June 22, 1941

June 22, 1941, is the opening date of the German attack on the Soviet Union and the decisive chronological marker for the eastern campaign of the 79th Division. The novel connects this military turning point to Hans Reiter’s experience as a soldier, tracing an advance across rivers and through Bessarabia and Ukraine while setting the division’s laborious movement against the scale and speed of the wider invasion.

The invasion begins

The attack on the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941. The 79th Division was attached to the 11th German Army; a few days later, its advance troops crossed the Prut and entered combat alongside Romanian army corps, whose fighting spirit exceeded German expectations. The date therefore marks not a single isolated encounter but the beginning of a sustained campaign in which Reiter’s unit was expected to advance and fight over a widening eastern front.

The division’s route and constraints

The 11th Army’s human and material resources were much smaller than those of Army Group South, whose formations included the 6th Army, the 17th Army, and the 1st Panzer Group. The 79th Division also faced difficult terrain, scarce roads, and the absence of the surprise that had favored the other army groups. Its movement depended on its own soldiers and mules: as a light infantry division, it carried heavy equipment by mule while its men marched and fought, a structure that one soldier compared to the marches and countermarches of the Napoleonic era.

After crossing the Prut, the division fought across the steppes and hills of Bessarabia, crossed the Dniester, and reached the outskirts of Odessa. It then continued while the Romanian troops halted, fighting retreating Soviet forces before crossing the Bug and advancing farther into Ukraine. The campaign’s progression is rendered as a sequence of crossings and continued movement, with the division leaving burned villages, granaries, and woods behind it amid seemingly endless wheat fields.

Reiter and the landscape of war

The destruction becomes a question within Reiter’s immediate experience. He asks who is setting the woods on fire; Wilke, Neitzke, Kruse, and Sergeant Lemke cannot identify the cause. Wilke denies that the soldiers themselves are responsible, and the others echo him. The novel thus places the unexplained fires beside the army’s forward movement without supplying a definitive explanation, preserving the gap between the devastation observed and what the soldiers know about it.

The date’s narrative significance lies in how it organizes this movement: the invasion is introduced through military attachment and operational limits, then made concrete in Reiter’s exhausting marches, river crossings, and encounter with a landscape marked by fire. The account establishes the eastern campaign as both historical event and lived experience, without reducing the unexplained destruction to a certainty the narration does not provide.