SOVIET ARMORED
TACTICS
IN WORLD WAR WW II
Introduction
The traditional view of the Soviet armor is huge masses of tanks blundering about the battlefield in columns of bunches or herd-like formations until they either roll over the opposition by sheer weight of metal or are shot up by smaller, expertly manoeuvring westerners. Ideally this volume will dispel some of that misconception by laying out the official basis for the real Soviet tank and armoured vehicle tactics as practiced for most of world war two.
The basic part of this work is a copy of the 1944 Soviet Combat Regulations for the individual armoured vehicle, tank platoon and tank company. The original from which this was translated and prepared was a "raw" German translation of the captured Soviet document, which had never been completed or issued to German forces before the war ended. The translation was done before September 1944, and the original Soviet regulation issued in February 1944, replacing the earlier edition of the same regulation issued before the war in 1938. Unfortunately, a copy of that earlier regulation is not available to me, but many of its provisions can be extracted from Soviet tactical accounts of tank fighting early in the war.
Specifically, the Soviet General Staff studies ("collections of materials for the study of war experience") of Armor early in the war (Vypusk 33), Use of Armor and Mechanized Forces in the War (Vypusk 15) and use of Tanks and Self-Propelled Artillery in the Offensive (Vypusk 21) all refer to the tactics to be employed, directly or indirectly. In addition there are numerous German comments on Soviet tactics early in the war, some of which are included in this volume as commentary on the actual application of the official regulation.
From this earlier material it becomes obvious that the principles laid out in the regulation were already present in the earlier tactical instructions. The problem was that the level of training and competent leadership in the armoured forces at the beginning of the war simply wasn't high enough to perform the required combat activities. The usual reason given for this is the great purge that struck the Red Army in 1937 - 39, but this, too, needs to be clarified.
Recent research on the Red Army in the 1930s (Reese: see bibliography) using the "Red Army Archives" of the pre-war Soviet military, reveal that the purge was not as significant as first thought: instead of removing 30.000+ officers out of 70-80,000, the purge removed about 24,000 out of an officer corps which, by 1938, numbered 179,000 - a much smaller percentage than once thought. The real problem, especially for the technical arms of the Soviet Army, was that the purge was removing primarily staff-level officers: senior lieutenants, captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels, at the same time that the Red Army was increasing in size by 500 in 5 years. The army on 1 January 1938, which had 179,000 officers, had increased from 144,000 officers a year earlier, while losing 18,658 to the purge and other causes. By 1 January 1941 the Red Army had over 5,000,000 men and three times the number of divisions and corps it had had in 1939.
Quite simply, even without the purge the Soviet military schools system could not begin to provide the numbers of trained staff officers required. Thousands of Russian Civil War veterans were recalled, and each Military District set up special Junior Lieutenant schools to train sergeants to become officers, but these did not provide the experienced and technically-trained officers required to command companies, battalions, regiments and divisions. By June 1941 there were Tank Divisions in the Red Army that were missing 50 of their required tank officers and sergeants, even though they had 90 or more of their enlisted men. This meant that not only were the tactical units poorly led and tactical manoeuvres poorly organized and supported, but the training of the troops themselves was almost impossible because the trainers were missing or trying to learn the basics of their own jobs at the same time.
As a direct result of the debacle that engulfed Soviet armor early in the war, Stalin's famous Order Number 325 of October 1942 (reproduced in this volume) reiterated some very basic tactical and operational concepts. It did so because even the most basic tactics, although spelled out and required by the regulations, were of no use to commanders who barely knew the technical attributes of their tanks and had little experience in leading troops at all. Order 325 became the basic stimulus for the new regulations issued in 1944 that updated the pre-war tactical regulations.
In addition to new tactical regulations, three other developments added contributed to the remarkable change in tactical and operational efficiency of the Soviet armoured force between 1941 and the latter half of the war. First, despite the losses an increasing number of tank commanders, tank crewmen, platoon, company, and battalion commanders gained combat experience. Furthermore, in 1942 the Soviet General Staff set up a regular system for collecting, analyzing and distilling that experience. This system, in the end, produced documents like the "Collections" (Vypusk, Sbornik ) some of which are cited in the bibliography.
Second, the general level of training in the Soviet Army, and the armoured force, increased dramatically. Not only were commanders more experienced and better able to pass on that experience to their subordinates, but the Soviet military, unlike the German Wehrmacht, had the manpower reserves to send a large percentage of their troops and officers to schools for technical training. By the beginning of 1943, almost 1,000,000 men (and women) were in military schools, academies, and "military courses" in the USSR. When these graduates went to the front 3-, 6-, or 9 months later, they were far better able to handle the basic staff and command tasks than the unfortunates standing in the way of Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
Finally, there was a general increase in the quality of equipment available to the Soviet tank and mechanized forces. There has been a great deal written in German sources, and the English- language writers citing them, about the superiority of the T-34 and KV tanks over the German armor in 1941. These writings rarely reflect the fact that until late 1942, the combined T-34 and KV tank totals were a minority of the total Soviet tank park: the majority of the tanks in service were light T-40, T-60, or T-70 types that were decidedly inferior to the German main battle tanks, the PzKpfw.III and PzKpfw.IV. As important as the replacing of light tanks with IS-II heavy tanks, self- propelled guns and T-34-85s in late 1943 and early 1944 was the technical upgrading of the entire Soviet armoured force through Lend Lease.
The extent of Lend Lease influence on the front-line Soviet forces has only recently started to be recognized, both in Russian and Western publications. First, in vehicles themselves: the M4A2 Sherman equipped three guards mechanized corps and a guards tank corps by the end of the war, and the Valentine Mk VIII and Mk IX were the only light tanks still used by the Red Army after the end of 1943. Earlier in the war, in 1942, two of the first dozen tank corps were equipped with Matilda IIs in place of T-34s, and M3 ("Grant" and" Lee") medium, M3A1 light ("Stuart"), Valentine Mk III and Matildas equipped a large proportion of the independent tank brigades formed that year. More importantly, though. Lend Lease provided a huge quantity of radio equipment, which went into Soviet armoured vehicles (and aircraft), and specialized armoured vehicles that the Soviets were not manufacturing at all for themselves: armoured personnel carriers and self-propelled light antiaircraft weapons.
Some of this is reflected indirectly in the Combat Regulations. Notes have been inserted into the text of the translation to specify and clarify points of both nomenclature and the references to non-Soviet equipment, In the sections following the regulation itself, there are sections elaborating on the organization of the Soviet armoured units, the tactical marking of the vehicles for combat and communication purposes, and a brief overview of the tanks and vehicles used by the Soviet Army in World War Two. There is also a section on comments on the Soviet tactics by both their German opponents and by Soviet commanders. These, among other things, frequently indicate deviations from the regulations for which the Soviet military is not famous, and of which it is usually not considered capable. In fact, based on the Combat Regulations given here, the Red Army armoured forces by the late war period included a number of commanders capable of considerable innovation and force leaders that were quite willing to "turn them loose" to practice their talents on the enemy.
