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

been awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for its excellent state of training. He seemed the obvious choice of a new iron broom for the wavering Western Front. If anyone could save the desperate situation there it was Yeremenko with his strong arm and unshakable belief in Stalin.
Certainly the situation on the Bialystok front was desperate enough. Three Soviet infantry divisions—the 12th, the 89th, and the 103rd—had not only offered no resistance to the Germans, but when their political commissars had tried, pistol in hand, to make the troops fight the troops had shot them and had then melted away. Most of them had been only too glad to go into captivity. It was this particular incident that had shaken Stalin. The situation required a very hard man.
Yeremenko had left Khabarovsk by the trans-Siberian express on the same day—22nd June. Anxiously he counted the hours he would have to spend en route. The man whom Moscow had chosen as the saviour of the Central Front was to make his journey by train! At last some one evidently thought better of it, and that was why he was snatched from the train at Novosibirsk.
Yeremenko drove straight to the headquarters of the Siberian Military District. But they had no news for him there from the front. As always in such circumstances, rumours were rife and were being spread even by senior officers. The Germans, they said, had been knocked on the head. General Pavlov's tanks had already moved forward from the
famous Bialystok bend and were clearing the road to Warsaw for the infantry. Captain Gorobin, who had only recently been transferred to Novosibirsk from the staff of the First Cossack Army, said with a wink, "The maps we had there covered the territory all the way to the Rhine—and every single division was marked on them." There was optimism in Novosibirsk. On 26th June the communiqué announced: "The enemy has taken Brest," but no one took the news very seriously. Brest? Nichevo —surely Brest was somewhere in Poland!
Two hours later Yeremenko climbed into a twin-engined bomber and took off for Moscow. He had 1750 miles to cover. There were four intermediate stops for refuelling, overhaul, and rest. Russia is a big country. Some 2200 miles from Novosibirsk battles were raging on the Western Front. Yet Novosibirsk was only about half-way between Brest- Litovsk and Vladivostok.
While Yeremenko sat in his bomber on that 28th June, flying towards Omsk some 2600 feet above the dark tayga, over the huge Siberian plain with its boundless fields of wheat, over the cheerless industrial landscape around Sverdlovsk, towards the Urals, the man against whom he was to measure his skill was standing in his armoured command vehicle barely fifty miles south-west of Minsk, the Belorussian capital.
Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, commanding Second Panzer Group, had just sent a signal to Colonel Freiherr von Liebenstein, Chief of Staff of the Panzer Group: "The 29th Motorized Division, at present engaged on a broad front against Russian break-out attempts 110 miles south-west of Minsk in the Slonim-Zelva area, is to wheel round as soon as possible for a thrust towards Minsk-Smolensk."
As Guderian's order arrived at the headquarters of the Panzer Group in the ancient Radziwill château at Nieswiez, Bayerlein and Liebenstein, Guderian's Chief of Operations and Chief of Staff respectively, were bending over their map-tables, swiftly sketching in the latest situation. Their headquarters had been moved into the château only that morning. Two gutted Russian tanks were still lying by the bridge. Their story was being told throughout the Panzer Group.
During the night of 26th/27th June General Nehring, commanding 18th Panzer Division, was looking for the headquarters of his Panzer regiment. In his open armoured car he cautiously drove up to the château. A German Mark III tank was covering the approach to the bridge. Nehring ordered his driver to pull up, some forty yards from the tank. He hailed