Army to the south, under the general direction of Southwestern Front commander Kirponos. Under the 5th Army command, Konstantin 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, Dmitry 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 Radekhiv, on the left flank of the 15th Mechanized Corps. The plan called for these forces to assemble and begin offensive operations at 22:00 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. Conditions were difficult for the Soviet Corps commanders: loss of communications, constant harassment by the Luftwaffe, lack of transportation, and the movement of large numbers of refugees and retreating soldiers on the roads made it difficult for the counter-attacking forces to 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 was seriously flawed, because it was dependent on the civilian telephone and telegraph network. German sappers, air attacks, and Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas had aggressively targeted these systems. Many Soviet front-line commanders were left to their own devices, and this disrupted 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, moved his division to the designated assembly point for his corps at Kovel laid out in the pre-war plan, 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. Motorized in name only, many of these divisions had only part of their full transportation establishment. Individual corps commanders had to improvise solutions to bring their full complement of soldiers to their assembly points. Rokossovsky commandeered 200 trucks from the district reserve at Shepetivka, but this still left him in the position of mounting much of his infantry on tanks. Even then, many soldiers