Part I: England
Part II: Germany

Before I begin this segment, I would like to recognize the assistance of Charles Sharp. Although he didn't have anything to do with the writing Of it, I've been picking his brains for twenty-five years. Much of what I've learned about the Soviet Army had its beginnings in long conversations over beer at game cons etc. for a good deal of those two-and-ahalf decades.

Military development in the Soviet Union took a different path from the rest of Europe. There were two reasons for this. First, the Red Army wasn't created until 1918, 'aftero the Bolshevik revolution. It therefore lacked the traditions and training of other major armies. Many of its commanders had been NCO's or junior officers in WWI. Few senior Tsarist officers remained with the new regime, and those who did were generally suspected of anti- Bolshevik sympathies. This resulted in a Red Army open to innovation, unhampered by excessive tradition or established doctrines. It also allowed for serious blunders based simply on the ignorance of inexperience.

Second, the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) was remarkably different from most of the European campaigns in WWI. Under-strength armies fought over vast distances. Penetration and encirclement were comparatively easy. Fluid maneuver became the rule rather than the exception. Partly because of this, the elite Soviet force was Marshal Budenny's 1st Cavalry Army, famed for the sort of encirclement and pursuit battles that these conditions dictated. This veteran force also had a patron: Joseph Stalin! Stalin had been commissar of the next higher headquarters to this army. As a result, many of its officers rose to senior positions both before and during WWII.

Like Germany, but unlike France and Britain, the Soviet Union was openly interested in offensive warfare. Part of the policy of international Communism in its early years was the spread of its philosophy through wars of "National Liberation' (Conquest) throughout Europe. As a matter of practicality, Stalin chose to concentrate on developing the Soviet Union before expanding into the rest of Europe.

The Red Army, however, could still expect any future war to be offensive in nature. This orientation was further reinforced by the close relationship that existed between the Red Army and the German Army that existed between 1923 and 1932. Soviet officers studied in Germany, while the Germans secretly manufactured and tested tanks, aircraft, and poison gas in European Russia. This is not to say that Soviet doctrine was dependent in any way on similar developments in Germany. Soviet concepts became official state policy long before Guderian gained even partial recognition and approval from his government.

During the 1920's and early 1930's, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and a group of like-minded Soviet officers developed a concept called "Deep Battle". This employed conventional infantry and cavalry divisions, mechanized formations, and aviation units in concert. The result was the "Field Regulations" of 1936. The infantry was no longer to be the premier combat arm. "Deep Battle" envisioned all available arms and weapons systems working together in a two-part battle.

In the first phase a massed echeloned attack on a narrow front would rupture the defender's conventional infantry-artillery-anti-tank defense. The attacker's artillery and mortars would suppress defending artillery and especially antitank weapons. Moving behind the artillery barrage and a few meters in front of the infantry, the tanks would safely crush barbed wire, overrun machinegun posts, and reduce centers of enemy resistance. Once the enemy's forward defenses were disrupted, accompanying tanks would not be tied strictly to the infantry's rate of advance, but could take advantage of opportunities to attack enemy reserves, artillery positions, headquarters and supply dumps.

The ensuing chaos would signal the onset of the second phase. "Mobile Groups", composed of cavalry, mechanized formations or both, would exploit their mobility to outflank the enemy or develop any penetration in order to reach deep into the enemy rear. The idea was to attack the full depth of the enemy defenses simultaneously, with conventional frontal attacks, long range artillery fire and tactical air attacks, deep penetrations by mobile forces, and bombing and parachute attacks on key points. Smoke screens, diversionary attacks, deliberate misinformation, and other deception operations would distract the enemy from the true objective.

This doctrine was remarkably sophisticated and difficult to implement, but the necessary force structure was well on its way to completion by 1937. Using the expanded production facilities of the Soviet's first Five Year Plan with design features taken, in part, from the American inventor J. Walter Christie, the Soviets produced 5,000 armored vehicles by 1934. This figure comes from "The Creation and Development of Tank Troop Tactics in the Pre-War Period" (A. Ryazanskiy 1966), and independent sources verify this figure.

This wealth of equipment enabled the Red Army to create tank organizations for both infantry support and combined arms- mechanized operations. Virtually all rifle divisions had a tank company, or even a full battalion, attached to them, with a full regiment (approx. 190 tanks) in each horse cavalry division. It was as early as 1930 that the Red Army began the experiment with integrating all arms into functional mechanized groups at the battalion and brigade levels (and sometimes even higher).

Organization changed rapidly with the evolution of equipment and techniques and it would take an enormous amount of space to illustrate these. The four "mechanized" corps of 1935 were actually small armored divisions. They were almost all tanks. By the end of the 1930's, the "Tank Corps" was increasingly large and "tank heavy", but still integrated essential combat arms at a relatively low level.

Problems

But there were problems! Soviet doctrine was so ambitious that not all units could be fully equipped. This meant that real integration of all weapons in training and true standardization of tactics was impossible. The average Soviet citizen had little or no experience with motor vehicles. This meant maintenance was always a problem. Soviet radios proved to be notoriously unreliable. This made cohesive movement and control of this mass of moving vehicles a command nightmare. The Soviets spared no effort in scheduling major exercises throughout the 1930's, but they still needed several more years of experimentation and training before the full potential of their doctrine could be realized. Time ran out!

On June 12th, 1937, Tukhachevsky and eight of his top ranking assistants were executed. Over the next four years over 20% of the Soviet officer corps, were either imprisoned or themselves executed in the greatest massacre of an army by its own government to ever occur. This included the majority of commanders at regimental and higher levels.

Thus, at the same time the Red Army was expanding to meet the threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it lost its most experienced planners and leaders. The "Peter" principle took effect as the politically reliable survivors were promoted beyond their capacity, with disastrous results on unit development and tactics.

At this same time, Soviet experience in the Spanish Civil War caused further reassessments in mechanization theory. D. Pavlov, chief of tank troops, had served in Spain. He came back pessimistic. Soviet tanks were too lightly armored, and in combat they tended to leave the infantry and artillery behind. Pavlov believed the new mechanized formations were too unwieldy, and would have a hard time penetrating enemy defenses in order to conduct "Deep Battle". Pavlov's conclusions were based on the use of fifty tanks at the battle of Esquivas with no chance of surprise. This didn't seem to prevent him from generalizing from his experience!

In his defense, many observers from other armies reached the same conclusions based on the same limited experience.

Pavlov's reports were partially responsible for a review of tank force organization by Gen. Kulik in 1939. There were few advocates for large mechanized formations - they were dead or in prison! The commission directed the partial dismantling of such units, and a re- emphasis of direct infantry support. A bright spot in all this was the emergence of the new "Motorized" division of 1939, which may have been a response to German armored success in Poland and the Soviet success against the Japanese in that same year. Fifteen motorized divisions were planned, with the first four created by 1940. They represented a more well-rounded organization than the tank corps they replaced.

Shambles

In spite of this reorganization, the Red Army was a shambles. It failed to occupy a defeated Poland effectively in 1939, and failed to rapidly defeat Finland in 1939-40. These failures prompted further reforms. All this was combined with the success of the Far Eastern Army, which was the last to feel the effects of the Stalin purge. The training and command structure of this army was still intact when hostilities against the Japanese erupted in the summer of 1939. To the utter surprise of the Japanese, the Soviets were able to mass 469 light tanks, 426 other AFVs, 679 guns and mortars and over 500 aircraft far from the nearest railway. They accomplished this using a shuttle system that brought together thousands of trucks to bring supplies over terrain the Japanese considered impassible to wheeled transport.

This Soviet force, under G. Zhukov, out-maneuvered, out- thought, and, in the end, out-fought the Japanese using probing attacks- to locate strongpoints, artillery and airpower concentrations to reduce them, and flanking maneuvers to unhinge the Japanese line and inflict a serious drubbing on them. The doctrine of "Deep Battle" had been vindicated and would prove its worth later in the struggle to expel the Nazis from Soviet soil.

More Combined Arms

Part I: England
Part II: Germany
Part III: Soviet Russia
Part IV: USA