of course, and under your personal responsibility.”
As a result, the implementation of my plan ended up in the hands of the NKVD, and I still had to report to my direct superior.
“Comrade Senior Major of State Security,” I began my report as soon as we were alone, “the reconnaissance flight was successful. The data for the night bombing strike is sufficiently collected. One fighter was lost. The pilot was killed. The other planes sustained varying degrees of damage.”
“I'm surprised you came back from there at all,” Sudoplatov answered grimly. “Mark on the map what you saw, and you can rest for a couple of hours. TB-7s and Yer-2s will be over our airfield at exactly zero o'clock. By that time you should already be in the air.”
The Headquarters of the Supreme High Command plan was not bad, but it had no chance of success because of the incorrect background information underlying it. The Red Army's intelligence could not uncover the Germans' plan and did not notice how the Wehrmacht's Fourth Panzer Group, which had been advancing on Leningrad until then, suddenly disappeared from under the besieged city and was redeployed to the Moscow direction. The cunning Germans left one of the radio operators of the Panzer Group near Leningrad, who had a specific easily recognizable 'handwriting' – individual features of signal transmission – , and the radio reconnaissance did not reveal any dramatic changes in the German forces.
The enemy was preparing for an attack on Moscow, gathering virtually all of its tank forces into a single fist, except for Kleist's First Panzer Group, which had gone south to capture the Donbass. But even without it, such forces were concentrated on the Moscow direction, to which the 21st and 40th Armies could not oppose anything. In addition, General Rommel's divisions, which had just arrived in France from North Africa, were reinforced with new tanks and other equipment and were preparing to move to Bryansk and Vyazma.
Only the need to finally eliminate the grouping of Soviet troops near Kiev, which was encircled and already split into two parts, was holding back the whole German armada from rushing to the Soviet capital.
However, the Soviet command did not know all this, and now the two armies were preparing to launch an unblocking strike, while the troops of the Bryansk Front had to actively bind up the German forces in order to make it difficult for the enemy to transfer reserves to the threatened directions. The armies in the pocket assembled few combat-ready formations to break through. Driver mechanics poured the last liters of fuel into the tanks of several dozen surviving combat vehicles, and artillerymen gathered the pitiful remains of ammunition for the few serviceable guns from field depots. I knew I couldn't get everyone out of the pocket, but I was going to give at least some of them a chance.
When Lieutenant Kalina's Pe-2, hastily repaired, took off, the entire horizon to the west was already thundering with explosions and glowing with white chemical light from the many hundreds of "chandeliers" suspended over the battlefield by our troops and the Germans.
We took off just in time. Two flights of TB-7s and four Yer-2s were approaching the front line a couple of kilometers behind our aircraft at an altitude of 6,000 meters. Ten long-range bombers, as I requested. All together they carried 40 tons of high-explosive bombs weighing from 250 kilograms to a ton.
So far the armies of Kuznetsov and Podlas have been successful. The plan called for two powerful converging strikes in the general direction of Romny. Both commanders managed to stealthily move the BM-13 divisions assigned to them into position at dusk. The Germans, confident in the effectiveness of their aerial reconnaissance, did not expect massive artillery fire, and the barrage of rockets that fell on their heads literally wiped out the enemy's forward positions.
Tank brigades assigned by the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command for this operation rushed into the gap that had formed. T-34s and KVs, which the Germans had great difficulty with, accounted for about half of these brigades.
Nevertheless, the initial success threatened to quickly wane. Information about strike directions had already reached German headquarters, and right now the fine-tuned mechanism for countering Soviet counterstrikes, which had already been worked out by the Wehrmacht to the finest detail during the first months of the war was beginning to work.
The enemy could not use aviation because it was dark, but it was not the first time the Germans had fought in weather conditions that prevented their fighters and bombers from flying, and they had many other effective means to repel the attack, chief among which were 88mm antiaircraft guns, which could be launched on direct fire, and motorized formations, which could be moved quickly to the breakout points to deliver flanking blows to the Soviet forces that had broken through.
It was this scenario that I intended to prevent.
“"Shark One", this is "Hornet". Are you ready to receive target coordinates?”
“"Hornet", this is "Shark One",” the heavy bomber group commander responded without delay, “I can hear you all right. Ready to receive coordinates.”
The commander of the Third Armored Division of the Wehrmacht, General von Schweppenburg, listened to the chief of staff's report and moved quickly into the room, where the maps of the battle area were laid out on the table. Several large wooden houses, from which the inhabitants had been evicted beforehand, were occupied by division headquarters, providing at least minimal comfort in the barbaric conditions with which von Schweppenburg had so often had to put up in this wild country.
True, the warning came not from Colonel General Guderian, but from some Berlin fop from the Abwehr, so von Schweppenburg didn't take it too seriously. As it turned out, the Abwehrman was right.
The locations of Soviet strikes had already been mapped. The Reds' plan was not original. Using the night attack to break through the front in two places 30 kilometers apart, then introduce tank brigades into the breakthrough, link up behind the back of the infantry division, block it, reach the inner perimeter of the pocket and break through a corridor to their surrounded armies, attacking from the rear against the infantry units holding it.
“Put me through to the headquarters of the Fifth Tank Regiment!” demanded Schweppenburg.
“The telephone connection is broken, Herr General!” the communications officer on duty reported a minute later. “Troubleshooting is already underway, but it will take time.”
“Then get on the radio! Do I have to teach you your job, Stabsfeldwebel?”
“There is interference on the air, Herr General. We have been calling the Fifth Regiment Headquarters continuously, but there has been no answer so far.”
“Then send a liaison agent with orders to Colonel Brown to raise the regiment on alert immediately. At 2:30 I want to see his tanks right here!” Schweppenburg turned to the chief of staff, showing the point on the map from which the arrow of the Russian tank strike began, “This road must be cut as quickly as possible and the 44th Infantry Division must be unblocked. The Austrians aren't bad soldiers, but I wouldn't want to test their resilience in an encirclement for long…”
The General's speech was interrupted by a growing whistle, clearly audible even through the closed windows. None of the four 500-kilogram bombs dropped from a height of two kilometers hit the headquarters buildings directly, but that was not required. The shock wave flattened the wooden buildings, knocking even the stone stoves off their foundations and burying the division commander and his staff officers under a pile of rubble.
It must have seemed to the commanders of the brigades and divisions going into attack, as well as to the common Red Army soldiers and tankers who tried to break the German defense in a night battle and get through to
