"Rubble as defensive terrain" Topic

I think it was Dan Snow's documentary on Stalingrad that claimed that it was serious a mistake for the Germans to have so heavily bombed the city before attacking it, because it made the city more easily defensible for the Soviets.

Why is that? Why are shattered buildings intrinsically better defensive terrain than unshattered ones?

Visual clutter. Very hard to pick out someone in a jumble of debris. In many cases, simply aiming fire at windows of an intact building can suppress the defenders. (If the defenders have been in place for an extended period, they've probably loopholed the walls, though.)

Obstructed movement, slow movement. More vulnerability to defensive fire. Difficult for AFVs to support troops.

Can't collapse the building on the defenders with HE.

There's more …

A rubbled building also gives you far more opportunities for the defender to fire on you as you approach and makes it harder to escape notice.

Agree with the above, plus…

Makes aerial reconnaissance and target spotting more difficult.
Impedes interpretation of photorecon images.

For ground troops, maneuvering and map reading are made more difficult by the absence of a visually distinct environment. Being unable to key off of specific buildings, losing references like power, telephone, and tram lines, and especially having the streets heavily obscured are all very challenging for a modern combatant.

Destroyed buildings make road maps inaccurate and unreliable. Hard to plan a tactical advance when the street are choked with rubble.

The serious mistake was fighting inside the city at all.
The germans strength was fast moving mobile combat. Getting bogged down in a huge bua gave away their advantage and resulted in an attritional battle.
Rubbled streets stop you moving vehicles through them.

Cassino being another example of a bombardment that actually helped the defenders.

Wasn't part of the deal at Cassino that the Germans had not taken up positions in the monastery, but after it was bombed, they considered it fair game?

Or is that urban legend?

The Germans claimed that they didn't need to put spotters in the buildings because they could do the same thing in nearby position on the hill. Once it was bombed, there was no downside to occupying the monestary.

The other angle is that the suburbs and outlying areas of Stalingrad were wooden, so the bombing burned them flat (with bare chimneys spaced every 40 feet), so the German troops approaching the city had that much less cover/concealment. And the big concrete public buildings in the center suddenly had clear fields of fire around them.

"Makes aerial reconnaissance and target spotting more difficult. Impedes interpretation of photorecon images."

Good point. There's a site on the internet with dozens of Luftwaffe aerial recon photos of Stalingrad, taken as the Germans approached the city. What surprises me is that the defensive lines in the city, built by mobilized civilian labor, are not at all where I would have put them if I were setting up a defensive line.

I don't think there are any serious claims the Germans had violated the zone around the monastery until after it was bombed.

The commanders making the decisions suspected they had and the troops looking up at it every day certainly thought it was occupied.

Destroying it was a tragedy but next to the thousands of casualties in the battle pretty small beer. A bit like the destruction of ancient monuments by ISIS – a tragedy and a crime but nothing compared to the mass murders etc.

As above, destroyed BUAs create a very complex environment (plus, all the buildings are already collapsed so not dropping on the defenders heads).

Complex environments are very easy to defend, although like all dense terrain (BUAs, forests) it sucks up huge numbers of troops to do it as part of a linear defence due to restricted fields of fire.

Fortified villages in WW1 were strongpoints not because the defenders were hiding in the wrecked buildings, but because the irregularity of the rubble made it much harder to pick out the trench systems.

I agree with all the above, but it rather begs the question:

So why did the Germans do it?

Surely they were aware of the downside? Or did they think bombing alone would be enough to drive the defenders out?

Well, there was Hitler and yes, he made a number of wrong calls, ie. attack Russia in late June, divert substantial parts of Army Group Center to Kiev, battle in Stalingrad, retreat at Kursk, fortify cities in Russia, didn't listen to Manstein, fired Guderian, killed Rommel, etc etc…. and that's just on the military side of things. All other atrocities and stupidities are well known.

So, in a nutshell, Hitler sent a weakened Army Group mainly made up by 6th Army and 4th Panzer to take Stalingrad "at all cost". As this Army Group was ripped of most of the tanks, it was mainly an infantry army which is why Goering (another smart cookie on military matters) decided to help out with the Luftwaffe. On top of that, 6th Army just received a new commander, Paulus, who was an excellent planner and organiser, but lacked the combat experience. The Russians attacked the advancing Army group from all sides in the advance to the city of Stalingrad and when it arrived in the rubles, 6th Army was already exhausted and depleted.
Hitler did not want the army to regroup and to give up on the city as it was "Stalin's City". So, one of the most epic battles on the Eastern Front took off.

The Germans were fighting a war of extermination.
Bombing the city helped kill more Slavs and helped induce panic and terror.

I don't think there's much more to it than that.

Might another advantage of defending in rubble be that it can be excavated to some extent, to construct field fortifications?

I think Stalingrad was the first city heavily bombed then assaulted while in ruins. The bombing was in part hoped to cause a collapse of Soviet morale. It was also just one more thing to try when it was proving hard to take. If you have a hammer handy every problem looks like a nail.

It was also the town of Cassino. A hundred defenders hindered the assault on the monastery way out of proportion to their numbers. Collapsing upper floors make great reinforced roofs for lower floors and basements.

Think of it as a rock swamp. Virtually impassinle to vehicles, difficult going for infantry but defenders get excelent visibility of moving targets ar shortish) ranges and are always in hard cover. Never though to fight over this sort of terrain and its not defined in our rules. Proably as its not a place that would be interesting to fight over for reasons well descibed in all the previous posts.

I think Mr Snow is partly guilty of putting modern interpretations onto contemporary thinking.
In 1942 (and in SAC, still in 1962) Douhetist theories on terror bombing were still all the rage, during the Poland campaign Richtofen had ordered the bombing of Warsaw: It promptly surrendered. Its not unlikely that he thought it would work at Stalingrad.

I think the argument as to whether the Germans should have taken Stalingrad is separate from the question of turning buildings into rubble. If a town has enemy troops in it, either you blow the snot out of the town in hopes of killing as many troops as possible and creating chaos before you attack, or you go in with small arms and grenades against an enemy in prepared buildings that loom over the streets you move down. Which sounds better to you?

With firepower you can reduce buildings to rubble, but after that with more firepower you only move the rubble around. My rules count concrete/stone rubble as giving the most protection to infantry.

As above, you need supporting fire to suppress defensive positions before you assault them. An unfortunate side effect of supporting fire is that it tears up the ground, and it requires truly monumental amounts of HE to actually kill the defenders.

WW1 and WW2 are replete with examples of this, and there really isn't an easy answer if you are forced into a position where you have to frontally assault defended areas. Ideally you'd manouvre the defenders out, but at Stalingrad in 1942, it just wasn't going to happen.

Nobody learns.

After Stalingrad and Cassino, the Brits bombed the snot out of Caen, killing around 2000 French civilians with the same result: easier defended positions in the rubble and the town becoming impassable to armor even after it had fallen.