Page 232 - The Chief Culprit

All the Way to Berlin! y 193

A fortnight after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, on July 7, 1941, Stalin sent a telegram
to the commander of the southern front, General I. V. Tulenev. In the telegram, Stalin de-
manded that the Soviet Union retain Bessarabia at any cost, “having in mind that we need
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the Bessarabian territory as a springboard for organizing our invasion.” Hitler had already
delivered his sudden blow, but Stalin still did not think of defense—his main concern was
organizing an invasion from Bessarabia, meaning an attack on the Romanian oil fields.
e invasion of Bessarabia by the Soviet Union and the concentration there of power-
ful aggressive forces, including the paratroops corps and the Danube flotilla, forced Hitler to
look at the strategic situation from a completely different perspective and to take preemptive
measures. But it was already too late. Even the sudden attack of the Wehrmacht Heer on the
Soviet Union could not save Hitler and his empire.
In the memoirs of Marshal of the Soviet Union G. K. Zhukov, there is a map of the
location of Soviet naval bases in the first half of 1941. Among these bases, one was in the
vicinity of the city of Pinsk, in Belarus. It is at least five hundred kilometers away from the
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nearest sea. After the disbanding of the purely defensive Dnepr military flotilla, some part of
its ships were sent to the Danube delta, and others were sent upstream to the tributary of the
Dnepr—the river Pripyat’. Ships were sent up almost to the sources, where the width of the
river hardly reached fifty meters. at was where a new base for the flotilla was built.
e Pinsk military flotilla almost rivaled the Danube flotilla in might—it included
four 263-ton displacement Zhelezniakov–class monitors and five captured Polish monitors,
ranging from 130- to 150-ton displacement. Altogether, the Pinsk flotilla had sixty-six river
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warships and cutters, a squadron of airplanes, a company of marines, and other units. It was
difficult to use the Pinsk flotilla for defense: the coastal monitors that came here had their
bows turned west, and turning such huge ships around in a narrow river was complicated.
If the ships were needed for defense, they should have been left in the Dnepr, because there
was nothing for them to do on the quiet forest river Pripyat’. It was unlikely that the enemy
would advance through the impassable forests and treacherous swamps.
e purpose of the Pinsk flotilla remains unclear, if one does not think of the Dnepr-
Bug Canal.
Immediately after the “liberation” of Western Belarus in 1939, the Red Army started
digging a more than 100-km-long canal from Pinsk to Kobrin. e canal was built in the
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summer and winter. Sapper units of the 4th Army and “construction units of the NKVD”—
that is, thousands of inmates from the GULAG—participated in its completion. e fact that
the construction was commanded by Colonel (later Marshal of Engineering Troops) Alexey
Proshliakov alone spoke of its purely military purpose. e canal was built in truly horren-
dous conditions. Equipment sank in the swamps, and the only way to complete the canal
within the deadline set by Stalin was to do everything by hand. e canal was built. Nobody
knows exactly how many human lives it cost. e canal connected the Pripyat’ with the river
Bug. e only use for the canal could be to let ships reach to the Vistula basin and further
west. e canal had no other use. In a defensive war, it would have had to be destroyed to
prevent German river ships from passing through the Vistula to the Dnepr. In the defensive
war of 1941, all the ships of the Pinsk flotilla had to be blown up and abandoned. At the end
of 1943, when the Red Army was rapidly advancing west, a flotilla was once again formed on
the Dnepr, and once again it went up the Pripyat’ River to the small river Mukhavets, which
flowed into the Bug.