The Impact of The Purges
Deep Operations were first formally expressed as a concept in the Red Army's "Field Regulations" of 1929, and more fully developed in the 1935 Instructions on Deep Battle. The concept was finally codified by the army in 1936 in the Provisional Field Regulations of 1936. By 1937, the Soviet Union had the largest mechanized army in the world and a sophisticated operational system to operate it.
However, the death of Triandafillov in an airplane crash and the 'Great Purges' of 1937 to 1939 removed many of the leading officers of the Red Army, including Svechin, Varfolomeev and Tukhachevsky. The purge of the Soviet military liquidated the generation of officers who had given the Red Army the deep battle strategy, operations and tactics and who also had rebuilt the Soviet armed forces. Along with these personalities, their ideas were also dispensed with. Some 35,000 personnel, about 50 percent of the Officer Corps, three out of five Marshals; 13 out of 15 Army Group commanders; 57 out of 85 Corps Commanders; 110 out of 195 Division commanders; 220 out of 406 Brigade commanders were murdered, imprisoned or "discharged". Without the personnel and strategy, Stalin destroyed the cream of the personnel with operational and tactical competence in the Red Army. Other sources identify 60 out of 67 Corps Commanders, 221 out of 397 Brigade Commanders, 79 percent of regimental commanders, 88 percent of regimental chiefs of staff, and 87 percent of all battalion commanders.
Soviet sources admitted in 1988:
In 1937–1938....all commanders of the armed forces, members of the military councils, and chiefs of the political departments of the military districts, the majority of the chiefs of the central administrations of the People's Commissariat of Defense, all Corps commanders, almost all division and brigade commanders, about one-third of the regimental commissars, many teachers of higher of middle military and military-political schools were judged and destroyed.
The deep operation concept was thrown out of Soviet military strategy as it was associated with the denounced figures that created it.
Read more about this topic: Soviet Deep Battle
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