May 26 2010
Svechin on the Encirclements of 1941
I’ve been reading quite of bit of military theorist Alexander Svechin over the last couple of weeks, and came across a nice observation of his on the nature of future war. It fits well with a phenomenon I’ve always found fascinating, which is the disintegration of encircled Soviet forces in the fall of 1941. When Soviet troops were encircled en masse by the Germans, as at Vyazma, say, or Kiev, some managed to keep their cohesion and break out through the stretched-thin German encircling forces. Most, however, marched off meekly into German prisoner-of-war camps–some 600,000 at Kiev alone. It’s difficult to know for certain, but the experience that drove Andrei Vlasov into collaborating with the Nazis may well have been the disintegration of his 2nd Shock Army when it was trapped behind German lines outside Leningrad and eventually disintegrated.
The contrast is quite striking with the German experience at Moscow in the winter of 1941-1942, where cut-off German formations maintained their cohesion and held on until they broke out or were relieved. It’s also a contrast with the Soviet experience of spring and summer 1942, when the Germans were advancing as quickly through Ukraine and southern Russia as they had through Belorussia and western Russia in fall 1941, but not were getting nearly the same haul of prisoners. Soviet troops were much more likely to retreat in good order out of German encirclement.
The reasons for the difference don’t seem especially mysterious to me–the Red Army in fall 1941 was badly-commanded, inexperienced, and not particularly thrilled with Stalin. By spring-summer 1942, the Red Army’s high command was getting better and the genocidal nature of the German war effort was increasingly clear. Svechin’s observation is quite striking, and a damning indictment of what Stalin’s regime had done to the Red Army:
“The typical battle of the future is fighting in encirclement, when the enemy will be on all sides and above . . and any sort of precise information on the location of one’s own troops and the enemy will be lost. The greatest achievements of military technology have put the center of gravity back on the human material—on the soldier’s consciousness and dedication to the banner under which he fights.” from Front nauka i tekhniki # 7, 1934, republished in Postizhenie voennogo iskusstvo (Moscow, 1999), p. 423.
there are plenty of examples of fighting encircled soviet troops in 1941… (if i remember correctly) monthly german losses in july 1941 were highest in 1941 and comparable monthly losses germans had only mid-end of 1942… though i do not argue that germans were better organized and trained… the key reasons why german had so many examples of “maintaining their cohesion” was their ability to provide reliable air supply to their encircled troops… soviet air force never could pull it off due to lack of a large number of required transport aircrafts…
on the other hand, there are also plenty of examples of german troops loosing “their cohesion” encircled in 1944 (Vitebsk, minsk, iasi, etc ) and of course 1945…
By 1942, the infantry would have understood better what awaited them if they surrenderred. The prospects for a Soviet POW were quite grim: either slave labour and starvation at the hands of the Nazis or, if by a miracle he escaped that fate, he would fall into the hands of NKVD, who dealt with so-called “cowards” with summary execution (in a few cases) or service in so-called “punishment” battalions (eg, reconnaisance through mine fields, frontal attacks on machine guns, etc). So, by 1942, the average Soviet infantryman knew that, one way or another, surrender was just a slow form of suicide and the only real alternative was to fight on as best he could in the hope that he might see his home and family again some day.
Of course, even if he lived through the war, he ended up merely as a helot for Stalin’s thugs. This is victory?