If he is not ordered to advance, he digs in deeper and deeper. At any moment the soldier may be ordered to advance again and, shouting at the top of his voice, will rush ahead. If a tank drives over such a trench the soldier has a 50% chance that it will do him no harm. The earth he has dug out forms a breastwork in front and at the side to act as an additional cover. In three minutes he will have dug a little trench 15 centimetres deep, in which he can lie stretched out flat, so that bullets can whistle harmlessly over his head. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him. Once they have such a foothold, the infantry will dig in in such a way that nothing will smoke them out of their lairs and burrows.įrom Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces:Įvery infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. Defending troops always need something to hold on to: the dismantled forts at Verdun the bastions at Brest- Litovsk the walls at Stalingrad or the trenches in the Kursk salient, which had been abandoned two years previously. If 170 first-echelon Soviet divisions were put into these albeit dismantled boxes, it would have been no simple matter to break through their defences. He will have at least one metre of reinforced ferro-concrete over his head, a metre and a half of it in front of him and a metre on each side, all carefully camouflaged from the enquiring gaze of the enemy. If you put the same soldier, armed with his rifle or even a light machine gun, not into a mud-hole in the middle of a field, but into even the most simple dismantled, then his tenacity and firmness will increase tenfold. The ordinary foot soldier, armed with his rifle and shovel, can dig a trench to make it difficult and sometimes impossible for the enemy to cross the Line. Red Army GRU officer Vladimir Rezun, who defected and wrote a series of slightly over-the-top books under the pen name of Viktor Suvorov in the 1980s and 90s, spoke at length about the use of such stubby one-man E-tools, and it almost feels as if he wrote the storyboard for the above video. The Russian E-tool design dates back to the time of the Tsars and is still in use both by the Russian army as well as many that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union.
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