От eugend
К Павел Войлов
Дата 24.07.2006 21:03:14
Рубрики Части и соединения;

оригинальный текст (на англ.)

Why eliminate the mixed system? True, the territorial system was created during a relatively peaceful time in Soviet history, and, as the thirties progressed, the prospect of conflict with either tlie Germans or the Japanese increased dramatically. Nonetheless, were these considerations sufficient justification for eliminating the admittedly inefficient territorial forces? After all, eliminating the system actually detracted from Soviet preparedness. By depriving the RKKA of a well-established, unionwide mobilization tool, the army would be less able to fight a total war. The territorial system had been the second echelon of defense. By transferring those units to the first line of defense, the RKKA deprived itself of an organized reserve, one that could send fairly cohesive units to supplement the regular army in a short time. If the object was to have a larger regular army, it does not follow that the territorial system needed to be abolished. At the time, untapped manpower abounded, and allocations for defense spending grew larger. By eliminating [32] the territorial forces, the Red Army gambled that it could successfully fight a war solely with regular forces.

Eliminating the territorial force and subsequently increasing the size of the regular forces caused problems elsewhere. For one thing, it took more able-bodied men out of the fields and factories and put them in uniform at a time when the Soviet Union needed more agricultural and industrial production than ever before. It also added to the shortage of officers and political personnel. Previously, the platoon commanders were territorials; now they had to come from the regular officer corps.The Red Army therefore now needed roughly one hundred additional officers for every territorial regiment turned regular.

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The Red Army committed a grave error when it chose its method of expansion. It created more divisions, all partially manned, rather than filling its existing partially manned divisions or creating new fully manned divisions. Since the end of the Civil War, the Red Army's regular rifle and cavalry divisions had purposely been only partially manned with from six thousand to eight thousand men—between 40 and 60 percent of the authorized strength. To absorb the extra manpower created by the conscription of two draft cohorts and the elimination of the territorial system, the army could have easily filled existing divisions first, thus requiring many fewer new divisions. Partial manning created the need for a great many field and general grade officers. Had the RKKA brought its existing units to full strength, it would have eliminated the need for so many new corps, division and regiment commanders, and staffs. Many more regiment commanders would have been experienced colonels, and experienced majors and captains could have been sprinkled throughout the regiments, thereby avoiding the situation common in the late thirties, when a battalion's highest-ranking officer was a senior lieutenant.

Had divisions been manned fully from the beginning, the Red Army would have been at full strength on the first day of the war, and any disruption in mobilization caused by hostilities would not have affected them. As it was, the RKKA planned to use partially manned divisions as part of its mobilization scheme. Upon mobilization, reservists would report to divisions, bringing them to full strength. This plan presupposed ample time for reservists to travel to their units, and it ignored all considerations of unit cohesion and the need for refresher training. With five fhousand to six thousand men joining a division overnight, existing cohesion in the companies was thrown into disarray; unit commanders knew the personalities and capabilities of only half of their men.

From beginning to end, the plan was flawed, as history had already proven: the tsarist army had used partial manning as its mobilization method, with disastrous results under conditions of rapid mobilization. ,What was especially damning about the Red Army's mobilization plan was that many of its senior officers and General Staff officers who wrote the mobilization plan had [36] experienced the failure in 1914 as tsarist soldiers. In his book, Strategiia (1927), Aleksandr Svechin, a former tsarist officer and instructor at the Frunze General Staff Academy in the twenties, prophetically warned against repeating the mistakes of August 1914:

We must avoid trying to set records for mobilization speed. If XIII Corps of Samsonov's army [in August 1914] proved unready for battle, this can partially be explained by the fact that it got its reserves just before boarding the rail cars and did not manage to become cohesive. The reinforcements remained nameless and unknown to their company commanders.82

Tukhachevskii, a participant in the First World War and a colleague of Svechin's at the academy, certainly should have known better, yet he had been an ardent proponent of ending the territorial system. A more timely example of the failure of this system, from which the Soviet high command should have learned, was the experience of the French army. The French mobilization plan in the interwar period was very similar to the RKKA's in that it used the active army as cadre for new units. Because there were so many new divisions in 1939 and 1940, they only had close to 15 percent regular officers and NCOs; the rest were reservists. In the years between the wars, the regular army had concentrated on the basic training of reserves rather than devoting time for more advanced training of its own forces. This created a system, much like that of the Red Army, of constant turnover of enlisted and officer personnel. According to Robert Doughty, the "active army for all practical purposes remained little more than a school for soldiers and a framework for mobilization."83 What the NKO and General Staff failed to realize was the possibility of having both a large, though not huge, fully manned regular army and a territorial force. In time of war or imminent danger, the reserves could have reported to the territorial unit nearest their homes and brought them up to full strength. Or they could have been used for new divisions, while the regular army, on perpetual war footing, held back the enemy.

In June 1941, the Red Army had 170 divisions of all types in the western military districts. To bring these units up to full strength, nearly 1.2 million men would have had to have been mobilized, not including the men needed to bring the corps and support units up to strength. In fact, in May 1941, around 800,000 reservists were mobilized, but they were not all sent to the border areas or to the divisions. The Commissariat of Defense assigned many to the air force, fortified areas, and other interior military districts.84 To bring the remaining regular divisions up to their authorized complement would nave required another 950,000 men. If the reserves were sent to the regular units, who was left to cadre newly created divisions manned by new recruits? [37] The answer is that there were fewer reservists to go around for the new divisions than would have been the case if territorial divisions had been maintained.

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Like the German, French, and American armies, the RKKA created new units by taking regiments from existing divisions and using them as the bases for new divisions. Each battalion of a regiment became the basis for a new regiment. In the years between 1937 and 1941, almost every rifle division gave up one regiment to create a new division. Some divisions even gave up two regiments. While the regiment that was forming the new division was hard at work conscripting and training the equivalent of two new regiments, the division that gave up the regiment busily replaced the unit it lost. The main drawback in this system was that while each division was building or rebuilding itself, major unit and advanced training suffered for an important part of the year. The demobilization of one cohort and the conscription of the next soon followed. Both the American and German armies had significant advantages, in terms of time and stability, over the Soviet and French armies. New units had many months or even years to train and develop cohesion before being committed to combat.87