had to walk, since the trucks were carrying critical munitions and supplies. In one case, heavy artillery pieces belonging to the 22nd Mechanized Corps were simply left behind for want of tractors to pull them. The commander of the 19th Mechanized marched his corps forward in two echelons with the tank divisions far in advance of his lagging infantry, which meant that his armored units arrived at the battlefield without infantry support. Ryabyshev, commander of the 8th Mechanized, reported similar problems. His artillery was towed by exceedingly slow tractors that held up the movement of the entire column: "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 22 June and 24 June, the 8th Mechanized Corps received three different locations for its assembly point: the original order from the Front Command, a new one from the commander of the 6th Army, and on 24 June another order from the Front command. The Corps crossed its own path and backtracked several times before finally arriving at Brody. Ryabyshev later wrote: As a result of these and other problems assembling the forces for the attack, the scheduled time for the operation was set back 6 hours to 04:00 on 24 June. By the time this decision was made on the evening 23 June, barely 48 hours since the war had begun, the 11th Panzer Division, with the 16th Panzer Division traveling in its wake, had already penetrated into Soviet territory. The 13th and 14th Panzer Divisions were well their way up the road to Lutsk with the objective of reaching the Styr River on the 24th, and the 44th, 298th, and 299th Infantry Divisions were moving up to consolidate the advance. Even with the delayed schedule, the counter-attack began piecemeal, since the full complement of forces could not be brought into position until two days later. The 4th, 8th, 9th, and 19th Mechanized Corps were still on the march and supporting infantry corps were even further away. Kirponos's Chief of Staff, General Maksim Purkayev, argued against the political officer attached to the Southwest Front, Commissar Nikolai Vashugin, on this point but Vashugin and Zhukov