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Old 06-21-2003, 02:08 PM   #1
Chris
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Shipov, Vsevolod Pavlovich, Captain, 487th Separate Discipline Battalion

I may be boring people with this one but I obtained a partial group which was sold by the veteran himself (A Captain in a Discipline Btn) to my "finder".

What got my attention was this holder for the Leningrad document.

Were these holders given for all defence and capture medals?

I have never seen one before.

Red Star is 44402...I got this entire gp with docs for 45$...the veteran in question sold them this week and apologised that he had temporarily lost a photo showing him wearing the medals and with his dates of service inscribed on the back.

He has kept his pat war 1 red banner etc...Good for him...might try and find him and see if he is ok...

The hot summer of 1942. Thousands of Soviet troops were retreating in confusion amid huge clouds of dust. Air space was dominated by German “Junkers” dive-bombers and “Messerschmitt” fighters. The impression was that of chaos, total confusion and the worst moments of 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Military archives still have quite a few sternly-worded cabled demands by the then Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that the army group commanders should check the troop retreat, bring order out of chaos, fight to the last ditch and not to withdraw from the positions held.
Stalin is fed up with the Red Army defeats. The nation is on the verge of a dreadful disaster, and the only tested way to avert it that he seems to know of is to resort to some extremely tough measures. And that is what he does when he signs his Order 227 in late July 1942. Under that document anyone who retreats without order will retreat into one’s death. When he orders the troops not to make even a single step back, he uses the words in their literal meaning. The Order 227 has a special paragraph about setting up penal battalions in the army groups and penal companies in the armies.
The term of service in penal battalions and penal companies was three months. These companies and battalions were the first to be ordered into action, even when they stood no chance of winning, but, conversely, every chance of dying. Yet, surprisingly, under those adverse circumstances they engaged the enemy in the fiercest of fighting. They were people just like anybody else and they feared death, too, but they had to clear the disgrace they had covered themselves in. If a serviceman was wounded in combat (or spilt his blood, - the formula that was used then for the occasion) he was normally released from his penal service.
The first penal battalion was formed at the Stalingrad front on August 22nd, one day before the German troops had reached the Volga river.
Those who served in penal companies or battalions were mostly people who had been tried under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, an article that sent people face firing squads. These people had their death sentences replaced by a term in a penal company (for privates and sergeants) or in a penal battalion (for army
officers). Those who served in penal companies and battalions could be both military and civilians, they could be those who escaped from captivity or who were branded as “enemies of the people” and were sent to the front from their prisons. They were seen as kamikaze soldiers and sent to where fighting was the fiercest and the chance to die – the highest. They could be committed to action unarmed and told that they should pick up arms from those who would get killed. They could be sent from one combat to another with no respite in between, and they were always used to spearhead an attack or as a rearguard screen, prepared to die, to let the retreating regular army units disengage from the advancing enemy. They were seen as having cleared their disgrace for what errors they may have made if they died or were wounded in action.
An attack by penal battalions or penal companies was a psychological attack by those doomed to death. They had nowhere to retreat.
The command stood to gain from using penal units. On the one hand, they helped maintain discipline. On the other, they could be used in verifying the correctness of a decision made. Whenever a village or a commanding height was to be captured, Red Army units had to know the strength of the enemy force that defended them. So, the commander of a penal company was ordered to send one or two of his platoons to conduct reconnaissance in force. Just how heavy losses the company could suffer in the process was of secondary importance. The main thing was to prevent regular army units from sustaining grave losses. But if penal units captured a built-up area, the seizure was normally said to be made by regular army units.
It’s anyone’s guess just how many servicemen died in reconnaissance-in-force operations, how many were machine-gunned by so-called anti-retreat detachments of the dreadful Soviet secret police NKVD, how many were executed by shooting on orders from the notorious “troika” military tribunals. No official agency has ever been charged with counting up these figures. But after the prominent Russian military historian Dmitry Volkogonov had obtained classified information from state military archives, he said that approximately 60,000 were sentenced to capital punishment and another 600,000 were ordered to penal battalions. But one has to admit that quite a few of them were later pardoned as those who had expiated their guilt.
Soviet punitive body chiefs liked the idea of penal battalions so much that they started to send to penal units also civilian prisoners of the GULAG, - the harsh labour camp system. Some historians claim that such prisoners totaled more than a million, but this seems to be an exaggeration. Those sent to penal units were promised rehabilitation, but the promise was often false, since bureaucrats couldn’t care less for those people’s future. Sometimes soldiers committed heroic acts of bravery and were still made to remain in their penal companies. Here is just one example. At the Stalingrad front all army officers who had fought their way back from encirclement were ordered into one unit. The first group of 58 were told they would be sent to a board of survey and then to regular army units. But none of them were ever interrogated, their cases ever investigated, and soon they found themselves in penal battalions. In a couple of months it turned out that this happened because of someone’s error, but most officers had been killed in action by then.
Those who fell in action were rehabilitated in general lists. Acts of heroism by penal battalion or penal company servicemen have never gone on the record. Former military pilot Artiom Afinogenov invariably gets irritated whenever recalling the performance of air force penal squadrons near Stalingrad:
“Penal squadron pilots were sent to the most dangerous places, first of all, to Volga bridge crossings, where the future of Stalingrad was decided, to air fields and enemy tank concentrations. So it was only penal squadrons that were sent to attack these targets, yet these operational flights were not taken into consideration. You keep flying missions and killing Germans, yet it is held that nothing happens, so nothing goes on your record. To be released from penal service you have to be wounded in fighting. But when a military pilot is flying a mission, the first wound he receives may very often be the last one.” (A.Afinogenov’s voice in RA)
In the 45 years since the end of the war the official Soviet policy was not to take up penal companies and battalions, as well as anti-retreat detachments of the special service known as SMERSH (“Smert shpionam”, the Russian for “Death to spies”), the detachments that would not hesitate to machine-gun Red Army units should the latter fail to contain a German attack and start to retreat. Former penal unit servicemen themselves choose - more often than not - to avoid elaborating on their penal service. Perhaps, the only exception is the story “The Warlord” by the Soviet writer Vladimir Karpov, where he tells about his military career, from a penal company serviceman all the way up to a Guards Colonel, who was besides awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Karpov was sent to a penal company not because he had done something bad, but because of slander or some misunderstanding.
At the front soldiers would not always remember the number “227” of the order under discussion, or the name of an official who signed it. But the order title - “ Not a Step Back!” – made it clear at once what it was all about. According to documentary evidence, the main reason for the Red Army’s poor fighting in 1941 and 1942 were grave errors and serious miscalculation by the nation’s top-echelon political leaders under Stalin, as well as the criminal assassination of thousands upon thousands of military commanders, which severely weakened the Red Army. But obviously, the military commanders and their troops had to fulfill their military duty, whatever their plight. Nor there is any need to prove that it is always more difficult and more important for your country’s future to fight to the last ditch, rather than lay down arms and surrender. The order not to surrender is by far less severe in war conditions than the order to attack. The order to advance made soldiers rise to their feet and meet bullets and shells, meet their death. The idea is so ordinary and clear, it is actually a stroke of genius. – If your Fatherland has called you up, so fight as war heroes do. If your Fatherland orders you to advance, then wipe out the enemy as war heroes do. If your Fatherland has told you to command regiments, try to do your utmost to win battles. If you’ve sworn an oath of allegiance to your Fatherland, don’t you ever think of breaking that oath until you’re alive. Someone may take all this as big words, but in point of fact these words are perfectly correct.

My comment....I will try and find this guy and find out why he ended up in such a unit.

Chris
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File Type: jpg disciple btn.jpg (35.8 KB, 3 views)
File Type: jpg disc btn medals.jpg (42.3 KB, 10 views)
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Old 06-22-2003, 05:41 PM   #2
olezha11
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My grandfather was in penal batalion for punching his lieutenant in the face. I think they gave him 2 month and he only lasted 3 hours, got wounded and almost lost his arm. He told me that survival time for any soldier in the batalion was 2 days.
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Old 09-11-2017, 06:58 PM   #3
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Re: Shipov, Vsevolod Pavlovich, Captain, 487th Separate Discipline Battalion

Here is the original citation for the Red Star, awarded 1st January 1942. Also his Leningrad Act.
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