Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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mark was ignored. Raus was relieved of his command. (Gu-

derian, 1952, 420-21)

The fundamental disunity of the Reich was also evident in

matters of organisation. Competition for authority and re-

sources was shown in the lack of coordination in the devel-

opment of weapons, the hoarding of ammunition and fuel, and

the tardy and broken-backed mobilisation for Total War in 1944.

Likewise the dissensions between Party and Wehrmacht were

responsible for the lack of effective defence in depth on the

Eastern Front, and for the deaths or needless misery of millions

of civilian refugees.

When the Reich neared its end, it became clear that leaders

had been fighting for different 'Germanies.' On the one side

the moral contagion of those closest to the Nazi system became

unmistakable. Field-Marshal Schörner, and those brown-jack-

eted heaps of filth the Gauleiters Greiser, Schwede-Coburg,

Koch and Hanke were unsparing of the lives of others as long

as there was a Nazi order to defend, and they then attended

with great speed to their own safety. In contrast, Germany was

honoured by the devotion of men like Hossbach, Reinhardt,

von Tettau, von Saucken, Lasch, von Ahlfen, von Niehoff and

many others, who proved that human responsibility could still

be reconciled with soldierly duty.

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

308

APPENDIX

The Conduct of War:

Soviet Science and

German Art

The Soviet Style

The Evolution of Soviet Mechanised Warfare

IT IS UNFORTUNATE that nobody has come up with a neater term

than 'blitzkrieg' to apply to a style of war which is familiar to

every student of twentieth-century military history. Blitzkrieg

is an offensive way of fighting, which uses the combined efforts

of tanks, mechanised infantry, mobile artillery and combat en-

gineers, and calls on the greatest possible close air support.

Concentration of force and a brief but intensive application of

firepower secures breakthroughs on one or more narrow sec-

tors, after which the emphasis shifts to fast-moving operations

in great depth. Victory is attained as much through achieving

psychological disruption as through inflicting physical damage.

The great disadvantage of the word 'blitzkrieg' is that it sug-

gests that the Germans were the sole pioneers and practitioners

of mechanised warfare in the second quarter of the twentieth

century, whereas in fact the Soviets proceeded at least as fast

on parallel lines.

Russian-built tanks were first shown to the public on Red

Square on 23 January 1923, which was the fourth anniversary

of the Red Army. However, the origins of Soviet mechanised

warfare are not to be found in the tank forces as such, but in

the notion of the 'interworking' (vzaimodeistvie) of infantry and

artillery, which was explored by General (later Field-Marshal)

Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevskii and two associates (M. N.

Tukhacheveskii, N. E. Varfolomeev, E. A. Shilovskii Armeiskaya

Operatsiya, Leningrad, 1926). This essential principle of com-

bining the action of the various arms was expressed in a ru-

313

dimentary way in the Field Service Regulations 1929 (Polevoi Ustav

R.K.K.A. 1929, or PU-29 for short).

In the Soviet version of mechanised warfare derived from a

collective effort on the part of the Operational Faculty of the

Frunze Military Academy, and the Operational Directorate of

the General Staff under V. K. Triandafillov. The various no-

tions, as they emerged, were put to the test in field exercises

and command staff games, which did much to obviate the gap

between theory and practice which plagued the development

of armoured warfare in the West.

Having established the basic 'combined arms' principle, the

Soviets studied how it was to be applied at the grand tactical

level in the 'deep battle' (glubokii boi). From there they moved

onto 'deep operations' (glubokaya operatsiya) at the army and

army-group level. They knew that European Russia was open

to new forms of mechanised attack, and in 1933 the chief of

staff, E. I. Egorov, reported to the Revolutionary War Council

that it was technically possible for an invader to penetrate up

to six hundred kilometres, disrupting the Soviet mobilisation,

overrunning military bases, and seizing economically important

regions. The Soviet answers were expressed in the Instructions

for the Deep Battle (Instruktsii po glubokomu boiyu, 1935), and in

the very significant PU-36. The preferred option in both pub-

lications was offensive, and PU-36 enshrined principles which

remained unchanged for years to come.

The first task was to 'achieve the simultaneous destruction

of the whole enemy deployment to its full defensive depth'

(Kir'yan, 1982, 116). Wide sectors of the enemy frontage were

to be amused and held down by the weak forces of the 'pinning

group' (skovyvayushchaya gruppa), while at least two-thirds of

the combat strength was focussed in the 'shock group' (udarnaya

gruppa), where the Russians concentrated up to forty tanks per

kilometre. These machines were mainly the tanks of the Direct

Support Group (Gruppa NPP), which worked in close associ-

ation with the infantry, artillery and air forces to break through

the enemy tactical zone of defence.

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

314

The second phase was exploiting into the open country in

the enemy rear, which was carried out by mechanised infantry,

horsed cavalry and the tanks of the Group for Further Oper-

ations (Gruppa DD).

The essentials of Soviet mechanised warfare were now com-

plete. There followed, however, a period of disruption which

extended for six or more years. This was partly the result of

the Great Purge of 1937-38, which eliminated Marshal Tukha-

chevskii along with 35,000 fellow officers, and partly a conse-

quence of misguided reorganisations of the mechanised forces

which were ordered in November 1939, July 1940 and February

1941. Communist armour fared disappointingly in the Spanish

Civil War and in Poland in 1939, and downright disastrously

during the first period of the Great Patriotic War.

Old principles now had to be rediscovered or extended, and

they were enshrined in the draft PU-41 and the fully fledged

PU-44. In general, the Soviets learned to strike a better balance

between the tanks and the infantry in their key formations, and

they relied more and more on artillery to make up for the

declining quality of their manpower:

We saw a well-organised artillery as the embodiment of

our army's power. We held that whatever we would do with

gunpower rather than the bayonet would be to our great

advantage and would safeguard our troops against superflu-

ous losses. Hence we should spare neither time nor effort in

preparing the artillery attack. In the final analysis, if we

looked at it from the moral point of view, such work was,

under war conditions, a specific expression of concern for

the human being in the highest sense in which the words

'concern for the human being' are at all compatible with the

word 'war.' (Konev, 1969, 10-11)

* * *

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

315

Soviet Organisation in 1945

Fronts

Soviet 'Fronts' were the equivalent of Western army groups—

literally, groupings of ten or so armies which could reach a

combined strength of about 1 million men. For the Vistula-Oder

Operation the 1st Ukrainian Front and the 1st Belorussian Front

formed what was in effect a double Front attacking on the same

axis, and they comprised 2.2 million troops, 33,500 field guns

and heavy mortars, over 7,000 tanks and assault guns, and

5,000 tactical aircraft (see p. 24).

Tank and Mechanised Formations

Tank Armies

The main exploitation force of the Fronts was concentrated in

the tank armies (Konev and Zhukov had two each in 1945). The

first Soviet tank armies began to appear in May 1943, but they

soon took a tremendous battering, for they were weak in ar-

tillery and the component rifle troops were not properly inte-

grated with the armoured forces. By January 1945, however,

the establishment of the individual tank armies had risen by

one-third in personnel, about twice over in tanks and assault

guns, and four times in towed artillery. The tank army was

now a well-balanced mechanised force, which normally in-

cluded two or three corps of tanks, and a single corps of me-

chanised infantry. This produced

35,000-50,000 troops

500 (two tank corps) or 900 (three tank corps) tanks

850 artillery pieces and mortars.

The mechanised infantry travelled in trucks or on top of the

tanks, and their role was never more important than towards

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

316

the end of the war, when they helped the tanks to winkle out

parties of Panzerfaust-armed German infantry in broken or

built-up terrain.

It was the infantry component which enabled the Fourth

Tank Army to batter its way a short distance into the heavily

industrialised region of Upper Silesia in the spring of 1945. This

army was already 'infantry heavy,' since it had just one corps

of tanks (X Guards) to partner its corps of infantry (VI Guards

Mechanised), but Lelyushenko was delighted to receive an ad-

ditional corps of infantry (V Guards Mechanised) on 24 March:

I had long striven to obtain a third corps, for the army, but

it was particularly fortunate that it was a [further] corps of

mechanised infantry which was added to our establishment.

This increased the general military effectiveness of the army,

but especially its capacity as regards artillery, mechanised

infantry and tanks. Two mechanised corps and one tank

corps—in my view that was the most advantageous organ-

isation for a tank army at that time. (Lelyushenko, 1970,

306-7)

Tank Corps

Lelyushenko's comment reminds us of a central principle of

blitzkrieg—that the Russian tank and mechanised formations

all comprised a mixture of tanks and mechanised infantry; it

was just the weighting of the two elements which was different.

Tank corps (usually to the number of two or three) were an

important ingredient of tank armies, as we have seen, but under

enterprising leaders they were capable of acting as miniature

armies in their own right, thrusting and weaving well ahead

of the main body of the first echelon (wave) of the Soviet armies.

This degree of independent life would have been unthinkable

without the brigade of mechanised infantry being at hand to

support the three brigades of tanks. A tank corps numbered

approximately

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

317

11,700 troops

220 tanks

40 assault guns

152 towed artillery pieces and mortars, and eight BM-13 Ka-

tyusha multiple-rocket launchers.

Mechanised Corps

The mechanised corps was almost as fast and useful as the tank

corps. Its organisation was a mirror image of the latter, for it

was made up of three brigades of mechanised infantry and one

tank brigade. The following figures show in addition the im-

portance of the artillery component:

16,000 troops

180 tanks

60 assault guns

252 artillery pieces and mortars, and eight Katyushas.

Tank Brigades

These little entities were highly versatile. As well as working

directly with the parent tank corps, they could find themselves

detached to all-arms (i.e. rifle) divisions, corps or even armies.

Tank army commanders also liked to employ them as personal

reserves, and they were particularly fond of packaging them

with supporting forces and sending them forth as the fighting

advance guards ('forward detachments'; see p. 340) of the army.

In 1945 the tank brigade was formed of three battalions of tanks

and one of mechanised infantry, and held

1,354 troops

65 tanks.

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

318