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The hot summer of 1942. Thousands of Soviet troops were retreating in confusion
amid huge clouds of dust. Air space was dominated by German “Junkers” dive-bombers
and “Messerschmitt” fighters. The impression was that of chaos, total confusion
and the worst moments of 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union.
Military archives still have quite a few sternly-worded cabled demands
by the then Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that the army group commanders
should check the troop retreat, bring order out of chaos, fight to the
last ditch and not to withdraw from the positions held.
Stalin is fed up with the Red Army defeats. The nation is on the verge
of a dreadful disaster, and the only tested way to avert it that he seems
to know of is to resort to some extremely tough measures. And that is what
he does when he signs his Order 227 in late July 1942. Under that document
anyone who retreats without order will retreat into one’s death. When he
orders the troops not to make even a single step back, he uses the words
in their literal meaning. The Order 227 has a special paragraph about setting
up penal battalions in the army groups and penal companies in the armies.
The term of service in penal battalions and penal companies was three months.
These companies and battalions were the first to be ordered into action,
even when they stood no chance of winning, but, conversely, every chance
of dying. Yet, surprisingly, under those adverse circumstances they engaged
the enemy in the fiercest of fighting. They were people just like anybody
else and they feared death, too, but they had to clear the disgrace they
had covered themselves in. If a serviceman was wounded in combat (or spilt
his blood, - the formula that was used then for the occasion) he was normally
released from his penal service.
The first penal battalion was formed at the Stalingrad front on August
22nd, one day before the German troops had reached the Volga river.
Those who served in penal companies or battalions were mostly people who
had been tried under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, an article
that sent people face firing squads. These people had their death sentences
replaced by a term in a penal company (for privates and sergeants) or in
a penal battalion (for army officers). Those who served in penal companies
and battalions could be both military and civilians, they could be those
who escaped from captivity or who were branded as “enemies of the people”
and were sent to the front from their prisons. They were seen as kamikaze
soldiers and sent to where fighting was the fiercest and the chance to
die – the highest. They could be committed to action unarmed and told that
they should pick up arms from those who would get killed. They could be
sent from one combat to another with no respite in between, and they were
always used to spearhead an attack or as a rearguard screen, prepared to
die, to let the retreating regular army units disengage from the advancing
enemy. They were seen as having cleared their disgrace for what errors
they may have made if they died or were wounded in action.
An attack by penal battalions or penal companies was a psychological attack
by those doomed to death. They had nowhere to retreat.
The command stood to gain from using penal units. On the one hand, they
helped maintain discipline. On the other, they could be used in verifying
the correctness of a decision made. Whenever a village or a commanding
height was to be captured, Red Army units had to know the strength of the
enemy force that defended them. So, the commander of a penal company was
ordered to send one or two of his platoons to conduct reconnaissance in
force. Just how heavy losses the company could suffer in the process was
of secondary importance. The main thing was to prevent regular army units
from sustaining grave losses. But if penal units captured a built-up area,
the seizure was normally said to be made by regular army units.
It’s anyone’s guess just how many servicemen died in reconnaissance-in-force
operations, how many were machine-gunned by so-called anti-retreat detachments
of the dreadful Soviet secret police NKVD, how many were executed by shooting
on orders from the notorious “troika” military tribunals. No official agency
has ever been charged with counting up these figures. But after the prominent
Russian military historian Dmitry Volkogonov had obtained classified information
from state military archives, he said that approximately 60,000 were sentenced
to capital punishment and another 600,000 were ordered to penal battalions.
But one has to admit that quite a few of them were later pardoned as those
who had expiated their guilt.
Soviet punitive body chiefs liked the idea of penal battalions so much
that they started to send to penal units also civilian prisoners of the
GULAG, - the harsh labour camp system. Some historians claim that such
prisoners totaled more than a million, but this seems to be an exaggeration.
Those sent to penal units were promised rehabilitation, but the promise
was often false, since bureaucrats couldn’t care less for those people’s
future. Sometimes soldiers committed heroic acts of bravery and were still
made to remain in their penal companies. Here is just one example. At the
Stalingrad front all army officers who had fought their way back from encirclement
were ordered into one unit. The first group of 58 were told they would
be sent to a board of survey and then to regular army units. But none of
them were ever interrogated, their cases ever investigated, and soon they
found themselves in penal battalions. In a couple of months it turned out
that this happened because of someone’s error, but most officers had been
killed in action by then.
Those who fell in action were rehabilitated in general lists. Acts of heroism
by penal battalion or penal company servicemen have never gone on the record.
Former military pilot Artiom Afinogenov invariably gets irritated whenever
recalling the performance of air force penal squadrons near Stalingrad:
“Penal squadron pilots were sent to the most dangerous places, first of
all, to Volga bridge crossings, where the future of Stalingrad was decided,
to air fields and enemy tank concentrations. So it was only penal squadrons
that were sent to attack these targets, yet these operational flights were
not taken into consideration. You keep flying missions and killing Germans,
yet it is held that nothing happens, so nothing goes on your record. To
be released from penal service you have to be wounded in fighting. But
when a military pilot is flying a mission, the first wound he receives
may very often be the last one.” (A.Afinogenov’s voice in RA)
In the 45 years since the end of the war the official Soviet policy was
not to take up penal companies and battalions, as well as anti-retreat
detachments of the special service known as SMERSH (“Smert shpionam”, the
Russian for “Death to spies”), the detachments that would not hesitate
to machine-gun Red Army units should the latter fail to contain a German
attack and start to retreat. Former penal unit servicemen themselves choose
- more often than not - to avoid elaborating on their penal service. Perhaps,
the only exception is the story “The Warlord” by the Soviet writer Vladimir
Karpov, where he tells about his military career, from a penal company
serviceman all the way up to a Guards Colonel, who was besides awarded
the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Karpov was sent to a penal company
not because he had done something bad, but because of slander or some misunderstanding.
At the front soldiers would not always remember the number “227” of the
order under discussion, or the name of an official who signed it. But the
order title - “ Not a Step Back!” – made it clear at once what it was all
about. According to documentary evidence, the main reason for the Red Army’s
poor fighting in 1941 and 1942 were grave errors and serious miscalculation
by the nation’s top-echelon political leaders under Stalin, as well as
the criminal assassination of thousands upon thousands of military commanders,
which severely weakened the Red Army. But obviously, the military commanders
and their troops had to fulfill their military duty, whatever their plight.
Nor there is any need to prove that it is always more difficult and more
important for your country’s future to fight to the last ditch, rather
than lay down arms and surrender. The order not to surrender is by far
less severe in war conditions than the order to attack. The order to advance
made soldiers rise to their feet and meet bullets and shells, meet their
death. The idea is so ordinary and clear, it is actually a stroke of genius.
– If your Fatherland has called you up, so fight as war heroes do. If your
Fatherland orders you to advance, then wipe out the enemy as war heroes
do. If your Fatherland has told you to command regiments, try to do your
utmost to win battles. If you’ve sworn an oath of allegiance to your Fatherland,
don’t you ever think of breaking that oath until you’re alive. Someone
may take all this as big words, but in point of fact these words are perfectly
correct.
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