Soviet Naval Infantry
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2008

In our Army of Lappland game, the Soviet order of battle contains a very large contingent of Red Navy ground forces. These are among the best troops on the Allied side, and give the Soviet player the flexibility to threaten the Germans' seaward flank.

Like many navies, the Soviet Union's Red Navy sent its new recruits through infantry basic training before assigning them to specialized schools for further instruction. The Soviets also retained a practice from the Tsarist days, organizing crews for new warships as soon as they were laid down, leaving thousands of sailors without ships as the navy expanded.

In 1917 that practice had helped fuel the Revolution, as Alexandra Kollontai and other agitators successfully mobilized the sailors' boredom and discontent to the Bolshevik movement. In 1941, that pool of surplus manpower would be mobilized again, this time to defend the Revolution from a Nazi sneak attack. But between the wars, Soviet thinkers saw other reasons for the navy to maintain its own ground forces.

	Soviet marines aboard a "torpedo cutter," ready for action.

The Tsarist Navy had developed a sophisticated specialized landing ship, the Elpidifor class, during the First World War. This 1,050-ton ship had a pair of gangplanks that swung down from the bow, similar to the U.S. navy's Landing Craft Infantry. The Black Sea Fleet built 30 of these ships. The Tsar's fleet also built 50 Russud type landing craft, 225-ton boats with the typical "bow ramp" seen in the landing craft of the Second World War.

The 1937 Provisional Naval Regulations laid out the Red Nay's doctrine for amphibious operations. The first wave, made up of specialized Naval Infantry, would seize a beachhead at least 300 to 600 meters deep, to push any defenders back out of machine-gun range. The next wave, not necessarily naval troops, would follow quickly with the objective of deepening and widening the landing zone to place the beaches out of enemy artillery range.

In 1940 the Red Banner Baltic Fleet formed a specialized unit for amphibious landings, the 1st Special Marine Brigade. The other four fleets had much smaller units, and all of them had Naval Infantry battalions, sometimes organized into brigades, to defend naval installations. More Naval Infantry brigades were formed once war broke out, and these troops wore black naval uniforms, drew their pay from the Navy and usually were commanded by naval officers. Organization varied between them, from small "brigades" little bigger than a reinforced battalion to oversized ones about the size of an Army rifle division.

The troops needed to be brought from the sea by specialized landing craft. Few of the World War One landing ships survived into the period of the Great Patriotic War, and those had long been rebuilt for other uses. The Baltic Fleet marines used a small, 25-ton landing craft (a "tender" in Red Navy parlance) with a high prow that crews usually modified with home-made armor — steel plating, concrete or even sand. This additional weight made the craft hard to maneuver, and soon a 100-ton version appeared that could carry 50 troops and came with an anti-aircraft machine gun as well. Black Sea and Arctic Fleet marines landed from similar craft, many of them brought by railroad from Leningrad after the siege ended, though the designs varied from shipyard to shipyard. In all cases, the landing craft would beach itself and the marines would leap over the gunwales into the surf before charging ashore.

Baltic Fleet landing craft on the Vistula River, 1945.

The tenders performed well in supplying Leningrad over Lake Ladoga and evacuating civilians, but lacked the capabilities of American or Japanese landing craft, or even the Russud type of the Great War. They could not carry vehicles, and these were usually landed, when they were included at all, by improvised barges. There was also a constant shortage of proper landing craft, and motor torpedo boats, fishing boats and in at least one case canoes were pressed into action.

Soviet marines participated in amphibious on all fronts: Black Sea, Baltic, Arctic and Pacific. The largest landings were those in the Black Sea at Novorossisk and Kerch in 1943. Baltic Fleet marines landed in East Prussia in April 1945 to unhinge Nazi defenses there, while Pacific Fleet marines carried out a series of landing operations on the east coast of Korea.

The Red Banner Northern Fleet's 12th Naval Infantry Brigade became the vanguard of most amphibious operations along the rocky Arctic coast; the 63rd and 254th Naval Infantry Brigades were also available by war's end. Formed in early 1942, it initially had three marine battalions drawn from the Northern Fleet's base defense forces. The brigade fought well in the April 1942 Soviet offensive on the Litsa front, landing on the left bank of Litsa Bay and turning the flank of the German Mountain Corps Norway. But the Soviets had no other troops on hand to reinforce this success, and the counter-attack stalled.

Encouraged by the brigade's performance, the Northern Fleet expanded it to six marine battalions, adding a formerly separate battalion, one transferred from the Red Army in a very unusual administrative move, and another formed from ships' crews. The brigade also gained a pair of mortar battalions, one with 82mm weapons and the other with 120mm heavy mortars, and its own combat engineer, recon and submachinegun companies.

During the October 1944 Soviet offensive, the 12th Naval Infantry Brigade advanced from the Fischer Peninsula against the German Division van der Hoop, breaking through its defensive lines is short order while the 63rd and 254th Naval Infantry Brigades landed on its right flank, at the mouth of Petsamo Bay. Soviet marines captured the Finnish ports at Petsamo and Liinakhamari on 12 October, and the 12th Brigade received the Order of the Red Banner. Slightly more than a division's worth of marines participated in the offensive, and their quick success placed the Germans in the jaws of a double envelopment, forcing a hasty retreat.

	A marine officer and machine-gun team storm ashore.

Another type of naval ground unit, the Naval Rifle Brigade, appeared in the late summer of 1941. These came under Red Army command, with naval personnel and army officers. Their uniforms, weapons and pay came from the Red Army, and they did not receive any special amphibious training. Because of their origins they usually had a strong esprit de corps, and they could boast a higher standard of individual training than the other rifle brigades made up of raw recruits. At least three dozen naval rifle brigades served in the Great Patriotic War.

Three such brigades — the 69th, 70th and 72nd — participated in the October 1944 offensive. As Army units, the naval rifle brigades had a much more formal structure than the naval infantry. Each had three rifle battalions, a light artillery battalion, an anti-tank battalion, a mortar battalion plus anti-tank rifle, submachine gun, engineer and recon companies.

During the offensive, the three naval rifle brigades plus a Red Army light infantry brigade turned the German right flank, causing the Germans to order a general retreat. After three and a half years of war, it would be the Navy's land forces that forced a final decision along the Arctic coast.

Your chance to storm the beaches in Army of Lappland is coming soon. Order now!