Penal battalion is one of the most difficult topics of the Great Patriotic War. Spears break around them, but most often from banal ignorance and based on works like the series "Shtrafbat" and other followers of Solzhenitsyn. In fact, of course, there were shotbats. They appeared after order No. 227 "Not a step back." But they were not at all the same and fought at all as liberal gentlemen like to imagine.