Is there any truth to Soviet officers having Soviet soldiers shot if they tried to retreat? Is it true that the Soviets did not have enough guns for all soldiers, so they would send out two or three soldiers with only one having a gun and when he was wounded one of the other soldiers would pick up his gun to fight?
Try a Google search for:
Soviet penal battalions WWII
Yes, both those things are true. The Soviet military in the early part of the war suffered massive organizational shock from the speed and success of the German attack. It wasn’t uncommon for soldiers and officers to be shot as cowards for retreating, often by senior commanders who were themselves afraid of being shot if they retreated. It really did happen that soldiers were deployed to the front without weapons, at least in some early battles. There are some good accounts of this sort of thing in the local bookstore. A nice little primer is “Russia’s War” by Richard Overy.
Later in the war this sort of thing stopped happening, as the Soviet army recovered and became a better equipped and organized force. The Soviets were better and better led as the war progressed, especially after Stalingrad and Kursk, and the supply of weapons and such was soon rectified.
The same thing was used by both sides during the War for Southern Independence…
I remember, sorry no cite, reading that during WWII the Soviets shot something like 1,000 of their own generals for cowardice, various failures to carry out plans, complaning, etc.
I’ll try some seaching on google to see if I can come up with something.
The Fall of Berlin by Anthony Read and David Fisher is a good book to read about Soviet tactics.
Yes. Both Soviet officers and NKVD troops were known to shoot retreaters. This also occurred at times in the German army, and is not unknown in other western armies either. I read somewhere of a British officer shooting dead a panicky subaltern during the great German offensive of 1918 because he was having an unsettling effect on the rest of the lads. Many tales abound from many armies of troops turning guns upon their own sides. A German army officer in the early days of the Normandy campaign forced at gunpoint a Luftwaffe flak platoon to engage allied armour with their 88s. The Luftwaffe commander had been preparing to retreat claiming that his guns were for fighting aircraft not tanks.
No. This is a myth arising from the trashy film “Enemy at the Gates” which uses it because it makes for a dramatic story. It has a basis in historical truth in so far as it was true in the Russian Imperial army in WW1 especially in the early years but by WW2 after the massive industrial expansion of the 1930s, the Soviet Union was an industrial giant capable of producing enormous quantities of armaments. There was no shortage of small arms in the red army.