Researching Red Army/Navy Units

[Taz]

Doug,
How does this look?

524-й ОТДЕЛЬНЫЙ УЧЕБНЫЙ БАТАЛЬОН ХИМИЧЕСКОЙ ЗАЩИТЫ

524th SEPARATE EDUCATIONAL CHEMICAL PROTECTION BATTALION

From the name obviously a training Battalion but no decent results came up in English or Russian.
However I did find this site:

http://www.himvoiska.narod.ru/himvoiska20th.html

This site seems interesting I've tried to translate some of the Titles, maybe it is worth a good look for a Russian speaker. It's a bit hard for me to navigate but it covers all aspects and time periods of Chemical Warfare, right up to the present day.

Химические войска в Великой Отечественной войне 1941-1945 гг

Chemical armies in Great Domestic war 1941-1945

Eddie.

[Esteban_cool]

Geez, that´s for sure an extensive source...
Thank you very much, Eddie! ^__^

Esteban

[Taz]

Geez, that´s for sure an extensive source...
Thank you very much, Eddie! ^__^

Esteban

No problem Esteban,

Glad to be able to help! ;)

Eddie.

[otlichnik]

Taz,

I have sent a commodation in to the commissar recommending you for a Red Banner for your service in finding out that awesome information! ;)

Shawn

[Kim]

I want to get the big picture about one of my groups. With the “big picture” I mostly mean unit history. So this is my starting point:

I have the recipients “voenny bilet” from 1946. According to this he was a sr. sergeant when he finished the war in the combat engineer troops. It also says that he served between July 25 and May 9 (!) 1945 in the 170th independent combat engineer battalion (ru. Inzjenerno-sapernuy batalon).

My problem is where to go from here? Was the 170th a part of the STAVKA reserve? Are engineer units covered in the Sharp books? Any pointers would help.

Another fact is that in September 1944 the 170th was part of 14th ind. eng. Brigade, 65th army, 1st Belo Russian front But what about the rest of the war?

I also found some interesting stuff in the Voeyenno-Istoricheskit Zhurnal no.1 1985, an article about engineering support in Vistula-Oder campaign. Translated at this page:
http://stinet.dtic.mil/str/index.html

/Kim

[Taz]

Hi Kim,
not much info as yet. I haven't found anything that indicates that they were with the STAVKA reserve.

Eddie.

[Kim]

Hi Eddie

Any help is appreciated :)

My STAVKA comment is just a stab in the dark, but as we have no facts yet... who knows ;)

/Kim

[vvadim]

170th independent combat engineer battalion (ru. Inzjenerno-sapernuy batalon) was one of four engineer battalions of 14 engineer brigade (ru. Inzjenerno-sapernuy brigady) 65 army of Central front. Battalion commander - Nilov A.N.

Before that in August 1941 supported 63 mountain-rifle division of 47 Army of Zakavkazskiy front during invasion to Iran.

[Kim]

Big thanks for this help Vadim!!! (A thanks too Eddie for pointing out my thread as well ;) )

Vadim: What books would you recommend for reseaching the Red Army? I mean Order of Battle down to batalion level. I guess the best books are in Russian. But where to get them...

/Kim

[vvadim]

Kim,

I do not know what to tell you. Can you read and understand Russian well enough? Otherwise it’s even more difficult and I do not follow non Russian language publications. I can not keep up with volume of information in Russian, say nothing about other languages. Even though I understand English, German and little bit of French and Spanish.

Hundreds of books on the subject were published in Russia in the past decade. Only publishing house “TERRA” published so far 47 volumes of original documents of People’s commissariat of defense. On NKVD there are several series of ongoing publications, plus so called “Lubianka’s reading”, plus private exchange of information and so on. Plus despite what one may think, very thorouful and comprehensive analyses of WWII was done by soviet government in first decade after the war. All those publications were for government use only (Dlia sluzebnogo polzovania - DSP) and not available for general public at the time, but they resurfacing now in really large quantities. And with filtering of ideological and political “patina” these are very useful too.

And I’m talking about only publications of original documents without any comments or with minimum comments from the publishers. Of course they all in russian. It is enormous task to translate even small part of it to english or any other language and it’s very small market for it in “the west”, so I doubt it will be done any time soon.

As far as to get them, it’s not easy too. They usually published in relatively small quantities from 500 to 5000 copies. Most of them on very high quality paper and subsequently they are very expensive. They made mostly for libraries and because of quality of paper, supposed to last for very long time. I have no doubt Library of Congress and leading US universities must have them. If not all then most of it.

But you can start from here. Download these volumes and you will be busy for a wile. And these documents were not published. Grisha purchased microfilms with these documents and then both of them went into A LOT of trouble converting them into Microsoft world format. I helped them with bla bla bla mostly. They half way through now. By they way it’s cost them a lot of money and time, but they keep doing it and give it to everybody for free.

http://vif2ne.ru/nvk/forum/2/doc.htm

Here are some documents too. Browse through and you may find something interesting to you.

http://rkka.ru/

Here are a lot of documents and first two volumes of TERRA publication I’ve mentioned.
They called on local sleng “malinovka” because of the cover color.

http://soldat.ru/boxroom/

I’m strongly recommending this site. Artem doing tremendous job, and for the past two years he and his helpers have Russian government support too.

http://www.iremember.ru/index.html

Let me know if it’s enough for now.

Vadim Voskoboinikov.