Unresponsive VVS.

[tcolvin]

Richard Simpkin in "Deep Battle: the Brainchild of Marshal Tukhachevskii", published in 1987, wrote on page 64;
"Despite its lavish army aviation resources, the Red/Soviet Army never seems to have come near to achieving the speed and intimacy of fixed-wing air support which the Wehrmacht possessed, and the Western Allies developed ..... The reasons for this shortcoming are twofold. One factor (which also affects artillery support) is that a request for additional support coming up from a subordinate commander was - and apparently and astonishingly still is - a one-way ticket to the nearest penal battalion. The second reason is organisational. Although the control organisation for tactical aviation is capable of putting out a tactical headquarters to army and tentacles to division, resources are concentrated in the air army under the control of front, and are not normally farmed out on an on-call basis".

Mindful of the Red Army's adoption of 'Auftragstaktik' when switching to Tukhachevskii's Deep Operation Theory in 1942, I share Simpkin's astonishment that the VVS and artillery should have remained under the failed practice of 'Befehlstaktik'.
Did Simpkin miss something?

Tony

[Six Nifty .50s]

Did he write about the various radio communications networks in the Soviet armed forces?

Many tanks, aircraft and infantry units did not have tactical radio sets, or a sufficient supply of parts and service technicians trained to maintain the equipment. The Russians did receive a large amount of lend-leased radios but I have not found a thorough study of how this was put to use.

[kalender1973]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

Richard Simpkin in "Deep Battle: the Brainchild of Marshal Tukhachevskii", published in 1987, wrote on page 64;
The reasons for this shortcoming are twofold. One factor (which also affects artillery support) is that a request for additional support coming up from a subordinate commander was - and apparently and astonishingly still is - a one-way ticket to the nearest penal battalion.

LOL!

Originally Posted by tcolvin

Mindful of the Red Army's adoption of 'Auftragstaktik' when switching to Tukhachevskii's Deep Operation Theory in 1942, I share Simpkin's astonishment that the VVS and artillery should have remained under the failed practice of 'Befehlstaktik'.

Tuchachevskii has nothing to do with Deep Operation Theory. The author of the concept was Vladimir Triandafillov.

[tcolvin]

You may be right, Igor, that Triandafillov invented deep operation theory, but this does not appear to be Simpkin's view (page 36);

"One at first gets the impression that, about 1931, this development took a sudden ninety-degree turn from 'broad' to 'deep', in tune with Triandafillov's 'second stage of development'.......... That this impression of a sudden change of direction may be wrong is largely due to the tendency of some Soviet writers to confuse 'deep battle' and 'deep operation'. In fact so eminent an authority as Losik at one point writes of ".....the deep battle, more correctly called deep operation theory". As we shall see, the 'deep battle' at tactical level was a first stage in the evolution of the 'deepening idea', leading to 'deep operation theory' and thence towards a 'theory of operational defence'. Isserson confirms this by stressing that the elements of the deep battle concept are reflected in the 1929 Field Service Regulations".

I do not, however, dispute your view because I do not speak Russian and must rely on secondary sources like Simpkin and his translation of the originals, and on you and others of course.

It might interest you, though, to know how Simpkin described the relationship between Tukhachevskii and Triandafillov (page 32);

"The intellectual relationship between T & T was a complex one. In effect Triandafillov the thinker was sandwiched between Tukhachevskii the dreamer, lover of the arts and of beautiful women, and Tukhachevskii the man of action. Isserson highlights the 'sweep of Tukhachevskii's operational thinking' and his intense technological awareness, and tells us that Triandafillov 'concretised' Tukhachevskii's ideas, thus allowing the latter to implement them".

This is slightly reminiscent of the relationship between Slessor and Trenchard, or even more slightly that between Coram and 'Forty-Second Boyd', in that the thinking of Trenchard and Boyd are known to us through others.

Finally, perhaps you would be good enough to comment on Six Nifty's interesting suggestion that a third reason for the unresponsiveness of the VVS and of the artillery arm could have been the backward state of Russian radio technology.

Tony

[mars]

tcolvin, though I also do not read Russian, but "request for additional support coming up from a subordinate commander was - and apparently and astonishingly still is - a one-way ticket to the nearest penal battalion." sounds absurd to me

[kalender1973]

Tony,

I don't know Richard Simpkin's book, but only one sentence about "penal batalion" move his work to non-read category. I don't know on what sources his researches are based but definitive not on russian archives, which are only now free for access.

About air support of soviet air force. Could you define the criteria for good or bad performance? If yes, we can go through these and look if soviet air force fullfill the points or not. From my point of view in the second part 1944 and in 1945 the soviet air force developed very formidable methods for massive support of soviet ground force and was key element for their success on the ground. The air support was concentrate primary on the domination over battle field and in the second line the cutting of supply lines and isolation of battle field. And if I understand correct this is the main difference to the air support method of western ally.

The situation with radio equipment is the same. The main problem was solved in the second part of 1944. BTW, if you read "The german air war in russia" by Richard Muller, you will see, the Luftwaffe suffered a problem with the communication equipment in 1941-42 and could not adequate communicate with ground forces

[tcolvin]

Simpkin's 'Deep Battle' was written with John Erickson's participation, and much of the material on which it was based was originally researched for Erickson's 'The Soviet High Command and the Road to Stalingrad' and/or for Simpkin's own 'Red Armour' and 'Race to the Swift'. Simpkin wrote before the Soviet Archives were opened, and used the periodical 'Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal'.

Simpkin and Erickson were important in the development of western understanding of maneuver warfare leading to Airland Battle Doctrine - see the sources quoted in www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/maneuver_warfare.

Simpkin's view was that "no reasonable person can question that Soviet writing on the operational art is streets ahead of anything produced by the Wehrmacht or in the post-war West".

The criteria for good performance of an air force in maneuver warfare is, IMHO, the speed and effectiveness of its response to the presence of enemy anti-tank weapons and machine guns. This was first defined in 1918 by the British. It requires real time action that is dependent on direct communication between CAS and ground troops, and it is best provided when the CAS is under command of ground troops.

The RAF's 2TAF in WW2 was deficient both in speed and effectiveness, and was never under command of ground troops. My specific interest is to find a comparison with that provided by the VVS which was, of course, an army airforce.

Tukhachevskii himself stated "the paradox between centralised direction and low-level freedom of action".

Tony

[Graham Boak]

Statements that 2TAF was somehow deficient in speed and effectiveness do not seem to reflect the contemporary opinions on the troops on the ground, but post-war manoeuvring for funds and squabbles among theorists over "ownership". It should be pointed out that the Army has many tools of its own for dealing with enemy AT guns and machine guns, such as mortars, tanks, and artillery, without necessarily calling on rare and expensive assets such as aircraft at every stumbling block.

There seems to be considerable difference in appreciation of the difference between what nowadays are termed called Close Air Support and Battlefield Interdiction. The former is definitely dependent upon good radio contact with the forward troops: if this was lacking in the early years of the Great Patriotic War then there is no way that good CAS could be practised, and the most efficient use of ground-attack aircraft was in Battlefield Interdiction. This involves attacking targets behind the front line such as headquarters, supply dumps, mobile forces and supply lines such as roads and railways. This is largely dependent upon good intelligence, but where such supply lines are few and spaces open, good results can be obtained even without this.

Of course, the successes obtained this way are largely invisible to the troops on the ground, and therefore ignored by critics of airpower to whom only aircraft seen directly overhead actually count.

It's not clear to me how the Soviet approach differs in principle from Western air force tactical operations. Beyond the tactical area, however, the near-complete lack of operations at any distance from the front permitted much more freedom of movement for the Germans in re-organising to reduce the effect of breakthroughs. In this case the Western forces had the luxury of an extra weapon not available to their Soviet or German counterparts.

[kalender1973]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

The criteria for good performance of an air force in maneuver warfare is, IMHO, the speed and effectiveness of its response to the presence of enemy anti-tank weapons and machine guns. This was first defined in 1918 by the British. It requires real time action that is dependent on direct communication between CAS and ground troops, and it is best provided when the CAS is under command of ground troops.

The RAF's 2TAF in WW2 was deficient both in speed and effectiveness, and was never under command of ground troops. My specific interest is to find a comparison with that provided by the VVS which was, of course, an army airforce.
Tony

Tony,

I would say, the reaction time from 1944 was "good enough". I have not exact numbers, but we have many samples how even for single tank or bunker or AT position the shturmoviks were dispatched by air controllers on the ground. In many cases the ground controlles redirect the attacking groups in the air to the target with higher priority. Such close cooperation was one reason for the high losses in soviet airforce, the common formation with 2-6 Il-2 and 2-4 fighters was very vulnerable against german jäger, which often flew in bigger formation(at least it was reported by soviet pilot)

IIRC the air controller on the ground was assigned on the level of infantery/tank corps and it is clear, not every single company could call CAS.

The main problem of soviet CAS and also fighter protection occurs at the end phase of front operation. In some cases the ground forces moved hunderds kilometers to the west and the air force unit could not move so fast with their air fields and infrastructure and on the other hand the soviet plane have very limited action range. Therefore in such cases the situation for the ground forces was not much better as in 1941-42. The examples are either the end of Bagration operation, where soviet 2nd tank army suffered under german air attack or german attack on the bridgehead on the Oder river in february 1945.

[Graham Boak]

The Western forces used fighterbombers on patrol ready for almost immediate response to the call - the Rover David or Cabrank tactics. Although diversion from planned attacks was possible, generally it was not needed. By using fighter bombers rather than more lumbering types they were much less vulnerable if attacked by the Luftwaffe - where it still existed, as it did on Western Europe if not in Italy. The main losses came from flak, despite armouring of vital parts of the aircraft.

The early North African campaign gave much the same result of the army outrunning their air support, but after this RAF fighter and fighter-bomber units were trained to rapidly move to advanced strips to maintain the pressure on the enemy and support the army. I believe (but don't know for sure) that the US 9th, 12th and 19th AF were the same. It may be that the deciding factor in the Soviet inability to achieve this was the logistic factor in supplying such bases, rather than the immediate transfer of the fighting unit.