The State of Other Armies in the Late Twilight War

[sglancy12]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

I agree wholeheartedly about the desertion issue as described by sglancy. I'd even go so far as to extend the arguement to cover Soviet troops in Poland - Home is a VERY long walk away through terrain absolutely crawling with marauders and rear eschelon units just waiting to pounce upon deserters.

As much as I wanted to get into these issued I thought perhaps they warranted their own thread. I think Raellus did an excellent job covering the state of the US Armed Forces overseas (particularly in Europe), and I wasn't sure I wanted to muddle his thread with discussions about other national armed forces.

But first of all I have to point out what an ungrateful bastard I am for turning around and disagreeing (at least partially) with Legbreaker after he so graciously agreed with me.

I believe that since Soviet troops can walk home (no matter how far it may be) they are are more likely to desert than US troops who can't get home without crossing huge expanses of ocean.

While it is a long way from Lublin to Moscow, I don't think it's the distance that dissuades them from deserting. I think it's all those KGB and MVD troops in the rear who have nothing better to do than police up Red Army deserters and shoot them. The US Army in WWII executed one soldier for desertion... the Red Army may have executed as many as 158,000 troops for desertion... of course Smokin' Joe Stalin considered surrendering the same as desertion and any liberated prisoners were sent to penal battalion or Siberian Gulags. No doubt that brutal reputation was well deployed during the Twilight War to discourage desertion.

What happens instead is that individual Soviet soldiers do not commonly desert. Instead whole units mutiny. They want to get home, but they know they need the firepower to brush aside those KGB border guards and MVD internal defense troops. Sometimes the mutiny engenders a complete breakdown of order and the unit breaks up. But not every time. In the TW2K time lines the Soviets have a real problem with low category divisions raised in a particular geographic area, mutinying and trying to return to the region from where they were raised. If everyone is from the Kiev area, then the mutinous troops can move as a group to get everyone back to their home towns and families.

Certainly though when a unit mutinies, not everyone is keen on the idea of the long march back to Smolensk (or wherever they are from). Some may still be loyal communists. Others may simply not have approved of the violence of the mutiny if certain officers were murdered in the process. Some may not want to risk the KGB reprisals or perhaps they prefer the relative safety of a Red Army unit in cantonment. What happens to those members of the unit who didn't participate in the mutiny but find themselves without a legal command structure to answer to? Well, I guess they desert from the mutinous unit and try to find there way to friendly forces... of course, with the Red Army, that might be easier said than done.

With political officers looking over their shoulders, many Red Army commanders might be hard pressed not to brutalize or execute deserters who voluntarily return to Red Army units. While the Red Army commander is probably happy for any manpower he can police up, there's a good chance that the Kremlin issued some wasteful and brutal orders concerning the disposal of "traitors" at the front. If he doesn't execute all "traitors" he might be declared one himself. On the other hand, if his Zampolit isn't a total fanatic, and is capable of understanding that the war is thinning the Red Army fast enough without accelerating the destructing with endless executions, maybe individual commanders would be able to reabsorb "stragglers" as they saw fit.

However, considering the brutal hazing in the Red Army at the best of times, I'm imagining a nasty reception for any troops rejoining the Red Army. At the bare minimum they might be forced to run the gauntlet: where the until lines up and the soldier petitioning to return to duty is subjected to a beating where everyone hits him once. Hopefully they'll only beat him with the flats of their leather belts and not rifle butts or boot heels.

Worse case scenario, returning deserters could be placed in a penal squad. When the squad's numbers get above ten, the unit is decimated. That is, one returning deserter is selected and shot as an example to everyone else about deserting. In order to bind the other returned deserters to the Red Army unit, they might very well have to select the soldier to be made an example of and even be forced to carry out the execution.

Hey, the Red Army has a reputation for brutality that is not undeserved.

Does anybody else have any thoughts on this? Especially for ways that Soviet commanders at the front could balance their operational needs with the unrealistic orders coming from the Kremlin.

A. Scott Glancy, President TCCorp, dba Pagan Publishing