Battle of Brody (1941) - Mobilization

Mobilization

The attack combined six mechanized corps under the command 5th Army to the north and the 6th Army to the south, under the general direction of the Southwestern Front commander Kirponos. Under the 5th Army command, K.K. Rokossovsky's 9th and N. V. Feklenko's 19th Mechanized Corps were to be deployed north-west of Rovno, while the 22nd Mechanized Corps was to assemble northeast of Lutsk. To the south, under the command of the 6th Army, Ryabyshev's 8th and I. Karpezo's 15th Mechanized Corps were to be deployed to the south-west and north-east of Brody, while The 4th Mechanized Corps under A. Vlasov was to be deployed between Sokal and Radekhov, on the left flank of the 15th Mechanized Corps.

The plan called for these forces to assemble and begin offensive operations at 2200 hours, on 23 June, 36 hours after the initial German onslaught, in an attempt to catch the attackers off guard, and before they could solidify their position by bringing up reinforcements from the rear in support of their fast advancing 11th Panzer Division.

The Soviet Corps commanders suffered under conditions of confusion caused by the shock of the initial German attack, loss of communications, constant harassment by the Luftwaffe, lack of transportation and the outflow of massive number of refugees and retreating soldiers fleeing the German advance, clogging the roads and making it difficult for the counter-attacking forces to properly assemble at their jumping off points.

While communication between the Front headquarters and the individual army commands was generally good, communication to the front line units themselves was seriously flawed because it was dependent on the civilian telephone and telegraph network. German sappers, air attacks, and even Ukrainians nationalists guerrillas had aggressively targeted this system with the desired result. Operating in the dark, many front line Soviet front line commanders were left to their own devises, and this had numerable impacts on the effectiveness of Soviet command and control. In one instance, the commander to the 41st Tank Division of the 22nd Mechanized Corps, for want of any new directives followed pre-war plan and moved his division to the predesignated assembly point for his corps at Kovel, and in so doing, moved his division away from the fighting.

Another endemic problem was the lack of transport for the infantry component of the Mechanized Corps. These were "motorized" division in name only. Many of these divisions only had partial compliments of their full transportation establishment. Individual corps commanders had to improvise solutions to bring their full complement of soldiers to their assembly points.

Rokossovsky succeeded in commandeering 200 trucks from the district reserve at Shepetovka, but this still left him in the position of mounting much of his infantry on tanks. Even then much of his infantry had to walk, since the trucks were used for carrying critical munitions and supplies. In one case, valuable heavy artillery belonging to the 22nd Mechanized Corps, was simply left behind for want of tractors to pull them. The commander of the 19th Mechanized, simply marched his corps forward in two echelons, with the tank divisions far in advance of his lagging infantry, meaning that his armored units arrived in the battle fields without infantry support. Ryabyshev the commander of the 8th Mechanized reported similar problems, since its artillery was towed by exceedingly slow tractors that held up the movement of the entire columns: "The columns were moving at top speed. Unfortunately, the tractor towed corps artillery was falling severely behind; the difference in speed was slowing down the overall concentration of forces."

These complications were compounded by the apparent inability of the Soviet commanders to assess an appropriate axis of attack in the context of the rapidly developing German salient—Between June 22 and June 24, the 8th Mechanized Corps was given three separate instructions about the precise point at which it was supposed to assemble, the original order from the Front Command, a new one from the commander of the 6th Army, and then again on the 24th of June again another new order from the Front command, meaning that the Corps crossed its own path and backtracked several times before finally arriving at Brody.

Later, the commander of the 8th Mechanized Corps, D. I. Ryabyshev, was to write:

"Around the second half of June 25, the Corps’ units deployed to the northwest of Brody. During the nearly 500 kilometer march, the Corps lost up to half of its older tanks and a substantial portion of its artillery and anti-tank guns to both enemy air attack and mechanical breakdowns. All of the tanks still in service also required varying degrees of maintenance work and were not capable of operating over long distances. Thus, even before the start of the counteroffensive the Corps found itself in a drastically weakened state."

As a consequence of the multiple problems of assembling the forces proposed for the attack the original ambitious schedule of attack was set back 6 hours to 0400 on the 24th of June.

By the time this decision was made on the evening of the 23rd of June, barely 48 hours since the war had begun, the 11th Panzer Division had already penetrated 40 miles into Soviet territory with the 16th Panzer Division traveling in its wake. The 14th Panzer Division and 13th Panzer Division were well their way up the road to Lutsk, with the objective of reaching the Styr River on the 24th, and the 298th Infantry Division, the 44th Infantry Division and the 299th Infantry Division moving up to consolidate the advance.

Even with the delayed schedule the counterattack would begin piecemeal since the full complement of the force proposed for the counterattack could not be brought into the position until two days later. The 4th, 8th, 9th, and 19th Mechanized Corps were still on the march. Supporting infantry corps were even further away.

Kirponos's Chief of Staff, General Purkayev, argued against the political officer attached to the Southwest Front, Commissar Nikolai Vashugin, on this point but Vashugin and Zhukov won out: the attack would begin without delay. Only two tank divisions of 15th Mechanized Corps in the south and a single tank division of 22nd Mechanized Corps in the north were in position to begin the attack on the 24th.