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Development
and Employment of Soviet Armor Tactics Prior to and During the Great Patriotic
War
Endnotes and Bibliography located at
bottom of page 2
At three o’clock in the morning, on June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa,
the German offensive against Russia, was launched. At the International
Bridge on the Russo-German frontier in eastern Poland, German sentries
simply gunned down their Russian counterparts instead of saluting
them, opening the way for the greatest military excursion in history.
Advancing along a two thousand-mile front, the offensive involved
over three million soldiers, seven hundred and fifty thousand horses,
and nearly two thousand planes--on the German side alone. The Russians
were over four and a half million men strong along the frontier but
were caught completely off guard and unprepared.
Stalin, believing that reports of invasion were faulty, misconstrued,
or a misunderstanding, went so far as to order Russian soldiers not to
fire upon their German "allies". Even after the order had been
countermanded, and the Germans met resistance, the Wermacht easily rolled
across western Russia. The initial German success, though partially due
to complete operational surprise, is largely contributable to Germany’s
early superiority in the field of armored warfare. The battle hardened
and experienced Panzer force, over three and a half thousand strong, overwhelmed
and annihilated the weak Soviet armored force, and displayed general dominance
over the Red Army. The Soviets, realizing that effective tank warfare
would be essential to slow, let alone stop the Germans, began emphasizing
and overhauling armor strategy, tactics, and operations. The stressing
of armor, the high quality of Russian tanks, and the eventual skill of
the Soviet armored force were perhaps the greatest factors that contributed
to Germany's defeat.
Soviet theoreticians, through their analysis of World War I and
the Russian Civil War, gained a strong appreciation for the role of
maneuver and firepower on the modern battlefield. They realized that
"the decisive weapons in future wars would be tanks, artillery, and
aircraft."1 With the advent of the first mechanized mobile
armies, Soviet theoreticians "called for the creation of powerful,
highly mobile mechanized forces that could strike the entire depth
of enemy dispositions."2 As early as the 1920s, the Red
Army realized that mechanized mobilization would be one of the deciding
factors in contemporary warfare. Unfortunately, the backwards Soviet
economy was in no way able to produce armored vehicles, due to the
great lack of established heavy industry. Even so, they began to plan
for the use of, and possible defenses against, armored vehicles.
Before the rapid industrialization of the Five-Year Plans, Soviet
industry, as far as military production was concerned, was impotent.
Steel and other materials vital to the military were so scarce that
an attempt to build up any sort of mechanized force would have been
laughable. However, due to the preliminary planning of Soviet strategists,
in spite of being
constrained by equipment . . . the Red Army in the late 1920’s
possessed the theoretical groundwork to realize a combat concept
of deep operations centered upon a future Soviet tank and mechanized
force.3 |
Therefore, when heavy industry began its astronomical increase in
output, the Soviet military was prepared to reap the benefits of
industrialization. In fact, one of the central goals of the 1929
Five-Year Plan was to dramatically increase the Red Army’s technological
force: namely tanks, aircraft, and artillery.
In the early to mid thirties, with the success of the Five-Year
Plans, the Soviet military not only grew, but modernized as well.
Russia experienced a period of dramatic military change from 1931
to 1937. In addition to shifting away from reliance upon militias
to establishing a standing professional army, great technological
advancements were made in the army, especially in the field of mobile
warfare. Strangely, though the Soviets adapted modern machines into
their armies, their tactics did not change to accommodate the new,
supposedly decisive weapons.
Rooted in Napoleonic ideals, the Soviet perception of war was one
of decisive battle and complete destruction of the enemy. These ideals
had been outdated even before the American Civil War, nearly eighty
years earlier. Since the 1860s, warfare had undergone radical change,
outdating the ideals even further. One can not blame the Soviets for
their backwardness, however, because even after the harsh lessons
of World War I, much of Europe remained bogged in archaic Napoleonic
ideals. It is rather interesting, because though Soviet strategists
had the foresight to see that mobile warfare would become the dominant
force on the battlefield, they failed to incorporate tactics that
would allow armor to reign. Instead, the tank was viewed more as "mobile
artillery" which would lend close support to the infantry. Once the
Red Army realized the true nature and potential of armor, after the
first major armored field maneuvers in 1936, this misappropriation
began to fade.
In the 1936 maneuvers, Soviet strategists and tacticians affirmed
the "‘great mobility, strong firepower and great striking force,’"4
of tanks, and realized that their current tactics were such that the
full potential of armored warfare could not be realized. The great
power of armor and combined arms, once assimilated into the military,
would allow the Red Army to create breakthroughs in enemy lines. The
capability to create holes in the enemy line would subsequently allow
the Soviets to pursue "deep operations".5 A true combined
arms theory, the idea of deep operations lent great importance to
armor, though the primary role of tanks was still to support the infantry.
By "deep operations," the Soviets meant that a great breakthrough
would be created in the enemy line, through which great numbers of
tanks and mechanized infantry would be pushed. These forces would
then attempt to destroy not only front line enemy forces, but the
opponent’s operational and strategic reserves as well.
This more armor-friendly policy became the central strategy of the
Red Army in the mid 1930’s. Before any real implementation of deep
operations could come about, however, Stalin instituted his great
purge of the military, in which he executed the cream of the officer
corps. The deaths of nearly all of the military officers crippled
the Red Army not only through the obvious loss of leadership and morale,
but in a way that greatly affected the "deep operations" plan and
its implementation as well. By executing nearly every officer with
experience in the conducting of modern battle, Stalin set the Red
Army back years, especially in the field of armor and mobile warfare.
The creators of the deep operations plan were executed, named traitors,
and their ideas were labeled traitorous as well. "The concept of independent
actions of large mechanized units ahead of the front was called an
attempt to sabotage the armed forces."6 The Soviets accordingly
returned the use of armor to infantry support and abolished the deep
operations plan.
The role of armor in the Red Army was further retarded by Soviet
involvement in the Spanish Civil War. The performance of the inept
Soviet forces, no match for the elite German army, convinced the Soviet
high command that mechanized corps were wholly ineffective. In actuality,
it was Soviet men, and not Soviet machines, that were ineffective.
This faulty dismissal of armor’s tactical value led the high command
to abolish all armored corps and sent the Red Army even further into
the past. Though still the second largest standing army in the world
(behind the Chinese) the Red Army became so antiquated that, by the
late 1930s, it was no longer the Herculean military machine it had
once been.
In September of 1939, the Soviets recognized their blunder. Unfortunately,
the realization came much too late. The astonishing success of German
armored units in the invasion of Poland, and Russian travails in Finland
shocked the Red Army and caused it to hastily begin reorganization
of armored corps. In addition, frantic efforts were made to produce
new, improved weaponry, with an emphasis on tanks and anti-tank guns.
Again, though technology was being incorporated into the army, tactics
to fit the modernization were not forthcoming. Instead, tanks were
again forced into infantry support roles, though not to as great a
degree as before. At the same time that the Soviet military was beginning
to inch toward tank warfare, the Red Army made the solid decision
to stress the medium, instead of the light or heavy tank. The decision
to move back to armored mechanization, combined with the decision
to emphasize medium tanks, was one of the primary factors that saved
Soviet Russia from Nazi Germany.
The medium tank combines the speed, mobility, and range of the light
tank with the firepower of the heavy tank, creating a lethal hybrid
of speed and power. The Russian T34, a medium tank, was arguably the
greatest tank of World War II. Though the early T34/76 was foolishly
built without coaxially mounted machine guns, making it ineffective
at close quarters against infantry, the later T34/85, complete with
machine guns, was highly effective in all situations, even against
the feared German "Tiger" heavy tank. The success of the T34 helped
promote the use of armor as a weapon in and of itself, instead of
as a mere infantry aid. Once the role of armor was established properly,
with the aid of the T34 and other positive factors, the Red Army would
regain power in proportion to its size, instead of drawing ineffective
power from the sheer immensity of the Soviet military machine. The
return to mechanized mobilization, however, took time--time that neither
the Soviet Union nor the Red Army had.
When Germany launched the 1941 invasion of Russia, the Wermacht
at first met with remarkable success. The highly experienced and mechanized
German army simply overwhelmed the unprepared and technologically
obsolete Soviet forces. As one German general put it, "The tactical
superiority of our Panzer divisions was fully demonstrated."7
The Red Army, in the process of making the transition to mobilized
mechanization, was still primarily an army of infantrymen, with relatively
few tanks or anti-tank weapons. In the face of tanks, infantrymen
without anti-tank weapons or tank support become little more than
targets for the metal monsters. Since the Red Army was primarily composed
of infantrymen, with only a handful of ineffective tanks, and few
anti-tank weapons, the armor laden German army had few difficulties
in fighting the Soviets.
The few armored vehicles that the Russians had present on the front
proved ineffective for various reasons. First of all, the Russian tanks
were somewhat outdated, and completely outmatched in comparison to the
German tanks. Secondly, the tank crews had been trained not to combat
other tanks, but to provide support to infantry. This vast disparity between
training and reality deeply hindered Soviet performance. Finally, the
swarming German armor vastly outnumbered the Russian tanks.
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The late, abrupt effort to reorganize caught
mechanized units in a debilitating expansion with relatively hollow
formations. The tank division was no more than a tank brigade;
the tank brigade, no more than a battalion. . . . The Red Army
entered the war without fully formed mechanized units and without
experience in the use of such troops.8
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Copyright
© 1994-2005 Stephen Payne
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