A German Nebelwerfer firing in Warsaw, August 1944.
- Modern armies are largely unprepared and ill-equipped to fight in cities
- While that skill set and the tools for it have fallen out of style, there were a number of weapons on the battlefield during World War II that could meet the need today, writes British veteran, lecturer, and military adviser Dr. Charles Knight.
- This story was originally published by the Modern War Institute at West Point.
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A key message of this site is that contemporary armies are unprepared for the challenges of operating in cities. In some respects, though, we are actually much less prepared now than in the past.
Last year John Spencer offered a wish list of tools the US Army does not have but that he would want if sent to fight in a dense urban environment, as he did in Baghdad in 2007-2008. Ironically, there were weapons systems available in 1944 that were better suited to the problems of urban combat than those we have today.
By 1944, both Allied and Axis armies had paid in blood to discover what was needed to progress against a determined enemy who took advantage of the cover and concealment offered by buildings and presented a threat of constant ambush from three dimensions.
While tactics differed between armies, some attack methods were constant. The essential tool for clearing was the grenade. Attackers had learned that they would lose a close-quarters marksmanship contest with lurking defenders unless every room and space was first blasted before entry to kill, or at least daze and deafen, anyone within. The building-clearing drill in Commonwealth armies was focused on supporting the "bomber" who, directed by the section commander, constantly tossed or dropped grenades ahead of the "entrymen."
Soviet Gen. Vasily Chuikov emphasized that in urban warfare, "you've got to pluck the enemy out with bayonets and grenades," and directed troops to carry 10 to 12 grenades and throw one first at every corner and doorway. Wehrmacht soldiers would tie their stick grenades in bundles to breach walls and use poles to get them behind interior cover or to reach defenders in upper rooms or stairwells.
Yet, by 1944 all the armies had also learned to minimize building-to-building and room-to-room fighting and exploit firepower. As the Soviets pushed west, Stalin's Stavka, the Soviet high command, directed bypassing defended urban areas and even leaving escape routes open to avoid a close urban fight that reduced Soviet advantages in mass and firepower.
When assault could not be avoided, Soviet forces applied their planning norms for extraordinarily heavy "annihilation" (unichtozhenie) levels of artillery bombardment. In the later battles for the smaller cities and towns of East Prussia this approach would turn the wood-and-brick buildings into a pile of rubble that buried the defenders: Resistance often only lasted a few hours.
In the bigger cities where buildings were more substantial, a doctrine of direct artillery fire was emphasized. Attacking Soviet infantry forces were not only accompanied by tanks but closely followed by medium and heavy guns to provide the direct fire that could systematically destroy buildings used as strongpoints. The Allies learned the same technique: After surrendering Aachen, the German garrison commander said, "When the Americans start using 155s as sniper weapons it's time to give up."
Immediately after D-Day the Allied forces also sought to use air bombardment to collapse resistance in urban objectives, despite having already discovered at Monte Cassino and other towns in Italy that if the defenders had underground shelter, the air bombing provided the enemy with a massive obstacle impassable to armored vehicles.
The Commonwealth forces encountered the same challenge when, to support the breakout from Normandy, the Royal Air Force bombed the French city of Caen. The military problem created by the rubble was compounded by the political problems flowing from the number of French civilian casualties. The resulting requirement for "restraint" to reduce civilian casualties came at a time that the Allies were also struggling with shortages of manpower and becoming increasingly sensitive to their own casualties.
Commonwealth armies determined that a man should not be sent to do what a machine could achieve and increasingly relied on a variety of specialized armored engineering vehicles that had been designed to overcome the German coastal fortifications and obstacles. During the advance into Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, tanks equipped to fire demolition charges and those fitted with flamethrowers proved a potent combination for collapsing an urban defense.
By this stage in the war, the Germans were now usually on the defensive, for which they had discovered their simple, tough self-propelled guns were a force multiplier in both urban defense and counterattack. They proved particularly valuable in the latter, by reducing the requirement to conduct infantry counterassaults against determined defenders in buildings, which invariably caused heavy casualties.
During the battles in the Netherlands to eject British and Polish airborne forces from Arnhem and Oosterbeek, or in Warsaw to destroy the Polish Home Army, the Germans learned to bring the self-propelled guns up and systematically destroy each defended building from the roof downward. In the same battles they also used fire, deliberately burning large parts of the Dutch towns to variously evict the paratroopers or turn them into hot ruins that could not be occupied.
The assault and engineering vehicles and some specialist infantry weapons that were available in 1944 might still prove remarkably useful if modern military forces had them today. Certainly, updated versions or new systems able to provide equivalent effects would offer significant capabilities that we do not currently possess.
Let's have a look at some examples.