A WWII Soviet officer recalls leading a battalion of convict-soldiers in this rare firsthand account of a Red Army penal unit.

Alexander Pyl’cyn was eighteen years old when he was drafted into the Red Army in 1941. He went on to serve with great distinction, earing the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Great Patriotic War, and the Order of the Red Star for his actions during the war. As the commander of a penal battalion on the Eastern Front, he led an unruly band of convict-soldiers, Gulag prisoners, and former Soviet POWs deemed untrustworthy. 

Relegated to the most difficult and dangerous assignments, Pyl’cyn’s unit was called up to break through the enemy’s defenses. He led his penal unit through the Soviets’ massive offensive in the summer of 1944, the Vistula-Oder operation into eastern Germany, and the bitter assault on Berlin in 1945. Though his men suffered massive casualties, and he himself withstood multiple wounds, he survived the war to tell this incredible story.