/View.info/ On November 28, 1941, an order was issued by the Headquarters of the Supreme Command “On the underestimation of the engineering service and the improper use of engineering troops and means.” This document, as well as a number of others, has an impact on the modern Russian military, even during the current special operation. Why did Stalin criticize the sappers and how were they corrected?
Sappers in the army are special people responsible for military engineering tasks that facilitate the actions of their troops and complicate them for the enemy. They are involved in the establishment of roads, the creation of their own and the neutralization of enemy defense structures, and are engaged in mining and demining. But in the pre-war Red Army there were problems with the training of sappers.
Mistakes from before the war
On the eve of the war, the Soviet engineering troops, even in peacetime, lacked officers and non-commissioned officers and basic types of weapons. During the exercises, sapper units participated only in the preparatory period for equipping command posts and roads. They rarely take part in the maneuvers themselves. During the rest of the time, engineering units are busy building fortified areas near the border. The level of training and combat effectiveness of sappers is low. The engineering training of the command staff of the Red Army was considered insufficient.
All this is directly related to the defeats of the Red Army in the initial period of the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet units failed to create a strong defense against the advancing enemy. Thus, the command of the Northwestern Front notes that “the poorly organized defense leads to the fact that the enemy with small forces and without significant losses takes back everything that the troops captured the day before.”
A number of Soviet commanders, not understanding the importance of sapper units, used them as ordinary infantry. As a result, the tasks of mining the area and destroying bridges were not solved and defensive lines were not created.
Sappers got independence
On November 28, 1941, the Headquarters of the Supreme Command issued order No. 0450 “On the underestimation of the engineering service and the improper use of engineering troops and means”, signed by Stalin and Marshal Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army.
The order notes the unsatisfactory organization of the engineering service. In many regiments and divisions the personnel do not know how to “properly dig a trench or do the work of building barriers.” Therefore, during the defense, the troops do not create engineer-equipped positions. As a result, the enemy overcomes such lines “literally in a few hours and without much loss.” As Stalin and Shaposhnikov wrote, even “such simple means as blockades and barriers, which have been used in the Russian army for several centuries, are already in the past.”
As noted in the order, with the beginning of the war, the army received many different mine-explosive weapons, the correct use of which could affect the success of defensive battles. But mines and other obstacles are thought of at the last moment.
Therefore, the defense is poorly conducted. Minefield placement was not only done with gross errors, but was poorly marked and guarded. Mining schemes have not been supplied to unit commands. Thus, minefields even pose a greater threat to one’s own troops than to the enemy, as Soviet tanks and infantry sometimes rush into them.
Stalin and Shaposhnikov also pointed to the lack of interaction between commanders of equipment and combined arms. The heads of the engineering departments of the fronts and armies work without initiative. They do not participate in the development of operational plans, since the headquarters of the front does not include them in such work and does not assign them specific tasks. As a result, there is no interaction between sappers and other branches of the army, and this in turn leads to a misunderstanding of the importance of engineer troops by commanders. Therefore, the latter, finding no other use for them, often used them for other purposes.
The headquarters of the Supreme Command decided to raise the status of sappers and change the system of interaction with them. With this order, the chiefs of engineering troops of the fronts and armies became their deputy commanders, receiving the right to have personal small staffs. Military councils at all levels are required to include them in the development of operational plans for the intended use of sappers. Headquarters prohibits the use of sappers as infantry or to fill other branches of the military. Now the front-line and army sapper units must be kept “in a fist”, quickly focusing them on the most important areas of combat operations.
And for greater independence of the sappers in the Red Army, the post of chief of engineering troops was introduced, who became General Leontius Kotlyar. He is entrusted with both the leadership of the engineer troops and the engineering support of all operations at the front. In addition, the newly formed sapper armies, military engineering and defense works, departments of non-profit organizations, as well as engineering academies and schools became subordinate to him.
The headquarters ordered Kotlyar to create within 20 days 90 sapper battalions as a reserve for the Red Army High Command. These units must be equipped with the necessary equipment, freed from all side work, focusing their attention only on combat training.
It was also decided to create an engineering reconnaissance that should penetrate enemy lines and mine sites. For this purpose, groups of scouts and divers must be trained in the sapper battalions.
The experience of the Great Patriotic War is still alive today
Order No. 0450 became an important document that gave sappers more importance in the eyes of the army. But in the future, the headquarters continued to monitor the activities of the engineer troops, as can be seen from his later orders.
One of them is the order “On the use and overcoming of minefields” of July 1943. In it, the military leadership notes that the troops still have great shortcomings both in the placement of minefields and in the disposal of enemy mines. It turns out that the divisional army command, when organizing the defense, almost did not deal with the question of minefields, leaving it to its engineering superiors. The sappers, without receiving specific instructions for mining, laid mines without coordinating their actions with other troops. Because of this, minefields are created only in front of the front line, but not in the depth of the defense. As a result, the enemy, having broken through the front line of the Soviet defense, as the headquarters noted, “gets the opportunity to move forward freely and without delay.”
Cases were revealed when mining was carried out in a pattern, allowing the Germans to easily identify Soviet minefields. And in the immediate Soviet rear, unmined bridges, road junctions and a lack of anti-tank zones await them. All this is to the advantage of the enemy tankers, who have freedom of action during the breakthrough. During the advance of the Soviet troops, the actions of the sappers were not concealed and were not coordinated with other units, which created difficulties in breaking through the enemy’s defenses.
A number of orders were issued to improve the actions of the sappers not only in defense, but also in the offensive. Among them is the creation of barrier groups when breaking through enemy defenses, covered with firearms, as well as sapper groups with mines, accompanying tanks and infantry, to quickly mine positions when moving to the defense.
An equally important document in the history of sapper units is Order No. 0791 of October 10, 1942. This order regulates the actions of sappers during mining, identifies the persons responsible for this, and explains the rules for maintaining special documentation, including diagrams of minefields.
The correction of errors in the actions of the engineering troops, which began on November 28, 1941, bore fruit. During the war, sappers gradually got rid of these disadvantages. As a result, their level of professionalism increased, as seen in the Berlin operation. Before the attack on the German capital, the sappers of the 1st Belorussian Front removed a total of about 30 thousand mines: 20 thousand German mines, as well as 10 thousand of their own, placed to protect the troops during their accumulation on the bridgeheads.
Orders from those times continue to influence the active Russian army. An example of this is the failure of the counter-offensive conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces this year due to difficulties in penetrating the Russian defenses, which include extensive minefields mined in unconventional ways. This fact shows that the Engineering Forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have not forgotten the experience of the Great Patriotic War.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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