Soviet Cannon Fodder

Were there actually Soviet troops on the Eastern Front that fought without firearms? It seems a bit illogical but I see this factoid regurgitated constantly

not in ww2, rifles and rifle ammo were one of the few things there was never a shortage of during the war

it did happen in ww1 though

That's a WW1 Imperial Russia thing, not a WW2 thing.

The Soviets built up a massive equipment surplus in the years between WW1 and WW2, particularly in small arms (partly because they were paranoid, partly to pad production statistics). When WW2 came, they had millions and millions of mosins in warehouses, what was short was ammo.

The only time where you had soldiers without firearms is when an encircled soviet formation broke out of encirclement early in Barbarossa. REMFs would be put on the front line in a desperate attempt to break out, and you don't normally issue a gun to every guy in a unit.

No. Soviet armament production was gigantic.

yes but there's so many guns you can pick up it doesn't really matter

There was "cannon fodder" in a sense.

their defense in depth strategy was to put penal battalions and weaker units in the path of any attacks to bog them down, and by town for the mobile forces to counter attack.

generally these units were slaughtered whole sale, but they were undesirables and degenerates as it was, (murderers and rapists who they needed to fight).

by town => buy time

No, it's a WW1 meme, Russia was extremely slow to mobilize because their ammunition and firearms production didn't match their manpower so they sent a bunch of soldiers equipped with jack shit to fight.

But the Soviets didn't re-adapt defense in depth until later in the war (say Kursk), having abandoned it at the time of Barbarossa due to its' main proponent, Tukhachevsky, having been put to death, whereas penal units were generally an early war "shit shit shit shit" type of thing.

If anything, at least in my view, the cannon fodder aspect of the Red Army (and by that I of course mean the RKKA) came about due to superiority of political officers over actual unit commanders - and the shadow of the Purge. As such, you had battalion commanders obey orders to the letter, lest they risk capital punishment themselves. I believe there were several cases where battalions made up of men from Central Asia (the steppe) were made to cross rivers - only to have the sorry sons of bitches drown because they'd never even seen that much water, let alone learned how to swim.

>Were there actually Soviet troops on the Eastern Front that fought without firearms?

The Soviets had more rifles than they knew what to do with. Support troops like engineers and logistics personnel would perhaps be unarmed, but anybody expected to fight on the front-line, or anywhere close to it, would certainly have been well-armed. Now, there were plenty of instances where Soviet units were cut off from supply lines and had to resort to using captured German weapons, but that wasn't a normal situation. There were just as many, if not more, instances where Wehrmacht soldiers found themselves without sufficient ammunition and were forced to use weapons picked off fallen Soviet soldiers.

No but a typical Japanese rifle squad had 3 guys armed with just pistols.

I doubt that's true.

ok, they had the will of the Emperor too

>is meme I saw in a movie really true?
why don't you read a single book and you'll find out. there was a shortage of LMGs and especially SMGs during the inital stages of barbarossa. and indeed there were huge stockpiles of weapons lost during the retreat from the western USSR. but as the scramble for arms production went on these losses were quickly made up for. there were 13 million m91/30s produced just during the war, there's no way in hell there was ever a shortage of rifles. in fact I'd say contrary to the meme, in the entire war manpower shortage was a greater concern than armament shortage. but germans had an even worse manpower shortage so it didn't seem like it.

How did the average soviet soldiers equipment improve toward the end of the war? Just more SMGs and and actual ammo?

More SVTs

>but they were undesirables and degenerates as it was
Shut you whore mouth.
My grandfather was in one of those units.
He and his comrades got into it because when their whole unit was dying of hunger they killed a horse that was supposed to be Soviet property. For this they were sent to shtrafbat.
In these units you either die or redeem yourself with wounds. My grandfather was wounded twice and this way he restored his honor and was sent back to regular unit

>My grandfather was in one of those units.
because he was an undesired degenerate

>you had battalion commanders obey orders to the letter, lest they risk capital punishment themselves.
Can confirm, Guderian actually asked the Soviets in Kiev why didn't they fall back, said they were ordered not to
>On 26 September we ended our victorious battle in the region of the Kiev cauldron. We had captured the commander of the 5th Army. I talked to him and asked him a few questions: (1) When did they notice my tanks approaching in the rear? The answer: Approximately on 8 September. (2) Why did they not leave Kiev after this?
>The answer: We received the Kiev front’s order to leave and move to the east and were just ready to depart when another order followed that rescinded the previous and which required defending Kiev to the end. Execution of this counter order led to the annihilation of the whole Kiev group of Russian troops. At this time we were extremely surprised by such actions of the Russian command. The enemy did not repeat such mistakes any more.

>absolute numbers
yea, those get repeated every time thread like this gets posted. Soviet problem never was the production but the logistics. And they remained long into war until land lease kicked in. Combine it with purge mentality of officers obeying orders however nonsensical they were, soviets found themselves without proper material support far more often than at just desperate break-outs from encirclement.

The issue in World War II was getting weapons and ammunition to the frontlines.

Arguably, this was the case in World War I as well, especially when internal factionalism came into play. I recall reading somewhere that fortress commanders refused to release their armaments for general issue.