THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Lennart Samuelson was kind enough to pass this Newsweek illustration along and let me post it. You’ll need to click the image to get the bad history in all its glory.

Clearly I’ve somehow missed the Western Allies’ triumphant liberation of Berlin in my previous studies of World War II.

So the US is certainly not immune to messing up the history of World War II. This particular instance, though, seems to me to represent the American problem of general ignorance about the war, and not the contemporary Russian problem of attempting to politicize knowledge of the war.

This story is not technically a matter of Russian military history, but Raul Castro was Cuban defense minister for almost fifty years, and so there indeed are Soviet ties. My chief purpose for posting this link to note that it’s Castro who serves as the voice of moderation and calm in the Colombian-Venezuelan spat.

Obscene shouting match at the Unity Summit? I’m reminded of the great line from Dr. Strangelove: “You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”

In the interests of fairness . . .

It’s not only the current Russian government that’s preoccupied with issues of historical falsification. In connection with another project, I serendipitously stumbled across a 1923 crusade by the state of Wisconsin to fight invidious falsifiers of the War of 1812. Today, of course, we’d be pleased to find someone who cares enough about the War of 1812 to bother to falsify it, but we’re dealing here with a simpler time.

Anyway, let me quote the statute, which I get courtesy of the American HIstorical Review 28.4 (July 1923), p. 699–JSTOR has it if your institution has access:

No history or other text-book shall be adopted for use or be used in any district school, city school, vocational school, or high school which falsifies the facts regarding the war of independence, or the war of 1812, or which defames our nation’s founders or misrepresents the ideals and causes for which they struggled and sacrificed, or which contains propaganda favorable to any foreign government.

No penalties for textbook authors, but districts which continue to use textbooks found to be guilty of falsifying are subject to revocation of state aid.

Now as best as I can find through on canvassing of Wisconsin’s online statute book, this law has long since become a dead letter. Perhaps some bright MA student in the UW system can do a thesis on the circumstances that produced the law–I’d speculate that it’s post-World War I isolationism and resentment of a war perceived to have been fought in the interests of the British–hence the focus on the revolutionary war and 1812, and not on anything else.

But the absurdity of this law, I think, highlights the absurdity of efforts to fight historical falsification more generally. For one, it is an effort by the state of Wisconsin to dictate the coverage of events which took place when Wisconsin was not a state and to which Wisconsin was not party–are you listening, Russian Federation President Dmitrii Medvedev? For two, this is clearly action not in service of an abstract quest for the truth, but in service of some particular political ax-to-grind now lost to us in the sands of time. After all, was there REALLY a problem of high school textbooks in Wisconsin carrying foreign propaganda, or are we dealing with interpretations at odds with the views of some crusading state legislator?

Inspired by GlavKom Scott Palmer’s list of Ten Songs about Airplanes , I have decided to catch up and overtake him with Eleven Songs [Loosely] about Russian History. Limiting myself to English language and rock / pop, I apologize in advance if the link seems somewhat tangential. Not too much to work with.

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I’ve posted here some diagrams from the book Inzhenernoe delo [Engineering], full title of which is Vremennoe nastavlenie po inzhenerno-tekhnicheskomu delu dlia komandnogo sostava vsekh rodov voisk [Provisional Manual for Engineering and Technical Matters for Commanders of All Troop Types], put together by the Red Army Staff and published by the Red Army in 1926.  As far as I can tell, it isn’t even listed in WorldCat.

The book covers roads, bridges, demolition, and a variety of other subjects, but what I’ve posted here is fortifications.  The Red Army was not focusing on continuous trenches, though that had been the experience of the imperial army for long stretches of the First World War.  Instead, the Red Army, judging by this manual, emphasizes separate positions within an overall defensive zone.  This first illustration is of a variety of squad / section [otdelenie] firing positions, seen from above.  Note the communication trench exiting out the back of the position, and the bends in the position to prevent fire due to enemy penetration of one part of the position from sweeping the entire thing.

This isn’t so interesting by itself, but it gives a little context to this, which is a company defensive position as part of a continuous front.  The enemy is at the top, and the company defends a frontage of 1000 meters with a depth of 800 meters.  You see two platoons up, one back (I haven’t figured out how to do cyrillic in this post–the word that starts with the letters B3B is vzvod, or platoon).  Each platoon has rifle squads (co), a rifle / machine-gun squad (cno), and machine gun squad (no).

Compare that to this company defensive strongpoint without a continuous front–this comes from the section on maneuver warfare: The strongpoint takes the form of a salient rather than a belt, and is strikingly similar to an 18th-century bastioned fort, and for similar reasons.  While you have the same “two up, one back” arrangement of platoons, the barbed wire is quite different.  It forms straight lines and nice angles, all the better for defense by automatic fire. Note how the machine-gun platoons (nB), the platoon from a machine-gun company (Bnr), and the medium machine-gun squads (ocn) are placed to sweep the lines of barbed wire.  To the right, the same is true of the rifle squads (co).  The defense includes bunkers (y) for protection against artillery bombardment.  Note that there’s no provision for anti-tank defense.  This is 1926, after all, when the Red Army was preparing to fight Poland and Romania and tanks were thin on the ground.  Indeed, the section on defenses against armor in the entire book of 367 pages is only eight sentences long.