Red Army Infantry Tactics in Stalingrad.

The following are short excerpts from books about the tactics Soviet infantry used in urban warfare. The excerpts come from two of the newest books on the Battle for Stalingrad. They are Antony Beevor’s “Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege” and Stephen Walsh’es “Stalingrad: The Infernal Cauldron”. One should always keep in mind, however, that Red Army soldiers fought this way only when they were capable of applying such tactics in terms of time and terrain, but most importantly when their commanders allowed and supervised such actions.

Walsh, Stephen. Stalingrad: The Infernal Cauldron. Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, NY. 2000.

Chuikov’s men were increasingly familiar with the city environment and quickly adapted to the nature of combat in the city. Having received intelligence on the likely area and objectives of the German attack, Chuikov quickly appreciated that, if the German were able to secure the Kurgan in the early stages of the attack and use it as a fire base, then the situation of the defenders below assailed from their left and righ would become intolerable. In line with Clausewitz’s belief that defence must be active, not passive, Chuikov planned a pre-emptive tactical assault on the Mamaev Kurgan. He instructed Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards on the left of to attack towards the station, while to its right Batyuk’s 284th would attack the southern end of the Kurgan. At the same time, Gorshny’s 95th Infantry Division would assault the eastern slopes of the Mamaev Kurgan. The attack was to begin at 0600 hours on 27 September after an hour-long artillery barrage. Significantly, Chuikov’s Order No. 166 finished with the following exhortation: ‘I again warn the commanders of all units and formations not to carry out operations in the battle by whole units like companies and battalions. The offensive should be organised chiefly on the basis of small groups, with tommy-guns, hand grenades, bottles of incendiary mixture and anti-tank rifles.’ The contrast with German commanders who, although they began to urge their men to form ‘storm groups’, continued to think in divisional and regimental terms, is quite remarkable.
As Chuikov had instructed his men to keep the fighting at close quarters, it was almost inevitable that, when one side was attacking, the other must be actively defending. The defenders quickly appreciated the defensive value of rubble, trenches and especially fortification of strong points within buildings. As the German discovered to their cost, the congested nature of street fighting severely curtailed the ability of large formations to undertake coherent sustained operations. Chuikov instinctively understood that the very nature of such fighting meant its conduct must be dominated by small, heavily armed groups of infantry capable of swift, flexible action in both defence and attack. At Stalingrad, the shock group was the basic Soviet unit and, in Chuikov’s eyes, evolved naturally from the chaotic nature of streeet fighting. The shock group was to act independently in pursuit of objectives laid down by a divisional commander, who in turn received orders from Chuikov. The idea was to make 62nd Army’s pursuit of its objectives compatible with the decentralized flexibility necessary to fight with the speed and stealth that the conditions within the city demanded, especially with the looming menace of the Luftwaffe. The shock group between 50 and 80 men was broken down into three interdependent units: the storm group, the reinforcement group and the reserve group.
Comprised of between eight and ten men, the storm group was the cutting edge of the shock group. Its role was to infiltrate the enemy’s position, be it a trench system or building, and destroy the enemy. The men were armed with machine guns, grenades, daggers and a short-handled shovel to be used as an axe at close quarters. The commander of the storm group, also in overall command of the shock group, was equipped with a signal rocket to be fired as soon as the storm group was inside the enemy position. This would trigger the reinforcement group, whose job was to finish off the enemy and secure the immediate area against enemy counterattacks, then prepare the immediate tactical defence of the captured objective. This group was usually about between 20- and 25- strong, and heavily armed with light and heavy machine guns, anti-tank rifles, picks, shovels, mortars and explosives. The reinforcement group always contained combat engineers who played a critical role in both defence and attack. The reserve group, between 30- and 50- strong, was used initially as a blocking force against potential attack and as an immediate source of reserves should the first two sections encounter tought resistance. The soldiers alternated between service in each group to acquire an automatic understanding of the shock group as a whole. Reconnaissance, surprise and speed at close quarters were the ingredients of success and defeat. Reconnaissance was essential to identify minefields and enemy firing points or blindspots, as well as to find bearings in night fighting among the tangled maze of trenches, rubble and shattered buildings. Surprise and speed were heavily influenced by Chuikov’s hand-grenade rule, which laid down that the distance to be covered should be no great than 27m (30 yds), the distance of a grenade throw. Chuikov also trained his men on the basis of a three-minute timetable to attack, clear, secure and reinforce the position.
Equally, the men of 62nd Army were instructed to defend the position, as well as take it, without reliance on supplies and communication from their parent unit for at least 24 hours. The men of the reinforcement and reserve groups were responsible for establishing an all-round defence. At first, machine gunners, mortar and anti-tank rifle crews would deploy on the ground floor, but, as the reserve group secured the area, they would then movie up the building to acquire greater observation and fields of fire. The engineers would then lay mines to channel any enemy attack into a prepared killing zone, while the reserve group ensured the delivery of food and ammunition. If the area could be held for 24 hours, it was usually possible to relieve the shock group and integrate the position into the overall regimental, brigade or divisional position. Chuikov’s 62nd Army would then inform the artillery commanders on the eastern shore, so that if the area came under major attack it could receive support. This was the method by which 62nd Army fought the Battle of Stalingrad and, if inexperienced units could survive their dangerous early days in the city, they quickly became semi-independent fighting units skilled at infiltration and night fighting. They had to be in order to survive. The 6th Army was a powerful and resilient opponent, while the Luftwaffe ruled the day, making all movement fraught with danger. Nevertheless, Chuikov’s tactical instructions ensured that, despite 62nd Army’s terrible casualties, its men were trained for and understood the nature of the fight they were undertaking at Stalingrad, in a way that German infantrymen did not. (Walsh, 74-77)

Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege. Penguin Putnam Inc. NY 1998.

Fighting in Stalingrad itself could not have been more different. It represented a new form of warfare, concentrated in the ruins of civilian life. The detritus of war - burnt-out tanks, shell cases, signal wire and grenade boxes - was mixed with the wreckage of family homes - iron bedsteads, lamps and household utensils. Vasily Grossman wrote of the ‘fighting in the brick-stewn, half-demolished rooms and corridors’ of apartment blocks, where there might still be a vase of withered flowers, or a boy’s homework open on the table. In an observation post, high in a ruined building, an artillery spotter with a periscope might watch for targets through a convenient shellhole in the wall, seated on a kitchen chair.
German infantrymen loathed house-to-house fighting. They found such close-quarter combat, which broke conventional military boundaries and dimensions, psychologically disorientating. During the last phase of the September battles, both sides had struggled to take a large brick warehouse on the Volga bank, near the mouth of the Tsaritsa, which had four floors on the river side and three on the landward. At one point, it was ‘like a layered cake’ with German on the top floor, Russians below them, and more Germans underneath them. Often an enemy was unrecognizable, with every uniform impregnated by the same dun-coloured dust.
German generals do not seem to have imagined that awaited their divisions in the ruined city. They lost their great Blitzkrieg advantages and were in many ways thrown back to First World War techniques, even though their military theorists had argued that trench warfare had been ‘an aberration in the art of war’. The Sixth Army, for example, found itself having to respond to Soviet tactics by reinventing the ‘storm-wedges’ introduced in January 1918: assault groups of ten men armed with a machine-gun, light mortar and flame-throwers for clearing bunkers , cellars and sewers.
In its way, the fighting in Stalingrad was even more terrifying than the impersonal slaughter at Verdun. The close-quarter combat in ruined buildings, bunkers, cellars and sewers was soon dubbed ‘Rattenkrieg’ by German soldiers. It possessed a savage intimacy which appalled their generals, who felt that they were rapidly losing control over events. ‘The enemy is invisible,’ wrote General Strecker to a friend. ‘Ambushes out of basements, wall remnants, hidden bunkers and factory ruins produce heavy casualties among our troops.’
German commanders openly admitted the Russian expertise at camouflage, but few acknowledged that it was their aircraft which had produced the ideal conditions for the defenders. ‘Not a house is left standing,’ a lieutenant wrote home, ‘there is only a burnt-out wasteland, a wilderness of rubble and ruins which is well-nigh impassable.’ At the southern end of the city, the Luftwaffe liaison officer with 24th Panzer Division wrote: ‘The defenders have concentrated and fortified themselves in the sections of the town facing our attacks. In parkland, there are tanks or just tank turrets dug-in, and anti-tank guns concealed in the cellars make it very hard going for our advancing tanks.’
Chuikov’s plan was to funnel and fragment German mass assaults with ‘breakwaters’. Strengthened buildings, manned by infantry with anti-tank rifles and machine-guns, would deflect the attackers into channels where camouflaged T-34 tanks and anti-tank guns waited, half-buried in the rubble behind. When German tanks attacked with infantry, the defenders’ main priority was to separate them. The Russians used trench mortars, aiming to drop their bombs just behind the tanks to scare off the infantry while the anti-tank gunners went for the tanks themselves. The channeled approaches would also be mined in advance by sappers, whose casualty rate was the highest of any specialization. ‘Make a mistake and no more dinners’ was their unofficial motto. Wearing camouflage suits, once the snow came, they crawled out at night to lay anti-tank mines and conceal them. An experiences sapper could lay up to thirty a night. They were also renowned for running out form cover to drop a mine in front of a German tank as it advanced.
Much of the fighting consisted not of major attacks, but of relentless, lethal little conflicts. The battle was fought by assault squads, generally six or eight strong, form ‘the Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting’. They armed themselves with knives and sharpened spades for silent killing, as well as sub-machine-guns and grenades. (Spades were in such short suply, that men carved their names in the handle and slept with their head on the blade to make that nobody stole it.) The assault squads sent into the sewers were strengthened with flame-throwers and sappers brining explosive charges. Six sappers from Rodimtsev’s guards division even managed to find a shaft under a German stronghold and blew it up, using 300 pounds of explosive.
A more general tactic evolved, based on the realization that the German armies were short of reserves. Chuikov ordered an emphasis on night attacks, mainly for the practical reason that the Luftwaffe could not rect to them, but also because he was convinced that the Germans were more frightened during the hours of darkness, and would become exhausted. The German Landser came to harbour a special fear of the Siberians from Colonel Batyuk’s 284th Rifle Division, who were considered to be natural hunters of any sort of prey. ‘If only you could understand what terror is,’ a German soldier wrote in a letter captured by the Russians. ‘At the slightest rustle, I pull the trigger and fire off tracer bullets in bursts from the machine-gun.’ The compulsion to shoot at anything that moved at night, often setting off fusillades from equally nervous sentries down a whole sector, undoubtedly contributed to the German expenditure of over 25 million rounds during the month of September alone. The Russians also kept up the tension by firing flares into the night sky from time to time to give the impression of an imminent attack. Red Army aviation, partly to avoid the Messerschmitts by day, kept up a relentless series of raids every night on German positions. It also served as another part of the wearing-down process to exhaust the Germans and stretch their nerves. (pp 148-150)
Chuikov soon recognized that the key infantry weapons in Stalingrad would be the sub-machine-gun, the grenade and the sniper’s rifle. After the Winter War, following the devastating attacks of Finnish ski troops, shooting on the move, the Red Army accepted the idea of sub-machine-gun squads of eight men, designed to be carried into battle if necessary on the back of a T-34. In Stalingrad street-fighting, this size of squad proved ideal for close-quarter fighting. During house- and bunker-clearing, the hand grenade proved essential. Red Army soldiers called it their ‘pocket artillery’. It was also effective in defence. On Chuikov’s orders, grenades were stocked ready to hand in recesses dug into the side of every trench. Not surprisingly, there were many accidents caused by untrained soldiers. The second-in-command of a company was killed and several men were badly wounded when a newly arrived recruit mishandled a grenade. Others were killed when soldiers, mainly from Central Asia, tried to fit captured German detonators in their own grenades. ‘Further weapon training is needed,’ the chief of the political department reported to the military council of Stalingrad Front.
Another weapon, often as dangerous to the user as to its intended victims, was the flame-thrower, which was effectively terrifying when clearing sewer tunnels, cellars and inaccessible hiding places. The operator knew that as soon as the enemy sighted him, he would be the first target for their bullets.
Red Army soldiers enjoyed inventing gadgets to kill Germans. New booby traps were dreamed up, each seemingly more ingenious and unpredictable in its results than the last. Angered at their inability to fight back against the Stuka attacks, Captain Ilgachkin, a battalion commander, decided with one of his soldiers, Private Repa, to construct their own form of anti-aircraft gun. They fastened an anti-tank rifle to the spokes of a cartwheel which in turn was mounted on a tall stake driven into the ground. Ilgachkin made complicated calculations on the basis of the gun’s muzzle velocity, and the estimated speed of a diving aircraft, but whether ‘the gaunt and melancholy’ Repa paid much attention to these figures is another matter. In any case their contraption achieved a certain success, with Repa managing to bring down three Stukas.
The real anti-aircraft batteries also amended their tactics. The Stukas came over at an altitude of between 4,000 and 5,000 feet, then half-rolled to drop into a dive at an angle of about seventy degrees, their siren screaming. They came out of the dive at just under 2,000 feet. Anti-aircraft gunners learned to put up a curtain of fire to hit them either at the point of going into the dive, or at the point of coming out. Shooting at them on the way down was a waste of ammunition.
Another device was dreamed up by Vasily Ivanovich Zaitsev, who soon became the most famous sniper in the Stalingrad army. Zaitsev attached the telescopic sight from his sniper’s rifle to an anti-tank gun to take on machine-gun nests, by slotting a shell right through their loophole. But he soon found that the charges in the mass-produced shells were not consistent enough for precision shooting. Fame could be achieved even with conventional weapons. Bezdidko, the ace mortarman in Batyuk’s division, was renowned for having achieved six bombs in the air at the same time. These stories were exploited in an attempt to spread a cult of the expert to every soldier. The 62nd Army’s slogan was: ‘Look after your weapon as carefully as your eyes.’ (pp 153-154)