Soviet Air Force Theory, 1918-1945

James Sterrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135987923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This new book examines the development of Soviet thinking on the operational employment of their Air Force from 1918 to 1945, using Soviet theoretical writings and contemporary analyses of combat actions.

1 Early concepts, 1900–1928

Before discussing the development of the Soviet Air Force’s theories, we must turn to a brief discussion of how the Soviets understood the concept of operational art in the 1920s and 1930s. This is necessary for several reasons. First, because the subject of this work is the employment of the air force, primarily at the operational level, it is necessary to provide a working understanding of how the Soviets understood this level of war. Second, this overview discusses it from the perspective of land warfare, both because Russian and Soviet understanding of the operational level of war first arose regarding land warfare, and because the activity of the Soviet Air Force was expected to be directly related to the activity of the Soviet Army, though on occasion the extent of the tie between them was a source of contention. Since the Soviet Army increasingly utilized the concepts of operational art and successive deep operations, the activity of their Air Force is not comprehensible without reference to that framework. An understanding of the operational level of war is also necessary for understanding Soviet concepts of independent air operations as well. Thus, this chapter begins with the rise of the notion of the operational level of war in Russia and the Soviet Union, then discusses how the Soviets understood the concept as it evolved, moving on to the outline of how they expected the Air Force to fit into Army operations, as a prelude to the close examination of the development of the Soviet Air Force’s theories that follows.

The roots of Soviet understanding of the operational level of war stretch back into the later nineteenth century Imperial Russian Army, when various officers, notably Genrikh Leer, began to develop the notion of theatre tactics as distinct from battlefield tactics and national strategy. Leer’s position as chief of the General Staff Academy from 1889 to 1898 gave him an excellent opportunity to pass on his developing ideas to junior members of the Russian officer corps. Thinking on the operational level of war began to develop more fully in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), albeit amidst much debate over its validity. Many of the Soviet Army’s best theoreticians, including Aleksandr Svechin and Mikhail Tukhachevskii, began their careers as officers in the Tsar’s army during this period of intellectual ferment, and carried that intellectual legacy to the new regime – even though this heritage went unacknowledged by the Soviets.¹

The Soviets developed their concepts of operational art over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. The term itself, coined by Aleksandr Svechin for a lecture in 1924, rapidly gained acceptance. In the Soviet understanding at the time, operations and operational art occupied a middle ground between the tactics of battle-fighting and the strategy of fighting the entire war.² To quote two of the key formulators of these definitions,

In grouping battles, the modern operation is a complex act; it is understood as the totality of maneuvers and battles on a given sector of a theater of military operations directed toward achieving the overall aim. . . . ³

All branches of the art of war are closely interrelated: tactics takes the steps that make up an operational leap, and strategy points the way. In the art of war an operation means a combination of different actions aimed at achieving a goal set forth by strategy. Several operations integrated in time and space form a campaign . . . . ⁴

The Soviets saw the stalemate of the First World War as arising from a process driven by improvements in technology and industry, by which the Napoleonic strategy of a single point, in which approach marches culminated in a day of decisive battle, spread into the multiple-sequenced, but disconnected, engagements seen in the Wars of German Unification. These disparate battles, in turn, melded into a continuous line during the Russo-Japanese War, and that line, in turn, extended its flanks to the limits of available terrain in the First World War. Unable to manoeuvre onto a flank to avoid losses from enemy firepower, armies had to find a means of penetrating the front line directly.⁵ They tended to fail because, as Georgii Isserson wrote of the German offensives in 1918:

There were no operational echelons to develop the penetration, and this reflected the entire indirect influence of the already obsolete linear strategy. [. . .] It is senseless to break down a door if there is no one to go through it.⁶

A key work in developing the concept for ensuring someone could go through the door, V. K. Triandafillov’s The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies examined numerous problems of operations, from approach marches, to sustainment, to combat. He saw the solution to the problem of the operational engagement in the concept of depth: that armies deployed not only along a width of front, but into the areas behind it, generating issues of time. For example, if an infantry corps marching to the front is 30 miles long, the lead elements of the corps may enter battle more than a day in advance of the rear guard. From looking at these problems, the Soviets realized that the staying power, defensive operational depth, and offensive logistical limitations on the abilities of modern armed forces was such that a single battle or campaign was very unlikely to destroy an enemy’s military. Combining this realization with the Soviets understanding of operational art produced the concept of ‘successive operations’. Successive operations required planning each operation so that it would not only be within the combat and logistic capabilities of the forces available, but also planning a set of sequential (and sometimes concurrent) operations, using either the same or adjacent groups of forces, so that the combined effect was greater than the sum of the individual efforts and achieved a significant strategic goal: each operation setting up the preconditions for the successful prosecution of the succeeding ones. An obvious predecessor to this is the Allied offensives in the 100 Days Offensive of 1918. However, the Soviets intended not a series of small bite-and-hold attacks, but offensives to advance one hundred kilometres or more. They expected this level of manoeuvre partly because the First World War on the Eastern Front was somewhat more mobile that that in the West, and partly because of their experiences in the Russian Civil War, which was often very mobile. Successive operations, then, is a general prescription for what operational art is intended to accomplish. The specific application paired the tactical concept of Deep Battle with the operational concept of Deep Operations.⁷

Deep Battle came from the Soviets’ study of recent wars and the application of the concept of depth to the problem of overcoming tactical defences. Most elements of the solution appeared on the Western Front in the First World War – including hurricane bombardments for suppression, improved flexible infantry tactics, effective counterbattery work, and support from aircraft and armour. Combined into a coherent whole and called ‘Deep Battle’ during the later 1920s, it began to appear in official manuals with the 1929 Field Regulations, and was more explicitly laid out in the 1932 Instructions for Deep Battle and the 1936 Field Regulations. The essence of the concept was the recognition that each tactical element played its own special role, all working together to overcome the enemy defence throughout its depth:

For the defeat of the enemy it is not sufficient to concentrate superior strength and equipment. Cooperation is required across the entire depth of the battle of all forces, acting on a given axis, as are supporting actions by forces fighting on other axes.⁸

The combination of artillery, aircraft, infantry, and tanks, working together, could create an extremely violent, fast-moving attack capable of cracking the enemy defence and forming a workable breakthrough at acceptable cost to the attacker. The enemy defence was expected to be arrayed in depth, from the outpost line to the heavy artillery and mobile reserve. Friendly forces were intended to engage all these positions simultaneously in order to prevent the various elements of the defence from supporting each other. In addition, friendly forces were to be echeloned in depth, with the initial wave in the front line and successive groups of assault forces held in the rear to exploit success and drive into the enemy’s defensive array, expanding the breach and driving into the deeper parts of the enemy defence. The ultimate objective of the battle was to pass subsequent echelons beyond the enemy defences to exploit the breakthrough into undefended areas. Deep Battle was a solution to the problem of breaking a dug-in defence by the synchronized application of massed, mobile firepower – and in order to prevent presenting a dense target array to the enemy, the forces producing this result themselves had to be arrayed in depth.

The Soviets called the expansion of this concept into the operational realm Deep Operations, which were developed on the basis of Deep Battle, and laid out in the 1936 Temporary Field Regulations. The combination called for a

. . . simultaneous assault on enemy defences by aviation and artillery to the depths of the defence, penetration of the tactical zone of the defence by attacking units with widespread use of tank forces, and the violent development of tactical success into operational success with the aim of the complete encirclement and destruction of the enemy.⁹

Deep Battle was the tactical prerequisite for this style of operation. By enabling Soviet forces to blow holes in the enemy lines, it enabled forces echeloned in depth to exploit tactical successes and develop them into operational gains. The primary exploitation forces were expected to be armoured, assisted by airborne forces inserted to seize key points whose control would ensure the tanks could move as rapidly as possible. Aircraft would provide both tactical support once the exploiting forces outran the range of friendly artillery, and interdiction of enemy logistical systems and reserve movements. The entire operation was intended to unfold swiftly, using careful synchronization to make maximal use of the disruption caused by the high tempo of the breakout. In keeping with the concept of successive operations, each operation was to seize objectives that set up the conditions for subsequent operations’ success. Successive deep operations were expected to accomplish decisive campaigns, and the Soviets spent much of the early and middle 1930s building a force structure to conduct Deep Operations, and testing it in large exercises. Experimentation with these ideas ground to a halt in 1937, when many of the best and brightest of the Soviet theorists were shot in the purge of the military.

Both the Soviet Army and the Air Force intended the Soviet Air Force to play a major role in operations. Soviet Army theoreticians intended the Air Force to provide firepower in the depths, which we would call Air Interdiction. Matters were not quite so clear-cut from the point of view of the Soviet Air Force. Over the course of the period under study, it wrestled with the issue of its role and how to accomplish it. The rapidly changing technical capabilities of aircraft kept the question of what was tactically feasible open. Since any force would be ill-advised to attempt tactically impossible missions, these changes in technology in turn kept open the issue of which missions the Air Force could or should attempt to accomplish, and the relative priority and sequence of those missions. This in turn linked up to the strategic sphere, as emphasis on different missions suggested different force structures and directions of research, development, and production to emphasize. The Soviet Air Force agreed that its mission was to support the Soviet Army. In detail, however, we find a far less unified picture, not least in the debate as to what ‘supporting the Army’ actually meant. The tale of the Soviet Air Force, like that of its ideas, begins before the existence of the Soviet Union, in the Imperial Russian Air Service.

Imperial Russia’s interest in aviation increased as the nineteenth century wore on, to the point that by 1895 observation balloons were a common feature in manoeuvres, and these balloons played a useful role in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. Investment in heavier-than-air machines increased sharply after the Grand Admiral, Grand Duke Alexandr Mikhailovich, noticed the implications of Bleriot’s flight across the English Channel in 1909. Stating that ‘victory in a future war will be impossible without an air fleet’, he put funds and institutional muscle towards the acquisition of aircraft and the training of pilots. By the outbreak of war, several firms produced aircraft in Russia. Most of them were foreign, but the star of the lot, Igor Sikorsky’s firm, was domestic and producing advanced aircraft. As a result of this attention, at the outbreak of war Imperial Russia’s military commanded 244 aircraft – more than Germany’s 232 or France’s 138. ¹⁰

This apparent strength masked numerous underlying weaknesses. Imperial Russia built 400 aircraft a year in 1914, as opposed to Germany’s 1,348, and its aircraft engine production capability remained critically weak. These problems left Russia dependent on deliveries from the Western Allies. In addition, pilot training facilities were too few to keep up with the demand – reduced though that demand was by lack of aircraft – and throughout the war many in the high command had little concept of the value of aviation. There were bright spots: Major General M. V. Shidlovskii’s squadron of 4-engine Sikorsky ‘Ilia Muromets’ heavy bombers could and did deliver ordnance up to 150 miles behind enemy lines, but this squadron rarely had more than 25 machines in flying condition. General Brusilov concentrated 100 aircraft for his 1916 offensive, and conducted large-scale bombing raids with groups of 20 or more aircraft in order to try to disrupt Austro-Hungarian airbases and railroad stations on the Lutsk axis. However, it is important not to overrate the importance of these actions. Often, half of Brusilov’s 100 aircraft were unable to fly, and of those flying only half were judged ‘fully capable for combat missions’. When the Germans reinforced the Lutsk sector, air superiority passed immediately and irrevocably to them. In general, innovation was a slow affair and generally worked upwards from pilots. While they tried all conceivable manner of missions during the war, the vast majority of sorties flown by Imperial Russia in the First World War, over 90 per cent, were reconnaissance missions. By December 1917, Russia fielded all of 579 aircraft, with a further 1,500 in various states of storage, repair, or training use.¹¹

The revolutions of 1917 fragmented the Russian armed forces, and the air force was no exception. Many pilots went home, or to the Whites; an unknown number of others, including Shidlovskii, were shot by their subordinates. Only a handful wound up joining the fledgling Red Air Force; by 1918 only 33 flights of 6 aircraft remained of 91. By late 1919 the Soviets managed to scrape together around 300–350 machines, and managed to maintain this approximate strength throughout the rest of the Civil War. Despite the numerous difficulties of keeping flyable aircraft at the front, which seriously strained repair and production abilities devastated by effects of the revolution, the most serious shortfall was in trained aircrew. There were at most 300 of these in 1919, and an average loss rate of 50 per cent per year made it difficult to improve on that number. Furthermore, the lack of training led to enough accidents – a disastrous average of one crash per 10–15 hours of flying in 1919 – that one article railing against it was entitled ‘Destroyers and Self-Destroyers’. With effort, the training and equipment situation did improve over the course of the war, albeit slowly.¹²

The combat employment of the available aircraft was extremely haphazard at first, with small groups, rarely reaching as many as 30 aircraft, sent to every front of the Civil War in 1918, in an attempt to shore up Soviet positions. Fortunately, at that time the air war was not intense, as indicated by the total of six dogfights recorded in 1918, and the Soviets had time to attempt to remedy their efforts. In 1919, a group of senior air officers, including A. N. Lapchinskii, wrote the Nastavleniie po primeneniiu aviatsii na voine RKKA: Proekt (Regulations on the Employment of Aviation in War, RKKA: Project) on the basis of experience at Tsaritsin and laid out a rule which would become one of the central themes in Soviet Air Force thinking:¹³

Due to our general insufficiency of military aviation, it is necessary to accept a basic rule: group them on the most important directions, completely starving secondary directions or serving them in extreme cases with single detachments and those with the smallest possible number of aircraft . . .¹⁴ [Emphasis added]

Aircraft were increasingly brought under centralized command in the Field Directorate of Aviation, which, combined with improvements in the Soviet transport system, made it possible to put more and more aircraft on one axis. Nearly 100 aircraft were concentrated against Kolchak in 1919, and 210 supported Tukhachevskii’s drive on Warsaw in 1920. At the same time, the intensity of the air war rose, with 23 dogfights in 1919 and 93 in 1920 – most of the latter against the Poles. Fifteen of Sikorsky’s four-engine Ilya Muromets bombers were brought together with about 20 other heavy aircraft into a ‘Special Purpose Aviation Group’ in August 1919 to form a strike group of heavy bombers. This group engaged in both close air support, including low-level strafing of enemy cavalry on Lenin’s orders, and at least one strike on an enemy airfield, claiming 10 enemy aircraft destroyed. Additionally, these aircraft conducted air interdiction against various targets, such as railroad stations and supply dumps, and there are numerous testimonials to the effectiveness of their close air support and reconnaissance work. Lighter bombers occasionally formed groups of 8–15 aircraft for concentrated strikes. Overall, Soviet Air Force official statistics claim 19,377 sorties flown in the Civil War, for 27,566 hours and 94,508 kg of bombs dropped.¹⁵

However, the official statistics do not square well with other data – that there were 800 sorties flown against Admiral Kolchak in the East during 1919, and 2,100 on the Western Front in 1920, and a total of 3,250 hours total in 1919. The official statistics are probably either inflated, include numerous non-combat flights, such as pilot training, or both. Losses in accidents, over 390, were nearly 5 times greater than those in combat, 83, in which the latter figure compares poorly with the claimed 21 kills in aerial combat. Even these figures are low if the claimed numbers of aircraft repaired and built during the war – 1,574 and 669 – are to be made to jibe with claims of an average strength of 350 machines by the end of the war. However, even if the actual figures are murky, it is quite clear that the Soviet repair, construction, and logistical organization o...