"Russian front 1942-1943" Topic

I'm fairly new to WWII wargaming and looking for some good books that give a feel for the fighting and tactics at the platoon/ company/ battalion level on the eastern front. Suggestions?

"Infantry Aces" from Franz kurowski tells of individual soldiers but from this perspective you get a good look at tactics at a small scale.

Paul Carell wrote some excellent books on the Russian Front.

Stalingrad: The Defeat of the German 6th Army', Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 1993 ISBN 0-88740-469-3
'Hitler's War on Russia', volume 2 Scorched Earth London: Harrap, 1970 ISBN 0-88740-598-3
'Hitler Moves East', 1941-1943 New York: Little, Brown, 1964 ISBN 0-921991-11-8
'Invasion! They're Coming!' New York: Dutton, 1963 ISBN 0-88740-716-1
'Foxes of the Desert' New York: Bantam, 1960 ISBN 0-88740-659-9

T-34 in Action by Artem Drabkin and Oleg Sheremet. The Kindle download is cheap and gives a very interesting insight in the tankers world.

The main thing you will find are that the majority of accounts are from a German pov, in some/many cases not particularly objective and some slightly odd ideas about the racial characteristics of Slavic peoples and their impact on military operations.

Having said that, a few more suggestions are:

'Panzers on the Eastern Front' by Erhard Raus

'German Battle Tactics on the Russian Front 1941-45' by Newton.

both are packed with detailed operational accounts, maps etc.

Although somewhat dry in places, various works by David Glantz are worth picking up as they include not only operational detail but tactical as well.

A few of the more detailed ones are 'The Battle of Kursk', 'The Siege of Leningrad', and 'From the Don to the Dneipr'.

A 'how to do it' manual for the Red Army is Glantz's 'Spearhead of the Offensive, The Soviet Conduct of Tactical Manouvre'.

Also informative are the reprints of the relevant German and Soviet infantry manuals: The Nafziger publication 'German Squad Tactics in WW2'and 'Soviet Infantry Tactics in W2' by Sharp. Both go up to company level, despite the titles.

Eastern Front tactical operations are characterized by the breadth of open terrain compared to the more cluttered Western Front. If not open terrain on the Eastern Front, one piece of terrain would dominate versus a more complex inter-linking of terrain in the West. These are generalities of course.

Open terrain can swallow companies and battalions meaning that it takes bodies and automatic weapons to cover all that open terrain. Bodies were usually in short supply compared to the terrain, even for the Sovs, so large swaths of terrain were often uncontrolled in any real sense. If you had the operational intel, the time, the logistics, and the force capability, you could go swanning off into the unknown and emerge someplace embarrasing to the enemy. Or you could starve on the vine a la Popov in Feb 43.

Without enough bodies created the preferred layerd defensivie zones, strongpoint defenses centered on holding a key piece of terrain or supply route were the norm. A weakened company or platoon responsible for a 2+km section of front would not be abnormal. You can imagine that any such defense is very tenuous in the face of a concentrated blow so the offense with a moderate edge in intel will usually win a single battle on a single day. Until the defenses contract as the enemy intentions become known and the offensive becomes streteched out. Then the defense can gain the edge. And thus it seesaws back and forth and the side that can put together the most offensive punches (reserves, supply, command focus/initiative) wins the seasonal or geographic campaigns.

As for good tactics, firepower and manuever work like anywhere else. Germans used armor wedges or small groups of armor working towards a common objectives. Western Allies and Sovs love massed artillery. Germans tend to parcel out their artillery in smaller chunks. Anti-tank defense as elsewhere; bigger AT guns further back and defense in a dispersed zone . . . if more concentrated AT defense needed then reserve and hopefully mobile AT units would be committed. In the West, the dense AT defense seems more rare due, in my opinion to the closed nature of the defense and the many opportunities for a single gun to hold up an advance (exceptions of course). In the east, you had to pile in more guns in a smaller area as the guns were more vulnerable individually. And again in the east, space works against the defender in a tactical sense.

Tactics are the same story as elsewhere, companies go forward discover resistance is light and take a few percent losses and call it a victory, or they discover resistance is heavy (a couple of machine guns), call in artillery, try to work around it, gain very little ground, maybe resort to a low-odds frontal attack in the hopes of beating the odds or at least taking the heat off of a neighbor and taking higher casualties.

Few days of that and company needs some down time to reorganize, re-arm, and stock up on any new bodies.

Repeat as necessary.

link

Red army at war by Grossman, and a novel (a good one) called front line Stalingrad

For a view from the "other side" as well as one fitting your request for level of the forces may I suggest: "Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks: The World War II Memoirs of Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitriy Loza". Translated and Edited by James F Gebhardt. University of Nebraska Press. 1996.

second the nafziger books
Leon degrelle campaign in russia
wermacht combat reports- the russian front by bob caruthers (skimpy probably not worth $15 USD)
I like most of the stackpole books

Hi EJ

I second Thomas's recommendation for "Hitler Moves East" and "Scorched Earth" by Paul Carell.

If you can find them, "Panzer Truppen" volume one and two (ISBN 0887409156 and 0764300806) from Schiffer are worth the effort as well.

Michael in Cloverdale.

"Paul Carell" was really Paul Schmidt, a dyed in the wool Nazi and von Ribbentrop's PR spokesman no less. So he certainly had an agenda when it came to writing about the German army after the war. He should be taken with a pinch of salt and some circumspection.

"Hitler Moves East" and "Scorched Earth" are written almost entirely from a German point of view, and mostly at the operational level rather than focussing on platoon or company level tactics. There is nothing wrong with this, as long as you realise what it is. To get a full and balanced picture read them alongside John Erikson's "The Road to Stalingrad" and the "Road to Berlin" which does the same for the Soviet side but with much more academic rigour.

Although about North Africa and not Russia, "Foxes of the Desert" is very interesting for its insights into Carell's mind. He was smart enough to figure out that the Germans had a big security leak but, since he was writing in the 1950s, he had no idea about ULTRA. Thus, although he had no facts, he points the finger of suspicion at the Italians, and at opponents of Hitler in Berlin, who, not being good Nazis like Carell, were prepared to betray German secrets and see her defeated. With no evidence he could not name names but he had no doubt about his incorrect theories and puts his speculation to the reader as an almost certain "smoking gun" or guns.

Cheers,
Bertie

The web site iremember.ru/en was created/maintained by Artem Drabkin and includes many more Soviet reminiscences similar to those included in "T-34 In Action". I'm not sure if the ones included in the book are on the site as well or not. This is the url for the English version of the site. The Russian version seems to include additional information and reads fairly well with Google translate.

Chris