H&L Barrikady, second historical module

[asl3d]

Barrikady is the second Historical Module for Heroes and Leaders mod.
The historical context is sited in the Battle of Stalingrad (autumn 1942). Specifically, during the days that the German Sixth Army exerted the maximum pressure on the Soviet Army and, specifically, in the hard confrontations for the control of the sector of the production factories, like the Dzerzhinskiy Tractor factory, the Barrikady gun factory, and the Red October steelworks factory.
This historical mod include the Soviet Army, with all infantry units, as well as its artillery and vehicles. In addition, the German Army will include the rest of its infantry (Pioneers, Sappers, Panzergrenadiers, and Schützen), and all of its artillery and vehicles. There will also be more Leaders, on both sides, as well as medical units, heroes and snipers.
Regarding the boards, new terrains will be included, such Debris (not Rubble), hexides that block the movement across them, special factory buildings, new railroad hexides, Cliffs, Gullies, etc. In total, there will be nine boards that reproduce partially the industrial sector of Stalingrad, next to the Volga river.

[asl3d]

Examining Soviet urban warfare at Stalingrad, particularly in comparison to pre-war Soviet doctrine on combat in cities, suggests a number of conclusions about Soviet military performance. Soviet victory was not simply a matter of enormous human sacrifice, but also required winning the production battle with Nazi Germany. The Red Army also had to master the tactics of urban warfare from bitter experience, given the underdeveloped state of Soviet doctrine before the war and lack of relevant experience before Stalingrad. Despite that, the Soviets proved to be highly skilled at urban warfare. Given that fighting in cities requires great initiative and improvisation on the part of individual soldiers and junior officers, the Soviet victory further undermines the outdated conventional wisdom of stolid and faceless Russian soldiers.

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The story of Stalingrad has been told many times. Too often in the past, that story has focused on the German experience, given the relative ease of access to German sources. This analysis will specifically examine Soviet urban warfare, using Stalingrad as a laboratory and testing ground, much as the Soviets themselves did. What will be shown here is the improvised, ad hoc nature of much Soviet thinking about urban warfare before and during Stalingrad, as well the surprising effectiveness of that improvisation. It will undermine some of the older conventional wisdom about the fighting in Stalingrad, and about the Soviet Army itself. Contrary to a picture drawn from German sources, Stalingrad shows the Soviet Army as analytical and innovative, understanding technology and employing resources effectively, and relying heavily on the initiative and flexibility of individual soldiers and junior officers.

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Before Barbarossa, the Soviets had generally done far less thinking about defence than offense in modern warfare, a problem magnified with regard to fighting in cities. Soviet doctrine, including both the 1929 field manual and the more innovative 1936 provisional field manual, clearly emphasized offensive warfare, with defensive warfare as a temporary means of transition to the offensive. Urban fighting was an afterthought. The 1929 manual, for instance, was quite sketchy about urban problems, and emphasized taking towns rather than defending them. Under its fundamental orientation to the offensive, it presumed that urban warfare would take place on foreign soil, and that foreign proletarians would naturally sympathize with their Soviet liberators. In urban reconnaissance, for example, “a thorough search is conducted with the assistance of the workers, the poor, and the strata of the population close to us.” The first task of reconnaissance in urban warfare was to determine “the political condition of the urban population and the possibility of enlisting the workers in active struggle.”

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After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the first year of fighting provided the Soviets with little concrete experience of fighting in cities. The Soviets did conduct several tenacious and inspiring city defensive operations in 1941 and early 1942, but those were clearly defence of cities, not defence in cities. As a result, the gap in Soviet doctrine was matched by a gap in Soviet experience. Odessa, for example, held out against besieging Romanian and German forces for almost two and a half months, until the steady reduction of the city's three major belts of fortifications led the Soviets to evacuate 80,000 defenders from Odessa to the major naval base of Sevastopol in mid-October 1941, well before the fighting moved into the city of Odessa itself. Indeed, the defence was deliberately conducted to keep Axis forces out of artillery range of Odessa's port.

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Tula was defended in winter 1941–42 by massive defensive installations ringing the city. Sevastopol came under siege from November 1941, and was finally reduced by massive German air, artillery, and ground assault in June and July 1942. Tula and particularly Sevastopol are remarkable examples of Soviet tenacity in defence but they are, like Odessa, a case of stubborn defence of fortifications, not defence in a city. By the time German troops ground their way through Sevastopol's formidable natural and artificial defences to reach the city itself, for example, the campaign was essentially over. Rather than send German troops into the city, German commander Erich von Manstein annihilated Sevastopol with a massive air and ground bombardment. The point of these observations is that the Soviets had no opportunity to grasp the nature of extended urban warfare or explore the inherent defensive potential of cities. Either cities were defended in their surrounding fortifications, as in Odessa, Sevastopol, Tula, and Leningrad, or they were taken relatively quickly as part of a larger campaign, as was Kiev. The closest the Soviets came to their later achievements at Stalingrad were the individual feats of courage and resistance in the face of certain annihilation that Soviet soldiers exhibited at the fortress of Brest-Litovsk on the Soviet western frontier, and in the fortifications around Sevastopol. Stalingrad thus represented something new for the Soviets—an object lesson in the advantages defenders have when fighting inside large cities, and a laboratory in which to develop the tactics of urban warfare so sadly neglected in the interwar period.

[asl3d]

In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine Stalingrad as anything but a death trap for the Germans. It did not seem that way at the time. The Germans had engaged in textbook mobile warfare in the steppe west of Stalingrad in the spring and summer of 1942, and there seemed a real chance that Stalingrad might be taken “on the march,” in the Soviet phrase, quickly and without serious resistance. On 3 September 1942, for example, just before the Germans clawed their way into Stalingrad itself, Joseph Stalin warned Georgii Zhukov, his Stavka representative on the scene, of the imminent danger of losing the city entirely: “The position in Stalingrad is worsening. The enemy is located two miles outside Stalingrad. Stalingrad might be taken today or tomorrow … no delay is permissible. Delay now is a crime”.
Within three weeks, the tone had changed markedly. While Vasilii Chuikov's troops of the Soviet 62nd Army were desperately clinging to their footholds inside Stalingrad on the west bank of the Volga under constant German pressure, Chuikov's commander Andrei Yeremenko and political overseer Nikita Khrushchev reported: "That offensive momentum which the fascists had is falling off with each day, although they are trying to gathering all reinforcements possible and throw them in, in order to maintain the combat potential of their units at the same level, and keep the initiative in their hands. With each day the curve is turning down, the enemy is clearly becoming exhausted. The stubbornness of our troops at Stalingrad has significantly broken the spirit of the fascist troops and the tempo of their advance, regardless of their persistent desire to take the city of Stalingrad and the concentration here of their best infantry, tank, and motorized divisions, and in particular aviation."

[asl3d]

Something had clearly changed. Stalingrad was defended in the streets of the city itself, as Odessa and Sevastopol had not been, and the Wehrmacht found this much tougher going. The Soviet 62nd and 64th armies in Stalingrad itself faced a horrific and desperate struggle not to be driven into the Volga, but they would exact a terrible toll on the German troops they faced. What, tactically, was happening? The Soviets were clearly adapting well to the strains of urban warfare, at least as well as the Germans, and their experience in Stalingrad repays closer attention. It is tempting to see the upturn in Soviet fortunes in Stalingrad as resulting entirely from improvement in tactics, doctrine, and command. This temptation was especially acute for veteran commanders like Chuikov writing their memoirs and naturally eager to highlight their own importance. The Soviet success in the urban environment of Stalingrad, however, cannot be separated from generally improving Soviet performance by late 1942, a matter as much attributable to the improving Soviet material position as to improved tactics. In other words, the successes of the individual Soviet soldier in Stalingrad are intrinsically connected to the successes of the Soviet state in providing more manpower and materiel, something that mattered far beyond Stalingrad itself.

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Soviet accounts of the disasters of 1941 and early 1942 make it clear that in addition to incompetent command, Soviet forces suffered from acute shortages of the men and arms necessary to defend effectively. Better tactics required better officers and training, but also required a simple quantitative improvement in supply. Soviet efforts to stop the initial German onslaught in 1941 were marked by excessively linear defences, the absence of real defence in depth, poor or non-existent anti-tank defence, and a general shortage of materiel. Linear defences can to a degree be blamed on bad command, but shortages of manpower and heavy weapons, attributable in part to the rapid pace of German advance, made it equally difficult to establish a defence in depth. Over the summer of 1942, the campaign from the Don to the Volga that brought the Germans to Stalingrad was marked by thin, brittle Soviet defences, thanks to insufficient reserves and anti-tank weaponry, as well as shortages of manpower that led to Soviet infantry divisions' routinely being asked to hold 15–20km frontages, far above their norm. Over the course of the war, there was a marked improvement in Soviet handling of the problems of defensive warfare, but that is inextricable from greater reserves of manpower and more machine guns, anti-tank rifles, anti-tank guns, artillery pieces, mines, ammunition, and all the panoply of industrial warfare. Better ammunition and more anti-tank weaponry led directly to deeper and more effective defences.

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Stalingrad's insatiable demand for ammunition illustrates very well the need for better supply to make improvement in Soviet performance possible. The demand for ammunition forced the Soviets to superhuman efforts to force supplies across the Volga to beleaguered Soviet defenders on the west bank. As Chuikov wrote: "We needed a lot of ammunition, the more the better in fact, because knowing the enemy's intention to wipe out the troops defending the city as rapidly as possible, we could not, and had no right to, tell the men to use ammunition sparingly in battle. Our soldiers made sure they always had a proper store of grenades, mortar bombs, bullets and shells. They always said quite openly that they were prepared to tolerate hunger and cold, as long as they were not left without ammunition …"
The particular features of fighting in the city made it essential for infantry units to have ample automatic weapons, grenades, and bottles of incendiary liquid. Despite the undoubtedly correct image of Stalingrad as an infantry battle, materiel played a vital role. In one instance during the struggle within the Red October factory in northern Stalingrad, Soviet troops assembled a 122mm howitzer on the spot to destroy a German stronghold. At ranges of 200 yards 203mm guns were used for direct fire, in keeping with the general use of artillery in a direct fire role within the city. The 62nd Army used more grenades in the fight for Stalingrad than it did for the rest of war.

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The importance of materiel cut both ways. Soviet improvements in supply were countered by overwhelming German superiority in the air and in armor. Chuikov's account of the battle makes it clear that the Luftwaffe dominated his calculations about what he could and could not do—his troops simply did not move about during the day. German air power also drove his tactical doctrine of ordering his troops to close with the Germans as much as possible, reducing the danger of air attack thanks to the German fear of accidentally targeted their own troops. By mid-September 1942, with both flanks of Chuikov's 62nd army resting on the Volga, he and his commanders noticed that German pilots “bombed our forward positions only where there was a broad expanse of no-man's-land between our forward positions and those of the enemy. It occurred to us, therefore, that we should reduce the no-man's-land as much as possible—to the throw of a grenade.” Chuikov's superiors Yeremenko and Khrushchev agreed with Chuikov's assessment of the importance of German airpower. In a report intended for Stalin, they dismissed the German 6th Army's commander Friedrich von Paulus as a mediocrity. They saved their respect for the Luftwaffe: “the key figure saving the Germans,” they wrote, “is the commander of the 8th Air Corps Colonel-General [Wolfram von] Richtofen.”

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The importance of airpower in Stalingrad is well-attested; more surprising, however, is the importance of tank warfare in Stalingrad, something far out of line with traditional understandings of Stalingrad specifically and of urban warfare in general. Conventional wisdom has typically held that urban terrain negates the advantages of armour and makes tanks more vulnerable to infantry attack. Stalingrad suggests, on the other hand, that the value of tanks in an urban setting far outweighs their disadvantages. The Soviet 1936 field manual made countering tanks the keystone of defensive warfare, holding that “Modern defence must constitute first of all an antitank defence,” with the organization of men, weaponry, and natural and artificial barriers centred on the tank threat.

It is no surprise that defensive questions in general focused on anti-tank warfare; the surprise instead is that the general principle of anti-tank defence was paramount even in Stalingrad, given the supposed unsuitability of tanks for urban terrain. A Soviet history of the battle claimed, in accordance with doctrine, that “the basis of every position [in Stalingrad] consisted of anti-tank defence,” a concept routinely stressed by Soviet scholars. P. I. Balashov, for example, argued that “regardless of the fact that the actions of enemy tanks in the city were made more difficult [by Soviet countermeasures], all defence knots and strong points were equipped above all for defeating the attacks of enemy tanks.” Given the terrible supply situation of the 62nd army on the west bank of the Volga, anti-tank resources might consist only a few anti-tank rifles, but they were nonetheless vital to Soviet defences.

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German attacks in the city routinely employed large numbers of tanks, forcing Soviet defenders to supplement their meager stock of anti-tank guns and rifles with improvised Molotov cocktails. Soviet tactics shifted to reflect the importance of anti-tank warfare, channelling German tanks towards anti-tank strongpoints of 2–4 anti-tank guns. Chuikov himself stressed the power of a coordinated German assault using aircraft, tanks, and infantry; the key to stopping such an assault, he argued, was decoupling it. Separating German tanks from German infantry made both far more vulnerable. Leaving the Germans the advantage of combined arms meant disaster. Though Chuikov had very few tanks himself, his memoirs stress how important they were, either used as stationary firing points in the defence, or (even in minuscule numbers) as a shock force in the attack. Tactical defensive improvisations by Soviet troops at Stalingrad included the preparation of strongpoints within individual buildings, treated as fortresses, prepared for all-around defence, and expected to serve as centres of resistance even if encircled. The Soviet 1936 provisional field manual, in its otherwise limited comments on urban warfare, had mandated exactly that.

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In early October 1942, with something of a non-sequitur, Stalin ordered his Stalingrad front to carry out a vigorous counter-attack, and “for this, it is necessary to turn every building and every street of Stalingrad into a fortress.” The Soviet high command Stavka did the same, ordering on 14 October the creation of defensive belts north and south of Stalingrad, treating the entire region as a fortification and preparing all towns and villages for all-around defence. A detailed Stavka directive on urban warfare the same day declared that proper defence in and of a city requires “each house, street, and block be … turned into a fortress,” and capable of extended resistance. Such an approach was routine in Stalingrad by the end of October, and an integral part of official doctrine by the 1944 Soviet Field Manual. While these strongpoints had been part of Soviet defensive doctrine before the war, Stalingrad produced innovations and refinements. Soviet defensive doctrine shifted away from a focus on individual strong points (an ochagovaia defence) to an emphasis on connections, links, and entire defensive systems. By comparison to previous doctrine, Soviet defensive tactics at Stalingrad paid much more attention to the creation of a coherent and unified system.

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Well before the war, the 1929 field manual had placed relatively little importance on connections, emphasizing instead self-contained operations by individual units. In a city, it declared, “Street combat is conducted by individual detachments each operating on one street… . The battalion is given an independent assignment in respect of capturing a certain area or major point… .The battalions conduct the combat entirely independently, rendering one another mutual support.” The very short section on defence in cities envisaged it as sectorial defence, with neighbourhoods and blocks under the responsibility of individual units, but saying nothing about linkages and connections. The 1936 provisional manual continued this vision of sectorial defence, not connected systems. This tendency towards isolated defensive strongpoints was marked in Soviet tactics generally, not just in urban warfare. Soviet tactics in the first year of the war focused excessively on strongpoints. As a result they were easily outflanked, bypassed, cut off, and annihilated, due to both naive tactics and the material shortages.

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The fighting in Stalingrad clearly illustrates a move from units fighting in isolation to fully-integrated defensive systems, with individual strongpoints tied together by interlocking fields of fire, trench systems, and communications networks. After the early September–October 1942 fighting in Stalingrad, Stavka called for: "A developed system of strong posts … located in close mutual fire support of one another … . The system of defence within the populated area itself includes … a number of strong points joined together by flank and cross-fire, covered by antitank and anti personnel obstacles, located under the effective fire of machine guns, mortars, and artillery… . All buildings and entries into the yard and on the street should be taken under the field of fire by a system of flank fire. All stone buildings should be joined as centres of resistance and adapted for defence by means of holes in adjacent walls and the installation of communications trenches." This new emphasis on linkage and coordination between defensive strongpoints, of an complete and unbroken (sploshnaia) network of trenches and centres of resistance is universally attested in accounts of the battle, and made German advances far more difficult and costly. This emphasis was also enshrined in official Soviet doctrine. The 1944 field manual required “mutually-flanking strongpoints,” “mutual fire support,” and barricades covered by fire to prevent enemy bypass and flanking manoeuvres.

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Although the Soviet high command was preparing a massive counteroffensive north and south of Stalingrad in late autumn 1942, the Soviets inside the city were largely on the defensive. That defence, however, incorporated constant small-scale counterattacks, and as a result Soviet offensive tactics are worthy of exploration as well. Soviet accounts of the fighting in Stalingrad emphasize the development of “storm groups” (shturmovye gruppy), small parties of soldiers of under company-strength, supplemented by engineers, anti-tank riflemen, and whatever special weapons were available. Chuikov notes that by the end of September Soviet assaults were invariably carried out by these groups, taking advantage of combined arms, working in small numbers to suit the terrain. A 26 September order of his 62nd army told his officers “I again warn the commander of all units and formations not to carry out operations in battle by whole units like companies and battalions. The offensive should be organized chiefly on the basis of small groups, with tommy guns, hand grenades, bottles of incendiary mixture and anti-tank rifles.” Certainly, the Germans were using combined arms as well; their attacks in Stalingrad attempted to combine their advantages in air power and tanks with infantry, artillery, and assault engineers. The difference, at least as the Soviets saw it, was that German assaults were carried out by much larger units, battalion strength, taking on an entire block at a time.

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The strategic situation in Stalingrad was a deliberate policy: the Germans were on the offensive, seeking to clear the Volga bank of Soviet troops, and had commensurately more ambitious aims; the Soviets were engaging in limited counterattacks to keep the Germans off-balance and recapture important strongpoints, not to oust them from the city entirely.

Storm groups were certainly an important part of Soviet tactics in Stalingrad. They may even have been Chuikov's innovation, as he suggests. Nonetheless, they should not have been; at least according to doctrine, they should have been the Soviets' first recourse. Soviet doctrine dating back at least to 1929 had mandated storm groups in urban warfare. The 1929 field manual had directed that “special units are appointed for taking strong points discovered within the settlement or individual buildings adapted for defence (redoubts) to which combat engineers with blasting equipment, individual guns, flamethrowers, heavy machine guns and armoured cars or tanks are attached.”

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Given the Soviet re-invention of what their doctrine already called for, storm groups seem like a natural response to urban warfare, one indeed found in other armies fighting in urban terrain. What is noteworthy in Stalingrad is thus not the existence of storm groups, since pre-war Soviet doctrine called for them and other armies resort to them, but instead the specifics of how those storm groups were employed.

The employment of these storm groups tells interesting and rather unexpected things about the Soviets in World War II. The use of storm groups was part of a general Soviet policy of active defence. The active defence was not a matter of Soviet urban warfare alone, but part of a broader Soviet approach to war which defined defence as a means to attack. Proper defence required constant counterattacks. The 1929 field manual had refused to accept enemy seizures of buildings, city blocks, and strongpoints. “When the outskirts of the settlement or part of it fall into enemy hands,” it instructed, “a vigorous and short counterattack by the assault group is immediately thrown against this latter. Given the failure of the counterattack, the combat switches to within the settlement, and the defender, furthermore, must stubbornly defend each house and each quarter.”

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In Stalin's 5 October 1942 command to the Stalingrad front to respond to a German breakthrough to the Volga: “it is necessary to push the enemy away from the Volga, and seize back those streets and buildings of Stalingrad which the enemy has taken from us.”

Chuikov made much of active defense as well. Snipers and storm groups, in his view, were essential to harass the Germans, keep them off balance, draw down their reserves, and recapture territory they gained, preventing them from bringing their full strength to bear and grinding the Soviets into the Volga. Even Soviet defense against German assaults and penetrations of the Soviet perimeter was active—separating German tanks from infantry and rendering each more vulnerable. Contrary to the Soviet approach to war in open ground that employed counterattacks in massive force, urban conditions required counterattacks and spoiling attacks to be small, quick, and risky. Whether inside or outside a city, active defense sought to seize the initiative and choice of battle from the enemy.

The urban warfare is expensive. Westerners, relatively rich in technology and casualty-averse, view urban warfare most of all as expensive in lives. To the Soviets, who lost 25 million dead in World War II, urban warfare is expensive in lives, but expensive in material terms as well.

The urban warfare, despite its human cost, is technological warfare. The demands of urban warfare on the courage and stamina of individual soldiers are extraordinary, but technology and materiel are nonetheless vital.