Whites. In this campaign he had earned his commission as an officer.
On 22nd June, the day war broke out, shortly after noon, General Smorodinov, the Chief of Staff of Army Group Far East, had rung up Yeremenko in great excitement: "Andrey Ivanovich, the Germans have been shelling our towns since early morning. The war has begun."
Yeremenko describes the scene in his memoirs:
As a man who had dedicated his life to the military profession I had frequently thought about the possibility of war, in particular about the way in which it might start. I had been convinced that we would always be able to discern the enemy's intentions in good time, and would never be taken by surprise. But now, listening to Smorodinov, I realized instantly, we had been taken by surprise. We had been utterly unsuspecting. All of us— soldiers, officers, the Soviet people. What a disastrous failure of our intelligence service!
But Smorodinov did not give Yeremenko time for meditation. He was passing on to him definite orders. One: the First Far Eastern Army was to be put on full alert. "That means an attack is threatening here too—by the Japanese?" Yeremenko asked, startled.
Smorodinov put his mind at rest. The alert, he explained, was a precautionary measure. There were no indications that the Japanese intended to attack. Indeed, the High Command's assurance on this point was clear from the second order, which instructed Yeremenko to leave for Moscow at once to take up a new command.
Lieutenant-General Yeremenko did not know what awaited him. He did not know that from all the marshals and generals Stalin had chosen him, the lieutenant-general from the Far East, to save the Central Front. Stalin considered him to be the very man he needed—a master of improvisation, a Russian Rommel, familiar with the problems involved in commanding large formations. His First Far Eastern Army had