Forest Fighting on the Eastern Front in World War II

G ERMAN and Russian attitudes toward, and techniques of, forest warfare in central and northern European Russia differed greatly during World War II. The Germans appear to have loathed forest fighting, and although the Russians had no particular aversion to it, and the individual soldiers and lower commanders seem actually to have preferred it, the higher Soviet commanders sought to fight their great battles in open terrain, where they could mass and maneuver great quantities of men and materiel. Why then did so many bloody battles occur in the forests? Before World War I armies were small enough to avoid forests, swamps, and other unfavorable terrain, and if the enemy occupied such areas, they simply turned his flank. But with the coming of vast national armies, a unit that met with forest or other unfavorable terrain had no choice but to fight through it, since the open spaces on either flank were already occupied by other units. In spite of the great spaces of European Russia, the armies involved were so large and the expanse of wooded land so vast that not all the forests could be avoided, however much the Germans might wish it. Most of the sources used in this study are German accounts and analyses of fighting on the Eastern Front.1 Few Russian sources were available to me; the nearest thing to a Russian account at the tactical level of warfare during World War II was a resume of the interrogations of Soviet officers who defected to the West shortly after the war.2 The maps available were incomplete sets of German 1:300,000 and : 00oo,ooo topographic sheets published before or during the war and more recent United States Army Map Service 1:250,000 topographic sheets.3 No large-scale Soviet topographic maps were available, though

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• World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century

  Roger A Sedjo, John F Richards et al.•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•1989

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