WI: No Barbarossa?

Why do you think that in your scenario they would not suffer huge losses? The Red Army circa 1939 suffered from the numerous problems from quality of the officers corps and all the way to equipment some of which had been at least marginally addressed after the Winter War. German army, as was demonstrated against France (leaving aside Poland), had a huge quality advantage which in OTL allowed it to keep advancing all the way to the end of 1942. A major offensive is a complicated thing and it does not look like the Red Army was capable of accomplishing it against the Germans in 1939. Strictly speaking, it was only capable of doing so on a limited scale in the late 1942 and even that under the very favorable circumstances (stretched front with the ill-equipped German allies on the flanks). Even then, shortly before the final Stalingrad counter-offensive (numerous earlier attempts failed miserably) commander of one of the newly-created tank corps sent a panicking letter personally to Stalin citing huge problems (starting with an absolute lack of experience in most of his troops) and predicting a disaster (fortunately for him, this did not impact his career and his corps ended up as the Guards).

So the Soviet offensive along the whole new Soviet-German border in 1939 would most probably end up as a series of the major encirclements of the Soviet troops with the Germans advancing into the Soviet territory. Not sure if by 1939 the same numbers of the reserves as in 1941 were available.
The Germans had a higher quality army than its opponents but quality isn't everything, being able to supply your army is much more important, Soviet supplying of the Germans was critical to their conquest of France, and the subsequent capture of French trucks was quite a contribution to German success in Barbarossa. Even in the 1939 campaign against Poland the Germans were running low on ammunition, without the Soviets sabotaging the Polish bridgehead the Germans would be even more worn out when they finally had to face the Soviets, they would be in no position to push deep into the Soviet Union and conduct massive encirclements. Germany in 1939 was in no shape to wage a two front war, Hitler started the war when he did because he had bankrupted Germany with his massive spending to build up the Wehrmacht and Germany was teetering on the edge of economic collapse
 
So basically you seem to think the Luftwaffe has improved so dramatically that they will pulverise the RAF who have done nothing to improve the quality of their aircraft or increased their production or improved their supply of pilots?

My words, just a half page above: I will not go that far to declare that BoB 2.0 is an insta-win for the Germans, despite the agregate advantage their fighter force has, as well as for not having range problems of 1940.

The reality is that by 1941 the Luftwaffe has received no useable replacements for the Ju87 or the Bf110 and its bomber force is dependent on the Ju88, an aircraft that had not proven nearly as effective as hoped in 1940. The RAF by 1941 were introducing centimetric AI radar, and had largely removed the obsolete aircraft from their order of battle as well as Fighter Command transitioning its pilots from the Hurricane to the Spitfire. The best the Luftwaffe can achieve in 1941 is a battle of attrition over Southern England that will still massively favour the RAF.

At 1st May 1940, RAF* has aircraft+crew:
- Hurricane: 505
- Defiant (probably all as night fighters): 92
- Spitfire: 388

Bf 109F with a drop tank is more than a replacement for the Bf 110, so is the Ju 88 for Ju 87.

*RAF FC, ie. in the UK
 
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My words, just a half page above: I will not go that far to declare that BoB 2.0 is an insta-win for the Germans, despite the agregate advantage their fighter force has, as well as for not having range problems of 1940.

Yes I read that, you believe that their fighter force has some 'agregrate advantage' so far no one else seems to agree with you


At 1st May 1940, RAF* has aircraft+crew:
- Hurricane: 505
- Defiant (probably all as night fighters): 92
- Spitfire: 388

I'll assume you mean 1941 and it would be nice if you provided a source for those numbers if they are from 1941. Also are you suggesting the RAF in 1941 isn't stronger than it was in 1940?

109F with a drop tank is more than a replacement for the Bf 110, so is the Ju 88 for Ju 87.

And again you think more loiter time for the Bf109 is some sort of panacea for the failings of the Luftwaffe and the Ju88 proved anything but decisive in 1940, why is going to do better in 1941? For that matter if its an adequate replacement for the Ju87 why did the Luftwaffe keep the Stuka in service throughout the war? You seem determined to ignore every improvement for the RAF while magnifying those of the Luftwaffe.
 
Yes I read that, you believe that their fighter force has some 'agregrate advantage' so far no one else seems to agree with you

I'm okay if people don't agree with me, but I don't consider it okay when people read my post and call me out for what I didn't wrote.
'Aggregate advantage' I was talking is a cue to a fact that RAF FC stil employed lot's of under-performers in mid-1941.

I'll assume you mean 1941 and it would be nice if you provided a source for those numbers if they are from 1941. Also are you suggesting the RAF in 1941 isn't stronger than it was in 1940?

Yes, numbers are for 2st May 1941, not for 1st May 1940 - my mistake.
RAF FC OOB for 2st May 1941:

FCoob.jpg


And again you think more loiter time for the Bf109 is some sort of panacea for the failings of the Luftwaffe and the Ju88 proved anything but decisive in 1940, why is going to do better in 1941? For that matter if its an adequate replacement for the Ju87 why did the Luftwaffe keep the Stuka in service throughout the war? You seem determined to ignore every improvement for the RAF while magnifying those of the Luftwaffe.

I'd thank you in advance for pointing out where I'd said that more loiter time is the make-or-brake thing for Luftwaffe.
Ju-88 was 6th most numerous 1-st line combat aircraft during the time of BoB (behind Bf 109s and 110s, Ju 87s, Do 17s and He 111s), freshly introduced. Expecting from it to be decisive in 1940 is ... wacky?
By mid-1941, Ju 88s were most numerous LW bombers.
Luftwaffe kept Ju 87 in service because they were short of aircraft, same goes for any CR 42s or Hs 123s they could spare.
I will not comment the latest sentence.
 
Referring to an earlier discussion where you cited the small numbers of Soviet POWs in the Winter War as proof of the high loyalty of the Red Army soldiers, I tend to disagree with your argument about the Red Army soldiers having "plenty of opportunities to shirk without a fear of reprisal". As I answered you in that thread, there really were not that many opportunities at all to surrender to the Finns during the war, not in the "motti" battles up north or in the heavy fighting on the crowded Karelian Isthmus. On both these theatres, objective conditions made it unlikely for the Red Army soldiers to surrender en masse, in the way that they did surrender to the Finns in the early stages of the Continuation War - in much greater numbers than in 39-40 even if in that war they were fighting a purely defensive, justified battle against a foreign invader (which arguably should have been good for loyalty and morale).

And I found your suppositions to be unsubstantiated by any actual study and not standing up to any sort of scrutiny. The Motti’s offered tremendous opportunity for surrender, isolated as they were and cut-off from the main body. All Soviet soldiers would have to do is throw down their weapons, raise their hands, and wait for the Finns to appear. You claimed that the Finns would have had difficulty taking prisoners, but this fits ill with the circumstances of the prisoners they did take: as it was, most of the prisoners historically taken during the Winter War did come from the Motti’s and were largely taken as a result of incapacitation. If the Finns didn’t have much problem getting out PoWs taken via incapacitation, why would willing PoWs represent more of an obstacle? There were also Motti’s which were never destroyed, as the Finns lacked the resources to destroy and grimly held out for the entire war. There is simply no example of a Motti voluntarily surrendering like the pockets of 1941 did. They either were crushed, broke back to the main Soviet lines, or held out for the war.
 
The Germans had a higher quality army than its opponents but quality isn't everything, being able to supply your army is much more important, Soviet supplying of the Germans was critical to their conquest of France, and the subsequent capture of French trucks was quite a contribution to German success in Barbarossa. Even in the 1939 campaign against Poland the Germans were running low on ammunition, without the Soviets sabotaging the Polish bridgehead the Germans would be even more worn out when they finally had to face the Soviets, they would be in no position to push deep into the Soviet Union and conduct massive encirclements. Germany in 1939 was in no shape to wage a two front war, Hitler started the war when he did because he had bankrupted Germany with his massive spending to build up the Wehrmacht and Germany was teetering on the edge of economic collapse

If the Red Army attacks in 1940, there is no need for the Germans to go deep into the Soviet territory to organize the big encirclement and general annihilation. In 1941 the attempts of the Soviet counteroffensives in the border area soon after the German attack resulted in almost complete annihilation of the participating mechanized units and clearly demonstrated that Red Army did not know how to coordinate armor, artillery and infantry. Even in the summer of 1942 the counteroffensives had been routinely failing by the same reason.

And in 1939 - 40 the Red Army was in a worse shape than in 1941, especially as far as armor was involved.
 

Deleted member 1487

That's not really in evidence though. The proportion of punishments handed out to deserters amount to only 8.6% the number of instances of desertion/defections we have the records for. For the other 91.4%, they were simply returned to their unit. The number of total executions is 3.5% the number of desertions/defections and that is without factoring in that a number of executions would have been for certain criminal actions rather then desertion or defection. The Red Army may have used the death penalty more frequently then other armies, but the numbers still show it's use still wasn't widespread... and the soldiers knew it.

Also interesting is that of the 2.846 million desertions recorded during the war, a majority (54%) turned themselves in.
Deserters weren't the only people punished of course. Executions, gulags, and use of punishment units is vastly higher than any other military, perhaps all other militaries combined in WW2. What is wipe spread to you? I'd say 150,000 recorded executions, who knows how many non-recorded ones there were, is extraordinary.
>2.8 million desertions? That's enormous. The Wallies recorded only 150k for the entire European and Mediterranean theaters. For those that turned themselves in, they probably found they had little other option, especially given the efficiency of the NKVD in hunting people down.

No, Reese covers a fair bit of the pre-war in the book.
I'm sure there is some overlap, but just going by the periods mentioned on amazon they largely cover different periods.

That's a red-herring. I made it clear the term Reese uses, what his definition for that term is, and what it is measuring. For the definition you provided, he tends to use the term "military efficiency" instead. I don't necessarily agree with his use of the term myself, but it is what it is and citing a different definition does not change the fact he was talking about how well the Red Army was able to motivate it's soldiers to fight rather then how well it was able to fight.
Right and I made it clear he is using a term with an already established definition and redefined it to his purposes, perhaps with a purpose to get the reader to conflate the two definitions, I don't know.

It is, in the end, what Reese is studying and he makes clear that the ability of the Soviet Union to motivate it's soldiers to fight was every bit as capable as that of the Germans, Japanese, or Anglo-Americans.
If you mean pushing it's troops in front of enemy guns, yes they were able to get them to move in the direction desired. What is debateable was how effective it was compared to other methods of motivation.

It pretty obviously was what you were saying and was trying to get across, what with you making hay of the number of executions the Red Army used in WW2, but the reality is that would have been quite inadequate on it's own. Descriptions of Soviet soldiers being driven on by blocking detachments firing into their rear rests in the realm of Nazis propaganda rather then reality. In any case, the Winter War shows that the Soviet soldiers, for whatever reason, were quite willing to fight and fight hard in a offensive war (although, it is worth noting, Soviet propaganda had largely convinced them the whole war was Finland's fault). If anything, Soviet soldiers in the post-WW2 era would be even more motivated and willing then their Winter War counterparts to fight as, unlike the Winter War Red Army, there was a solid sense of professionalism and had a talented pool of junior leadership better able to lead... well until the officer corps ossified and the Dedovshchina got out of hand, that is.
It seemed like you were trying to ignore the reality of Soviet use of force as a major element of it's motivation of troops to fight. It wasn't the only reason Soviet troops fought of course, but it is one that you cannot leave out when discussing the subject, same with the Nazis using it to motivate German troops to fight into 1945.
Soviet use of blocking detachments is a matter of record, the question is how widespread they were, how often they used violence to maintain troops in the field, and how long they lasted. AFAIK they were used at the bleakest part of the war to prevent further retreats. They weren't necessary when the Soviets were winning. But then of course you have SMERSH active and present in military units. Less overt force is needed, but reminders of consequences for misbehavior were used. In the Winter War you keep asserting that Soviet troops fought willingly and hard, but what evidence is there of that? All that is obvious are the very heavy casualties the Soviet military took and their extremely high rate of missing personnel.

Which, as I pointed out, is a unsubstantiated conclusion which assumes that a significant number of the missing were deserted without evidence. In reality, it's much more likely that the vast majority of the missing were soldiers who were killed in the chaotic Motti engagements up north and whose deaths were never identified. The number of desertions would be vastly smaller and probably was similar to the number of surrenders at several thousand.
Unless the Soviets were exceptionally bad at finding their war dead or the Finns were truly expert at massacring Soviet PoWs and hiding their bodies, it is extremely unlikely that a force would have such a high proportion of missing to dead and have the vast majority of those missing just be dead. Especially for a victorious army.
For comparison German records for WW2 have 4.3 million missing+dead, with 1.2 million of those missing. That's about 27% for a defeated army, lower than the victorious Soviet army in the winter war. What evidence do you have to support that the Soviets were so bad at finding their war dead in a war they won when they controlled the ground that was fought over?

Sure, but that's based on the bad assumption that missing = deserted while ignoring that the Finns were in a much better position to accurately identify their own dead at the end of the Motti Battles.
I'm not saying all the missing=desertions, just that a lot of the missing could well have been desertions instead of unrecovered dead. Especially considering that if they had the dead bodies, the Soviets would be able to at least list that they had x number of dead were unidentifiable. You don't need a name to the body, you can still list them as dead and deduct them from the missing totals.

Which is why your cherry picking and I'm not. You threw out a (deliberately) limited number that did not give a proper sense of scale of the conflict which shows that the number of missing is very small in relation to the total casualties and number engaged. Even that ignores that a missing soldier is not proof of desertion.
I compared the same numbers for both sides in the war, dead+missing, to get a percentage. The Finnish number was vastly lower than the Soviet number, despite losing the war and losing the battlefields to the Soviets. As part of the overall Soviet force, how many were combat troops? Non-combat troops wouldn't have nearly as much opportunity, nor motivation to desert in a war that the Soviets couldn't lose.

It's actually rather the opposite, interestingly enough. The documented instances of Soviet desertion we have in the course of the Winter War largely occurred in the rear-areas.
Documented instances. I'm talking about the stuff that the Soviets wouldn't know about because they successfully deserted and simply get listed as MIA. AWOL rear area personnel aren't MIA.

The evidence indicates they weren't expecting it. Of the returned, only less then a thousand escaped punishment. 350 were executed and 4,354 were sentenced to hard labor in the camps for terms of five to eight years. There is no indication their families were punished, at least not overtly.
Fair enough.
 
Deserters weren't the only people punished of course. Executions, gulags, and use of punishment units is vastly higher than any other military, perhaps all other militaries combined in WW2. What is wipe spread to you? I'd say 150,000 recorded executions, who knows how many non-recorded ones there were, is extraordinary.

Yet it only represents around 1% of Soviet war dead. That's not widespread at all, which I tend to regard at least a significant minority (so, a minimum of approximately 30%, give or take 5). Of course, most of the Soviet executions are likely piled into the first 1/3rd of the war, whereas the Germans and Japanese are liable to be most pronounced in '44-'45.

>2.8 million desertions? That's enormous. The Wallies recorded only 150k for the entire European and Mediterranean theaters. For those that turned themselves in, they probably found they had little other option, especially given the efficiency of the NKVD in hunting people down.

Well, technically it's 2.8 million desertions and draft dodgers and the figure does include repeat offenders. In comparisons to the number who served, it's 8.2%. This is more then double the corresponding Anglo-American number that Reese gives, at 3%, but it's still not really widespread. It's also worth observing that, like executions, the numbers appear to have been stacked into the first period of war. In 1943, the Soviets caught 201,392 soldiers as either away from their units or stragglers, of whom around 41,000 were determined to be deserters. For 1942, the number caught away from their units was a little over a million and while the number who were determined to be deserters isn't given, it'd be something like 200,000 men assuming similar proportions. Obviously one can conclude that as both the fortunes and professionalism of the Red Army improved, desertion rates fell.

It's also worth considering that Anglo-American soldiers also tended to have oceans separating them from their home, which would act as a practical deterrent to desertion since a Brit or American soldier trying to flee would need to enlist a ship crews aide. What would really be telling is comparing it to German rates of desertion, particularly in 1944/45.

Right and I made it clear he is using a term with an already established definition and redefined it to his purposes, perhaps with a purpose to get the reader to conflate the two definitions, I don't know.

Paging through the section where he discusses the definitions, it seems it might be because he's using a social science definition rather then a strictly military science one? Or perhaps because there doesn't seem to be a single set definition? It's... actually rather difficult to tell.

If you mean pushing it's troops in front of enemy guns, yes they were able to get them to move in the direction desired. What is debateable was how effective it was compared to other methods of motivation.

Doesn't seem to have been any more or less effective then any other methods of motivation.

It seemed like you were trying to ignore the reality of Soviet use of force as a major element of it's motivation of troops to fight.

Right, which is why I stated a sentences like:

there’s no doubt that force or threat of force was an integral element of the Red Army

:rolleyes:

Soviet use of blocking detachments is a matter of record, the question is how widespread they were, how often they used violence to maintain troops in the field, and how long they lasted.

The use of blocking detachments is a matter of record. Their widespread use of violence, particularly the old myth of them machine gunning troops to keep them advancing or prevent them from retreating, is not and is found only in Nazis propaganda.

Unless the Soviets were exceptionally bad at finding their war dead or the Finns were truly expert at massacring Soviet PoWs and hiding their bodies, it is extremely unlikely that a force would have such a high proportion of missing to dead and have the vast majority of those missing just be dead. Especially for a victorious army.

Given the isolated location in which the Soviets suffered their losses, the inaccessibility of these regions to the Soviets at the end of the war (since they were on Finnish soil), the low-priority the Soviets placed on recovering bodies, and the even lower priority (not to mention lack of interest) on the part of the Finns in recovering Soviet dead, it is entirely likely a high proportion of those missing were dead.

For comparison German records for WW2 have 4.3 million missing+dead, with 1.2 million of those missing. That's about 27% for a defeated army, lower than the victorious Soviet army in the winter war. What evidence do you have to support that the Soviets were so bad at finding their war dead in a war they won when they controlled the ground that was fought over?

Because they didn't control much of the ground that was fought over? Most of the territory in which the Motti's occurred were still in Finnish hands when the war was over, hell many were still in Finnish hands when the Continuation War was over... Suomussalmi is still Finnish too this day, and even if they weren't, they are in area's with extremely barebones infrastructure and difficult terrain which is why it was so easy for the Finns to isolate and destroy the Soviet units in the first place. These factors would make body retrieval difficult even if the Soviets paid as high a priority to corpse recovery, which they didn't, so there wouldn't be a very good probability of a Soviet corpse killed in those regions being successfully dragged out and identified. If an entire unit was wiped out, which happened frequently enough in a Motti, the only witnesses would be the Finns and they wouldn't know who those dead Soviets were nor have much incentive to retrieve their corpses from some nowhere stretch of woodland, now would they?

Looking ahead a bit, missing making up around a 1/3rd of irrecoverable was also the case for the Soviets at the end of WW2. Looking at other armies in WW2: there's your 27% for the Germans but the US recorded 79,000 missing out of a total irrecoverable of 400,000 at the end of the war and still record 72,000 today, both of which is around 18-19%. I can't find any figures for British missing, but I can't imagine they were very much far apart from the Americans. Japanese missing is even more of a mystery. Looking at WW1, the proportion of missing/pow out of the total irrecoverable losses on the victors side runs the gamut from 0.9% (Japan) to 76.5% (Serbia). Even discounting cases where practically the entire country was overrun (thus dropping Serbia), we still have stuff like Italy's ~50% and Portugal's ~74%. So the assertion that 1/3rd of personnel unaccounted for or prisoner is somehow an unusual proportion for a victorious power, whether it controlled the ground in the end or not, doesn't really withstand scrutiny.

Documented instances.

Which based on WW2, would be the overwhelming majority. Only 7.4% of Soviet deserters were never caught.
 
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And I found your suppositions to be unsubstantiated by any actual study and not standing up to any sort of scrutiny. The Motti’s offered tremendous opportunity for surrender, isolated as they were and cut-off from the main body. All Soviet soldiers would have to do is throw down their weapons, raise their hands, and wait for the Finns to appear. You claimed that the Finns would have had difficulty taking prisoners, but this fits ill with the circumstances of the prisoners they did take: as it was, most of the prisoners historically taken during the Winter War did come from the Motti’s and were largely taken as a result of incapacitation. If the Finns didn’t have much problem getting out PoWs taken via incapacitation, why would willing PoWs represent more of an obstacle? There were also Motti’s which were never destroyed, as the Finns lacked the resources to destroy and grimly held out for the entire war. There is simply no example of a Motti voluntarily surrendering like the pockets of 1941 did. They either were crushed, broke back to the main Soviet lines, or held out for the war.

My two posts were based on recent Finnish studies. I can provide you a direct quote from the book Sotavankien ja siviili-internoitujen sodanaikainen kuolleisuus Suomessa ("The Wartime Mortality of Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in Finland") by Lars Westerlund et al. from 2009 (pages 71-72, my translation):

"The Winter War tactics produced relatively little POWs

...The Winter War was essentially a defensive war, although its tactics were based on counter-attacks and encirclement, which created the famous "mottis". The goal of the Finnish forces was to create as much harm and manpower losses to the enemy as possible. Due to these successful tactics, a great number of Soviet soldiers died in the "mottis": without food, warmth, even rudimentary accommodation, supply connections and organized medical care the Soviet soldiers did not have chances for survival. There were relatively few mass surrenders by the Soviet soldiers dug in close defence inside the "mottis". Instead, the Finnish soldiers often made sure that attempts to break out were stopped, allowed time and the freezing weather to work for their advantage in expectation of the final blow. After so-called "ripening" and destruction, the "mottis" usually produced relatively small numbers of POWs, if at all.

A significant factor for the small number of prisoners was the iron discipline held by the Soviet officers, as in a tightly-packed "motti" it was easy to monitor all soldiers. Surrenders were not allowed, and despite the cold, the lack of food and general hopelessness, the "mottis" often lasted for weeks as the Red Army soldiers fought to the last man. Nevertheless, it was found out that the POWs received from the "mottis", apart from rare exceptions, were 'entirely fed up and unsatisfied with the war, felt themselves deceived and were ready to tell all they knew openly and truthfully'(...).

As the Finnish troops broke apart [Soviet] formations advancing among small roads, additionally a great number of individual Soviet soldiers were left wandering aimlessly in the wilderness without supply or contact with their units. In this way, thousands of Soviet soldiers may have met their demise in a matter of days. Often, the Finns didn't even try to catch these wanderers, as such Soviet soldiers roaming alone in the woods did not present a threat...."

So, the combination of the conditions of the "motti" battles, the Finnish tactics, and the close control by Soviet officers (/political officers) through discipline and threat of punishment was what probably explains the small numbers of Soviet POWs to a major degree. Like I commented above, the fear of the "White Finns" was also a factor that discouraged surrendering. I could provide you documentary examples of the horror stories told about the deeds of the Finns among the Soviets at the time. The Red Army soldiers' expectation of being killed, tortured or at least badly mistreated in Finnish hands is not just a supposition.

Generally speaking, I believe that trying to escape the dangers of the front and shirking duty in battle was quite common among the Red Army soldiers during the war. But it exhibited in different ways than surrendering to the Finns. I'll translate a bit of a classified Soviet post-Winter War document below, taken from Tuntematon talvisota. Neuvostoliiton salaisen poliisin kansiot ("The Unknown Winter War. The Files of the Soviet Secret Police") by Timo Vihavainen, Andrei Saharov, et al. from 2009. The book is based on NKVD documents (held today by the FSB central archive) that were opened to a group of Russian and Finnish researchers in the 1990s.

From this one source alone, we can see that shirking duty at the front was exhibited in various ways among the soldiers of the Red Army, and this effort quite probably affected thousands of men during the war.

"A report by the special command of the Leningrad Military District to the special command of the main administration for state security, regarding the most important mistakes committed by different military units during the war fought against the White Finns (according to material from special branches)

5 April 1940

...

Pages 441-442:

...The record-keeping by various army units has been in an unsatisfactory state. The units' chiefs of staff have not directed necessary attention to recording the troop numbers. The dead, the wounded, and the missing have not been properly recorded. The missing book-keeping has allowed the weaker soldiers of the Red Army to desert and leave the front lines to the units in the rear. In individual cases, great numbers of soldiers have fled from the front to the rear.

According to information from the 469th Regiment of the 150th Division, 500 men were sent to the front line. In an inspection, only 145 men were found at the front. The battalions' and regiments' leadership did not know where the rest were.

The 674th Regiment's failure to execute its orders on 29 February was due to the fact that the unit sent to attack did not have the adequate numbers of men needed for battle. The different staffs' information about the number of men were contradictory. As according to the 674th Regiment's staff there were twenty riflemen and ten machine-gunners in the 4th Company, in reality there were five riflemen and six machine-gunners. According to the staff, the 6th Company had 31 men at the front line, but in reality there were ten, five riflemen and five machine-gunners.

The 274th Regiment of the 24th Division of the 7th Army received its reinforcements by noting only total numbers. Men arrived to the regiment with no lists, and they were sent to the battalions and companies without specific orders.

When the NKVD special unit in the 19th Corps made an inspection of the books of the 274th Regiment, the actions of the leading officers were deemed to exhibit clear signs of criminal negligence. On 30 December 1939, the regiment's books included 3126 men, and during the fighting the unit received 893 men as reinforcements. At the same time, the unit lost as dead 110 men, as wounded 749, sick and frozen/frostbitten 257 and left in winter quarters 91 men, in total 1207 men. On the day of inspection, there should have been 2812 men at the unit, but according to the information of the staff, there were only 2475 men. Nobody could say where the missing 337 men were.

The battalions and companies did not keep the numbers of their men. The transfers from battalions and companies were not verified with orders. The reports of the numbers of men by the lower units were not consistent with the information of the regimental staff.

The leadership of the 75th Division of the 8th Army purged its units in the rear and its supply units of the men belonging to units on the front. They rounded up nearly a thousand men, and nine officers, of which the division's leadership did not know about.

...

Page 452:

Due to the lack of adequate organization and the weakness of the political work among the men sent to the front, drinking, fighting, dangerous discussions and desertion happened en route. Detachments were often sent without non-commissioned officers.

In the reinforcement unit sent from the Belarusian special military district to the 113th Division there were three cases of self-harming to avoid participating in the fighting, and 58 men of the unit deserted.

From the unit sent to the 62nd Division from Sambor 256 men deserted on the way. The greatest number of deserters was in the 123th Regiment (133 men), 104th Regiment (40 men) and the 306th Regiment (62 men)

The reinforcement sent to the 100th Division from the Belarusian special military district was selected among those who had been punished for poor discipline and military crime, and of the timid soldiers. En route from the 60th Regiment 12 men deserted and half the men drank heavily.

When the 41st Separate Reinforcement Battalion formed in Vladimir-Volynsk in late December 1939 was en route to the 9th Army, in between 10 and 17 January 158 men deserted.

During the transport of the 131st Division to Kemi (9th Army) there were 19 cases of deliberate self-harming recorded.

...

Page 481:

During the fighting, there was cowardice, panic, desertion and self-harming (to avoid taking part in fighting) in the units of the armies.

In some cases the political officers did not only fail to fight with determination against persons eating away at the strength of the Red Army and facilitating disintegration, but also showed lack of character and fell into panic.

The political counsellor of the 9th Company of the 756th Regiment, Sektaryev, fled from to front to the rear twice.

During the attack on 14 February the political counsellor of the 8th Company of the 15th Regiment, Soldatov, abandoned the company to flee to the rear and returned only after the battle, looked at the wounded, and went back.

Instead of raising the spirit of the soldiers, Panin, the commissar of the 4th Machine Gun Battalion of the Karelian Fortress Area Machine Gun Regiment, spread defeatism himself: "If the Finns bring a few tanks here, there will be a lot of dead meat. Let's run before the tanks come".

Some political workers escaped themselves from the front. The leader of the 449th Reserve Artillery Regiment's [?] club, the younger political counsellor Ananyev fled on 25 February 1940 from his unit to Leningrad and returned only when the regimental commissar sent for him twice. Even while Ananyev was seriously warned by the officers and the party, his actions were not corrected but he showed that he wanted out of the army. Ananyev deserted his unit again on 1 March and travelled home to Ryazan where he was until 8 March.

Romanovski, the political counsellor of the 12th Battery of the 101th Howitzer Regiment deserted from his unit twice, leaving it without political leadership in frontline conditions.

Ananyev and Romanovski have been sentenced.
"
 
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