Medieval cavalry charges?

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Larso
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Medieval cavalry charges?

#1

Post by Larso » 28 Jun 2003, 17:08

I have been wondering for a while about the reality of medieval cavalry charges. I have read that horses will not run into something solid (makes sense). So how then did they cope with infantry which stood firm or even an equally armoured cavalry force charging at them. On the later, John Keegan makes the comment that two such forces charging each other would have led to mutual destruction. So how did it work?

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#2

Post by ChristopherPerrien » 30 Jun 2003, 09:24

Welcome to the forum Larso

Cavalry did not atack organized infantry.Cavalry is used after the infantry is disorganized by other arms. To be honest cavalry has not been a "shock army" since Alexander's time, 300bc.

At the battle of Hasting William's cavalry , which was composed of Norman Knights, could not break the line of English infantry , William had his archers assail the English for several hours until by sheer attritriton there was not an organized infantry to oppse his cavalry charges.

This is always the case, cavalry , even Napoleon's vaunted cavalry could not "break" an organized infantry defense.

Cavalry never charges other cavalry as that is not their mission and it does not work anyway, only in the realm of jousting do heavy armour cavalry meet and that is not war but "dueling".

I would suggest you read about The battles of Hastings and Waterloo and that will answer all your questions about cavalry from 1066 to 1815.


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Paul Timms
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Cavalry Charges

#3

Post by Paul Timms » 30 Jun 2003, 22:10

I would disagree about Cav vs Cav charges during the Napoeonic wars. There are many examples The Union Brigade charged French Cuirassiers at Waterloo and the Lancers counter attacked the Scots Greys. However i read somewhere that a line of Hussars charged another one and both made two passes through each others lines without inflicting a casaulty.

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Tom Houlihan
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#4

Post by Tom Houlihan » 30 Jun 2003, 22:14

My understanding was that the success of the cavalry charged was based on the discipline and structure of the infantry. A wall of 12 foot lances would probably be effective. A line of swordsmen probably wouldn't stand up as well. But, I claim no mass of knowledge on the subject, just my own understandings.

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#5

Post by ChristopherPerrien » 30 Jun 2003, 23:28

The English infantry at Hastings were armed primarily with axes, and William nearly lost his head during one of the seven charges they made.

Yes during Napoleonic war cavalry did charge cavalry, I believe that at Waterloo the British did charge French cavlry, I think the french cav had been severely disorganized by their ineffective attacks on English infantry squares earlier.

By by the time the Civil war came cavalry was ineffective as a battlefield weapon,although there was some good use of dismounted cavalry on the defensive, Dragoon tactics, Cavalry ended up pretty much recon and harassment, of course many generals did not believe it until the end of WWI.

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Oleg Grigoryev
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#6

Post by Oleg Grigoryev » 01 Jul 2003, 19:25

Cavalry was used extenesevly during Russian Civil(when the last large cav vs cav occured - 1st Red Cavalry Army under Budenniy against Denikin cavalry) war and during Russo-Polish conflict whnen 1st Cavlry Army and Gai Cavalry Corps were used in very much same manner tha later large armored formations were used. 2nd Cavalry Army under Mironov had key role in capture the last "white" hold-out -Crimea

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#7

Post by ChristopherPerrien » 01 Jul 2003, 22:07

Quite right Oleg , I really did not think of Russia in this. The dispersion in Russia and Asia is so great that Cavalry did last there some time. I really know nothing about any cavalry battles there, except for Napoleon's calvary during his invasion. And of course the Mongol invasions , horse-archers, and etc.

Another note: Read up on Gustavus Adolphus, he did some excellent cavalry manuevers during some of his battles, truely an Alexander, too bad he died, half of Europe might be Sweden today.

Larso
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#8

Post by Larso » 03 Jul 2003, 01:52

Thanks everyone. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion regarding this aspect of warfare, at least in military literature. Perhaps some of this is due to authors just repeating perceived wisdoms or failing to envision what they've actually written about. Terms like 'ride them down like grass' and others always implied heavy cavalry's unstopability. How this went when two similarly equipped forces rode at each other, I'm not sure. Perhaps they had to leave gaps for each other to ride through. I recall the cavarly charge scene in Braveheart. Stunning as it was, I always thought why did the horses not flinch? I've been told that horses can be trained like that but then Hastings and others signify a different reality. Anyway thanks for your thoughts.

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Paul Timms
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charges

#9

Post by Paul Timms » 03 Jul 2003, 20:18

As long as infantry hold steady they are ok but it takes a brave man (or men) once one breaks you are lost. I was in the path (not the target of) a Police charge with about 25 horses boot to boot in Heavy cav style. Its pretty scary, the crowd broke and ran. To face 5 or 6 hundred (or thousand) would take nerves of steel.

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#10

Post by Attila the Hunking » 09 Jul 2003, 13:12

Cavalry did not atack organized infantry.Cavalry is used after the infantry is disorganized by other arms. To be honest cavalry has not been a "shock army" since Alexander's time, 300bc.
I think this is not quite true. Afaik, in the 30years War, the use of cavalry against infantery units beeing still in well organized shape was a quite common thing. In the Battle of Breitenfeld ,for Instance, a imperial unit of pikemen was separated from the imperial army anf thus fell prey to swedish cavalry.
I can also remember this Account of Skirmish at Fjelkinge where swedish Infanterymen considered it to be wiser to surrender to danish cavalry, rather than to fight.

But besides that, take a look at the infamous Battle of Bannockburn, in which english heavy cavalry rushed straigt into the pikes of the scottish schilltrons.

A quote from this Bannockburn-Site :
[...]Gloucester, eager to lead the charge without the interference of Hereford, spurred his horse forward without taking the time to don his brightly coloured surcoat bearing his coat of arms. Without this he was just another mailed, armored rider and many of the knights didn't recognise him at first. As such the charge he led was not as compact and cohesive as it should have been. It was still a terrible sight to behold and was powerfully heavy with the weight of iron suddenly propelled forward. The knights raced on, faceles men in iron helms, their lances lowered and their great warhorses pounding the earth with their iron-shod hooves. They crashed into Edward Bruce's division and, though Gloucester was plucked from his saddle impaled by a Scottish spear, the fury of the charge caused the schilltron to bend - but not break. The English knights were not lacking in courage and they drove their mounts onto the spears. Horses and riders fell with broken spears in their breasts, but some broke into the schilltron and flayed around with mace, battleaxe and sword, cleaving skulls, limbs and shoulders until they were dragged from their horses, their helmets pulled back and their unprotected throats cut. [...]

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#11

Post by Attila the Hunking » 09 Jul 2003, 13:29

The English infantry at Hastings were armed primarily with axes, and William nearly lost his head during one of the seven charges they made.
The first rows were armed with large shilds and spears, beeing aided by those who stood behind them with danish battleaxes.
You forgot to mention that Harold placed his Army on a Hill,which was crucial for succesful defence. Harold had become aqainted with the norman cavalry earlier on his expiditions against Wales, and he was aware that the odds would be heavily stacked against his men, when fighting norman cavalry in the open field. This was clearly shown when some saxon soldiers left the hill to pursue auxilary infantery of Williams army, after seeing his cavalry retreating from the scene. However this retreat turned out to be a feigned one, the norman cavalrymen turned back and easily crushed them while the rest of the saxon Army had no choice but stand by and watch.

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Oleg Grigoryev
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Russian Civil War and the use of Cavalry

#12

Post by Oleg Grigoryev » 10 Jul 2003, 03:36

As a background to the study of operational art, the Russian civil war constitutes an extremely interesting, although highly contradictory, phase in the operation's development. The peculiarities of the conflict, at once grandiose in its immense spatial scope and anachronistically small in the numbers of men and equipment actually engaged, represent a highly eccentric break with the heretofore orderly quantitative development of a number of operational indices. For example, at its greatest length in early 1919 the "front" stretched some 8,000 kilometers, from the Gulf of Finland south along the border with the Baltic States, then southeast across Belorussia and southern Ukraine to the Northern Caucasus, before looping back to the Caspian Sea. The line then moved north through the Volga-Kama basin, before turning to the northwest until it reached the Finnish border north of Petrograd (Leningrad/St. Petersburg). From mid-1918 the fighting centered along two main fronts, which alternated periodically in strategic importance. These were the eastern, generally between the Volga and the Ural Mountains, and the southern, embracing most of Ukraine, the Don River basin, and the northern Caucasus Mountains. During the follow-on war with Poland the front came to include the western districts of Ukraine and Belorussia, to the ethnic border of Poland and beyond. Secondary fronts also existed at various times west of Petrograd, the area south of Archangel and Murmansk, the Trans-Caucasus region, Central Asia, and the Far East. The Soviet forces held the interior of this line, while their enemies, the Whites, operated from the periphery.
The troops available to man this front were hopelessly inadequate to the task, due not only to an objective shortage of manpower but also to the troops' irrational employment. At its peak strength in 1920 the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA) numbered 5.5 million men, of which only 700,000 to 800,000 were regular troops and a mere 400,000 to 500,000 were combatants .47 The White armies, for their part, never totaled more than 640,000 men at best, although they made up somewhat for their inferiority by the high proportion of trained officers in their ranks. In material terms the situation was even worse, and by the end of the civil war the Red Army still possessed only 2,300 artillery pieces, or about as many as were in the German Fifth Army, which attacked along a 15-kilometer front at Verdun in 1916.49 Rarely in the history of modern warfare have the forces of the warring parties been so minuscule in relation to the stakes involved. These factors made the maintenance of a continuous defensive front impossible and shifted the advantage decisively in favor of the attacker, who could generally break through the defender's porous line or turn his position by means of a flanking movement. This helped to make the civil war a conflict of exceptionally wide-ranging maneuver, particularly in comparison with the limited movement of the Great War. The scarcity of reserves on both sides made even the slightest breakthrough or turning movement a potential disaster for the defense. Thus while offensives on the western front in 1914-18 could often be measured in hundreds or thousands of meters gained, civil war operations flowed back and forth over hundreds of kilometers and more. For example, during the Red Army's 1919-20 offensive on the eastern front the White forces were driven all the way from the middle Volga to Lake Baikal, a distance of several thousand kilometers. In brief, the military problem for the Bolsheviks was to break out of their central Russian redoubt and extend their control over the outlying areas of the country. The problem for the anticommunist forces was just the opposite: to pierce the Soviet heartland from one or more of their strongholds and bring down the regime by a march on Moscow. However, both sides were hobbled by a number of serious economic, military, political, and other liabilities. For example, the Whites at one time controlled territory that before the war produced 85 percent of the country's iron ore, 90 percent of the coal, three-quarters of the steel, and almost all of the oil and that housed two-thirds of its military factories . The White forces could also count on significant aid from Western governments, although what direct military intervention there was by the Allies proved to be insufficient. The Whites also possessed greater military expertise at first, although this became less of a factor as the war progressed. The Bolsheviks, however, were not without their advantages, which ultimately proved decisive. The Reds, although they initially occupied only a fraction of the country's territory, did hold the most populous areas and hence the larger recruiting base. They also enjoyed the inestimable benefit of interior lines, which allowed them to switch forces from one threatened front to another as the situation demanded. During the war 70 percent of the Soviet divisions fought on two or more fronts, with some employed on as many as five. This was in contrast to the Whites, who were never able to establish a continuous front under a single commander in chief and whose offensive operations were consequently uncoordinated. The same was true in the political sphere, where the White effort suffered continuously from factionalism and the inability to articulate a coherent and popular program. This was opposed to the Bolshevik leadership, which combined superior political insight and flexibility of method with utter ruthlessness of execution. Both sides relied on a small, solid core of ideologically committed volunteers, while the bulk of their forces consisted of reluctant peasant conscripts who were essentially indifferent to the political quarrels involved. Loyalties were particularly weak, and large-scale desertions were common on both sides. Between January 1919 and December 1920 the Red Army tallied 2,846,000 cases of desertion or otherwise absent without leave. The fidelity of most soldiers was ensured by harsh discipline and consistent military success rather than any sort of political allegiance. Indeed, so great was the reluctance to fight in Russia that the Red Army throughout relied heavily on the military skills of former German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war who had converted to communism. About 50,000 Hungarians, Czechs, Germans, and other nationalities fought on the Soviet side during these years and accounted for as much as 10 to 11 percent of the Red Army's strength in late 1918.53 The Whites also had their foreign allies, including former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war, who proved to be some of their most effective soldiers. Along with the Red Army's numerical growth came a corresponding development of its organs of strategic and operational control. The Bolsheviks' first military body was the Military Revolutionary Committee, created by the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies for the purpose of overthrowing the Provisional Government. This organization was followed in rapid succession by the Committee for Military and Naval Affairs, the Council of People's Commissars for Military Affairs, and, finally, the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs in late 1917. General Dukhonin briefly carried out the functions of supreme commander in chief under the Bolsheviks until his removal and murder in November 1917. He was succeeded by the lawyer and professional revolutionary N. V. Krylenko, who held the post until its abolition in early 1918. By the summer of 1918 the outlines of a more permanent military organization had begun to take shape. At the top stood the Communist Party's Central Committee, although this body played a secondary role to the more powerful Politburo. The party exercised direct control over the war effort through the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense, created in November 1918 and renamed the Council of Labor and Defense in April 1920. The Bolshevik leader Lenin headed this body, which served as the prototype of the 1941-45 State Defense Committee under Stalin. Direct control of military operations was exercised through the RVSR, created in September 1918. Trotsky, who was also the people's commissar for military affairs, headed this body. The highest strictly military post in the Red Army was that of commander in chief (glavnokomanduyushchii, or glavkom), who was at the same time a member of the RVSR and carried out its directives. The first commander in chief was Vatsetis, a Latvian and former czarist colonel, who had graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1909 and occupied the post from its creation in September 1918 until his removal in July 1919, as the result of a policy dispute. He was succeeded by Kamenev, also a former colonel and 1907 academy graduate, who served in the post throughout the remainder of the war. The working organ of the RVSR and the commander in chief was the RVSR Field Staff, created in September 1918 and charged with drawing up strategic plans and transmitting orders to the fronts and independent armies. The preponderant role of the "military specialists" in the Red Army is the most obvious point of continuity between the czarist regime and its communist successor. Another, but no less significant, link between the two is the enduring front system of command. The front existed in theory as early as 1900 and was already fully developed by the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks, for all their revolutionary ardor in abolishing the old regime's symbols, adopted this organizational expedient without any difficulty, and for many of the same reasons-broad frontages and a multiplicity of enemies. The Red Army organized its first front, the Eastern, in mid-1918, which was followed over the next several months by the creation of the Northern, Southern, and Ukrainian Fronts, among many others. Civil war fronts, compared with those of the late empire, were quite small and technologically primitive, numbering only about 46,000 to 147,000 men and 245 to 660 artillery pieces. The armies of the period were also pale reflections of their imperial predecessors and contained anywhere from 14,000 to 28,000 men and 72 to 216 guns. The Eastern Front had its origins in the events of the spring and summer of 1918. Here resistance to Soviet power was based primarily on the Czechoslovak Corps, which had been formed from Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war to fight on the Allied side. The Czechoslovaks responded to the Bolsheviks' clumsy attempts to disarm them by seizing the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Vladivostok to the Volga and becoming the backbone of White resistance in Siberia. The latter also included elements of the short-lived Constituent Assembly, which had been dispersed by the Bolsheviks in early 1918, and other groups. In response, the Soviets created the Eastern Front in June and appointed as its first commander Murav'ev, a former lieutenant colonel and member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Following Murav'ev's death in an abortive uprising a month later, Vatsetis was appointed to the post. These events coincided with the Soviets' first major military crisis in the summer of 1918, when the White forces began a broad offensive in the area between the Urals and the Volga. By mid-August the Whites had crossed the river and taken Samara, Simbirsk (Ul'yanovsk), and Kazan', and they threatened to link up with anti-Bolshevik forces advancing from the Don River area. Even more threatening was the possibility of an advance through Nizhnii Novgorod to Moscow. The Soviets recovered, however, and in a six-month series of offensive operations (September 1918-February 1919) threw the Whites back nearly to the Urals and restored communications with Soviet authorities in Central Asia. The Red Army's position was now better than it had been for some time, although new trials were not long in coming. By early 1919 the White forces in the east had recovered from their defeats of the previous autumn and were once again ready to resume the advance on Moscow. This time they were led by Admiral A. V. Kolchak, who had seized control of the anti-Bolshevik movement in Siberia from more democratic elements the previous November. By the beginning of the offensive in early March, Kolchak's forces numbered some 113,000 men and more than 200 guns against 111,000 Red troops and 379 guns. The White forces were organized into the Siberian and Western Armies in the north and the "Southern Army Group," Orenburg and Ural'sk Armies in the south. Opposed to them were the Soviet troops of the Eastern Front under Kamenev, who had replaced Vatsetis in September 1918 when the latter was called to Moscow to take up the newly created post of commander in chief. The Soviet armies were divided from north to south into the Third, Second, Fifth, Turkestan, First, and Fourth Armies. These forces occupied an 1,800-kilometer front that stretched from the forests north of Perm' to the Caspian Sea. The White advance began on March 4 (see map 5) along a broad front from Perm' to Orsk, with the main effort concentrated along a 450-kilometer front from Perm' to Ufa. The Whites apparently were seeking to link up with allied forces near Kotlas and in the Kuban' region, which, if correct, represented a dangerous dispersion of scarce manpower. Nevertheless, this assault was initially successful against the scattered Soviet forces in the area, which had been neglected in favor of the armies currently fighting in Ukraine. Ufa fell on March 14, while to the south Kolchak's forces severed the tenuous Soviet link with Central Asia and threatened to cut off the Red garrisons at Orenburg and Ural'sk. The danger was particularly great in the center, where Gen. M. V. Khanzhin's Western Army was pressing Tukhachevsky's Fifth Army back to the Volga south of the Kama River. By mid-April Kolchak's forces had succeeded in opening a large gap between Tukhachevsky and the neighboring Second Army and threatened to break through to the river in the direction of Simbirsk and Samara. Once the scale of the White advance became apparent, the Soviets quickly set about preparing a counterattack. Glavkom Vatsetis first broached this idea in a message to Kamenev on April 2, suggesting that the front gather a "strike fist" against the White forces advancing from Ufa. A meeting between Trotsky, Vatsetis, and Kamenev on April 10 adopted and developed this idea further and made a number of important organizational changes as well. The most visible response was to split the Eastern Front into two semi-independent groups for greater ease of control: the Southern (Fourth, First, Turkestan, and Fifth Armies), which incorporated Soviet forces south of the Kama, commanded by Frunze, and the Northern (Second and Third Armies), which included those forces north of the river, under the former czarist colonel V. I. Shorin. That same day Kamenev ordered Frunze to strengthen the Fifth Army and gather forces in the Buzuluk area, between Samara and Orenburg, for a counterattack .The energetic Frunze, together with his chief of staff, the former czarist major general and 1895 General Staff Academy graduate F. F. Novitsky, immediately set about drawing up plans for a counterstroke against the exposed southern flank of Khanzhin's widely scattered forces, which were nonetheless pressing inexorably toward the Volga. His initial plan foresaw the creation of a powerful infantry-cavalry strike force to attack the enemy's left flank and push him back to the north. However, numerous transport difficulties slowed the concentration of this force, and the necessity of shoring up Tukhachevsky's collapsing army soon forced Frunze to send part of his planned strike force north to reinforce the Fifth Army's left wing. Frunze, in a message to Kamenev before the start of the counteroffensive, outlined the operation's goals, which included launching a concentrated attack between the widely separated 3d and 6th Corps in the Buguruslan-Zaglyadino area, "for the purpose of separating these corps and routing them in detail." To compensate for the loss of part of his strike force, Frunze directed Fifth Army to attack toward Buguruslan and Bugul'ma, while at the same time units of the First Army's left flank would pin down enemy forces and cover the advance from the right. Frunze resorted to a good deal of internal regrouping to create his striking force. His final arrangements for the offensive are an excellent example of employing the maximum concentration of force at the point of decision, even given the watered-down version that he was forced to adopt. Of the approximately 70,000 troops under his command at the end of April, Frunze managed to concentrate for the attack 36,620 men and 152 guns along a 200- to 220-kilometer front against the two White corps' 7,400 men. The remainder of the Southern Group's front, stretching more than 700 kilometers, was manned by a mere 33,200 troops and 152 guns.Thus by late April the Soviets, by ruthlessly scraping together men and materiel from the less active sectors, were able to achieve a hefty superiority over Khanzhin's army, which due to a combination of desertions and combat losses had shrunk to between 18,000 and 22,000 men. Frunze was so concerned by the Whites' continued progress against Tukhachevsky's left flank in the Sergievsk-Chistopol' area that he ordered his strike group to attack on April 28, before it had fully concentrated. Nevertheless, the offensive's opening phase was highly successful, as the Soviet units flowed easily into the 60-kilometer gap between the White corps, which was screened only by detachments. Resistance was therefore minimal at first, and by April 30 leading units of the Fifth Army had cut the Ufa-Samara railroad east of Buguruslan and were poised to continue the drive to the northwest in the direction of Belebei. Meanwhile, unmindful of the threat to his left, Khanzhin pressed on to Samara, which was practically undefended. The continuation of this advance would have soon put the Whites in the strike group's rear, even as the latter strove to cut them off from Ufa. Kamenev therefore ordered Frunze to shift the axis of the advance from the northeast to the north (Turkestan Army) and northwest (Fifth Army), in the general direction of Bugul'ma. At a single stroke Frunze's deep flanking movement was reduced to an attempt at a shallow envelopment of the leading White units, while the attack's former spearhead, the Turkestan Army, became, in effect, the flank guard for Fifth Army's right wing. Frunze's understandable irritation with his superiors' interference undoubtedly increased, due to personnel changes in the Eastern Front command caused by political intrigues in Moscow. On May 5 Kamenev was replaced by Samoilo, a czarist major general. Lebedev, also a former major general, became his chief of staff. Samoilo's first order of business upon arriving at front headquarters in Simbirsk was to remove the Fifth Army from Frunze's control and subordinate it directly to himself. This caused Tukhachevsky to later claim that Samoilo's interference "completely ruined the brilliant beginning of our counteroffensive and allowed the Whites to put their retreat in order." Samoilo later stated that he had never wanted the job, which took him away from his command of the Sixth Army south of Archangel. He also accused S. I. Gusev, the leading member of the front's military council, Kamenev, and Tukhachevsky of conspiring against him. The second half of the Buguruslan operation saw considerable heavy fighting as the Soviets continued to press the Whites from the south, southwest, and west. Khanzhin correctly guessed the Soviets' intention to cut him off west of Bugul'ma and began to withdraw his troops through the town before the Reds could close the trap. To keep their lifeline open, the Whites made a number of spirited counterattacks north of Buguruslan in early May. The Soviets successfully fended these off but were delayed just long enough to enable the Whites to extricate their troops through Bugul'ma ahead of the Fifth Army. With the town's fall on May 13 the operation ended. The ensuing Belebei operation (May 15-19) was the missing second half of Frunze's original plan for a drive to the northeast, which had been aborted by Kamenev's reorienting the strike group toward Buguruslan. The shallow and inconclusive movement that resulted made an advance on Belebei the logical next step in the unfolding Soviet counteroffensive toward Ufa. Indeed, the first clashes preceding the counteroffensive's next phase were already taking place north and west of the town even as the Buguruslan operation was drawing to a close. However, Frunze's plan for reviving the advance to the northeast was very nearly upset by Samoilo's concern over the continuing White advance north of the Kama River. Here, the Czech Siberian Army, led by Gen. Lt. R. Gajda, was slowly pushing back the Soviet Second and Third Armies on Vyatka (Kirov) and Kazan'. At this point the front commander began to entertain the vague notion of switching Tukhachevsky's army northward across the Kama against the enemy left flank. Orders to this effect were issued several times in mid-May, orienting the Fifth Army first one way, then another. M Frunze, who quickly saw that the diversion of the now-powerful Fifth Army away from the Belebei-Ufa axis would leave his remaining forces too weak for further offensive operations, took his case directly to Samoilo. In a heated exchange with the front commander on May 12, Frunze insisted on a deep turning movement by Fifth Army to cut off the enemy's retreat to the east. And although Frunze failed to reassert his control over Fifth Army, he did convince Samoilo to allot him two divisions to continue the attack. Frunze's plan aimed at the destruction of the White troops barring the way to Ufa. Due to the fighting for Buguruslan and Bugul'ma and the removal of Fifth Army from Frunze's control, most of what remained of the original striking force now lay along the Ik River on the Southern Group's extreme left. Frunze accordingly ordered the First and Turkestan Armies to move northeast along the UfaSamara railroad to pin down the enemy forces south of Belebei, while a mixed infantry-cavalry force was to attack north of the city "for a deep envelopment in order to cut the enemy off from his communications with Ufa." The Soviets moved out on May 15. They advanced slowly, however, although speed was essential if the railway was to be cut ahead of the retreating enemy. The White units slowly fell back on Belebei, and Soviet troops entered the town on the seventeenth. Farther north, Red units closed on the town from the west, although too slowly to block the Whites' retreat. Although Frunze had pushed the Whites back some distance during the short offensive, the Belebei operation must be regarded as a distinct disappointment for the Soviets. Once again, the Whites had slipped away and still barred the road to Ufa, although they were showing signs of tiring of the fight. Undaunted, Frunze pressed his offensive and once again singled out the Turkestan Army to make the main assault. Cavalry and infantry would spearhead the latest effort, designed to push the Whites northeast across the Belaya River. Once across this formidable barrier south of Ufa, elements of Frunze's forces would move directly on Ufa from the south, while the movement's flanks would be covered by other units advancing on Birsk and Sterlitamak. For the operation, Frunze could count on only an equality of force of 49,000 men and 92 guns in his two attacking armies (Fifth and Turkestan) against Khanzhin's force of 46,000 to 47,000 men and 119 guns." However, defeatism was spreading rapidly within the White ranks, and some units were already showing an alarming tendency to "turn their coats" when pressed. Once the operation got under way on May 25, the Turkestan Army, subordinated for the duration directly to Frunze, had little trouble in achieving its preliminary objective of closing to the Belaya along the entire front, as the Whites elected to fall back and make a stand along the river. Farther to the north there was heavy fighting along Fifth Army's front, where the Whites suffered substantial losses in a vain attempt to halt the Soviet advance. This victory had important consequences for the Ufa operation by eliminating a potential threat to Frunze's left and allowing him to move up infantry reserves to assist the crossing south of Ufa. By the time the Turkestan Army closed to the river in early June, strong forces were available for crossings north and south of the city. South of Ufa, heavy White artillery fire and the river's swift current foiled the southern wing's initial attempts to cross. The Soviets were more fortunate farther north, where as early as June 4 rifle units were able to secure a bridgehead below the city. By June 8 Frunze had ferried an entire division to the eastern bank in an improvised crossing, as further Red attempts to force the river south of Ufa were beaten back. The White command was alive to the danger that the northern crossing represented and launched repeated and bloody counterattacks against the Soviet bridgehead over the next two days. These attacks, however, led only to heavy casualties on both sides and an overall weakening of the White defense. The Soviets finally broke out of their bridgehead on June 9 and captured Ufa the same day. Meanwhile, Soviet cavalry and infantry units persisted in their efforts to cross the river south of the city, succeeding only on June 14. Red units continued to push to about 50 kilometers east of Ufa, where a shortage of troops and supply difficulties forced Frunze to call a brief halt in operations. The fall of Ufa was the occasion for a good deal of high-level debate about the front's scope of future operations. Vatsetis, supported by Trotsky, wanted to halt the front's advance short of the Urals and throw the bulk of its forces south, in response to the worsening situation in Ukraine. Kamenev, who had been reappointed commander of the Eastern Front at the end of May, insisted on a continuation of the offensive. Both sides appealed to their political patrons for support. The party's Central Committee ultimately decided in favor of the front apparatus, and the advance continued. Trotsky offered to resign, but this move was rejected. His protege, Vatsetis, did resign and was replaced as commander in chief by Kamenev in July. Following the capture of Ufa, the Eastern Front's story is quickly told, as the Soviets resumed their advance in June against Kolchak's disintegrating armies. Operations in June and August cleared the important Urals industrial region of White forces and set the stage for the conquest of Siberia. The next series of operations (August 1919-January 1920) completed the destruction of the White armies and brought the Soviets as far east as Lake Baikal, where they were halted by the presence of foreign troops. Although more than two years of fighting remained before Soviet troops actually reached Vladivostok, the events of 1919 effectively ensured the triumph of Soviet power in Siberia and the Far East. The civil war's other main front, the southern, had its beginnings on the morrow of the Bolshevik coup. Here the Reds scored their first military victories by defeating General Kaledin's Cossack forces and driving General Kornilov's newly created Volunteer Army back to the area of the Kuban' River. The Red Army, however, soon faced a new and more serious threat from Germany. The Germans, following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, proceeded to occupy all of Ukraine and by May had advanced as far as Rostov. The Germans also began supporting General Krasnov's Don Army, which during 1918-19 made three unsuccessful attempts to take Tsaritsyn and advance up the Volga for a junction with the White Siberian armies. The German collapse in November 1918 strengthened the Soviet position considerably, and the Red Army moved in to fill the vacuum left by the kaiser's retreating forces. By early 1919 the Soviets had reoccupied almost all of Ukraine, and the Don Army, deprived of German aid, quickly collapsed and was soon subordinated to the Volunteer Army, now commanded by General Denikin. In early 1919 Denikin reorganized his forces into the Armed Forces of South Russia, which included the Volunteer, Don, and, later, Gen. P. N. Wrangel's Caucasus Army. This force was based primarily on the Cossack populations of the lower Don and Northern Caucasus and those officers who had managed to make their way south following the Bolshevik coup. Also, thanks to Denikin's consistently pro-Allied orientation, the White armies here could count on Western aid, which began to arrive in increasing amounts through the reopened Turkish Straits. The Soviets were indeed fortunate that the time of greatest danger in the east coincided with a period of relative calm in the south. Here Denikin's forces began to move in strength only in May 1919, after the tide had turned against Kolchak, although the Reds were still preoccupied by the situation along the Volga. The White advance was also greatly aided by large-scale Cossack uprisings in the Soviet rear along the middle Don. Denikin's forces successively defeated the qualitatively inferior Soviets north and east of Rostov and by early summer had taken Tsaritsyn and Khar'kov before turning west. The Whites soon captured Kiev and most of right-bank Ukraine before they turned north to resume the advance on Moscow. By early autumn the White armies were deployed along a huge arc, stretching east from Zhitomir through Chernigov, Orel, Voronezh, Tsaritsyn, and Astrakhan'. Elsewhere Polish troops menaced the Soviets in Belorussia, while farther north Gen. N. N. Yudenich advanced for the second time on Petrograd from his Estonian base. However, much as Kolchak, Denikin's forces rested on an extremely weak political-military base, which collapsed almost immediately upon the first serious reverses. In the early autumn Denikin claimed to have had only 98,000 troops to man his 1,800-kilometer front against a Bolshevik force that he estimated at between 140,000 and 160,000 men. Nor were Denikin's forces of a uniformly high quality. The summer's rapid advance had carried the Whites far from their anticommunist base and had entailed the drafting of large numbers of reluctant Russian and Ukrainian peasants. This diluted the army's strong officer base and led to an overall decline in the Whites' military efficiency, heretofore their strongest suit. Finally, Denikin's forces were greatly hampered by bands of semianarchist peasants in their rear under N. I. Makhno, who hated the Whites even more than the Reds, although he played both sides against the other. At the height of the October fighting, Makhno's forces numbered 28,000 infantry and cavalry, supported by 50 guns and 200 machine guns, and even briefly threatened Denikin's headquarters at Taganrog. The necessity of dealing with this and other internal threats forced the White command to divert significant numbers of men from the front at critical moments and so helped pave the way for their ultimate defeat. On September 13 the Soviet high command, in response to the rapid White advance, split off from the Southern Front the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Armies to form the Southeastern Front, under Shorin, to man the line south of Voronezh. What remained of the Southern Front (Eighth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Armies, joined by the Twelfth Army from the Western Front in mid-October) continued under the command of former general lieutenant V. N. Yegor'ev. However, this reorganization was not actually effected until September 30, by which time the situation had changed considerably. Kursk had fallen to Denikin's forces on September 20, and it was now the White advance along the Orel-Tula axis (see map 6) that presented the greatest danger to the Soviet Republic. Here, what one participant described as the "threatening proportions of a strategic catastrophe" forced the Soviet command to shift its attention to the area immediately south of Moscow. The Soviets commendably resolved to halt Denikin's advance on Orel by launching an attack of their own. To this purpose, in late September Glavkom Kamenev ordered the concentration southeast of Bryansk of 10,000 infantry, 1,500 cavalry, and 80 guns, which was to form the core of the Soviet counterattack. 71 In an October 9 directive to his army commanders, deputy front commander Yegorov, a former czarist colonel, outlined the plan for the coming counteroffensive. The strike group, under the command of former general A. A. Martusevich, was to advance from the Kromy area and strike at Denikin's communications along the OrelKursk railroad in the general direction of Maloarkhangel'sk and Fatezh. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Armies were to halt their withdrawal and support the strike group by pinning down what forces they could .The Soviet response to this latest crisis was as rapid and decisive as it had been on the eastern front. With the proclamation of the southern front as the main area of operations in early July, the Bolshevik military machine swung into action. The steady influx of men that this designation brought in its wake enabled the Soviets to bring the Southern Front up to a strength of 113,439 infantry, 27,328 cavalry, and 774 guns by the start of the operation, against a White force of 58,650 infantry, 48,200 cavalry, and 431 guns. In the center, however, the opposing forces were essentially equal. Here the Whites managed to concentrate 45,200 infantry and 13,900 cavalry, supported by 200 guns, against a Red force (Fourteenth, Thirteenth, and Eighth Armies) of 55,630 infantry, 1,820 cavalry, and 412 guns.Meanwhile, some 250 kilometers southeast of Orel, events were also reaching a crisis for the beleaguered Red forces. Here Gen. V. I. Sidorin's Don Army was pressing the Soviets back in the Voronezh area and had opened a 130-kilometer gap north of the city between the Thirteenth and Eighth Armies, which threatened to split the Southern from the Southeastern Front and unhinge the entire Soviet position in the south. Kamenev, to forestall a disaster, ordered Budennyi's cavalry corps northward from the middle Don to shore up the front in the area of Voronezh, which had fallen on October 6. However, at this early stage in the operation's planning there was no attempt to link the Orel counteroffensive with events to the southeast, and from the very first the situation around Voronezh was of secondary importance in Soviet calculations. The Soviet counteroffensive in the Orel area opened on October 11 in an extremely fluid situation that saw both sides advancing and withdrawing simultaneously. So lightly manned were the White lines west of Kromy that the initial assault hit only air and did not even encounter the enemy in strength until the next day. Nevertheless, the Soviets moved forward slowly and succeeded in taking Kromy only on the fourteenth. The group's plodding advance was due not only to stubborn White resistance but also to Martusevich's justified fear for his lengthening flanks, as he followed with growing concern the retreat of the Red infantry units on either side. These and other Soviet units were literally fighting for their lives as the White forces maintained the pressure, seemingly indifferent to the Soviet attack. The situation was even more critical to the northeast, where the Whites took Orel on the thirteenth, tearing a dangerous gap between the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Armies and opening the way to the military-industrial center of Tula. For the strike group to have continued to advance in the original direction would have meant putting its head farther into the noose. Yegorov, recently appointed front commander, reacted to this new threat by changing the axis of the group's advance and orienting it due east toward Eropkino station to threaten the White communications and attack toward Orel from the southwest. The primacy of Orel in the developing situation was reemphasized on October 17, when Yegorov ordered the newly arrived Estonian Rifle Division into the attack directly on the city. Yegorov regretted having to make this change in plans but defended his decision by maintaining that to have continued to push the front's spearhead in the original direction "would have led to catastrophic results." Actually, very little now remained of the original plan for a deep strike against the White communications. Instead, the two exhausted armies continued to batter at each other in what had become an extended meeting operation along the entire front, and the strike group's efforts differed little from any of the other headlong collisions now taking place. The Whites continued to advance to the east of Orel and captured Novosil' on October 17. But the Soviet advantage in numbers was beginning to tell, and the Reds recaptured the town two days later. The Whites, by now beset on three sides, also abandoned Orel on October 20, although they continued to attack in the Kromy area. While the fate of the Orel counteroffensive hung in the balance, Yegorov harried his left-wing units (Eighth Army and Budennyi's corps) to speed up their attack toward Voronezh. However, the Soviet units in this area seemed in no hurry to move and limited themselves to some heavy sparring with the White cavalry east and southeast of Voronezh. Yegorov's orders on October 18 were more detailed and for the first time implied a connection between the activities of his left wing and center. The front commander ordered Budennyi to defeat the enemy in the Voronezh area and to cover Eighth Army's advance across the Don. The cavalry was then to advance on Kastornaya and Kursk, which would put the Soviets in the rear of the Volunteer Army engaged around Orel and threaten it with the loss of its communications to the south .The skirmishing east of Voronezh climaxed on October 19, when the White cavalry struck Timoshenko's cavalry division, and the melee quickly expanded into a major encounter as units from both sides were fed into the fighting. The Whites were ultimately defeated in the brisk, close-quarters battle, and they withdrew into Voronezh. The Soviets failed in their attempts to take Voronezh on the march. They then brought up their forces for a coordinated assault and began their attack on the city on the twenty-third: the cavalry corps from the east and north, with the Soviet infantry attacking from the southeast. The Whites, to avoid encirclement, abandoned the city and took up defensive positions across the Don. Two days later the Eighth Army's left-flank units took Liski to the south. Yegorov, with the initiative in the Orel area now in his hands, hurried his armies forward. His order of October 20 reoriented the axis of the spearhead's advance away from Orel and toward Fatezh and Kursk, while the remainder of Fourteenth Army was to continue its attack toward Dmitrovsk and Dmitriev, and Thirteenth Army moved south on Livny and Kastornaya.78 Once again, however, the Soviet attacks became snarled in a series of costly frontal engagements all along the line. The lumbering Soviet style of attack did involve, however, an attrition that the Reds could afford far better than the Whites, whose meager resources were already stretched to the breaking point. Nevertheless, for the time being the Whites stubbornly answered each Soviet attack with an assault of their own during the seesaw fighting that characterized the next two weeks. Denikin's units, continually pressed by superior forces, gradually began to give ground. As the fighting around Orel swayed first one way and then another, the Soviet command began to look more and more to Budennyi's corps to tip the scales. This was particularly true of the Novosil'-Elets area, where a White breakthrough toward Lipetsk and Tambov appeared imminent. Budennyi began crossing the Don on October 28 north of Voronezh and in the first days of November fought off numerous attacks in the Zemlyansk area. Here the Soviet cavalry was able to link up with the Thirteenth Army advancing south and close the gap in their line. By November 8 both units had closed to Kastornaya from north and east. The Whites could ill afford to lose this vital rail junction, which provided the most direct communications route between the Don and Volunteer Armies. Throughout the following week the Red and White cavalry traded blows in the surrounding villages, each side first advancing, then retreating. The weight of numbers was decisive here as well, and Budennyi was able to maneuver southeast of the rail junction and drive a wedge between two White cavalry corps. Soviet cavalry finally took Kastornaya on November 15. With the town's fall the operation came to a close, with the Soviets well placed to continue the drive south. Although the Voronezh-Kastornaya operation had always occupied a secondary place in Soviet calculations, its importance had nevertheless increased as the counteroffensive around Orel faltered. No less an authority than Denikin credited the Soviet offensive out of Voronezh with forcing him to abandon Orel. Time was also running out for the White cause in the Orel area, where the Volunteer Army continued to fall back before spirited, if inept, Soviet attacks. The Whites tried to organize a defense in the Dmitrovsk-Eropkino area, but Soviet infantry broke through on the morning of November 3. Red cavalry surged into the breach and advanced to cut the Orel-Kursk railway at Ponyri the next day, while another unit raided as far south as Fatezh. The disorganization that these incursions caused in the White rear only served to speed up the defenders' collapse. Sevsk fell on the sixth, as the White front began to buckle. Dmitriev finally fell to the Reds on November 13, and another cavalry raid on Lgov captured that town on the seventeenth, cutting this vital east-west rail link. With the fall of Kursk the same day the operation came to an end. In contrast to the rapid Soviet advance in the east, more than a month of heavy fighting during the Orel-Kursk (October 11-November 18) and VoronezhKastornaya (October 13-November 16) operations had thrown back the outnumbered Whites no more than 160 kilometers. Nevertheless, the two operations had brought about a complete reversal of military fortunes in favor of the Red Army. In the south the Soviets moved swiftly to realize their strategy of destroying Denikin by driving a wedge between the Volunteer and Don Armies and splitting the White forces in two against the Sea of Azov. An undertaking of this magnitude involved for the first time the cooperation of the Southern and Southeastern Fronts, making necessary their coordination by the commander in chief in what was a strategic operation by later Soviet standards. The Soviets cleared the eastern Ukraine and the middle Don of White forces in November and December and later that month captured the vital Donbass industrial region. The Soviet armies captured Rostov in January 1920, which irreparably split the White armies into eastern and western halves. A number of operations remained to be conducted before Soviet power was finally established in the south, notably in the Kuban' River area, the North Caucasus, and southwestern Ukraine, all in the face of military exhaustion and a typhus epidemic that ravaged both sides equally. With the lone exception of the Whites' Crimean stronghold, by the spring of 1920 the war in the south was over. Following the end of the Soviets' war with Poland, the last hope of the faltering White cause lay in the Crimea, where the shattered remnants of the Volunteer Army maintained a small bastion against the Red forces. Here Wrangel had succeeded Denikin in command of the remaining anticommunist forces in early 1920. Although Wrangel's rechristened "Russian Army" (First and Second Armies) was pitifully small, he was able to take advantage of the Red Army's preoccupation with the Poles to move successfully against the weak Thirteenth Army in June (see map 7). This offensive soon reached the line of the lower Dnepr but was halted. Likewise, an attempt to reestablish a front across the Kerch peninsula in the Kuban' region collapsed in early September, following a month's fighting. Still, by early September Wrangel was in a position to threaten Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk) and the Donbass industrial area. However, spirited White attempts to take these areas were beaten back, and by early October Wrangel had been forced to retreat to a shorter line. The Soviet high command responded to this latest challenge by reconstituting the Southern Front on September 21. This force initially included the Sixth and Thirteenth Armies, as well as the newly created Second Cavalry Army. This force was later augmented by the formation of a new Fourth Army and the arrival of Budennyi's First Cavalry Army from the Polish front in late October. Frunze, newly arrived from the Turkestan Front, was appointed commander. As long as the situation with Poland remained uncertain, Frunze remained on the defensive, content to repel White forays and build up his own forces. He fretted over the latter's slow arrival, fearing that Wrangel might foil his planned counteroffensive by withdrawing his forces into the security of the Crimean peninsula. By the end of October Frunze could count on a heavy numerical and technical superiority of 99,500 infantry, 33,685 cavalry, and 527 guns against a meager White force of only 23,070 infantry, 11,795 cavalry, and 213 guns." Frunze's October 26 directive described the goal of the operation as destroying the enemy's "main forces by a coordinated, concentric offensive" so as to cut off his retreat back into the peninsula. According to this plan, the Fourth and Thirteenth Armies would attack to the southwest, with the latter breaching the Melitopol' fortifications and pursuing the enemy with its cavalry. While this force occupied the defenders' attention, the main blow would come farther west, along the Dnepr. F. K. Mironov's Second Cavalry Army would attack due south out of its Nikopol' bridgehead toward Seragozy to "surround and destroy the enemy's main forces," which Wrangel had concentrated against the Soviets' Kakhovka bridgehead. Meanwhile, the Sixth Army would force its way out of the bridgehead and head south to cut off the Whites' retreat through the Perekop Isthmus. The army, at the same time, would open a path for the First Cavalry Army to drive to the east. The Soviet cavalry was to pour into the breach made by the infantry and, having advanced as far as Aksaniya-Nova, would then turn north with its main forces toward Seragozy to link up with the Second Cavalry Army to cut off the White forces in the area. Budennyi was also instructed to detach a small force to cut the railroad leading from Melitopol' into the peninsula through Sal'kovo. The evolution of Frunze's plan is noteworthy for what it reveals about the styles of individual commanders. Budennyi and his commissar, Voroshilov, had
proposed that the First Cavalry Army deliver the main blow by driving due southeast to the Sal'kovo area to cut off the Whites' path of retreat into the Crimea. However, both Frunze and Kamenev rejected this proposal, probably on the grounds that it was too risky. Frunze, for his part, suggested in mid-October moving the Second Cavalry Army south to the Kakhovka bridgehead to con
centrate the bulk of the front's cavalry at a single point. Kamenev rejected this proposal as well, citing the problems of controlling such a large force. 14 The commander in chief's caution on both counts was probably due to a lingering respect for the Whites' abilities, even at this late stage. He was probably also reluctant to take any unnecessary chances while the peace negotiations with Poland were still in progress. The most striking feature of the final Soviet plan was its multiplicity of objectives, even taking into account the Soviets' crushing superiority. Frunze, by leaving the Second Cavalry Army in the Nikopol' area, effectively divided the Soviets' most powerful strike arm into nonsupporting halves. Furthermore, the plan incorporated some elements of the First Cavalry Army's proposal for a dash across the base of the Northern Tauride, while denying it the necessary means to accomplish its goal. This meant that the Soviets would ultimately find themselves with insufficient forces at the battle's crisis. Still, given the numbers involved and the unfavorable configuration of the Whites' 350-kilometer front, there could be little doubt about the final outcome when the Soviet offensive began on October 28. The fighting had actually begun two days before with the Second Cavalry Army's attack out of its Nikopol' bridgehead, although progress in this sector was limited at first. The Reds had greater success to the east, where the Whites methodically pulled back and the Fourth and Thirteenth Armies advanced as far as Balki and Bol'shoi Tokmak. Elsewhere, part of Sixth Army made good progress toward Perekop. Budennyi's army, arriving late and tired, was unable to advance much beyond Sixth Army's forward units in the Kakhovka area. However, the first day's mixed success did nothing to dampen Frunze's enthusiasm. In fact, so impressed was the front commander by erroneous reports of Second Cavalry Army's progress south of Nikopol' that he radically altered his operational plan. On October 29 he ordered Budennyi to extend his attack to Sal'kovo and Genichesk (the latter on the Sea of Azov), which would cut off the Whites' escape route into the Crimean peninsula. However, he failed to allocate additional forces for this new task, while the original goal of trapping the White forces around Seragozy remained in force. As a resuic, two cavalry divisions turned northeast toward Seragozy, while the other half of the army pushed southeast to the Azov coast. It was a division of effort that would cost the Reds dearly. However, all seemed to go well at first, as Budennyi's cavalry moved almost effortlessly through the undefended White rear. By the evening of October 29 Soviet cavalry had advanced as far east as Novonikolaevka, barely 40 kilometers from the Sea of Azov. To the west, Sixth Army had reached the Black Sea coast and the White defenses athwart the Perekop Isthmus. Units of the First Cavalry Army reached the sea at Genichesk the next day, while to the northeast the Thirteenth Army finally captured Melitopol' in a disappointingly slow advance. For the moment, it appeared as though the Whites were trapped.
But Wrangel was not yet beaten. His forces facing the Thirteenth, Fourth, and Second Cavalry Armies had managed to break contact with their languid pursuers, which reduced the pressure from that quarter and gained the White commander valuable time to pull his forces south, where the fate of his army was being decided. Wrangel was quick to see the opportunity presented by Budennyi's overextended line in the Sal'kovo-Genichesk area, and he decided to attack in order to pin the Red cavalry against the Sivash, an arm of the Sea of Azov, just north of the peninsula. The White counterattack began on November 1, with particularly fierce fighting north of Sal'kovo. Here half of the First Cavalry Army was fighting virtually alone against an increasing number of White units being funneled through the remaining escape route to the peninsula. The Soviets were forced to abandon their blocking position and fall back to the west to rejoin the main forces. By November 3 the last White forces had passed through the bottleneck and taken up defensive positions covering the approaches to the peninsula. In spite of this incomplete success, the Reds had certainly weakened their opponents and were now poised to finish them off.
Final victory came in the course of the succeeding Perekop-Chongar operation (November 7-17, 1920), which drove the Whites from the Crimea and ended most organized resistance to Soviet rule. With the exception of minor fighting in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East, the civil war in Russia was over.
The end of hostilities provides a convenient backdrop against which to examine the Red Army's conduct of operations during the civil war. It should be emphasized once again that the civil war represents an extremely eccentric case of the operation's development, according to those operational indices already mentioned: length of front, the forces involved, the duration of operations, and other factors. Whereas on one hand the length of the various fronts increased geometrically, the size of the forces manning them shrunk to the level of the Napoleonic Wars and smaller. As these elements changed vis-a-vis each other, so did the Soviets' conduct of operations.
For example, the Eastern Front's April-May operations were conducted along an extremely broad front (1,800 kilometers) with only a minuscule number of troops (110,000) to man it. The Southern Front in the autumn of 1919 was more fortunate, holding a line approximately 1,000 kilometers in width with some
140,000 men. Continuing this trend, the reconstituted southern front in October 1920 attacked along a 350-kilometer front with a force of 133,000. Along with the increasing density of the front, there was a corresponding increase in the number of cavalry and artillery, which gradually brought the civil war's operational indices into something approximating modernity.
These changing factors had their greatest effect on the Red Army's employment of maneuver. The most signal characteristic in this regard throughout was the Soviets' frequent reliance on flank attacks. Frunze, in the Buguruslan and Ufa operations, would first pin down part of the enemy army with secondary attacks, then break through his front to launch turning movements against the Whites' flanks, aimed at cutting them off from their source of supply. The intermediate Belebei operation chiefly involved frontal attacks in what was essentially the postscript to an altered Buguruslan operation. That these flanking movements often fell short of expectations was primarily due to the Reds' overall insufficiency of force, their low mobility, and the disruptive changes in the Eastern Front's command and organization.
By the autumn of 1919 the situation had grown somewhat more difficult for the attacker, although opportunities for maneuver still existed. The Soviets' main effort during the Orel-Kursk operation was a flank attack aimed at Denikin's communications. Budennyi's flank attack toward Kastornaya was actually more successful, although it was planned as a strictly secondary effort.
However, the two operations also reveal a number of flaws in Soviet execution, particularly during the Orel fighting. While it must be acknowledged that in the Volunteer Army the Soviets faced an opponent of higher quality than Kolchak's ragtag legions, they often frittered away their advantage by ignoring the importance of maneuver. The Red Army displayed its usual skill in massing large numbers of men along the projected attack areas, although the widespread practice of launching frontal assaults all along the front did much to negate the advantage gained. This was particularly true of the front's shock group as it became increasingly drawn into the frontal battles for Orel. Yegorov had to constantly remind his subordinates to refrain from making frontal attacks and instead strike the enemy in the flank and rear with all available forces. 81 These clumsy efforts turned the operation into a grinding slugfest, which was won only through greater Soviet numbers. Later Soviet historians, in referring to the operation as an "attrition struggle," implicitly recognized their own shortcomings.
During the October operation against Wrangel the Soviets again sought a decision based on turning the enemy's flanks, followed by a deep drive into his rear, for the purpose of surrounding his forces and cutting off their retreat. This was to be carried out in the form of a double envelopment by the two cavalry armies and testifies to growing Soviet skill, or at least ambitions. Unfortunately for the Soviets, this otherwise laudable approach was blunted by their failure to adequately reinforce their main strike arm. This was another instance of inadequate means in pursuit of decisive ends, which had led them into disaster in Poland just a few months before.
Essential to the Red Army's increased maneuverability was the growth of its cavalry arm, which flew in the face of much recent experience, in which the cavalry arm's role was sharply curtailed. This was most apparent during World War I and the formation of a continuous front. During that conflict the major belligerents
continued to maintain large mounted establishments to exploit a breakthrough that never came. The conditions of the Russian civil war, with its almost nonexistent fronts, for a brief moment restored the cavalry to its former place of glory as the
exploiter of success. However, this was not entirely a uniform development, given the laborious task of building the Red Army from scratch and the proletarian army's lack of familiarity with this historically aristocratic arm.
The growth of the Soviet cavalry arm may be followed through the operations in question. For example, on the Eastern Front the cavalry's role had been relatively minor due to its small numbers. By the autumn of 1919 this situation had changed considerably, and the cavalry was instrumental in the Soviet victory, particularly during the Voronezh-Kastornaya operation and the follow-up pursuit of the Whites during the winter of 1919-20. The Red Army was not slow to see the potential of even larger formations of this type. The creation of Budennyi's First Cavalry Army in November 1919 indicated the lines along which their thinking was to develop, and the creation of the Second Cavalry Army in July 1920 was the logical continuation of this process. As we have seen, the cavalry was absolutely essential to the Reds' victory in the Northern Tauride in 1920.
Hand in hand with the cavalry's quantitative growth was the Red Army's increased skill in employing these large cavalry formations. Of particular importance in this regard was the Soviet practice of creating strike groups with a heavy cavalry complement, which increased the range, shock power, and mobility of these units significantly. The Soviet cavalry's growth in numbers and skill during these years meant that these units could be used more effectively as a shock force to crack the enemy's thinly held positions and exploit the subsequent breakthrough in depth. This was hardly possible or necessary on the Eastern Front, given the small number of Soviet cavalry. By the autumn of 1919, however, the evolving conditions of the war had made the creation of such groups necessary, although the forces involved were still relatively small. By the time of the Soviet offensive in the Northern Tauride, their presence was absolutely essential, and the Soviets at last had the wherewithal to employ them to decisive effect.
The Soviets' use of their cavalry strike arm during the latter operation is especially noteworthy. It was not deemed expedient, given the heavy White fortifications ringing the Kakhovka bridgehead, to attempt a breakthrough with cavalry forces alone, as had been the case at Voronezh the previous autumn, when the mounted formations had breached the front without infantry support. The Kakhovka position was the one instance in the civil war in which conditions approached those of the Great War's trench system on the Western Front. At Kakhovka the Soviets were forced to break through the enemy's tactical defense with infantry before they could exploit the success in depth with their cavalry. This method of infantry-cavalry cooperation would serve as a point of departure for a technically updated Red Army's later theoretical work on the theory of the deep operation. The latter involved the traditional infantry-cavalry mix, plus tanks and mechanized units.
The Soviets' use of the cavalry arm during an operation's pursuit phase is also significant. Once again, the Eastern Front's experience is of marginal value because the pursuit of Kolchak's forces was carried out primarily by the infantry. The situation, however, changes dramatically when one examines the Southern Front's pursuit of Denikin's forces during the winter of 1919-20. In previous wars the cavalry arm was used to pursue the enemy from the tactical battlefield. Here for the first time is an instance of operational-strategic pursuit of a beaten enemy army. The Soviet pursuit of Wrangel's forces in October-November 1920 is less dramatic, if only because of the smaller distances involved, although the forces capable of such a task were certainly in place.
Finally, the fronts' various operations are significant for the consecutiveness of their conduct. As has been shown, pre-World War I Russian theorists such as Neznamov and Elchaninov predicted the appearance of a number of more or less consecutive operational efforts in the pursuit of a larger goal. This theory foresaw a series of offensive efforts, each punctuated by brief periods of rest and refurbishment, before the cycle would begin again. However, the Great War's positional stalemate negated this possibility, which was only revived under the more mobile conditions of the civil war. The latter conflict fairly teems with examples of this new phenomenon.
The Eastern Front's "Southern Group" carried out the Buguruslan, Belebei, and Ufa operations in April-June 1919, while at the same time the "Northern Group" conducted the Sarapul'-Votkinsk operation. This six-week period of almost nonstop fighting began with the Reds everywhere falling back and ended with the initiative firmly in their grasp. During the counteroffensive the Soviets advanced from 350 to 400 kilometers along a front several hundred kilometers in width. Following a brief pause, the front resumed its advance. The Perm', Zlatoust, Ekaterinburg, and Cheryabinsk operations, which carried the Reds over the Urals, some 300 kilometers from their starting point, were the next stage in this operational sequence. This lunge was followed by the Petropavlovsk, Omsk, Novonikolaevsk, and Krasnoyarsk operations, which brought the Eastern Front to Lake Baikal, a distance of nearly 3,000 kilometers.
In the same way, the Southern Front conducted the aforementioned Orel-Kursk and Voronezh-Kastomaya operations in October-November 1919, which succeeded in moving the front forward only about 160 kilometers, although it was decisive in breaking the back of the White resistance in Ukraine. Thereafter it conducted successively the Nezhin-Poltava, Khar'kov, Kiev, and Donbass operations in December, and the Rostov-Novocherkassk and Odessa operations in January-February 1920, the latter as the Southwestern Front. The Southeastern Front simultaneously conducted the Khoper-Don, Boguchar-Likhai, and Tsaritsyn operations in November-December and, together with the Southern Front, the Rostov-Novocherkassk operation in January. Renamed the Caucasus Front, these forces continued their drive with the Don-Manych, Tikhoretsk, and Kuban'Novorossiisk operations in January-March 1920. Finally, Frunze's Southern Front
conducted its October 23-November 3 counteroffensive, which was quickly followed by the Perkop-Chongar operation.
In some cases, one operation would succeed another, without a significant break. In others, there would ensue an operational pause, during which the armies would be reinforced for the next leap forward. The Red Army had encountered something new in military affairs, and the succeeding decade's theorists would make the theory of consecutive operations one of the cornerstones of their operational art.

Piotr Kapuscinski
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Re: Medieval cavalry charges?

#13

Post by Piotr Kapuscinski » 13 Jul 2011, 15:47

I have read that horses will not run into something solid (makes sense).
Myth - nothing more.

For example let's look at the battle of Swiecino (1462) - Poland vs Teutonic Order. In that battle Polish cavalry used their horses as "battering rams" smashing through enemy palisade (!) in several places.

There are also examples of horses used as "battering rams" to crush other obstacles (such as fences). As well as examples of breaking enemy pikes (probably by "jumping" on them from side) with chests of horses.

================================================

A participant of World War 1 wrote this about resistance of horses to fire of even modern firearms:

"The fear of infantry was intensified by great resistance of horses to wounds. During a charge only killed horses or those which had crushed leg bones were falling immediately. Other horses, often wounded several times, even mortally, in a zeal of attack continued to run and with their entire mass - under riders or without them - were blindly bumping into the enemy, parting and trampling his lines. From distance this apparent lack of casualties of the charging unit was creating an impression of inefficiency of infantry fire. Infantry was confused enough, that most of bullets were starting to fly too high, and often in a decisive moment infantry was throwing their weapons and commencing a flight, which meant a certain annihilation for them."

Combat horses are in general very resistant to wounds.

They have a huge amount of thick muscles in their chests - plus Medieval horses often had armours.

James A Pratt III
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Re: Medieval cavalry charges?

#14

Post by James A Pratt III » 16 Jul 2011, 00:56

Not quite medival but my notes from "The Northwern Wars 1558-1721" Robert I frost have at the battle of Kircholm 27-7-1605 have Lithuanian hussars charging and overruning Swedish Pike and matchlock armed infantry.

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Re: Medieval cavalry charges?

#15

Post by Piotr Kapuscinski » 16 Jul 2011, 01:38

Yes. Kircholm was not the only example of Polish-Lithuanian winged hussars defeating pikemen.

There were many examples, one of them being the battle of Domany (vs Russians) in 1655:

"А перед обозом шли три роты солдатских, и они начали с теми литовскими людьми, отыкався пиками острожком, биться и из пушек стрелять. И их, солдатских три роты, польские и литовские люди гусары, напустя копьями, побили."

Maybe some Russian member can translate it accurately.

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