On occasion, U-boats also carried German military offi cers and Japanese diplomats.. BLOCKING DETACHMENTS “zagraditelnyi otriad.” Zagradotryady were Red Army troops positioned in the imm
Trang 1Blocking Detachments
170
warfare capabilities meant that U-boat blockade runners proved decreasingly
effec-tive and were frequently sunk On occasion, U-boats also carried German military
offi cers and Japanese diplomats One transported Subhas Chandra Bose from
Ger-many to the Pacifi c In the case of isolated Japanese garrisons in the Pacifi c, blockade running by submarine was vital to even minimal resupply of starving troops
BLOCKING DETACHMENTS “zagraditelnyi otriad.” Zagradotryady were Red Army troops positioned in the immediate rear of frontline combat troops
to block mass desertion and to shoot stragglers, or anyone else who could not explain why he was there and not at the front killing Germans Sharpshooters and machine gun crews picked off would-be mass deserters, while fi ring squads dealt with individual stragglers Discipline was enforced by the harshest means to prevent mass desertion, panic, and surrender that threatened to lead to strategic defeat The role of Zagradotryady was thus expanded during the great crisis of mass surrenders in the opening months of the German invasion Too many had surrendered overly easily in 1941; more would do so in the fi rst half of 1942 As historian Evan Mawdsley aptly put it, Soviet soldiers at that time were “demoral-ized troops in a demoral“demoral-ized society.” On September 12, 1941, Joseph Stalin and the Stavka therefore issued a harsh directive establishing “blocking detachments.”
Their role was only strengthened by his July 28, 1942, Order #227
The men of blocking detachments were drawn directly from Red Army units
They were not NKVD troops, but operated under NKVD control and in the shadow
of their own potential execution by Red Army offi cers or by the NKVD Behind dragooned detachments of Zagradotryady were still harder NKVD troops and fi r-ing squads, ready to shoot even senior offi cers or any Zagradotryady who failed
to do their duty as defi ned by the Stavka and by Stalin The Stavka issued orders
to reduce the number of executions from October 1941, cautioning that offi cers
should instead try to persuade men to stand and fi ght Recruitment of krasno-armeets from regular units into blocking detachments was ended one year later
Thereafter, NKVD troops alone fi lled the enforcement role of Order #227, with their usual utterly ruthless disregard for individual pleadings or special cases Such extraordinary measures were continued even after the open wound of mass sur-renders by Red Army soldiers was stanched That was because suspicion remained among the NKVD, and in Stalin’s mind, that too many Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles, and Balts were actively hostile to the Soviet system—which many of them were—and hence could not be trusted to fi ght Blocking detachments were fi nally disbanded in October 1944, as fi nal victory came into view
BLOMBERG, WERNER VON (1878–1946) German fi eld marshal A veteran
of the Great War, Blomberg served on the secret Reichswehr General Staff in the
1920s He was minister of defense, then of war, from 1933 to 1938 He supported the ascent to power of Adolf Hitler, seeing the Nazis as a bulwark against social chaos and as the wrecker of the Weimar Republic, which he and other generals so despised In turn, Hitler saw Blomberg as a useful link to the old Prussian offi cer