The Russian Offensive

[Der Alte Fritz]

The Russian Offensive is a series of four scenarios depicting the main events in a typical late war Soviet attack. The idea is to show how the different forces contributed to the overall effect and to highlight the differences with the German method of war. Intended to be played Russian vs AI or H2H.

Scenario 1 represents the breakthrough of German lines by a Rifle Division supported by heavy tanks.

Scenario 2 covers a Mech Corps moving into the breach to widen it and engage possible counter attack forces.

Scenario 3 is a Tank Corps which has been launched into the operational hinterland to seize a bridgehead.

Scenario 4 is the Motor Rifle part of a Tank Corps defending the bridgehead against a counter attack by German strategic reserves.

Russian Offensive scenario 1: Infantry Break Through is now posted at TPG at http://www.the-proving-grounds.com/scenario_details_link.html?sku=1252 . All play testing and comments welcome.

Just published Scenario 2 at TPG today.

Difficult scenario to make as it tries to show the various parts of a Mech Corps, the Tank Regt and the Motor Rifle Bde and what their roles were.

Find it here at http://www.the-proving-grounds.com/scenario_details_link.html?sku=1254

Thank to everyone who downloaded the first in the series, I hope you enjoyed it.

cheers

[coe]

speaking of russian offensive...- so I have to ask, in something like Operation Bagration...how is it that the soviets in scoring a major victory managed to lose almost just as much as the Germans did so to speak. I mean I know it was a victory in that they could afford to lose more people...but you don't see the same kind of allied losses against germans in the west once there were breakthroughs or were there equivalent losses?

Conan

[JasonC]

Main reason, overconcentrating infantry in breakthrough attacks.

Multiplying the number of warm bodies in the danger zone directly multiples the number of not so warm bodies the next day. Having a whole regiment rather than a battalion is some protection against enemy riflemen - you shoot them first - but none against a corps level artillery barrage.

Second and related, a strong tendency to simply attack directly with everything available, without regard to combined arms principles or the right tool for the job or the nature of the enemy or terrain. Something will stick, as the "combined arms lite" principle effectively being used. Which is expensive compared to holding off with the wrong stuff until the right stuff does the work.

Third and related, a command system and political environment that rewarded aggressiveness and did not punish expensive tactics. Failing in the mission with an intact command could get a man shot for cowardice. But nobody would call you a coward if half your battalion died yesterday. Implicitly, officers were held responsible for the attempt rather than a success. An aggressively pushed failure bucked responsibility for it all, up the chain of command to the muckety-mucks who thought it was such a good idea.

(This exact same tendency was epidemic in the western armies in WW I, but much less so in WW II).

The armor was rarely committed until the rifle formations were thoroughly hung up in the defense system. It usually had to complete the breakthrough itself. The rifle formations had helped - the defense was usually thoroughly messed up and intermingled with attackers by the time the armor went in. It is just, they also took heavy losses without achieving full breakthrough, before the tanks were unleashed in strength.

Doctrinally, KVs were supposed to help in the early parts. In practice, there were never enough of them and independent brigades or regiments of more common types were used to. But all of it low concentrations compared to tank corps, and the sort of thing a German ID might be expected to deal with using its PAK and a few assault guns etc.

Once in the rear, much better. Still had to fight German reserves, and did so on at best equal terms, typically. Occasionally got seriously overextended, particularly earlier on, and lost significant bits of the mech arm that way. By later in the war, the tide of rifle armies moving up behind the mech made actually standing in the face of them pretty suicidal. Giving ground equalized oods as the mech distanced the rifle and the Germans only had to fight the former, for long stretches.

Tactically speaking, it is also perfectly possible to lose a lot more than you inflict, if the mission is swamping dug in HMG-42s with lots of riflemen.

In the west, the allies had considerably more "capital" per unit manpower. They could rely more on weight of HE thrown, less on weight of bodies ordered forward. Russian arty was massive in set-piece attacks, but relatively quiet thereafter (as the front moves, I mean), because logistically primitive by western standards. (Most guns horse drawn, no great fleets of trucks to move mountains of shells, etc).

It is safe to say the western allies were also more careful of soldiers' lives, and were quicker to abandon or tone down relatively expensive tactics. They did indulge them from time to time, typically on a timescale a few weeks at most, though. They did use continual attacks at times, but typically as endless modest probes following up fire.

[Bigduke6]

Another aspect of the high casualties in the early phases of Soviet offensives is that the Soviet doctrine held that there are plenty of Soviet machines more valuable than some Soviet human lives - particularly tanks. From a strict resource point of view this was correct: the Soviet Union had deeper human reserves than it did excess heavy machinery manufacturing capacity.

Of course, it helped that the human reserves didn't vote.

But, I think it is unquestionable brutal German conduct in the parts of the SU they did manage to conquer, went a long way towards convincing Soviet soldiers to be willing to sacrifice, in order to defeat the Germans.

Crudely put, high risk of death under the command of some assault mad Red general was probably, for most Soviet soldiers, far preferable than the prospect of living as member of one of Germany "slave races." The Germans murdered hundreds of thousands often within weeks of their arrival in conquered territories, and literally enslaved the rest. Soviet willingness to expend troop lives, and the troops' willingness to go along with it, needs to be seen against that background.

That made it easier for Soviet command to demand continual sacrifice from their troops (or just waste their lives) to a degree British and U.S. soldiers would almost never tolerated. Unlike the British or the Americans, the Soviets knew if they lost the war the Germans would occupy their country. There was plenty of evidence that pretty much anything was preferable to German occupation.

Another point worth remembering is that Soviet units typically perfoming the break-in stages of a deliberate offensive were traditionally of lower quality: the uneducated, the poorly-trained, and where possible Asians. All were over-represented in the early stages of an attack.

The Soviet logic was that there was no such thing as a successful offensive achieved "for free", there would always be a blood price, and so better to pay with the blood of citizens considered more disposable by the state. By no conincidence, political prisoners and convicts led assaults where possible.

The parallel to that is that, traditionally and especially as the war continued, there was often a dramatic difference in combat skill, and overall officer care to preserve soldier lives, between the rifle formations and the mech formations. Of course, it helped that the soldiers the Soviet state cared more about protecting, were riding on valuable tanks and trucks.

[Der Alte Fritz]

One of the purposes of my series of scenarios was to highlight the differences between the Russian and German system of war. Compare the German Kursk offensive with any Russian offensive from Stalingrad onwards. The German offensive is led by heavy tanks with plenty of tanks in reserve, mounted infantry, flexible artillery and lots of specialist equipment to deal with enemy strongpoints. Compare this with the Russian offensive - rifle armed infantry on foot supported by a fixed artillery fire plan and the flexible response that they have is on call mortars. This is very similar to WW1 tactics. The lack of flexible support menat that the Rifle Corps had to rely on the small number of heavy tanks and SAUs to provide direct fire support, which itself was vulnerable to counterfire. I have been reading about the assault on the Chir river at Stalingrad and the Rifle Divisions and Vth Mech Corps were well aware that their standard infantry attack would fail, so attacked at night with limited success. Later supported by a company of KV1s for each infantry battalion, they broke through the German lines with relative ease.

German defences were very good, as any Allied opeartion shows. The Russian ones proved so expensive in lost men because they did not field enough of the equipment to deal with those parts of the defence left intact by the artillery barrage.

But given the loss rates suffered by the average Tank Corps, it is hardly suprising that the bulk of the tanks were given to them.

cheers

[JasonC]

Big Duke 6 - no, actually the Russian commanders were just formulaic and stupid and wasted valuable and scarce military assets in pound foolish fashion.

As for the laughable notion that asians could be relied on to take all the break in losses, the entire WW II era population of central asia would not have sufficed. Those regions grew in pop along with the rest of the third world only long after the war. All the lesser ethnics combined contributed only a few percent of the Russian force, which is called Russian for a reason.

As for the idea that the tanks are more valuable, actually the Russians outnumbered the Germans in tanks by on the order of 4 to 1 throughout, and readily replaced their (certainly high) losses in that category. Their manpower on the other hand was taxed to the limit, where only 2 to 1 overall to begin with, and their late war offensives were sustained only by drafting more men from the areas freed, because losses were so high they were depleting the rest of the nation.

If ground were not taken regularly they would have run out of manpower for continued expensive attacks, long before they would have run out of tanks (which they could afford to lose at 20,000 per year, since they made that or more).

As for the notion that the Russians loved their slave driving superiors because at least they weren't Germans, it is a Hobson's choice. There is simply no human or professional military excuse for the waste of excellent military material and potential that overly costly Russian tactics involved.

It was the officers' clear duty to husband the lives of their men, to ensure victory in the war as well as for obvious human reasons. Low expectations or standards mean low achievements; instead set the bar at as high as it ought to be, not "better than being squashed by tyrants".

The real reasons are different. The Russian staff decided that the key to breakthrough was concentration of force. This could and did work, though often at ridiculous cost. It was a clear retrogression in Russian military art. They made the same mistakes in WW I, but Brusilov already learned better by mid 1916. The right tactics give a cutting edge to numbers, deriving full force from them.

The division of labor between mech and rifle was skewed by status rather than tactical considerations. Mech was the rich side of the family and expected to win the war, so other arms sacrifice to make their fighting easier. There is some sense in that, but there is more sense in using weapons for the tasks they are best suited for, in a combined arms sense. And charging barbed wire, entrenched MGs, and registered artillery in your shirtsleeves while hundreds of T-34s sit and wait, was criminal folly.

The great masses of rifle forces truly became dangerous after the front was ruptured. They engulfed and devoured any Axis formation too slow getting away. (Look a the Dnepr bend period e.g.) Mech helped slow them by getting behind the enemy, of course - but the mech alone could not fight the whole German army.

The tanks should have done more of the crust-breaking, leaving the rifles stronger for the pursuit-devouring. You don't have to be the fastest to help in the latter - every pocket needs a far side wall and a near side wall.

As for a few KVs being sufficient for this, look at the opening of Operation Kutuzov on the east face. The KVs were slaughtered by dug in PAK, because they simply never achieved the tactical concentration a full tank corps readily does. And oh, they never had a company of KV per attacking battalion - try more like 60 for an army-level rifle-led attack, over 15 km or so.

The formula for *cheap* breakthrough was "put 100 tanks on 1-2 km of front", because that swamps enemy AT defenses to the depths in a matter of hours. Trying instead to substitute a full division of infantry, just invites the counter, "call every gun in the corps".

North face of Kutuzov, opening, shows the other way rifle could lead and succeed - terrain and operational surprise. If you hit thin enough enemies in wooded terrain, you can readily conduct breakthoughs and pursuits with leg infantry. In fact, it is frequently harder to stop them than to block a limited, primitive road net against mech.

The Russians made the division of roles too rigidly, independent of terrain.

Do not let national differences or interest in the military systems involved obscure obvious and objective failings in military doctrine and achieved art. The mark of a professional attitude in the matter is to damn apologetics and face weaknesses and lessons that were not learned, emphasizing them at least as much as strengths or sound portions of doctrine.

[Der Alte Fritz]

The battle on the Chir River in Dec 1942 illustrates the effectiveness of tanks quite well for attacking forces. The original attack by two Rifle Divisions on the 9th failed. The subsequent attack by two brigades of the Vth Mech Corps at night managed to seize a bridge over the river. So when the 49th Bde attacked the following day with tanks, they broke through the German defences and made deep in-roads into their lines. The same day the rifle divisions attacked again on their sector and made little forward movement. The Vth Corps continued to advance even against counter attacks and continued to make ground until the 12th when they went into reserve. The Vth attacked on a three BRIGADE front and had 193 tanks committed to the battle in two Tank Regts with an additional company attached to each brigade. What is suprising is that the tanks were Valentines and Matildas (not KVs as I had thought).

So yes, the Russian offensive using Rifle Corps and Artillery was a wasteful and inefficient tactic and resulted in huge and unecessary losses; in many offensives they had to commit armoured forces early to help the infantry breakthrough and especially through the later German defences which were deeper and denser. Even tanks as apparently worthless as Matildas could make all the difference if used in sufficient numbers.

cheers

[Der Alte Fritz]

Scenario 3 is published at TPG.

You can get it at http://www.the-proving-grounds.com/scenario_details_link.html?sku=1256

In the series, you have been able to try an infantry force and a mech force, now you get to try a Tank Force. The objective is to seize a river crossing but you must overcome a German infantry force first and defeat their PAK and armour support.

Good Luck

[Bigduke6]

JasonC-

You suggest -

Red officers were professionally obliged to protect the lives of the men they commanded.

Not so. That's your definition of a professional officer, and of course a standard European definition. But it wasn't the Red Army's.

Red army officers, first and foremost, were professionally obliged to defeat the German military, and proximately advance the interests of the Soviet state. Loyalty to one's men came second.

Certainly you are within your rights to criticise that attitude as socially dangerous or morally unsound.

But that's your perspective. If the Soviet officers and for that matter arguably the Soviet soldiery as well didn't particularly share your opinion, if as far as their experience and knowledge was concerned war is sacrifice and leaders will not be held to account for decision leading to the near useless death of their troops, then how valid is your criticism? Isn't it anachronistic?

More to the point, could junior Soviet officers, for instance, at the wave of a magic wand have ingrained fire and movement in their rifle platoons, given the training and education of those officers, and the training and education of their men?

Certainly, if there was a peace and a will from higher command to support such an attitude, it might have been possible. But during a war against the Wehrmacht? In a Red Army launching another large offensive every quarter, smaller ones more often, and the platoons are taking casualties and receiving fills throughout?

Just how exactly is this hapless Soviet platoon leader to meet your standards of military professionalism? This is, after all, most likely a kid, a provincial college graduate aged 20 or 21, no life experience, trained only what the Red Army thought he needed to know. A portion of his platoon doesn't even understand Russian, usually. For him a telephone and maps are mysterious, sophisticated, and quite frequently secret knowledge. Yet for the Red Army not to conduct the WWI rifle assaults against MGs in trenches, which you condemn, this kid somehow has not only to learn Hutier fire and movement tactics, but to manage the much more complicated task of training his men to execute those tactics, without anything resembling the NCOs v. Hutier made so critical to his system?

That's not the only change that would have had to take place, for the Red Army to forgoe the massed rifle assaults. But for sure, if the infantry company leaders can't "do" combined arms, and learn fire and movement the hard way only, then it not easy to avoid fielding riflemen capable of massed assaults only.

Same deal as one moves up the chain of command. In one of your past posts you made what I thought was a brilliant turn of phrase, you were rubbishing some one's assertion Soviet lower level field commanders had much influence over artillery fire plans, or could call in fire on their own.

The predicted response, you theorized, would roughly have been: "Who are you to ask for artillery fires, or to decide where artillery fires should go? Who are you, Stalin?"

That's not an exact quote, I'm going from memory. I'll dredge up the exact comment if you want. I certainly agree with you that Soviet fire plannning, on the whole, was rigid and top down, especially if one isn't talking about mortars.

Given that, how valid is your implicit criticism the Soviet mid-range officer corps should have done more to protect the lives of its riflemen? How is a Soviet rifle regiment commander to keep more of his men alive, when he not has no control over indirect fires, aside from rgt assets. Had you worn those boots, could you have achieved demonstrably better results? How?

Of course, as one goes up Red Army pyramid, one generally seems to find more military competence, and the higher up one goes (once the war started of course) the more likely a leader would have some intelligence and skill and talent about him.

But then one is faced with the obvious question: How is this smart guy, this Red officer with the smarts and luck and charisma to rise to the top, a Batov or a Novikov or a Chuikov or Katiukov or similar, how is he going to meet your standard of being a true military pro, and husband his men's lives, if the only subordinates the Red Army issues him are the company and field grades in the previous paragraphs?

How does this Soviet officer of talent and sufficient rank, make over his Corps or Army to step away from the Red Army system, and put into place tactics that get machines killed more, and people less? And if he can't, if the result you are suggesting he aim for, was in fact impossible, doesn't that technically make him a better commander, not a worse one?

All of which begs the question, how long would the NKVD allow deviation like that?

The issue is not semantics, but realistic evaluation of the options available to a commander. If one assumes Soviet commanders had options that were in fact not possible, then one's evaluation of Soviet historical military skill will be skewed.

As to Asia, I am not saying, nor should you have concluded that I am trying to say, that the Soviet Union chose to solve its manpower problems by filling the rifle ranks exclusively with Central Asians. I wrote "where possible."

As to the relationship of armor losses to personnel losses, you make a good, solid point. You're quite right, by raw numbers, the rarer resource for the Soviets was, overall, men rather than tanks, and as the war wore on the more unbalanced that ratio became.

However, I assert that reality was well-known to the Soviet leadership, and that that knowledge didn't change Soviet strategy much. The rule for most of the war was: sacrifice men rather than machines if possible. The corrolary was: Sacrifice cheap men (i.e., not well-equipped, educated, or trained) before expensive ones.

It was somewhere between summer '45 and early '45 the Soviets stepped away from that ruthless "lose men first" strategy.

It is indicative that their decision to rely more on machines came primarily because they finally had enough material - tanks, artillery, ammunition, supply capacity - to pull off offensives without needing to mass riflemen. In other words, it wasn't humanity, but the appearance of sufficient combat tools, more effective than riflemen at getting the job done - with sufficient practically defined as "And after the break-in is over, we have masses of tanks to ram into the gap."

In the latter stages of the war, the Soviets concentrate tons of material and machines to achieve offensive success. In the earlier stages there were more unprotected warm bodies. But either way, from June '41 to May '45, the Soviets had one way and one way of doing business: mass.

But as the Nazi fan boys (not you) never seem to understand, creating mass is not so easy. Mass is not raw overwhelming numbers, it is the creation of overwhelming force at a particular point.

Mass is at least as deeply embedded in the Russian military psyche, as for instance the importance of officer skill is embedded in the German military psyche. In my opinion, Russian military tradition made any Soviet doctrine during World War Two impossible, except one focused pretty much unilaterally on achieving mass.

So how to do it? Perhaps the most important lesson the Soviets learned from Barbarossa is that masses of tanks, by themselves, do not necessarily translate to operational capacity.

If you have too many mech units incapable of performing basic combat tasks, they are an operational liability, first because they eat up resources, and second because their existence gives the false impression they might be able to do something besides come apart simply by trying to execute the command "march to combat". If one depends on the mech forces being able to beat the Germans without massive numerical odds, and German mobile reserves well pinned down, one risks a disaster; as Timoshenko's offensive towards Kharkov showed.

The Soviet lesson learned is, mech formations need to be trained, they need to be husbanded, and their commitment to combat should never be a panic reaction, or a tactical move, but rather a calculated rational decision aimed at achieving an operational effect, and almost always the effect desired was breakthrough and destabilization of the enemy line.

They achieve the effect by mass.

There was nothing new about any of this, Frunze wrote it up in the 1920s. In the early months of the war, the Soviets had the doctrine but didn't have troops trained well enough to execute it.

By the latter half of the war the Soviets knew quite well sending tanks into a combat zone would ease the break-through (the interminable armor introduction debate), and indeed sometimes they bit the bullet, stepped on the doctrine, and sent in the tanks. But in their opinion, by doctrine, mech units were too valuable to waste in straight-ahead combat. A senior officer bogging his tank forces in slogging was not going to last long in command.

Certainly the value of mech units extends past the tanks. Stuff like supply trucks, communications equipment, etc., all that fits in. And all of it makes a Mech unit too valuable to waste.

After all, a Mech unit by Soviet standards is an elite formation, a mass of men trained in machines and mobile combat and all sorts of arcane stuff not particularly familiar to the average recruit. Note that in the Soviet parlance, there is no pecking order distinction between the motor rifle troops and the tank troops. Both are part of the elite mech formations, so designated because they ride on machines to battle. I use the term "mech" below in the Soviet sense.

Since the men capable of operating mech forces in mass were not a common commodity, and since creating replacements took more time and resources than creating riflemen, the doctrine tacitly protected the mech formations. Again, not out of humanity, but because their tanks were supposed to do something more than just fight forehead to forehead with the enemy.

So technically you have me, where I wrote "tanks" when it would have been better to write "mech formation". But that said, I think you will agree with me Soviet doctrine as it evolved stayed true to the Frunzian concept massed Mech formations were how you win wars, and as such you don't fritter them away.

I think your arguement that, had the Soviets been more rational, they should have tried to expend more machines and less men, and that they should have used those machines more intelligently, is theoretically on solid ground.

But only theoretically. As a practical matter, I question whether the Red Army had the time to avoid your criticisms, or the mental flexibility to abandon the concept of massed armor to exploit the breakthrough, for the (from the Soviet POV) wasteful issue of excess tank and artillery to the infantry.

Does this make them stupid? There were fools in responsible positions in the Red Army at the beginning of the war, but the Soviet had their share of commanders and operational brains as well.

Yet, in the top operational school of the war, on the East Front against the Germans, with competent people like Zhukov and Vasilievsky increasingly calling the shots, the Soviets needed about eighteen months to bring their force to the point where it could conduct a coherent major armored operation. They needed another twelve to eighteen months before they reached the point where massing and dispersing their operational tools - the tank and air armies, and artillery divisions - was a matter of routine, and mass occurred wherever and whenever the Red Army saw fit.

If turning the theory of mass to SOP mass on the ground took that long to manage, how much longer would it have taken the Soviets to manage other bits and pieces of military capacity, keeping casualties down and economizing force and so on, foregoing mass in favor of minimum force necessary, which you would call the result of officer professionalism?

Like all armies, the Soviets started with a doctrine and then when it hit war they adapted it to the actual conditions. To me, the move from mass rifleman armies backed by masses of armor without operational tasks, to high-firepower/low manpower/simple task rifle formations opening the way for goodles and gobs of better-trained mech formations with clear operational goals, is an understandable transition, and indeed in some ways an inevitable one.

Maybe, to take the discussion further, you could suggest things the Soviet officer corps should have done differently, that they definately could have done differently, that would have made them better qualified for the term "military professional.

This is not to say I am arguing the Red Army was a perfect force. I am arguing improving it was not an easy thing, and some directions of improval, though easy to suggest, were not options for the Red Army's commanders.

[JasonC]

Don't misquote me or put words in my mouth and then claim it is my definition of something. It is inaccurate, and it is rude. The statement you open with is not one I ever made.

I said

"There is simply no human or professional military excuse for the waste of excellent military material and potential that overly costly Russian tactics involved. It was the officers' clear duty to husband the lives of their men, to ensure victory in the war as well as for obvious human reasons."

You pretend I am talking only about some humanitarian point. I am talking about pure military competence and getting the most out of the available means. It happens that coincides, here, with moral duties and common sense, because the latter both frown on obvious waste, and avoiding waste is militarily sound.

Professional cannot be made relative to nation or time. It means objective matters of art, it means the independent standard of the true military relationships involved, it means the standing code of honor, which men may fall away from or live up to, but have no power to alter in the slightest particular. It means ruthless, objective self-criticism with a sole eye on future improvement, and disdain for any form of apologetics or pointless vainglory.

(Lots of people acting stupidly will not make stupidity intelligence, or disgrace honor).

It would be incompetence to take off an entire air wing and crash it straight into the ground without harming the enemy in the slightest. It would be incompetency to drive an entire tank brigade off a bridge into a river one after another, losing the tanks. And it is incompetence of a perfectly parallel kind to march a fresh infantry corps without proper support, weapons, terrain, armor etc, into fortified machineguns and massed artillery and get them all slaughtered to no purpose.

It is a simple waste of military potential. The item lost could do tons more than the incompetent got out of it. Being without it the next day makes his country weaker in every respect and serves it in none. This is obvious, it is not a peculiar standard that requires high learning or hindsight. It was obvious at the time to the men actually being shoved into such conditions.

In WW I, the Russians made repeated attempts to achieve "decision" by massing on narrow sectors, saturating them with artillery fire, and packing in enough men to win the ensuing brawl in the enemy defended zone when they tried to exploit the results. These regularly failed completely with very heavy losses.

The lesson that needed to be learned was that concentration only *of infantry specifically* does not achieve decision when the obstacle to be overcome is *fortified machineguns and heavy artillery*. The point falls under the heading of "combined arms relationships". It has a corollary that speaks to the next thing tried - sustained massive artillery fire does not suffice either.

The physical cause of both is that the defensive systems mentioned have very low target signature, but inflict losses in direct proportion to attacking infantry concentration. Weapons with a high target signature can be made less effective by massing maneuver branch units, because the organic fire of the latter has something to bite on. Weapons with a high target signature can be made less effective by large scale artillery fire for a similar reason. You can beat a regiment of infantry with a division of infantry. You can beat a divsion of infantry pack into a comparable frontage with sustained, corps-level artillery fire.

But these methods will not beat thinly strung but layered dug in machineguns backed by heavy artillery. Artillery of your own will hit air - the empty spots between the MG nests, the wide spaces to full artillery range behind the enemy front line. Massed infantry of your own cannot see or engage the enemy artillery, which is over the horizon. Massed infantry finds it hard to find the MGs, only small portions of them actually do so and take them out, and the rest simply multiply losses by giving those MGs more to fire at in the meantime.

These were all WW I lessons and learned during WW I by at least portions of the Russian army. Brusilov figured them all out, for instance. A tactically effective counter to the new defense system turns on

1. careful intelligence to locate enemy firing points *before* the attack - both MGs and battery location.

2. deception to bring the attacking force opposite without revealing themselves.

3. short arty prep to avoid giving the enemy time to react with his reserves, rather than saturation fire.

4. aimed at located firing points specifically

5. followed by box barrage fire to isolate the intended attack areas.

6. infantry attacks are then led by pathfinder sections, mission to blind enemy OPs, locate and where possible KO MGs

7. the infantry mass then follows the thinly pathfinders to widen penetrations etc.

Even without armor, these tactics were sufficient to largely destroy the Austrian army in a matter of days, under WW I conditions. Where all previous attempts to achieve mass without such "finesse" had failed completely. Without mech to exploit at speed, even such tactical success was not strategically decisive.

WW II introduced a new means at the stage of 6 as well as 7. Gived the inability of defenders to mass sufficient towed anti-tank guns along every portion of their front to meet *massed* armor - meaning, order 50-100 tanks per kilometer on narrow attack sectors of a few km width - the initial breakthrough could be and was made, more painless than ever before possible.

Defenses reacted by adding depth, and by sending operational reserves to the breakthrough points. This made it more important than ever to preserve combat power *through time* to outfight these arriving defenders. Depth of the attack becomes important, it frequently needs to "outlast" the defender's ability to "spend" fresh reserves - a relationship well understood in Russian military traditions going clear back to the Napoleonic era, incidentally. And, because the speed of arrival of those reserves is much increased compared to the WW I case, it is also more important than ever to get as deep as possible in the first 24 to 48 hours.

These are not national proclivities but the objective professional facts of the fighting on any side, given the technology and techniques developed for both offense and defense. Men discover more or less of them, and apply sound lessons about them widely or only narrowly and haphazardly, but they can't change their truth. They are facts (for the period) as unyielding and unforgiving as the multiplication table.

Russian commanders in WW II forgot a bunch of these lessons already well and truly paid for in Russian blood. They remembered a few of them. They applied many of them haphazardly, doing item number n well in operation Whositz and badly in operation Whatzits.

The Russians as a whole were consistently too late in committing the armor. In the best cases they were 12 to 24 hours too late and did OK. In some cases they were a week too late (meaning e.g. a main tank army for the operation reserved for "exploitation" and in the end committed to brawling long after sufficient enemy reserves had arrived) - and did poorly.

The Russians as a whole consistently failed at step 6. You can find maybe 2-3 major offensives where there was good pathfinder work, and pretty much always it was aided by terrain. Occasionally you can find relatively rapid (but still unnecessarily delayed) armor introduction making up for it - but *after* serious losses had been unnecessarily taken by the first waves of rifle forces. Conceptually, they were leaving step 6 out and trying to jump to the exploitation. Armor just lacks the area fire vulnerability that actually needs to be avoided at that stage, and so sufficed. Step 1 they did well maybe 1 time in 3.

In the spring 1942 Kharkov attack, they led with rifle. Yes the mech was not really ready for prime time, but they failed for other reasons (in addition, if you like). Combined arms was simply still too primitive, which is an instance of the problem being diagnosed.

No, the Russians did not get appreciably better at all this late in the war, and never really implemented proper arms for the job, proper attack sequencing. That is why they took 500,000 casualties in just the last 3 weeks, taking Berlin and Prague. Despite overwhelming force superiority in every respect.

The officers in charge of all this were not snot nosed butterbars fresh out of OCS. It is not the case that everyone of serious rank knows better and they just can't teach all the men. Nor is it the case that nobody has noticed any of it and it is all some deep arcane subject. There are training documents that speak to individual pieces of it - typically explaining how the third thing tried actually worked, after expensive hamfisted initial attempts. But you do not see them implemented in their preliminaries by the muckety-mucks.

Instead they are carefully counting items and noses to jam into the attack sector, looking for the magical number of tubes and bodies per km of frontage to win. Which is a military retrogression and unlearning of lessons already learned as early as 1916. Yes mass is important, not it is not a substitute for tactics. It is an amplifier of tactics if you have them. If you have no tactics and lean on mass only, instead, you pay in blood sevenfold.

Which is dumb any way it is sliced. Perfectly preventable. And thoroughly unprofessional. It cannot be excused, it can only be acknowledged a a just criticism and corrected for the future.

[Bigduke6]

No offense intended. My apologies.

However, I disagree with your assertion the rules of war are as immutable as multiplication tables. The reason is, obviously, it is not equations and numbers determining the result of operational-level combat. Rather, it is all those immutables and not-so-easy-to-quantifiables - morale, supply, equipment, weather, manpower quality, national military tradition - that decided what happened when manuever forces hit one another on the East Front.

For the Soviets, mass was decisive. It was decisive because they could achieve it, because they could supply it, and because the soldiers they were using fit relatively well into a mass approach.

Indeed, there are plenty of advantages in mass. There is no need to train extensively. Crappy human material can be fed to the meatgrinder just as well as quality human material. The operational decisions are concentrated in the hands of the people, usually, who have the brains to make them. Small unit tactics - fire and movement, company-level combined arms - is practically unnecessary. Your tankers don't have to bother about learning about wingmen or alternative firing positions. Just every time a German shoots, every one and his brother and their entire extended family of cousins fires back. Sure you'll lose tanks that way, but maybe you have lots coming off the lines.

Mass is simple. In war, simple is generally considered good.

Just figure out where you need to make your strike, and then turn on the hose of men and material. Then when you blow through, drive like hell until you can't any more. Repeat until you win. The risk of course is if your opponent can destroy your mass faster than you can concentrate it. Fortunately for the Soviet Union, they inherently were larger than their opponents.

Certainly, this is an operational recipe for increased casualties, both material and personnel. But the Soviets could sustain them, they had the morale and a dictatorial regime, and as you have pointed out wiping out 100 Soviet tanks at a pop is not so impressive, if the Soviets are churning out 1,000 mediums in a month.

So I think you are avoiding my basic question.

Again: How could the Soviets have employed not mass but, as you put it, tactics? Not theoretical Soviets, but real ones: living in a Stalinish regime, with Barbarossa and Finland the most recent disasters to learn from, Russian military traditions not European, etc.

You recommend the use of tactics. I ask "Fine, how do you see the Soviets implementing them?"

I submit that you are suggesting a non-existant alternative.

As to WWI lessons, as an aside, you apparently forgot point 8 of the Brusilov technique, which is dig saps and infiltrate as close as you can before kicking off the offensive. Maybe you imply it in "pathfinders".

In any case, I see more continuity than disconnect. When the Soviets had time and resources, they bided their time like Brusilov, trained units in the assault sequencing over and over like Brusilov, tried to get as close to the Germans as possible before kicking off their assault, like Brusilov, tried for surprise, like Brusilov, etc. After all, this is the Russian army we're talking about.

So where's the regression? The Soviets, at least at times, fired box barrages, short artillery preps, led with infantry most of the time, etc. One might almost say that Soviet WW2 doctrine, in many ways, is Brusilov grand infantry assault doctrine as a base, with mech ops added Frunze.

Certainly some of the Brusilov lessons stuck. During Bagratian and Lvov-Sandomirz, talking off the top of my head, inflitration of full infantry battalions into a prepared German defense system was the standard technique.

But as Frunze (and Fuller and Gudarian and all those guys too) recognized, once a static front was broken mechanized forces gave opportunity for decisive results - movement of the front 100s of kilometers in a month, encirclement and annihilation of entire armies. And even if the Soviets had forgotten Frunze, there was the overt German example plain to see: Mass the tanks, get decisive results.

Probably more importantly for the directin of Soviet doctrine during WW2, was the fact that

the Red Army had massive combat experience after WWI, the Russian Civil War and the Polish War. Both were decided, the Polish War not so favorably, by the Soviets' ability to concentrate and apply mass, ruthlessly.

For practical purposes, every senior Soviet officer of WW2 saw that personally.

Certainly mass is a simple recipe, and unquestionably it runs through human lives and machines faster than the actual German example: mass the tanks, but also have every one skilled at combined arms, and make sure smart battlefield decision-making doesn't stop at the field grade level, but gets down to the sergeants.

But if you are the Russian army and not the German army, can you ever fight exactly like the Germans? If you don't try, are you a military incompetent?

[JasonC]

Straw man fallacy. Nobody is talking about fighting like the German army. The retrogression is seeking breakthrough by simply packing more infantry and more gun tubes per km on the attack sectors. It multiplies losses and risks very expensive failure, unnecessarily. If instead the needed tactical preliminaries are followed, losses are reduced and risks lowered. And there is no excuse for paying a million men to learn the same lesson over and over, and still not knowing it by the last month of the war.

(This is not a quote but a rhetorical statement to comment on) - Saying "I can save myself the trouble of thinking or working at all hard, and all it will cost is millions of my countrymen's lives and years of war and risks of failure and defeat" - is not a professional military attitude, it is reckless stupidity and criminal negliance.

As for all the additional factors you mention, sure, every one of them is part of objective military relations as unforgiving as the multiplication table. Other things equal, greater supply is better than less, etc. "We shall decide to find glorious shock-worker advantage in having fewer supplies" will not make it so. Nothing subjective or optional or stylistic about it.

Yes the Russians sometimes prepared an offensive well, and they sometimes sent ahead blinding assault detachments in small numbers to prepare routes with economy of force, etc. But they didn't do it consistently, they also just sent masses of infantry "over the top" without the prep. That is how you rack up an Omaha Beach a day for four straight years, and it is how you lose far more than you inflict even with all the material advantages (cf Berlin).

Nor was it a matter of not having better uses for infantry than to throw them away like that. Infantry won the battle of Moscow, pretty much, exploiting greater resistence to the hardest conditions of weather, wooded terrain, an enemy not keeping a continual front.

Vanilla Russian rifle forces had solid defensive ability at all times, when adequately supplied with ATGs employed in the proper manner, a few independent armor formations (which can be penny packeted for that role).

The same had solid offensive use in pursuits as the broad front component of a mixed threat, with the mech making the enemy want to concentrate on a few avenues. If they stopper those with concentrated blocking forces, the rifle will find gaps a few days later and engulf things, turn positions, etc. If they spread out instead, the mech can readily punch holes.

The same had the additional offensive role of forming pocket walls, first the near sides of them, then relieving the motor rifle on the far sides.

The same had offensive potential in broken-crust situations by the method of night infiltration in battalion strength, through parts of the German line covered only by fire. Also through wide wooded areas or marsh areas in the northern half of the front. It takes continual lines of manned obstacles ("intact crust") to avoid this being a regularly successful and quite cheap tactic.

The same had special offensive uses in bridging situations and in urban fighting, where infiltration methods could be used, prepared where necessary by fire.

The same can keep up continual pressure against a stabilizing line by probing continually, relying on organic (e.g. heavy mortar) fire support to hit everything encountered on each probe, rather than seeking to overwhelm each holdout MG with riflemen.

None of this needs elaborate drill, it is common sense about the things rifle is good at, and readily apparent to any higher commander simply by looking at which tasks they accomplish successfully when ordered to perform them. And which they can do continually, because the losses involved are not ruinous.

What rifle does remarkably poorly is break the crust of an integrated defense long on firepower and short on targets. Massed armor does it remarkably well, rapidly. Since German reaction times with PD reserves are on the order of 48 hours from major attack for entire panzer corps to arrive, you can't afford the lost time in throwing away a division of infantry on the first day each time, any more than it is a sound or economical way to spend said infantry. Which could accomplish 5 times as much in the other uses explained above.

"Well, they did that here, and they did that there, so what is the complaint?" That simply shows they knew how to do it and there is no excuse for not doing it consistently. The butcher bill, on the other hand, comes directly from not doing it consistently, and instead sending regiment after regiment "over the top" into MG and artillery fire they are lousy against.

Combined arms starts with *avoiding* the expensive, perfect-for-the-enemy match-ups. Outsized casualties come from giving them to the enemy every day on several parts of the front. The biggest come from the staff's over-fixation on nose counting to pack the breakthrough sectors. Tank counting and surprise prep would work fine, packing in more warm bodies just makes ccold ones.

[PFMM]

"Professional cannot be made relative to nation or time."

Wrong, so hopelessly wrong.

Your judgements of people are not absolute, it's merely your belief in them.

[jtcm]

All very interesting (and the scenarios look very interesting, too). I'm just a bit puzzled; I'd read earlier posts by JasonC, something like "how to fight like a Russian" or "how the Russian tactical system works", which actually extolled its flexibility, simplicity and effectiveness (notably explaining how tank riders + T-34s make for effective solution at taking apart infy +ATGs based defences). What JasonC seemed to be saying was that the Soviet precisely did not fight with the "Bolshevik hordes" in human wave, but careful tactical solutions (Rifle forces advance, meet HMG fire, hit the ground, call up organic fire support, fight like the dickens to make headway, or not)-- which in fact (I thought) lay at the basis of JasonC's much admired and imitated "attritionist model" as applied by counbtless CMBB battn commanders.

And now... I see JasonC writing in favour of maneuverism; and posting long posts which seem to argue for (historically) human waves machined gunned down while shouting hurrah. What gives, in the end ?

[Cuirassier]

"Wrong, so hopelessly wrong.

Your judgements of people are not absolute, it's merely your belief in them."

Instead of just disagreeing with people on a basis of what seems to be just arbitrary choice, why don't you actually back up your postion like everyone else. If you have something worthwhile to add, then say it. If not, then don't post.

[Der Alte Fritz]

I think that many of us who study the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War, celebrate the successes like the creation of the T-34, the massive offensive power of the Red Army in 1944 with it's tank riders and T-34s and the fact that the Red Army fought and defeated the bulk of the German Army in 1943 while the other Allies were only engaging a small part of the remainder.

Yes tank riders and T-34/85 were a great combination of firepower and mobility. But the life expectancy of a tank rider was very short. A better way to do it would have been to provide the tank riders with APCs but the Russians built tanks in preference to lorries.

Likewise we are horrfied by the toll of death, the chronic disregard for human life shown by the Soviet leadership and the political system. There are lots of examples. Look at the purges of ethnic groups in Russia, where soldiers on the front line were unaware that back home their families had been loaded onto trains and shipped to Siberia with large numbers dying on the way.

Interest and even admiration for some elements of a thing do not necessarily mean support or concurrence for it. I am interested in the Third Reich, would have loved to been a fly on the wall while it took place, but would still want it utterly destroyed.

Anyway, have a go with the scenario, you should find that even with massive artillery support and tanks, you will need to sneak your infantry forward and in the process will take heavy casualties. A new version is due out soon, which will be more difficult.

cheers

[ February 02, 2007, 09:05 AM: Message edited by: Der Alte Fritz ]

[Bigduke6]

I'm a little busy, it'll be a bit before I can kick my next two kopecks in.

[PFMM]

I'm a sucker for Soviet heavy tanks and tank riders, so when a friend suggested this I jumped at the oppertunity.

Overall I enjoyed it and have only a few quibbles.

The briefing was a bit vague with regard to the plan of attack.

Would like to see more use of labels to mark the terrain and tell me which way to go (ie German trenches here, important hill here, exit here and so on).

The Soviet artillery felt a little weak for an attack of this magnitude.

Similarly, I would have liked to see a few more of the heavier SU's present.

My opponent felt there should be more mines, tank trenches and wire for the Germans.

The map seems a bit deeper than required.

Can't desribe it but the setup zones felt odd.

ATRs for the Soviets? An unusual choice to my mind.

Lastly, have you ever consider presenting these sceanrios together as an operation?

Many thanks.

[JasonC]

PFMM is being involuntarily humorous, by stridently exclaiming the objective falsehood of belief in objective truth.

Some early communist theorists claimed that since the laws of economics were merely subjective relations among men, they could just use enough political power to force men to think differently, and write their own new laws of economics. Doesn't remotely work. You pay attention to real scarcities and solve real allocation problems rationally, or they come back and bite you in the backside. You might as readily walk off a cliff in the firm belief that you won't fall unless you believe in gravity.

As for attrition supposedly meaning one endorses straight ahead massed infantry attacks on dug in MGs and registered arty, it is straw man slander and a misrepresentation of attrition theory. The whole point of attrition analysis is that odds always matter, therefore achieved exchange ratios always matter, therefore economy in the use of means for purposes they are best at, is always essential.

It is a person who thinks nothing else matters if he "achieves breakthrough", today, who ignores its cost, not someone who views the entire war through the lense of cost and exchange efficiency.

Attrition analysis means expecting every job to need to be performed, all of them to involve unavoidable loss, and all of them required to be sustained through time. Then means are matched to needs so as to minimize costs for oneself, and maximize them for the enemy. It is an economic attitude at bottom. What do you spend your tanks on? Pretending you aren't spending them is, to attrition analysis, a delusion. But spending them blindly without regard to their "substitution values" and "comparative advantage" at this or that role, is dumb spending.

A tank corps has many abilities, one of them being its ability to slice through a relatively thin infantry front inside 48 hours, with a high chance of success and minimal loss (exchanging off a few heavy PAK on the frontage, modest loss to riders, etc). In doing so, it "saves" an infantry division from getting a third of its combat power smashed for a modest chance of getting a decent start on the same job.

This is only a bad trade if the infantry can't do much of anything useful, otherwise. But it can, as I detailed at length in a previous post. So the best use of the paired forces is to achieve the crust-breaking bit - the hardest part for the rifle - "leaning" on the mech, and then task the rifle as heavily as you please on all its other uses.

Once "through", into broken crust fighting, it is not the mech's role to help the rifle but the other way around.

The Russians had some organizational practices that, properly used, would have allowed this correct division of roles. An attack army - always an infantry army, usually 6 rifle divisions but sometimes as many as 12 - was typically given a single tank corps to support its attack role. On top of a handful of smaller indepedent armor formations. Tank armies, on the other hand, were not so subordinated, and had deeper breakthrough roles.

This would have worked just fine if the assigned tank corps formed the first breakthrough force at a single chosen point. The lesser independent armor is needed to aid the rifle against any reforming of crust etc. A tank army on the other hand, can be introduced 48 hours into the attack, clean, etc.

What they actually typically did instead was have the rifle attack at H-hour with support only from the smaller independent armor formations, penny packeted along the line. Then threw in the army level tank corps at the earliest, afternoon of the first day, and more often, on the second day of the offensive. This was an overcautious use of it and leaned too heavily on the rifle etc.

Now, another fellow wonders what is wrong with massed infantry attacks, given frontal attrition tactics using them. There is nothing wrong with frontal attrition tactics. They are not ruinous, as some pretend. But they have to actually be tactics, and they have to be actually used. Packing a regiment per km on a breakthrough sector and charging at dawn is not frontal attrition tactics. It is higher muckety mucks trying to get something to happen without knowing how it actually does happen, and reaching for the only tool they know they can control - how much stuff is sent to location X before the attack is ordered in.

How frontal attack tactics actually need to happen I have already sketched, explained at length in previous posts, etc. Nowhere is the attempt to run the enemy off his feet in one "go". Nowhere is economy to be abandoned. Nowhere is combined arms to be ignored.

Pathfinder infantry is an economy of force tactic. Packet movement likewise. Slowly picking at a defense is not trying to rush it in one go. Calling down overwatch after going to ground is not charging straight at the enemy shouting hurrah. You can do all of it right, you can also do it wrong.

If you want to see the wrong version in CM, group select on turn 1 and do a single "human wave" all the way to the objective with your first battalion. Wait 20 minutes and then do it again with your second. You will quickly notice that the only thing you are "economizing" is command workload.

The Russian force structure and doctrine are sufficent to do it all right, and they sometimes did, and it won them the war. Russian officers were also not infrequently blockheads who did it wrong instead, and they have the causalty lists to prove it.

[jtcm]

Within the doctrinal choice of sparing armour and leaving the break in to massed infantry, the question becomes to what extent tactics were applied-- whether more infantry attacks were carefully prepared applications of tactics, or dawn human waves-- when, and where ?

[Der Alte Fritz]

Hi jtcm

version 1.1 of the scenario is on its way. Set up zone has been amended, more AT guns, MGs and TH for the Germans, labels on all positions for the Russians. Generally trying to make the defence a bit stiffer without huge increases in forces.

Artillery is weak because the Germans have already been hit by a huge bombardment before the game starts and are already at 60% strength!

Am updating the briefing to be a bit clearer as to objectives.

How many KV1s and SU-122 did you lose?

Does the German front platoon need wire?

At what move did you capture the rear flag on the road to Uman? Do you do it in the time allowed?

thanks for the notes.

cheers

[Andreas]

Time to link 'that' thread again:

How to Attack like a Russian Rifle Corps in 1944

All the best

Andreas

[PFMM]

Der Alte Fritz,

From my side of things I expected to have to push hard and fast, bypassing points of resistance.

I was so concerned with going forward quickly that my opponent was able to spring ambushes on me, and I lost three KVs, another immobilised and one or two SUs knocked out in quick succession. Despite this I was able to overwhelm his main point of resistance and move on.

As to the flag, I thought this scenario was about exiting? In any case I was too cautious and blew my oppertunity doing neither.

My opponent felt that after his cover was blown he was reduced to crawling around trying to get at my main force. He would have liked more ability to channel them.

I would have liked more artillery to suppress any potential points of resistance that I'd have to bypass. Maybe some conscript heavy artillery that the Soviets would advance behind might be interesting. It's a long map after all.

Will try to give the new scenario a try next weekend.

[jtcm]

Thinking about it some more, I think what puzzled me about JasonC's post was the possible conflation between two points:

A. Doctrinally / theoretically, is it better to effect break in of continuously held MLR with tank force or with Rifle Battns in frontal assault ? — JasonC seems to hold the former, on various grounds (timing of counter stroke); Rifle better for myriad other duties, notably infilitration and flooding MLRs with gaps. etc.

B. Historically, break-ins with Rifle assets in the assault role were often badly executed, and hence jeopardized the whole sequence of the assault anyway. But it doesn't have to be this way; and (as discussed in earlier threads) all the elements are there for effective use of this sort of force (pathfinders who use stealth, grenades and "balls of brass", to quote a memorable JasonC post; follow up elements with organic heavy weapons, attacking in column. I seem to remember that the Russians fight increasingly well with this sort of assets, from 1943 onwards.

Will look at "that" thread again.

[JasonC]

Yes, that is how infantry attacks. And certainly, infantry attacks for a living, among other tasks. But when you can hit a single unsuspecting infantry regiment with 100 tanks at once, you can save yourself hundreds to thousands of men. Why wouldn't you?

The original question is a perfectly just one. With a sound military system, solid equipment, overall odds, and excellent operational direction at the highest levels, what excuse is there for the outsized losses the Russians actually took, in the offensive second half of the war? No, this scale of losses was not a necessary result of their enemy or their force structure or any unsoundness in their doctrine, at its best.

But the losses are there. And the reason for them isn't hard to find - unimaginative tactics instead of the sound ones the system was capable of. Sometimes they did it right, sometimes they did it right the third time, and sometimes they did it wrong. Those result in moderately favorable losses, moderately unfavorable losses, and outsized unfavorable losses. Add them all up and you get "unfavorable", because the last is all too common and the first not at all the norm.