Leningrad

On 16 July the High Command ordered the creation of four more opolcheniye divisions, eventually comprising another 41,446 volunteers. Recruitment criteria were loosened to include ‘white-ticketers’, spectacle-wearers and the sons of ‘enemies of the people’, and age limits extended from eighteen down to seventeen, and from fifty up to fifty-five. Their grand new title of ‘Guards Divisions’ failed to disguise the fact that they were even worse equipped than their predecessors. The 3rd Rifle Regiment of the First Guards Division, for example, had 791 rifles, ten sniper’s rifles and five revolvers for 2,667 men.30 Training was again abysmal or non-existent (‘We’re teaching them to fight with stones’, lamented an instructor). Thanks to the profligacy of the past three weeks, the new divisions were also acutely short of experienced officers — of the First Guards Division’s 781 officers only eighty-two were ‘cadres’ — roughly speaking, professionals. To officer the Second Guards Division, commissars had to scout the unoccupied Soviet Union, bringing men from as far away as the Urals.31

The new divisions were thrown into the same bloodbath as their predecessors. On arrival at the front on 11 August, the First Guards Division’s orders were changed three times, with the result that some regiments had to march seventy kilometres in twenty-four hours. They were then thrown straight into action, despite lacking cartridges, shells and grenades. More ammunition could not be brought up from the rear, a Political Department boss reported to Zhdanov after a tour of the front, because the division had no fuel tanker, and had had to leave behind 390 horses for lack of harnesses and carts. Nor could the wounded be evacuated from the battlefield, since the medical unit had only four trucks. The ‘high-ups’ who descended on divisional headquarters were more hindrance than help:

Every one of them feels that it’s his duty to give an order or advice. A characteristic example: the divisional commander only found out that the 2nd Rifle Regiment had been ordered to attack on the evening of 12 August, when the order had already been carried out, under the command of a major general from group headquarters. In conversation with me, Major General Shcherbakov and brigade commissar Kurochkin both declared ‘Everybody gives orders but nobody actually helps.’

A long list of requested supplies included water carts, an ambulance and a mobile field hospital, as well as twenty more mid-ranking officers and politruki to round up and rally retreating volunteers.32

The Second Guards Division was sent into the lines at Gatchina on 12 August, and cut to pieces two weeks later. During the battle, regimental commissar Nabatov reported, it became apparent that

A. Some of the soldiers don’t know how to handle rifles or grenades. This contributed to their dispersal during fighting.

B. A number of soldiers were badly camouflaged, having failed to carry out orders to dig themselves in. As a result we suffered large losses from artillery fire and mortars.

C. During counter-attacks soldiers tried to keep close to one another instead of spreading out in proper formation. This meant more losses.

D. Soldiers do not recognise their neighbours to the left and right. Mistaking their own men for the enemy, they think they have been encircled.

E. A number of unit commanders do not know their own soldiers by name.

F. Some soldiers do not know how to use their first aid kits. As a result some, having suffered relatively minor wounds, bleed to death before they can be delivered to a medical point.

In between the bouts of carnage, volunteers sat out summer thunderstorms in half-built trenches, wet and hungry (‘We sploshed about’, as Frenklakh put it, ‘like hippos in the zoo’). Units pleaded for tarpaulins, tents, field kitchens, underwear, razors, mess tins, water bottles, shovels, entrenching tools, helmets, and most of all for vehicles, communications equipment, weapons (the Third Guards had only three rifles for every four volunteers) and men who knew how to use them. ‘The majority of volunteers’, reported a politruk of a battalion of the Fourth Guards Division, sent to join the eviscerated Second Division,

are untrained, or insufficiently trained, to shoot, so that in some cases they are unable to load their own rifles and their officers have to do it for them. . Out of 205 listed as machine-gunners only 100 turned out actually to be acquainted with machine guns, the rest were just riflemen. A list of ‘sappers’ included more riflemen and ordinary labourers, but not a single explosives expert. . Nor do they have any tools for repairing weapons, so that simple breakage of a machine gun’s firing pin puts the gun out of commission.33