III. Development of Russian Offensive Tactics

The Russians carried out their first preconceived large-scale offensive in the severe winter of 1941-42 in the Moscow area. It was well thought out, and cleverly exploited the detrimental effect which the muddy period and the onset of winter had on the striking power of the German Army, unprepared as it was for winter warfare. This offensive marked the turning point in the Eastern Campaign; it did not, however, decide it, as the Russians had expected it to do. Therefore, it did not achieve the intended purpose.

According to the Russian fighting method the mass attack was supposed to shatter the German front. Units penetrating and infiltrating through the lines were to cut off the supply lines.

The German front was not yet ready for defense when frost set in. Some sectors were still fluid. The solidly frozen ground and the exceedingly heavy snowfalls precluded the methodical construction of a defensive position. Taking advantage of the dusky weather and the blizzards, the first waves of Russians, clad in white camouflage coats, worked their way close to the German positions without being detected. Wave after wave, driven on by the commissars, surged against the German lines. At that time the Russians knew nothing about methodical preparation for an attack by concentrated fire of heavy weapons and artillery, or by the employment of massed tanks.

When the attacks continually failed and enormous losses were incurred, the Russians changed to infiltration tactics. Forces capable of rapid movement were generally used for this purpose. Tanks and ski units were preferred when the terrain permitted their use. Except for a few local reconnaissance thrusts, the Russians regularly attacked on a broad front. They always assembled far superior forces for those attacks. Cooperation between the different arms of the service improved noticeably. It was patterned after German offensive tactics. Russian methods of attack were subjected to many changes as a result of war experiences. In 1941-42 the Russians always resorted to mass attacks after bringing up strong reserves. Thus, for example, they repeated their attacks in the same place against the Fourth Army for weeks at a time during the so-called Battles of the Rollbahn (express motor highway, in this case the Minsk-Moscow road) near Smolensk between 21 October and 4 December. Cooperation between the various infantry weapons likewise was imperfect. Attacks on German unit boundaries, which the Russians always sought and usually detected, were dangerous. Artillery support was active, but as yet often without a definite fire plan.

The year 1943 brought a definite change in the method of attack. Concentrated artillery fires were employed more frequently and supplemented by massed mortar attacks. The Russians tried to infiltrate through known German weak points. For this purpose they preferred forest areas or hollows previously designated by the tactical command. If they succeeded in infiltrating by this system, they immediately entrenched themselves and laid mines. Subsequently, a period of vulnerability set in because the artillery and heavy weapons were brought up slowly, and cooperation with them ceased abruptly.

The employment of massed tanks brought about a revolutionary change in Russian tactics in 1944. After a drum fire of artillery, a large number of tanks led off the attack, followed by the infantry in deep wedges. While the artillery gave good support at first, communications with it frequently broke off during a further advance. To the very end of the war it was difficult for the Russians to coordinate fire and movement. The penetrations were deep, and invariably in a straight line. Then a halt was called in order to bring up the greatest possible number of infantry during the night. These masses of infantry dug in as soon as they reached the points of the attack. The assault wedges closed up in echelons behind the tanks.

Since the German counterattacks were usually launched when the enemy infantry was separated from its tanks, the Russians began in 1945 to make deep thrusts with infantry riding on tanks. These thrusts often went so deep that contact with the main forces was lost. The Russians were able to take the risk because the German front of 1945 no longer had adequate reserves available to destroy the far-advanced, strong enemy forces.

Though the Russians built field fortifications whenever they halted it did not follow that they had plans of attacking. The Russian always dug in. The time to be suspicious came only when a gradual sapping toward the German lines into a jump-off position for an assault could be noted in connection with their entrenchment activities. That usually meant preparation for attack. Recognized preparations behind a front sector did not necessarily indicate an attack at that particular point. Surprise attacks were launched by skillfully and quickly shifting attack forces to the planned assembly area during the course of one night. Numerous reconnaissance thrusts, supported by artillery and tanks, and conducted on a broad front both by day and night in strength up to a regiment, were to procure information for an attack and to confuse or deceive the Germans as to the time and place of the attack. Movement behind the front, even at night, was not necessarily followed by an attack. The Soviets were very skillful in the use of feints, sham installations, and dummy matériel of all types. Evaluation of artillery observation data, often painstakingly carried on for weeks, and constant interrogation of prisoners, whose statements were checked by German reconnaissance operations, produced reliable evidence of an impending attack. The Russians often cleverly concealed a projected assembly of their artillery by extraordinary emplacement activity and by a highly mobile employment of roving guns and batteries. They were also very cautious about fire for registration whenever it was not executed for purposes of deception.

Not until later did the Russians make extensive use, in the attack, of artillery fire based on mathematical computation. Despite all their efforts to conceal their true intentions, however, the pattern of enemy artillery activity, carefully worked out day by day, still revealed very reliable clues as to impending enemy attacks. The Germans could often observe that a few days before an attack the enemy moved about as little as possible by day or night, and that his combat activity decreased noticeably, until suddenly the attack was launched out of a clear sky.

Secondary attacks and feints were often launched at the same time as the main attack in order to make the assault front appear as broad as possible, and at the same time cause the Germans to split up their defense forces. In the summer of 1943, the Russians used smoke on a broad front while carrying out attacks across the Donets. This concealed preparations and denied observation to the Germans. At that time the Russians incurred severe losses. The German XXX Infantry Corps repulsed all attacks and attempts to cross the Donets by immediately concentrating the fire of all heavy weapons straight into the smoke. At that time the Russians still were very inexperienced in the use of smoke and did not use dummy smoke screens. Likewise, they failed to understand the principle of laying a smoke screen over German observers in order to blind them. At that time, too, the Russians did not necessarily carry out their attacks with artillery preparation. When they did, their artillery, massed into points of main effort, laid a rigid concentration on infantry positions, battery positions, towns, and road junctions. During the artillery preparation the infantry worked its way forward into the jump-off position by infiltration, and from that point made a mass advance. When the first objective, which was still within range of the supporting artillery, was reached, a long halt was called since the Russians were not in a position to displace their artillery and heavy weapons forward in a manner that would allow a continuous forward thrust. The infantry immediately dug in and felt its way forward only by combat reconnaissance. During the halts, the infantry had to rely almost exclusively on local support from accompanying tanks and mortars. The Russian heavy mortar battalions (probably 120-mm.) were an ideal direct-support artillery for infantry. However, they also were too slow for continuous support of the infantry in an attack. The infantry-support tanks acted very cautiously and fought more in the manner of self-propelled assault guns, or like armored artillery pieces of the infantry.

Even at the beginning of the Eastern Campaign the Russian infantry was very clever at utilizing terrain features. If the Russians could not continue their current main attacks with the desired success by day, they proceeded to launch local attacks at night. In that case, they either launched sudden mass attacks, or infiltrated at many points through the German lines which for the most part were lightly manned. Thus, in a night attack on the 97th Light Infantry Division in the winter of 1941, they broke through east of Artemovsk in the Donets Basin with an entire cavalry division. However, the next day this division was cut down to the last man. Also in the battle of encirclement at Uman in 1941, and at Beli - southeast of Toropets - in November 1942, thousands of Russian soldiers without equipment or heavy weapons penetrated the German lines during hours of darkness by piecemeal infiltration. Well-prepared night attacks were rare.

Low-flying aircraft, supporting the main efforts, picked as their principal targets the defending infantry, batteries, reserves, supplies, and villages in the divisional combat sectors. The attack planes did not venture far into the rear area.

In order to develop the war of position into mobile warfare later in the Eastern Campaign, the Red Army command concentrated its forces, which were numerically far superior to those of the Germans, into more and more powerful masses at the points of main effort and, after heavy artillery concentrations, broke through or sent the German front reeling. The Russian command attempted to conceal strategic preparations for large-scale attacks from German reconnaissance, and therefore carried them out only at night. Preparations could thus be detected only by night aerial reconnaissance. Night truck transport operations on a grand scale (2,000 to 3,000 trucks in each direction in the course of one night), which usually took place shortly before a large-scale attack, were the first reliable indication of an imminent Russian offensive.

Russian Combat Methods: IV. The Use of Armor
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