Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1943-1945: Red Steamroller

Although a number of Red Army leaders recognized the need to go beyond the tactical prescriptions of Order No.325, and that larger, better-equipped tank and mechanized formations might actually be able to execute something akin to the pre-war Deep Battle (glubokiy boy) doctrine, the risk of failure inclined them towards conservative progress toward this goal, rather than a rapid shift in doctrine. Noticeably, Order 325 really only addressed the tactical breakthrough battle and said very little about operational art. Key leaders in the Red Army, such as Georgy Zhukov and Vasilevsky, recognized the need to improve operational technique rather than just to rely upon mass, which had rarely prevailed in the counter-offensives of 1941–42. The best minds in the Red Army knew that mass was not enough to defeat an opponent as skillful as the Wehrmacht. One of the first steps toward a doctrinal shift at the operational level was the increased use of echelonment in both offensive and defensive formations. Whereas the Germans tended to employ everything they had from the outset of an operation, Red Army leaders were beginning to learn the value of feeding fresh formations in at critical moments in order to keep up momentum. Previously, Soviet offensives had tended to commit all or most of their armour up front, as at Kharkov in May 1942, incurring huge losses and rapid loss of capability. For short periods of time, the Germans demonstrated that they could defeat Soviet mass, but echeloned offensive operations enabled the Red Army to conduct protracted offensives that gradually exhausted a German-style defence. Use of echelonment enabled Soviet commanders to use their numerical advantages to best effect. Echelonment would also be used in defence, at Kursk.

Another subtle change in Soviet armoured doctrine was a growing realization that there would have to be increased emphasis on ‘push’ logistics, i.e. getting fuel and ammunition resupply to fast-moving tank units at the front in order to sustain the pace of advance, rather than just waiting for the rear echelons to arrive. Up to November 1942, the Red Army had spent more time retreating than advancing and had been able to rely upon resupply from nearby railheads. Yet it was the lack of emphasis upon forward logistics that marred the Red Army’s first execution of Deep Operations (glubokaya operatsiya) with the Tatsinskaya Raid in December 1942; the 24th Tank Corps succeeded in capturing this important German airfield, but the Southwest Front was unable to resupply the immobilized corps, which became encircled by two German Panzer-Divisionen and was virtually annihilated. In order to make this change, more trucks, radios and support troops would have to be allocated to Soviet armoured units and the haphazard style of staff planning drastically improved. Thus, the improvement of logistical sustainment over long distances and the staff planning processes to make this occur when and where it was most needed were an essential requirement for the Red Army to begin conducting large-scale advances westward. These changes did not come easily.

Soviet Tank Training

During the first two years of the war, the Red Army had been desperate to crank out as many tankers as possible and had created a plethora of training units. Prior to the war, the Red Army had operated a number of Tank Training Schools (STU, Tankovoye Uchilishche) to train officers; by 1943 there were still more than a dozen STU with two each in Gorky, Kazan and Ulyanovsk and three in Saratov. Each STU could train about 500 tank commanders in a six-month long course. In addition, there were also higher-level courses for battalion and regimental commanders at the VAMM, which was initially evacuated to Tashkent but brought back to Moscow in 1943. Most of the tank training units were stationed near the factories that built the tanks, which simplified the creation of replacement crews. A number of Tank Automotive Training Centres (UABTTS or Uchebnyy Avtobronetankovyy Tsentr) were created around the tank factories to coordinate and supervise subordinate tank training regiments and battalions. Training battalions were broken down by type of tank (heavy, medium and light) and there were separate units to train crews on American or British tanks. The Chelyabinsk UABTTS was the largest and its subordinate units could generate over 2,500 replacement crews in six months. A typical training battalion had about 1,190 students and 171 staff, while the training regiments had over 4,000 trainees.