Soviet Rifleman 1941-45

Introduction

When the German armies poured across eastern Poland and into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on June 22, 1941, it found a massive army of 9 million troops organized within 303 divisions. Although well armed with artillery and tanks, this formidable army soon melted away under the Teutonic onslaught. A number of units fought bravely, but most folded and retreated deep within the Soviet Union. In the first two months of the war some 20,000 armored vehicles were lost, a total six times greater than the number of tanks possessed by the Germans. The air forces were largely destroyed on the ground, and some 4 million men were lost in combat or as prisoners of war (POWs) - 80 percent of the total strength of the USSR's armed forces. Yet the Soviet military held, and gradually turned the tide against the invaders to drive them back to Berloga - the “beast's lair” - Berlin.

The Raboche-Krest'yanskaya-Krasnaya Armiya (Red Army of Workers and Peasants; RKKA), while massive and well equipped, was a lumbering great bear of an army in the summer of 1941. It had performed well in a small-scale Siberian border clash with Japan in 1939, but its invasion of eastern Poland in the same year had been less than extraordinary. The western Ukraine and the Balkan States were seized in 1939-40, and although it eventfully won the 1939-40 Winter War with Finland, its humiliating initial defeats against a poorly equipped and much smaller army reinforced Hitler's perception that the cumbersome, overstuffed Red Army was ill prepared to face the Blitzkrieg offensive. To complicate matters further, from May 1937 to May 1938 Stalin had unleashed a far-reaching purge of officers at all levels of command. In many instances the most able commanders were executed en masse and the cowed remnants were often weak and incapable of dealing with the German forces about to slam into them.

As losses mounted, armies dissolved, and the Germans pushed deeper into Mother Russia, official attitudes began to change. The draconian methods used to keep units at the front lines, the relentless and often unfair punishment of those who faltered, and the abuse inflicted on troops and civilians alike by the Communist Party apparatus were endured and the Red Army rebounded. With the aid of wide-ranging propaganda and the realization that the Germans would stop at nothing short of destroying the Motherland, the workers and peasants began to fight back, with a vengeance.