The Soviet Union at War 1941-1945 by David Stone

Author:David Stone [Stone, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Home Front, Campaigns, Strategy, World War 2
ISBN: 9781848840522
Amazon: 1848840527
Goodreads: 20699303
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Published: 2010-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

In the Red Army’s organization the same general pattern of crisis, retrenchment and growing success was repeated. The first stage, simplifying the Red Army’s units and organization, was a direct result of the horrific material and human losses it experienced in the first few months of the war. From 22,600 tanks and other armoured vehicles at the start of the war, the Red Army had been reduced to 7,700 by the end of 1941. Active and reserve aircraft had similarly fallen from 20,000 to 12,000. These figures understate the shortage of equipment available for fighting against the Axis, since a large proportion was tied up in internal formations, reserves or defending other borders. The Soviet Union was also burdened by an enormous stock of hopelessly obsolete tanks and aircraft devoid of real military value. The actual number of tanks in the fighting army was only 2,200 by the end of 1941. Even that figure conceals just how thin tanks were in some sectors. As of 1 October 1941 the 21st Tank Division, a component of the 54th Army, lacked even a single operational tank.41

As a result of the massive losses in the first year of the war the Soviet high command embarked on radical simplification. Short on trained officers, wherever possible it reduced command burdens by shrinking the size of formations, simplifying tables of organization and extracting extraneous units to group them at a higher level of the command hierarchy. Tanks, aircraft and artillery which had survived the initial onslaught were reorganized into specialized formations to be plugged as necessary into situations which required them. Artillery was pulled out of the hands of divisional commanders, both to reduce their decision load and to concentrate scarce resources for application at the point of greatest need. Once Soviet arms production hit full stride in 1942 and 1943 these specialized formations expanded again and flowered into tank armies, artillery corps and air armies, all possessing massive amounts of firepower aimed at smashing German defences and enabling rapid exploitation of breakthroughs.

In the first phase the organization was radically simplified. Units became smaller. A front, which had previously commanded multiple armies, became the rough equivalent in overall size to a pre-war army. An army, in turn, shrank to the size of a pre-war corps, with 30–60,000 men and around 100 tanks by 1942. A typical rifle division had 5,500 men, half its pre-war norm. Since there were not enough men to staff even these reduced divisions, the Soviets resorted to the temporary expedient of rifle brigades as smaller cousins to rifle divisions, each with 4–6,000 men and commensurately fewer officers and pieces of heavy equipment. By early 1942 the Red Army had 200 such brigades. To reduce the complexity of commanders’ tasks, and to eliminate the officers required to man additional formations, the corps as an intermediate link between the army above and the divisions below was essentially eliminated. Mechanized corps, created at great speed in 1940–41, were dissolved into component tank divisions, which were much smaller than their pre-war equivalents.

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