Urban warfare
Ambushes laid down by small groups of soldiers with handheld anti-tank weapons can destroy entire columns of modern armor (as in the First Battle of Grozny), while artillery and air support can be severely reduced if the "superior" party wants to limit civilian casualties as much as possible, but the defending party does not (or even uses civilians as human shields).
Tactics are complicated by a three-dimensional environment, limited fields of view and fire because of buildings, enhanced concealment and cover for defenders, below-ground infrastructure, and the ease of placement of booby traps and snipers.
[10] Urban military operations in World War II often relied on large quantities of artillery bombardment and air support varying from ground attack fighters to heavy bombers.
[citation needed] Military historian Victor Davis Hanson noted the lethality of urban warfare in the Second World War, "When civilian met soldier in the confined landscapes, the death toll spiked, and it was no surprise that the greatest carnage of World War II—at Leningrad and Stalingrad—was the result of efforts to storm municipal fortresses".
This has since been supplemented by the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International and Non-International Armed Conflicts.
[16] When Russian forces attacked Grozny in 1999, they conducted a massive artillery and air bombardment campaign in an attempt to smash the city into submission.
[18][17] Fighting in an urban environment can offer some advantages to a weaker defending force or to guerrilla fighters through ambush-induced attrition losses.
The attacking army must account for three dimensions more often,[19] and consequently expend greater amounts of manpower to secure a myriad of structures, and mountains of rubble.
[24][25] Spencer confirmed this to be true in an article in 2024, providing a list of numerous urban battles in the recent decades of the 21st century alone, those being Fallujah, Sadr City, Mosul, Raqqa, Marawi, and now Bakhmut, Mariupol, and Khan Yunis in the 2020s.
The characteristics of an average city include tall buildings, narrow alleys, sewage tunnels and possibly a subway system.
[citation needed]The buildings can provide excellent sniping posts while alleys and rubble-filled streets are ideal for planting booby traps.
The U.S. Army had no prior training in urban warfare and the Mexican defenders hid on rooftops, shot through loopholes, and stationed cannons in the middle of the city's streets.
[27] On September 21, 1846, the U.S. Army which included some of its best soldiers, recent West Point graduates, marched down the city's streets and were cut down by the Mexican defenders.
[29][30] Worth's men used pick axes to chip holes in the adobe walls of the homes, in the roof of the house from where the soldiers could drop in, or used ladders to climb to the top of a rooftop and assault the Mexican defenders in hand-to-hand combat.
[32] Historian Iain MacGregor states that the "evolution of urban, house-to-house fighting and defending these buildings and built-up areas was seemingly born in Stalingrad in the winter of 1942".
It seems to encapsulate and personify it, to provide an instinctive yardstick by which urban warfare can be examined, understood, defined, and assessed" according to military historian Stephen Walsh.
[34] The Soviets used the great amount of destruction to their advantage by adding man-made defenses such as barbed wire, minefields, trenches, and bunkers to the rubble, while large factories even housed tanks and large-caliber guns within.
[23] In addition, Soviet urban warfare relied on 20-to-50-man-assault groups, armed with machine guns, grenades and satchel charges, and buildings fortified as strongpoints with clear fields of fire.
Most of the central districts of Berlin consisted of city blocks with straight wide roads, intersected by several waterways, parks and large railway marshalling yards.
Most of those, thanks to housing regulations and few elevators, were five stories high, built around a courtyard which could be reached from the street through a corridor large enough to take a horse and cart or small trucks used to deliver coal.
They moved through the apartments and cellars blasting holes through the walls of adjacent buildings (for which the Soviets found abandoned German panzerfausts were very effective), while others fought across the roof tops and through the attics.
The heavily armoured bulldozers began by clearing booby traps and ended with razing many houses, mainly in the center of the refugee camp.
The armoured bulldozers were unstoppable and impervious to Palestinian attacks and by razing booby-trapped houses and buildings which used as gun posts they forced the militants in Jenin to surrender.
[citation needed] The term close-quarter battle refers to fighting methods within buildings, streets, narrow alleys and other places where visibility and manoeuvrability are limited.
The fundamentals of muzzle awareness and weapons safety are of the utmost importance given the propensity for fratricide due to the confined spaces, as well as the limited avenues of approach.
During World War II, as preparation for the Allied invasion of Normandy, the population of the English village of Imber was evacuated compulsorily to provide an urban training area for United States forces.
The facility has been retained, despite efforts by the displaced people to recover their homes, and was used for British Army training for counter-insurgency operations in Northern Ireland.
