After seven days of fighting, the German High Command was convinced
its armies had defeated Russia's. The German High Command has, to
most of the world's misfortune, not yet been wrong. The first seven days were days of mystery. Citizens of the outside world
could only ponder the oddities of totalitarian propaganda; look at
German pictures of happy byplay in captured villages; muse on Russian
geography—Dvinsk here, Pinsk there, Minsk in between; and take their
pick between diametric optimism. “A heavy defeat was inflicted on the enemy,” the Russian
communique would say. “Our troops,” the German communique would say on the same day,
“obtained big decisions, which will be made known short-ly.” Reporting by official and neutral news agencies was dreamy, unreal,
ridiculously ironic. D.N.B. told of Alpine troops fighting on Ukraine's
plains; Tass described Germans rushing into battle “in a drunken
condition,” Rumanians being pushed into battle at the bayonet's
point; and though there had never been such vastnesses, the world's
press was overfed with vignettes —a number of Russian peasants
capturing three parachutists, two planes dropping eight bombs which
killed a postman and burned two barns at Tammisaari, Finland. A pall of smoke was reported over Leningrad. A cloud of dust hid the
battlefield north of the Pripet Marshes. A German reporter in a Stuka
said well: “There is nothing but confusion beneath us.” In
those seven days one fact stood up gaunt and real as the remains of a
bombed wall. The Russians admitted on the third day that they had lost
374 planes while they had shot down 381 German planes. Set beside the usual fantastically onesided claims, that sentence told
volumes. The premise of victory in mechanized war is air superiority; it looked
as if the Germans were getting it. As the second week began, the German High Command released its
long-promised catalogue of triumphs. Having built up a record of
unswerving veracity as to geographical gains in six previous campaigns,
the German official communiques were hard to disbelieve.
