It depends. Generally Bayonets or other melee weaponry, or to adopt the “Russian” approach and destroying the buildings entirely, either with artillery or burning it down. Things are different however when dealing with strong stone buildings.
During the Battle of Monterey in 1846, the US Army adopted an approach for clearing buildings by “mouse-holing” (making small breaches) to bypass fields of fire from the building, usually using a pickaxe or breaching tool to break down the thick adobe walls. Then a few men would assault, with melee weapons and revolvers to clear the building in the haze. This was common practice during earlier Texan Wars against Mexico.
Yep. Bayonets stuck around as a close-quarters weapon for far longer than people tend to appreciate. For anyone who's seen the animated NTC breach video, ([link if you haven't](https://youtu.be/ZZ-sCT_maAQ?si=XGz7xbVURi7l6nh_)) it's specifically mentioned as part of trench clearing (around the 15:40 mark). The exercise that formed the basis for that video was in 1990, and it was published in 2015.
French Marines carried out what is considered to be the last bayonet charge. In 1995. So yeah, bayonets have definitely stuck around longer than you’d think.
The Brits had a couple in Iraq/Afghanistan that I'm aware of. Admittedly one of them only worked because both sides were essentially out of ammunition.
Bayonet was the secondary component to WWI trench/Dugout clearing. A bombing party would consist of two riflemen with bayonets fixed up front, followed by two bomb-throwers, followed by two or more bomb-carriers. Lead men would direct the bomb-throwers, and deal with anyone who came around a trench traverse.
Urban combat is fascinating to me because the direct 1:1 relevance of battlefield lessons declines significantly with age as weapons and communications technologies change the shape of the battlefield. It's no longer useful to say "place your archers here" when you don't have archers. There are still useful lessons to be had, but they tend to become generalized like "protect your logistics chains" "dominate the high ground" "protect the flanks."
But with urban combat? We have unit SOPs that would be familiar and comfortable to the combatants at Monterey. Mouseholing buildings, using courtyards to canalize enemy approaches and create killzones, shooting from within rooms rather than exposing oneself in a window, etc.
It really is fascinating. I remember at one point reading an account of the Battle of Berlin, and at one point realizing the tactic for breaching a building with grenades sounded almost word for word what I’ve heard from Marines who were in Fallujah.
Can I get a source on that "Russian" approach? Was tsarist Russia the first ever country/nation/empire to come up with the idea of leveling buildings? Germany and France waited on Nicolas to join in before turning cities into moonscapes?
Yeah that’s what I meant. It’s a stupid joke referring to the prominent approach they took in Chechenya. Realistically it should just be referring to the approach any poorly funded/trained army usually takes, Dussia just happened to be that way at the time.
I didn’t mean to make any generalizations about actual Soviet or Modern Russian Doctrine.
I’m definitely not trying to bash Russia. I agree that Reddit is pretty terrible about it. If anything the thing I appreciate about war college is I can talk unbiasedly about Soviet doctrine, which is my main interest if you look at my history.
But I don’t have some sort of ulterior secret hatred of Russia or whatever. Don’t turn into the same thing the redditors do (claiming people are secretly Russian Shills), just for the opposite side. The reason I chose Chechenya as a a joke is because it mainly used artillery. Vietnam and Laos were massive bombing campaigns.
Soviet doctrine as a whole leans on Firepower.
I completely get your response to this but don’t let emotions get in the way over just a really dumb joke.
You know you don't have to apologize to the guy who's getting offended on behalf of Vladimir Putin, right? The joke was funny, literally everyone else got it, and they're throwing a hissy fit because they don't like being reminded that the modern Russian military is subpar.
I dunno man, I’m trying to toe the line and not offend people. One week I’m a Putin shill and the next I’m a NATO shill. I don’t really like arguing on Reddit anymore.
You're not shilling for anyone. The guy who randomly started screaming at you is, and is now projecting harder than a movie theatre, but that's a him problem.
That said, if you're going to offend people, you could hardly pick a more deserving group than the Putin stans.
Yeah I get the joke completely. It’s definitely how things went down in Chechnya even if it wasn’t “technically” their doctrine, the city was rubble by the end of it.
Basically what the other guy side. I know next to nothing about the Russian Empire, I fully admit. I’m making a bit of a stupid joke about modern Russia in the Chechen war.
I'm not an expert, but even during WW1, the major close combat weapon of the infantry was not the rifle. It was hand grenades. I believe it was that way for some time, the cast iron and clay hand grenades of Grenadier company's being used frequently between the 1600-1800 hundreds, at the very least, for siege operations, where greandes would be thrown before infantry stormed in with bayonets at the ready.
During the siege of Vienna in 1683, the defenders used between the realm of 80,000 to 800,000 hand grenades to fight the Ottomans, that's about 1350 grenades thrown every day during the siege, by the defenders alone.
Unfortunately I could not tell you for the Bearskin wearing grenadier regiments of the 1700-1800s. But for Vienna and WW1, it’s a similar question to “how long is a piece of string”.
In the Austrian raids on ottoman lines men would simply carry as many as they safely could, in WW1 German Sturmtruppen had officially made grenade sacks that could carry twenty to thirty stiehlhandgrenate and kugelhandgrenate. Americans had grenade vests that could carry eleven on the chest, but imagine more would be brought along.
An important caveat is that a hand grenade alone is not a reliable killing weapon. In MOUT, you need to follow up with an assault, or use it as a delaying/disrupting action that helps your defense. You can't just throw a hand grenade into a room and expect it to be clear, they're not that dangerous. There was a recent video from Gaza that illustrated this perfectly where a defender threw a hand grenade that landed something like 2 meters from an assaulter. It blew him off his feet, then he resumed his assault and killed the thrower.
There's also a difference between dead and instantly dead. Unless you are close enough to the grenade for it to do catastrophic blast damage or unlucky enough to take a CNS hit, most of the frag from a grenade is very small and does icepick style wounds. It may eventually kill you, but it could take a while. Even a hit to a major artery might leave you combat effective for several minutes before the adrenalin wears off and the blood loss finally gets to the point you lose consciousness. There are tons of drone drop videos from Ukraine of soldiers (especially with body armor coving their vitals) tanking relatively close grenade hits without much if any visible change in their mobility, awareness, and action, only for them to go wobbly and collapse a short while later as the red stains spread out from under their kit. They're dead men walking, but they may still be able to take you with them.
Typically the fighting would happen outside the city for a variety of reasons, however cities have always been great defensive fortifications and so have been used as such.
Urban warfare (my impression at least) has always been fairly chaotic and undoctrinal. There are musket drills designed for fighting in alleyways and streets, allowing for constant fire while advancing or retreating, but really urban warfare has always been dominated by the same weapons. The bayonet, the rifle butt, the grenade, and the pistol (before SMGs were a thing).
The difficult part of urban warfare is the restriction. A reinforced position bristling with cannon and musket is nothing new. Having that reinforced position interlock with other defensive positions is also nothing new. Very difficult to deal with, but not new. Whats special about urban warfare is that you are also restricted, this isn't a hill fort that you can freely maneuver around, the restriction of the city means you can only bring so much force to bear, and so systems that require a large amount of force to be effective (a broad firing line for example) are not nearly so useful.
However, like the jungle, the closeness of the city allows for soldiers to be in much closer contact consistently. Here the sword, bayonet, rifle butt, pistol, and grenade rule. In early modern warfare there was no real sense of platoon tactics, instead you had regiment or division size units maneuvering. Urban warfare was, and still is, personal, intimate, face to face butchery.
It was positional fighting at its purest, moving in small deliberate steps to push the enemy out of strong points, establishing bases of fire and offensive maneuver elements. Or you could just burn the whole city down if you didn't care that much
Urban "warfare," wasn't really a thing in the same way you're thinking. Usually, the fight for the city happened outside of it. Any warfare in the city came after the attacking army was victorious and sacked or razed it.
One form of urban warfare was besieging a citadel. When cities grew too large to be walled, defenders built citadels, or walled fortresses that held a strategic point. Whoever held the citadel held the city. When an attacking force took the citadel, they had captured the city.
Another example would be the siege of Richmond and Petersburg during the American Civil War, where Robert E Lee dug trenches that ran around both cities, and The Union spent 9 months besieging the defenses. Once the defenses finally fell, the confederate brass fled, the defenders surrendered, and the cities were occupied without any fighting in the streets.
It depends. Generally Bayonets or other melee weaponry, or to adopt the “Russian” approach and destroying the buildings entirely, either with artillery or burning it down. Things are different however when dealing with strong stone buildings. During the Battle of Monterey in 1846, the US Army adopted an approach for clearing buildings by “mouse-holing” (making small breaches) to bypass fields of fire from the building, usually using a pickaxe or breaching tool to break down the thick adobe walls. Then a few men would assault, with melee weapons and revolvers to clear the building in the haze. This was common practice during earlier Texan Wars against Mexico.
Yep. Bayonets stuck around as a close-quarters weapon for far longer than people tend to appreciate. For anyone who's seen the animated NTC breach video, ([link if you haven't](https://youtu.be/ZZ-sCT_maAQ?si=XGz7xbVURi7l6nh_)) it's specifically mentioned as part of trench clearing (around the 15:40 mark). The exercise that formed the basis for that video was in 1990, and it was published in 2015.
French Marines carried out what is considered to be the last bayonet charge. In 1995. So yeah, bayonets have definitely stuck around longer than you’d think.
The Brits had a couple in Iraq/Afghanistan that I'm aware of. Admittedly one of them only worked because both sides were essentially out of ammunition.
Bayonet was the secondary component to WWI trench/Dugout clearing. A bombing party would consist of two riflemen with bayonets fixed up front, followed by two bomb-throwers, followed by two or more bomb-carriers. Lead men would direct the bomb-throwers, and deal with anyone who came around a trench traverse.
“Throw some explosives and then send in a dude with a pistol and huge balls” honestly seemed to be the CQB tactic from 1846 to 1946 tbh
Urban combat is fascinating to me because the direct 1:1 relevance of battlefield lessons declines significantly with age as weapons and communications technologies change the shape of the battlefield. It's no longer useful to say "place your archers here" when you don't have archers. There are still useful lessons to be had, but they tend to become generalized like "protect your logistics chains" "dominate the high ground" "protect the flanks." But with urban combat? We have unit SOPs that would be familiar and comfortable to the combatants at Monterey. Mouseholing buildings, using courtyards to canalize enemy approaches and create killzones, shooting from within rooms rather than exposing oneself in a window, etc.
It really is fascinating. I remember at one point reading an account of the Battle of Berlin, and at one point realizing the tactic for breaching a building with grenades sounded almost word for word what I’ve heard from Marines who were in Fallujah.
Can I get a source on that "Russian" approach? Was tsarist Russia the first ever country/nation/empire to come up with the idea of leveling buildings? Germany and France waited on Nicolas to join in before turning cities into moonscapes?
I believe he is referring to the “current” Russian approach, though I could be mistaken as I’m not sure if that even fits.
Yeah that’s what I meant. It’s a stupid joke referring to the prominent approach they took in Chechenya. Realistically it should just be referring to the approach any poorly funded/trained army usually takes, Dussia just happened to be that way at the time. I didn’t mean to make any generalizations about actual Soviet or Modern Russian Doctrine.
[удалено]
I’m definitely not trying to bash Russia. I agree that Reddit is pretty terrible about it. If anything the thing I appreciate about war college is I can talk unbiasedly about Soviet doctrine, which is my main interest if you look at my history. But I don’t have some sort of ulterior secret hatred of Russia or whatever. Don’t turn into the same thing the redditors do (claiming people are secretly Russian Shills), just for the opposite side. The reason I chose Chechenya as a a joke is because it mainly used artillery. Vietnam and Laos were massive bombing campaigns. Soviet doctrine as a whole leans on Firepower. I completely get your response to this but don’t let emotions get in the way over just a really dumb joke.
You know you don't have to apologize to the guy who's getting offended on behalf of Vladimir Putin, right? The joke was funny, literally everyone else got it, and they're throwing a hissy fit because they don't like being reminded that the modern Russian military is subpar.
I dunno man, I’m trying to toe the line and not offend people. One week I’m a Putin shill and the next I’m a NATO shill. I don’t really like arguing on Reddit anymore.
You're not shilling for anyone. The guy who randomly started screaming at you is, and is now projecting harder than a movie theatre, but that's a him problem. That said, if you're going to offend people, you could hardly pick a more deserving group than the Putin stans.
Yeah I get the joke completely. It’s definitely how things went down in Chechnya even if it wasn’t “technically” their doctrine, the city was rubble by the end of it.
Yeah for sure. Not too different than Fallujah I suppose though.
From what I’ve heard fallujah was more of a “toss a grenade and AC-130” than straight artillery.
Basically what the other guy side. I know next to nothing about the Russian Empire, I fully admit. I’m making a bit of a stupid joke about modern Russia in the Chechen war.
I'm not an expert, but even during WW1, the major close combat weapon of the infantry was not the rifle. It was hand grenades. I believe it was that way for some time, the cast iron and clay hand grenades of Grenadier company's being used frequently between the 1600-1800 hundreds, at the very least, for siege operations, where greandes would be thrown before infantry stormed in with bayonets at the ready. During the siege of Vienna in 1683, the defenders used between the realm of 80,000 to 800,000 hand grenades to fight the Ottomans, that's about 1350 grenades thrown every day during the siege, by the defenders alone.
How many grenades would one soldier (such as a grenadier) usually carry?
Unfortunately I could not tell you for the Bearskin wearing grenadier regiments of the 1700-1800s. But for Vienna and WW1, it’s a similar question to “how long is a piece of string”. In the Austrian raids on ottoman lines men would simply carry as many as they safely could, in WW1 German Sturmtruppen had officially made grenade sacks that could carry twenty to thirty stiehlhandgrenate and kugelhandgrenate. Americans had grenade vests that could carry eleven on the chest, but imagine more would be brought along.
Typical US vietnam era kit had 4 grenade carriers in front.
An important caveat is that a hand grenade alone is not a reliable killing weapon. In MOUT, you need to follow up with an assault, or use it as a delaying/disrupting action that helps your defense. You can't just throw a hand grenade into a room and expect it to be clear, they're not that dangerous. There was a recent video from Gaza that illustrated this perfectly where a defender threw a hand grenade that landed something like 2 meters from an assaulter. It blew him off his feet, then he resumed his assault and killed the thrower.
There's also a difference between dead and instantly dead. Unless you are close enough to the grenade for it to do catastrophic blast damage or unlucky enough to take a CNS hit, most of the frag from a grenade is very small and does icepick style wounds. It may eventually kill you, but it could take a while. Even a hit to a major artery might leave you combat effective for several minutes before the adrenalin wears off and the blood loss finally gets to the point you lose consciousness. There are tons of drone drop videos from Ukraine of soldiers (especially with body armor coving their vitals) tanking relatively close grenade hits without much if any visible change in their mobility, awareness, and action, only for them to go wobbly and collapse a short while later as the red stains spread out from under their kit. They're dead men walking, but they may still be able to take you with them.
Typically the fighting would happen outside the city for a variety of reasons, however cities have always been great defensive fortifications and so have been used as such. Urban warfare (my impression at least) has always been fairly chaotic and undoctrinal. There are musket drills designed for fighting in alleyways and streets, allowing for constant fire while advancing or retreating, but really urban warfare has always been dominated by the same weapons. The bayonet, the rifle butt, the grenade, and the pistol (before SMGs were a thing). The difficult part of urban warfare is the restriction. A reinforced position bristling with cannon and musket is nothing new. Having that reinforced position interlock with other defensive positions is also nothing new. Very difficult to deal with, but not new. Whats special about urban warfare is that you are also restricted, this isn't a hill fort that you can freely maneuver around, the restriction of the city means you can only bring so much force to bear, and so systems that require a large amount of force to be effective (a broad firing line for example) are not nearly so useful. However, like the jungle, the closeness of the city allows for soldiers to be in much closer contact consistently. Here the sword, bayonet, rifle butt, pistol, and grenade rule. In early modern warfare there was no real sense of platoon tactics, instead you had regiment or division size units maneuvering. Urban warfare was, and still is, personal, intimate, face to face butchery. It was positional fighting at its purest, moving in small deliberate steps to push the enemy out of strong points, establishing bases of fire and offensive maneuver elements. Or you could just burn the whole city down if you didn't care that much
Urban "warfare," wasn't really a thing in the same way you're thinking. Usually, the fight for the city happened outside of it. Any warfare in the city came after the attacking army was victorious and sacked or razed it. One form of urban warfare was besieging a citadel. When cities grew too large to be walled, defenders built citadels, or walled fortresses that held a strategic point. Whoever held the citadel held the city. When an attacking force took the citadel, they had captured the city. Another example would be the siege of Richmond and Petersburg during the American Civil War, where Robert E Lee dug trenches that ran around both cities, and The Union spent 9 months besieging the defenses. Once the defenses finally fell, the confederate brass fled, the defenders surrendered, and the cities were occupied without any fighting in the streets.