Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [86]
Establishing a ferocious discipline was hard at first. Not until 8 October did the political department of the Stalingrad Front feel able to report to Moscow that ‘the defeatist mood is almost eliminated, and the number of treasonous incidents is getting lower’. That the Soviet regime was almost as unforgiving towards its own soldiers as towards the enemy is demonstrated by the total figure of 13,500 executions, both summary and judicial, during the battle of Stalingrad. This included all crimes classed by the commissars as ‘extraordinary events’, from retreating without orders to self-inflicted wounds, desertion, crossing over to the enemy, corruption and anti-Soviet activities. Red Army soldiers were also deemed guilty if they failed to shoot immediately at any comrades seen trying to desert or to surrender to the enemy. On one occasion in late September, when a group of Soviet soldiers surrendered, German tanks advanced rapidly to protect them from fire directed at them from their own lines.
Chuikov’s weakest units were the militia Special Brigades, made up mainly of workers from factories in the northern part of Stalingrad. Blocking groups of well-armed Komsomol volunteers or NKVD detachments were placed behind them to prevent retreat. Their commissars in black leather jackets and armed with pistols reminded the writer Konstantin Simonov of Red Guards in 1918. In the case of the 124th Special Brigade, facing the 16th Panzer Division up at Rynok, the blocking groups behind the lines forced those who were cracking under the strain to escape to the enemy. Dobronin reported to Khrushchev that, on 25 September, a group of ten deserters, including two NCOs, crossed over to the Germans. The following night another five men slipped away. According to the German report on the interrogation of the first group of these very same deserters, their company strength was down to fifty-five men. ‘Since their last attack on 18 September, in which they suffered heavy losses, they have been given no more tasks. Behind the front line there is a second line of Party and Komsomol members, armed with heavy machine-guns and machine pistols.’
A Soviet senior lieutenant from Smolensk deserted for a different reason. He had been captured in the battle for the Don bend in August, but managed to escape from German custody soon afterwards. When he reported for duty again with the Red Army, ‘he was arrested according to an order of Stalin, treated as a deserter’, and sent to a penal company in 149th Special Brigade sector.
Others deserted for reasons which led the Germans into a false optimism. ‘Morale among the Russians is really bad,’ an NCO from the 79th Infantry Division wrote home. ‘Most deserters are driven over to us through hunger. It’s possible that the Russians will suffer from a famine this winter.’
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Soviet records reveal a great deal about the mentality of the time. When three soldiers deserted from the 178th Reserve Rifle Regiment, a lieutenant was ordered to go off and grab three other men, either soldiers or civilians, to make up the loss. Many if not most deserters were from batches of civilian reinforcements drafted in to make up numbers. For example, a large proportion of the ninety-three deserters from 15th Guards Rifle Division had been ‘citizens of Stalingrad evacuated to Krasnoarmeysk’. ‘These men were completely untrained and some of them had no uniforms. In the haste of mobilization, their passports were not taken from many of them.’ This, the report to Moscow acknowledged, was a serious mistake. ‘Clad in civilian clothes and having passports, they easily managed to get back over the Volga. It is necessary and urgent to take passports from all soldiers.’
Commissars were incensed by rumours that the Germans allowed Russian and Ukrainian deserters to go home if they lived in the occupied territories. ‘A shortage of political training is exploited by German agents, who carry out their work of corruption trying to persuade unstable soldiers to desert, especially those