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
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
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
are untrained, or insufficiently trained, to shoot, so that in some cases they are unable to load their own rifles and their officers have to do it for them. . Out of 205 listed as machine-gunners only 100 turned out actually to be acquainted with machine guns, the rest were just riflemen. A list of ‘sappers’ included more riflemen and ordinary labourers, but not a single explosives expert. . Nor do they have any tools for repairing weapons, so that simple breakage of a machine gun’s firing pin puts the gun out of commission.33
The decision formally to wind up the remains of the
