Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (12 page)

In practice, no adequate training could possibly have taken place in the time available. On 7 July, after three days in barracks, the men of the Kirov Division marched through the streets, followed by crowds of wives and children, to the Vitebsky railway station, where they entrained for the front. It was a piece of theatre, for a few stops out the army command sent them back again, to pick up basic equipment. Altogether, a volunteer remembered,

 

we set off for the front three times . . . The first time was on 7 July. The command sent us back because we didn't have any kit. On 8 July our weapons arrived and were distributed. We set off again, and our uniforms were handed out on the way. Again we were turned back. By the 9th we were finally properly dressed and equipped: everyone with his rifle, and the officers with carbines.

 

But though the First Division had artillery, machine guns and a few sub-machine guns, it had no anti-aircraft guns, its mortars lacked sights and some of the rifles that had been issued were forty years old. (‘Mine was made in 1895', one
Kirovyets
remembered. ‘It was the same age as me.'
21
) The division finally arrived at its destination – a railway town between Luga and Novgorod – on 11 July, in the middle of an air raid.

Later
opolcheniye
units were even worse off. The Second Division also had no anti-aircraft guns, no automatic weapons save one machine gun, and such inexperienced gun crews that they had to ‘learn how to use their guns while in battle'. The Third Division,
opolcheniye
commander Major General Aleksei Subbotin complained to Zhdanov, had half its designated artillery, no armoured shells, no grenades or Molotov cocktails, ‘not a single mortar', insufficient cable for field telephones, only a handful of cars and motorbikes, and no gun oil for rifles, which meant that they hadn't been cleaned since being handed out. The third was nonetheless sent to man fortifications near Leningrad on 15 July, the actual day of its call-up.
22

The Party saw the volunteers, internal records make clear, as cannon fodder. Meeting with his colleagues in the Political Department, Verkhoglaz praised their diversity – ‘In our units you can see a professor marching alongside a student, a metalworker and a blast-furnace operator, or an architect doing target-practice alongside a baker' – but admitted that ‘Since we don't have much preparation time, they must train while fighting, and fight while training.' Volunteers were ‘not to be used for manoeuvres, only for defence . . . which is why they need to know how to use grenades and other primitive means of fighting off enemy attacks'.
23
The first division to be thrown into battle was the Second, which on arrival at the front on 13 July was immediately ordered to turn back German tank units from a bridgehead across the Luga River south-east of Kingisepp. The First and Third Divisions followed suit a week later, as the Wehrmacht's motorised divisions spread south along the Luga Line.

The result was near-universal panic and confusion. Unarmed, untrained, exhausted by night-time marches and sleepless days hiding from air attack, volunteers fled or fell into captivity in vast numbers. So many abandoned their ancient rifles that a special campaign was launched with the slogans ‘Losing your gun is a crime against the Motherland' and ‘A soldier's power is his weapon'. Mass flight in the face of tanks was so common that it got its own pseudo-medical name –
tankovaya boyazn
, or ‘tankophobia'. Verkhoglaz even hinted to his subordinates that they should spread the rumour that the Germans were using dummies:

 

The other day exactly this sort of incident was uncovered; it was spotted through binoculars. A colossal column of tanks was seen approaching. The tanks stopped, an officer got out and leant against one with his elbow, and his elbow made a dent. Well, as you know, elbows don't make dents on real tanks. This slight detail revealed the truth – the tanks turned out to be fake.
24

 

Whether this absurd attempt at persuading men to fight panzers virtually with their bare hands had any success we do not know; it seems highly unlikely.

Brought to battle, the volunteers' lives were thrown away in the most primitive fashion. ‘Russian attack method', German chief of staff General Halder wrote in his diary: ‘Three-minute artillery barrage, then pause, then infantry attacking as much as twelve ranks deep, without heavy weapons support. The men start hurrah-ing from far off. Incredibly high Russian losses.'
25
One of those infantrymen was Frenklakh. ‘You're so terrified that your legs root themselves to the ground', he remembered. ‘It's extraordinarily difficult to make yourself get up, pick up your rifle and run. Once you're up it's fine – you just run forwards. But it wasn't just fear of being shot in the back of the head if you didn't that made you do it – you were high on a sense of duty.'

Officers who emerged from battle alive were subjected to the usual suspicious bullying. Verkhoglaz interrogated a
politruk
, Mikhail Serogodsky, after a disastrous engagement near Kingisepp at the end of July:

 

Serogodsky: ‘Nine hundred of us arrived at the railway station, and six hundred came out of the fighting there.'

Verkhoglaz: ‘Were the rest killed, or did they make off?'

Serogodsky: ‘Some went off towards Gdov, some were killed.'

Verkhoglaz: ‘I know exactly why some of them ran away – it was because you lost your head. You didn't understand that you have to lead. Thanks to your failure of leadership they ran away in animal terror.'

 

The remainder of the unit, Serogodsky continued, were ordered to ‘consider themselves partisans', broke up into groups and headed into the woods:

 

Verkhoglaz: ‘The reason for your return from the rear?'

Serogodsky: ‘We had difficulties with food. For the last three days until we met up with our units again, we fed off wild plants. We were walking through deep pine forest and living off wood sorrel. Extreme hunger forced us to rejoin our lines.'

Verkhoglaz: ‘And your losses are how big?'

Serogodsky: ‘Hard to say. In our detachment there are sixty-five men left. That wasn't just deaths; twice I sent men out on reconnaissance and they didn't come back.'
26

 

Anger and despair come through the battalion-level reports as well, their language burned clean of the usual political jargon. A Commissar Moseyenko of the First Division explained, on 21 July, why his unit had been forced to retreat:

 

The battalion was defending itself against mortar fire, and could not open fire in return because it had no mortars of its own. The battalion had no communications with the regiment, the artillery or its own companies, as a result of which our artillery was firing at our own soldiers in their own trenches. The 1st Company of the battalion subjected the 3rd Company of the same battalion to fire.
27

 

Another officer of the First Division complained of the lack of medical services:

 

It isn't just that the situation with drugs is bad; we have no surgical equipment at all. If the wounded need surgery we can't help them. There are no surgeons, no instruments, no nurses. There are the Red Cross girls – they are heroines, true, but that isn't much help to them. We haven't got enough first aid kits. There are no back-up stocks, only what the soldiers already have in their bags, that's all. One small bottle of iodine per bag . . . What can I say about medical transport? We should have 380 trucks; we have 170. There are no qualified doctors . . .

 

It was small wonder, he hinted, that officers often found their position unbearable:

 

There was one unpleasant incident. The commander of the 1st Kirovsky Regiment shot himself. The reason, apparently, was cowardice, fear that [the regiment] was not properly armed. They say that fifteen minutes earlier he had given an excellent speech [to the troops], then walked out and shot himself. His actions have not been explained to the soldiers; they have been told that he was killed by diversionists.
28

 

A senior lieutenant questioned why he had ordered a retreat on his own initiative, replied, ‘I don't know how to be an officer and I didn't want lots of people to be killed through my fault', before bursting into tears.
29
A machine-gunner left a brisk note: ‘I've decided to take my own life. It's too difficult in the company. Signed, company sergeant major Smirnov.'

 

On 16 July the High Command ordered the creation of four more
opolcheniye
divisions, eventually comprising another 41,446 volunteers. Recruitment criteria were loosened to include ‘white-ticketers', spectacle-wearers and the sons of ‘enemies of the people', and age limits extended from eighteen down to seventeen, and from fifty up to fifty-five. Their grand new title of ‘Guards Divisions' failed to disguise the fact that they were even worse equipped than their predecessors. The 3rd Rifle Regiment of the First Guards Division, for example, had 791 rifles, ten sniper's rifles and five revolvers for 2,667 men.
30
Training was again abysmal or non-existent (‘We're teaching them to fight with stones', lamented an instructor). Thanks to the profligacy of the past three weeks, the new divisions were also acutely short of experienced officers – of the First Guards Division's 781 officers only eighty-two were ‘cadres' – roughly speaking, professionals. To officer the Second Guards Division, commissars had to scout the unoccupied Soviet Union, bringing men from as far away as the Urals.
31

The new divisions were thrown into the same bloodbath as their predecessors. On arrival at the front on 11 August, the First Guards Division's orders were changed three times, with the result that some regiments had to march seventy kilometres in twenty-four hours. They were then thrown straight into action, despite lacking cartridges, shells and grenades. More ammunition could not be brought up from the rear, a Political Department boss reported to Zhdanov after a tour of the front, because the division had no fuel tanker, and had had to leave behind 390 horses for lack of harnesses and carts. Nor could the wounded be evacuated from the battlefield, since the medical unit had only four trucks. The ‘high-ups' who descended on divisional headquarters were more hindrance than help:

 

Every one of them feels that it's his duty to give an order or advice. A characteristic example: the divisional commander only found out that the 2nd Rifle Regiment had been ordered to attack on the evening of 12 August, when the order had already been carried out, under the command of a major general from group headquarters. In conversation with me, Major General Shcherbakov and brigade commissar Kurochkin both declared ‘Everybody gives orders but nobody actually helps.'

 

A long list of requested supplies included water carts, an ambulance and a mobile field hospital, as well as twenty more mid-ranking officers and
politruki
to round up and rally retreating volunteers.
32

The Second Guards Division was sent into the lines at Gatchina on 12 August, and cut to pieces two weeks later. During the battle, regimental commissar Nabatov reported, it became apparent that

 

A. Some of the soldiers don't know how to handle rifles or grenades. This contributed to their dispersal during fighting.

 

B. A number of soldiers were badly camouflaged, having failed to carry out orders to dig themselves in. As a result we suffered large losses from artillery fire and mortars.

 

C. During counter-attacks soldiers tried to keep close to one another instead of spreading out in proper formation. This meant more losses.

 

D. Soldiers do not recognise their neighbours to the left and right. Mistaking their own men for the enemy, they think they have been encircled.

 

E. A number of unit commanders do not know their own soldiers by name.

 

F. Some soldiers do not know how to use their first aid kits. As a result some, having suffered relatively minor wounds, bleed to death before they can be delivered to a medical point.

 

In between the bouts of carnage, volunteers sat out summer thunderstorms in half-built trenches, wet and hungry (‘We sploshed about', as Frenklakh put it, ‘like hippos in the zoo'). Units pleaded for tarpaulins, tents, field kitchens, underwear, razors, mess tins, water bottles, shovels, entrenching tools, helmets, and most of all for vehicles, communications equipment, weapons (the Third Guards had only three rifles for every four volunteers) and men who knew how to use them. ‘The majority of volunteers', reported a
politruk
of a battalion of the Fourth Guards Division, sent to join the eviscerated Second Division,