/ world today news/ Exactly 80 years ago, the General Staff of the Red Army issued a little-known but most important document on the course of military operations. This is a special directive regarding the work of the corps of representatives of the General Staff in the troops. Their service was initially looked down upon, but in the end they made a significant contribution to the victory in the Great Patriotic War.
One of the important reasons for the defeats of the Red Army at the beginning of the war was the general staff’s ignorance of the situation on the fronts. Reports arrived late and were not always accurate.
The former head of the Operations Directorate of the General Staff, General Sergei Shtemenko, recalls that Moscow often knew more about the enemy than about its own troops. Sending operatives to the front for the necessary information only leads to the loss of these valuable specialists, because “some die, others are out of action for a long time due to injury, many front commanders simply do not let them return, but are assigned to various posts in the troops.’
The first Soviet officers
The way out of the situation was the appearance in July 1941 of a new structure – the Group of Officers of the General Staff. As Shtemenko writes, “in the entire history of the Red Army, the word “officer” was used here for the first time. The group size must be more than a thousand people.
But due to a shortage of personnel, it is not easy to complete the group. By September alone, 70 students from the Frunze Military Academy were selected for this role. One of them, Nikolay Saltikov, later wrote that initially everyone was worried about the question: what will the new, previously unknown position require of them? It turns out that they have to report to the General Staff the situation at the front, check on the ground the execution of the orders of the high command, provide assistance to the headquarters and troops, and also study combat experience.
Thus, if the General Staff is the “brains of the army”, then the General Staff officers in the troops were to become its “eyes and ears”. At the same time, as Shtemenko noted, “the General Staff officer had the right to report only what he saw with his own eyes, and not from the words of other persons or from staff documents.”
At first this group was not taken seriously at the front. As noted by historian Sergei Aptreykin, the Chief of the General Staff Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov was reported to have “disdainful, bossy, and sometimes hooligan treatment” of General Staff officers by some chiefs in the headquarters of the fronts and armies. As Shtemenko writes, other commanders and superiors contemptuously called them “spies”.
To improve the status of its officers, Moscow had to review their rights. This was done at the end of 1943, when on December 28, a directive was issued, signed by the Chief of the General Staff, Alexander Vasilevski, which introduced “Rules and instructions for the work of the officer corps – representatives of the General Staff of Cherv. army. This document became a new milestone in the work of the officers of the General Staff.
Examples of boldness and courage
The directive informs the headquarters of the front that now the generals and officers of the General Staff who are with them and in the troops are its authorized representatives. The General Staff must report to Moscow on the progress of military operations and the condition of the troops, assist in the elimination of deficiencies, and study the experience of combat operations. These officers, as the document states, must be “an example of courage and bravery”, always striving to be where the situation is most complicated. In exceptional cases, they even have the right to interfere in the command and control of the troops.
The “Regulation” obliges the officers of the General Staff to “timely, accurately and truthfully” report to the General Staff not only about the situation at the front, but also about the behavior of the command and the troops in battle, their combat readiness, shortcomings in the work of the staff and the measures taken for their removal.
They reserve the right to personally familiarize themselves with the documents of the headquarters, as well as to visit other military facilities (airports, warehouses, communication centers and others) and to inspect combat sites. They may interrogate prisoners and study captured documents, use any means of communication, and all transport with the right to travel on all roads. Their main task is to monitor the execution of command orders.
The main method of control is the visit of troops for on-site inspection. After arriving at a particular unit, the officer presents himself to its commander and visits the troops, accompanied by a representative of the local headquarters. The “Regulation” requires the inspector to report not only on the identified deficiencies, but also on their causes, as well as on the measures taken to eliminate them. In the reports of the General Staff, it is not recommended to recount the documents of the inspected part, but to report what “is not visible from these documents.”
„Eyes and ears” of the General Staff
The “eyes and ears” of the General Staff witness both major operations and local battles. And since they must tell only the truth, their reports often contain criticism of those commanders who do not know how to fight properly.
Ignoring intelligence is particularly costly to troops, resulting in mission failure and heavy casualties. An example of this is the Taganrog operation in March 1942, which ended in failure due to “ignorance of the defense system of the front line, which led to an underestimation of the enemy.” The same thing happened during the Oryol-Volkhov operation in February 1943. Then, according to the reports of officers of the General Staff, the troops of the Bryansk Front “advanced to an unexplored, strongly fortified area of the enemy” and their infantry “fought bravely and fell to the bone in front of the barbed wire’. Alas, there are many such examples, but the General Staff fiercely fights against them, asking the high command “to increase the responsibility of superiors for their subordinates, for the preservation of the most valuable capital of our homeland – man.”
They also have to deal with cases of false information to the high command. So, in October 1943, the commander of the North Caucasian Front, General Ivan Petrov, reported to Stalin about the defeat of 10 enemy divisions on the Taman Peninsula. However, General Staff officers reported to Moscow that there were no signs of defeat during the fighting. On the contrary, the enemy “carefully prepares and executes in a planned manner” his withdrawal from Taman, sustaining relatively small losses. These conclusions were fully confirmed during the Kerch-Eltigen landing operation, which began immediately after the evacuation of the Germans from Taman. The enemy, retaining his strength, showed stubbornness, the advance of the Soviet units in Kerch ended in failure, for which General Petrov was eventually removed from his post and demoted.
Another function of the Front General Staff is to check everything that can affect the combat effectiveness of the troops. For example, in November 1943, they revealed the carelessness of the rear services on the Volkhov Front. Officers found that soldiers and divisional commanders of the 59th Army were not provided with sufficiently warm uniforms and were suffering from the cold. At the same time, the Tilovaks wear short fur coats, which are attributed to the soldiers at the front. The revealed outrage was reported to the commander of the front, Kiril Meretskov, who ordered the arrest of the culprits and the provision of warm clothes to the soldiers at the front within five days.
Another important aspect of the activities of the General Staff officers is their participation in major military operations. For example, during the preparatory period of the Battle of Kursk, they monitored the execution of the orders of the Supreme Command from the headquarters and provided assistance to the troops preparing for the battle. The fact that the high command attached special importance to their work is also evidenced by the number of officers assigned to it – 86 representatives of the General Staff then worked on five fronts.
Their contribution in the legendary operation “Bagration” (1944) is equally important. During its preparation, groups of the most experienced officers from the General Staff work on four fronts, directly subordinated to the representatives of the Staff – Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky.
According to the memoirs of Saltykov, who was then a senior officer of the General Staff of the 2nd Belorussian Front, “every day early in the morning all the officers went to the troops, carefully studied everything they were doing, and in the evening they returned to the front command post and drew up short written reports on the progress of preparations for the operation. They then gathered at Shtemenko, reporting to him “everything they saw” as well as their conclusions and proposals. As a result, by the end of each day the General Staff had detailed information on the progress of preparations for the offensive. With the beginning of “Bagration”, the work of its representatives became even more active. Such awareness of the command played an important role in the defeat of the German army group “Center” and the liberation of Belarus.
Another important point in the work of the officers of the General Staff is the collection and synthesis of information about the combat experience gained by the troops, instructive moments, new tactical techniques, etc. For example, immediately after the end of the Battle of Stalingrad and the Soviet troops resting after the battles, the officers of the General Staff continued to work to preserve and study the most valuable experience from the first success in encircling and destroying the enemy. Their reports cover all the most important issues of the past operation, starting from the street fighting in Stalingrad and ending with the evacuation of prisoners to the rear. In addition, they contain valuable conclusions and recommendations, many of which are included in various manuals, statutes and instructions created on the basis of war experience.
As the elite of the Red Army, officers – representatives of the General Staff perform the most important task of strengthening the relationship of the General Staff with the troops and the army headquarters. Their reports allow the command to better understand the situation and react to its changes. As participants in many military operations from 1941-1945, the General Staff improved its ability to highlight from them the most valuable for the development of the native military art. It will not be an exaggeration to say that their work made a great contribution to the victory in the Great Patriotic War.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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