For its assault on Berlin in 1945, the Red Army deployed five armies and four tank armies, encompassing 464,000 men, 12,700 guns and mortars, at least 2,000 Katyusha rocket-launchers, and 1,500 AFVs. This gave it a massive numerical superiority over the German defenders, who ranged from hard-bitten veterans of the regular army and Waffen-SS to hastily raised, virtually untrained Volkssturm militia, totalling possibly 60,000 men and 50-60 AFVs. However, as this highly detailed study shows, the Soviet forces committed to the attack on the city faced myriad problems.
The initial attack was made by the 1st Guards Tank Army on 24 April under cover of a barrage from 3,000 guns and heavy mortars – 650 guns per kilometre of front! The Russians quickly learned just how difficult it was to dislodge determined defenders from ruined buildings and rubble-choked streets – ironically, just as the Germans had discovered at Stalingrad more than two years earlier. All Soviet units took heavy casualties, largely due to poor coordination between tanks, infantry, and artillery. (General Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army initially sent unsupported columns of tanks straight down main streets; Panzerfausts and anti-tank guns trapped them by knocking out the lead and rear vehicles, before infantry anti-tank teams moved in to destroy the remaining AFVs.)
As Chuikov ruefully remarked, ‘a battle within a city is a battle of firepower’. The author describes how units quickly developed special assault teams comprising an infantry platoon or company, a tank platoon, a section of self-propelled guns, a section of Katyushas, and a detachment of assault engineers. The assault drills almost invariably involved artillery and Katyushas smothering the objective with smoke and close-range direct fire before the infantry attacked. As the Russians reached the city centre, they found that the larger government buildings had been turned into formidable improvised fortresses. Dealing with these demanded exceptional measures – at one stage, 500 Soviet guns were firing from a 1km section of the Unter den Linden.
