Western Front was created at the beginning of the war on the basis of the Western Special Military District, (which before July 1940 was known as Belorussian Special Military District). The Front Commander was Dmitri Pavlov (since June 1940, being the District Commander before the war).
The defense line of the Front was 470 km, from the Southern border of Lithuania to Pripyat River. It was on the direction of the major strike of the Army Group Centre during the Operation Barbarossa. Front's tanks and aviation at airfields were annihilated by German air strikes. The Front had no permanent defense installations and weak flanks. The major forces of the Soviet Westen Front were concentrated in the Bialystok salient. German Ninth and Fourth Armies of Army Group Center marched North and South of the salient. In the evening of June 25th German 47th Panzer Corps made a cut between Slonim and Volkovysk.
On June 27 German Panzergruppe 2 and Panzergruppe 3 striking from South and north linked near Minsk, and the Third, Tenth, and Thirteenth Soviet Armies were trapped in an encirclement, total about 20 divisions. On June 28 the Ninth and Fourth German Armies linked East of Bialystok spitting the encircled Soviet forces into two pockets: larger Bialystok pocket and smaller Novogrudok pocket. Eventually, in 17 days the Soviet Western Front lost 420,000 personnel of total 625,000.
The Front commander and Front Staff were recalled to Moscow, accused of intentional disorganization of defense and retreat without battle, and executed, with families repressed according to NKVD Order no. 00486 about families of traitors of Motherland. (They were rehabilitated in 1956.)
The command was transferred to Acting Commander Andrei Yeremenko, and later to Semyon Timoshenko, and the Front took part in the fierce Battle of Smolensk (1941), which managed to disrupt the German Blitzkrieg for two months.