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Praetorium Honoris

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Cut Off

(Source)
One hundred and twenty seven men still in the ranks, at least that's what the sergeants were reporting. Majór Ivan Filippovich Telitsyn shook his head as he pondered the implications of that number. He had lost over eighty percent of his battalion. The high command would not be pleased with this, Telitsyn thought, not at all.

"Why so glum Comrade Major? Look on the bright side, none of the politruks¹ have been accounted for." Krasnoarmeyets Vitaliy Afanasievich Kolobkov grinned as he said this.

"I am still stunned that the Party hasn't had you shot for your anti-Soviet attitude, Vitaliy Afanasievich." Telitsyn smiled. He was rather fond of his orderly. Not a day went by that he didn't remember the Winter War in Finland. No doubt had it not been for Kolobkov, Telitsyn's corpse would be moldering in some Finnish bog.

"Without me, who would the politruk point to as a 'bad example,' Comrade Major?"

"Has Stárshiy Serzhánt² Kasharin been accounted for yet?" Stárshiy Serzhánt Arseniy Antonovich Kasharin was the battalion's senior non-commissioned officer. A professional soldier who had been conscripted into the Czar's army back in 1916, he had chosen wisely during the Revolution and had served with the Reds during the Civil War. Though long in the tooth at 41 years of age, men like him kept the Red Army going. The other non-commissioned officers in the battalion were jumped up conscripts, promoted for simply having served longest.

"No Sir, one of the junior lieutenants, his name escapes me, said he was spotted with the rear guard as we fell back into the forest. No one has seen him since." Kolobkov shook his head as he looked to the west. Though Kasharin was a crusty old bastard, the men liked him. He wasn't sure how things would go without the old sergeant around.


Ernst Paulus was sweating profusely, the 12 kilogram MG 34 felt heavier than it usually did after a long march. For today was the first time Paulus' team had taken a casualty.

They had been advancing down a dirt road, Paulus had heard that Russia had paved roads, but he'd yet to see one. Word was that the Soviets were falling back willy-nilly, trying to escape being surrounded by the German tanks advancing far more rapidly than the German infantry could keep up. Their job would be to mop up pockets of resistance.

So far that had consisted of detailing one or two men to herd hundreds, if not thousands, of Russians who no longer wished to fight for Stalin to the rear. As Paulus' team was the heart of the German squad, they weren't detailed to guard prisoners. But they had lost two riflemen from the squad detailed to escort prisoners, which left them understrength.

Paulus' squad leader had pointed that out to their platoon leader when he had directed that the squad take the point. To no avail, the young Leutnant was convinced that the Soviets were collapsing, just as Hitler had promised.³ He ordered the squad to take point, reluctantly their squad leader took them forward of the main column.

The squad leader and three of the squad's remaining riflemen were a good fifty meters ahead of Paulus and his team. The squad leader had told him, "Stay back here Ernst, be ready to come forward at the run if I need you."

The Russians who ambushed them knew their business, aiming for the machine gun team. Fortunately for Paulus and Kołodziej, they were not very good shots. But they were good enough to hit Schütze Kazimir Dutka, multiple times. The big Pole was dead before he hit the ground.

Paulus and Kołodziej had the gun in action in record time, laying down suppressing fire as their squad leader took the riflemen around behind the Russians. Within minutes the squad leader brought two Russians out of the woods lining the dirt track.

"Two men? That's all, two men killed Kazimir?" Paulus was outraged and was reaching for his sidearm.

"Calm down Ernst, there were four other live ones, we killed them when they wouldn't quit. There were also three bodies which appeared to have been killed by MG fire. These two decided not to die for the Motherland." The young Unteroffizier thought for a moment, then he looked at Paulus as if he'd come to a decision.

"What should we do with these two prisoners?" Paulus asked.

The Unteroffizier began to point his MP 40 at the two Russians, then stopped. "Send them back with Brinkmann, that's what we'll do. Let the Leutnant decide what to do with them."

The rifleman named Brinkmann gestured with his K98k, the two Russians understood and began to move. Both looked resigned to whatever fate awaited them.


"Sir, they've found Stárshiy Serzhánt Kasharin!" a man shouted as he approached the small command group.

"Where soldier, where is he?" Telitsyn asked, grabbing the man by the front of his gymnastyorka.

"Down by the road, Comrade Major, he's dead."

Telitsyn shook his head then turned to his orderly, "Vitaliy Afanasievich, have the surviving officers report here. Have them set up defenses before doing so, we'll spend the night here. It sounds as if the Germans are everywhere but our little slice of the Rodina."

Telitsyn's battalion, or what was left of it, was cut off in the forests between two German armored pincers. He and his men were not alone, the frontier defenses were collapsing all along the line. One scout had reported seeing a huge mass of Soviet soldiers, all disarmed and moving to the west, guarded by as little as one or two German soldiers.

Telitsyn was no longer worried about being shot by the Party, the Germans would probably finish him first.

Things looked very bad indeed for the Red Army.




¹ A politruk was a Soviet-era political officer or commissar.
² Equivalent to a Sergeant Major in the U.S. Army
³ "Wir müssen nur die Tür eintreten, und das ganze verrottete Gebäude wird zusammenbrechen." Hitler to his generals during planning for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. (We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.)

20 comments:

  1. Good stuff as ever, Sarge! The character ranks are thinning; Dutka was one of those "good guys" to be found in any army, and our Winter War survivors are likely either gonna go down fighting or into the bag. Hopefully Kolobkov is around for a while; I was a bit of a smart-ass as a non-rate myself so I'm identifying a bit.
    Boat Guy

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    1. Kolobkov started the war as a simple grunt. But Major Telitsyn likes the fellow so he pulled him out of the ranks to be his orderly. I like Kolobkov myself, I think we'll keep him around.

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    2. It's good when "you" like a character in your story!

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    3. Means he has a better than even chance of surviving!

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  2. Crusty Old TV Tech here. Dealing with masses of Soviet POW's probably degraded the German Heer's effectiveness just enough to cause that little bit of delay in advancing...hadn't thought of that until your story mentioned having to detach soldiers to herd POW's back to the rear. Another good chapterlet.

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    1. It's not mentioned much but taking prisoners does tend to thin out your manpower over time.

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    2. Which probably contributed to the atrocities committed by both sides in this fight.

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    3. In all theaters, in all wars, men which could have been taken prisoner were not. Rapid advances where you have neither the time nor the inclination to take prisoners tended to see a lot of would-be-prisoners getting gunned down while trying to surrender. Also, on the Eastern Front it really was a battle of ideologies, Communism versus Nazism, which tended to make things worse.

      I won't mention the German Einsatzgruppen which followed the front line armies whose sole purpose was to murder Jews and intellectuals, and others considered by the Nazis to be "undesirables." (We will get to those eventually, no tale of Russia in WWII would be complete without mentioning them and the horrors they inflicted.)

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    4. A lot depends on behavior. According to Farley Mowat, the canadians didn't take German Paras as live prisoners for a couple of months in 1944 after catching the Germans working Italian civilians as slaves. Angry infantry men make poor social workers. Aerobracero.

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    5. Good point. From my reading I note that the Soviets shot many SS men out of hand. For good reasons.

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  3. Looking back from the comfortable view of "how it worked out", it is not often remembered how badly the Red Army did initially.

    80% casualty rate. Something we cannot even fathom today.

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    1. They were caught with their pants down. But once they made a stand and started punching back they wound up in Berlin at the end.

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  4. Some of the Russian patronymics make us English speakers have to put our mouths in a lower gear, and engage the four wheel drive in our tongues!

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    1. I know, sorry. I've been tempted to just follow western practice and just use first names, which does occur between friends from what I understand. But using the name and the patronymic feels more "authentic."

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    2. Crusty Old TV Tech Ivanovich here. Da tovaritsch! Always use correct Russian patronym. Only muzhyk does not.

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    3. Always!

      Interesting word, "muzhyk." According to Google Translate, in Ukrainian "мужик" translates to "peasant." In Russian it translates to "man." I've heard Russians use it in the slang sense "Hey, man" or "Эй, мужик."

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    4. Oh,no, please continue! I realize that is it is done in Russia, so for authenticies sake, you must continue, as you should! I didn't mean to sound like I was criticizing!

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    5. No, I'm glad you mentioned it, so I could explain why I did it. It's a fair point.

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  5. I understood, from my mother's side (Ukrainians), that a muzhyk, like his cattle, was only good for fertilizing a field.
    Is that why the U.S. press is unable to call the current President of Russia: Vladimir Vladimirovich and the President (for the moment) of the Ukraine: Volodymyr Oleksandrovych.

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    1. Those patronymics tend to confuse a people for whom speaking a single language is something of an achievement. That is, your average American politician.

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Just be polite... that's all I ask. (For Buck)
Can't be nice, go somewhere else...

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