She died three times. Reincarnations of the Second Infantry Division
Started story divisions in Ryazan in 1918, when the Soviet government, after the collapse of the Old Army, began to create the Red Army:
Among which was the Second Tula Infantry Division. That was the time of all sorts of veils, detachments, workers' guards and other temporary formations, which gradually turned into permanent formations, converted at the expense of the old army and its cadres.
The second Tulskaya was no exception. It was headed not by a commissar, not an old Bolshevik, but by a very middle-aged major general of the imperial army, Mikhail Ivanovich Merro, who commanded an infantry brigade and a division during the First World War, and had passed all the steps of the career ladder since 1883. However, the subsequent commanders of the 2nd Infantry in the years of the Civil were far from the proletarians - Stepnoy-Spizharny Konstantin Ivanovich, the professor's son and staff captain, Andrey Georgievich Keppen - Lieutenant Colonel, Roman Voitsekhovich Longva - Staff Captain, and Lieutenant Eduard Fridrikhovich Vilumson, which looks in this row almost like a black sheep. There were only two members of the party from this number, the rest were engaged in the work of their whole life - they defended Russia, and what kind of power was there was not the main one for them.
The division commanders were lucky in the future - such figures as Fabricius, Loktionov and Konev passed through it. And the beginning of the combat path turned out to be excellent - the division smashed Kolchak, participating in a number of operations on the Eastern Front. Then the defense of Petrograd and the war with the Latvians, then the Trudarmia with the extraction of peat, which for Peter 1920 was almost more important than the military actions, and in the summer of 1920 - the Polish front. The division again distinguished itself during the assault on Brest-Litovsk, but was defeated and surrounded near Warsaw, however, the division headquarters and some of the fighters left the encirclement, retaining the personnel backbone. The one that the country did not need. The civilian was over, the economy was in ruins, and the division that ended up in Belarus after a period of border protection, and the battles with the Poles after the Riga Peace went on for a long time, was first reduced by new states, its three brigades were transformed into regiments, and then turned into a national Belarusian and territorial. In 1926, a two-year plan for the Belarusian division was even adopted.
Of course, all this could not but affect the quality of the formation - that division, formed in 1918 by a career general from among the front-line soldiers of the First World War, was practically destroyed, in its place a rather amorphous formation appeared, pulling a maximum of the militia in case of war. Such a process took place everywhere - there was no money, and there were no resources for the army either, they tried to keep at least specialists and commanders. And national experiments ... They can be understood somewhere in the Caucasus or Central Asia, where the majority did not even know Russian, but in Belarus to introduce a language unfamiliar even to many, leading to an elementary misunderstanding with other formations is, of course, bold and stupid.
Although the 2nd Infantry was particularly lucky, by 1931 it had become an exemplary and cadre in the composition of:
Division Management - Minsk
4th Red Banner Rifle Regiment - Borisov
5th named. workers of the Moscow-Kursk and Nizh.-Murm. railway SP - Cherven
6th Infantry Regiment - Minsk
2nd Belarusian Artillery Regiment - Minsk
And by 1935, it was listed as one of the three personnel divisions of the Belarusian Military District. The rest of the divisions were mixed or territorial. And in 1939, the personnel unit passed another attack of the pre-war years - a triple deployment. This is when from one division, with a slight movement of the hand, three are obtained, and all three have only a third of the personnel, the rest come on mobilization. The idea, for the small and weak Red Army of the 30s, was great. The point is this - of course, making three divisions out of one trained division is bad, but creating divisions from scratch is even worse, for the same Belorussian district it meant a disaster, due to the small number of cadre formations. As a result, the 2nd rifle rifle bypassed this case, retaining, in contrast to the deployed, combat potential:
The 82nd SD immediately after deployment in the area of the Khalkhin-Gol river, in the first battle, fled from the battlefield. "
Which was used on September 17, 1939 in the Liberation campaign of the Red Army. After him, the division received a new place of deployment - the infamous attack of the dead Osovets, where it was at the time of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.
On the one hand, the division was staffed with both people and equipment for the 12 thousandth staff of 4/100, on the other, there were nuances:
There are no artillery or anti-aircraft gunners, a third of the commanders and half of the transport are missing, including the divisional commander, three of the nine battalions, armed with shovels, stick out at the border ... Is that why Comrade Pavlov was shot by Comrade Stalin? The result was somewhat expected, the Germans quickly defeated one of the best divisions of the Red Army, literally dismantled for parts by their own command. From the Belostotsky boiler left ... 250 people.
And to the point of heroism, if the troops are disorganized and lose up to half of the equipment and personnel in senseless marches, as, for example, the artillery regiments of the 2nd rifle regiment, forced in broad daylight under air strikes to rush to their infantry. In September 1941, the division was disbanded, having endured only two weeks of active fighting. And almost immediately it was formed again - the name of the 2nd Belarusian Red Banner Infantry Division named after M.V. Frunze was received by the militia of the 2nd division of the people's militia of the Stalin district of Moscow. Received, however, conditionally - without preserving the numbering of the regiments and honorary titles. The division went to the front on September 26, and died in the Vyazemsky cauldron by October 11, only the commander and a small group of fighters emerged from the encirclement. On December 27, the division was officially disbanded as killed at the front.
The third formation of the 2nd Infantry Division took place in the besieged Sevastopol, where the 2nd Cavalry Division was renamed the 23nd Infantry Division on November 1941, 2. The third reincarnation of the division took an active part in repelling the second assault on Sevastopol, and suffered heavy losses. Among its regiments was the combined regiment of the NKVD. On January 29, it was renamed the 109th Infantry Division, and eventually died in Sevastopol in the summer of 1942.
Only the fourth reincarnation turned out to be lucky - in December 1941, the formation of the 410th rifle division began in the city of Arkhangelsk. In January 1942, the number was changed to 2, the regiments were also renamed, which received the numbers of the regiments of the personnel division of the Red Army that was killed in Belarus. The division, resurrected once again, fought on the Volkhov front, participated in terrible battles near Myasny Bor, where it broke through the corridor to Vlasov's Second Shock Army. In 1944, it attacked Novgorod, later Narva, and was again disbanded. The personnel were transferred to other units, and under number 2, in fact, a new division, already the fifth under that name, was transferred to the place where it all began - to the Bialystok area. Then there was participation in the storming of Konigsberg, the clearing of the Augustow forests from the Poles and the Nazis (the 2nd Infantry Division was doing about the same in those parts in the 20s), based in Suwalki and the disbandment of the 2nd Mazurian Order of Kutuzov Infantry Division in 1946 year.
Again, the disbandment is quite logical - that much was not necessary after the war. But it so happened that divisions (in fact, six) with such a number had to go through all the vicissitudes of the formation of the Red Army-SA, from the territorial division to the reduction after the Great Patriotic War. The division created by the tsarist general completed its journey under the command of a farm laborer - Major General Miron Ivanovich Perevoznikov, who served in the same division in 1936, as chief of staff of an artillery regiment. And this is the best evidence of both the continuity and the overcoming of the difficulties of the growth of the Russian army, regardless of epochs and names.
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