It would be appropriate to begin the story with the statement of Field Marshal Manstein, who mentioned in his memoirs that "the Russians were masters of rebuilding roads." Indeed, the units of the army road workers, staffed during the war with servicemen of older ages and almost completely devoid of equipment, managed to accomplish the impossible. The duties of the road troops (8% of the Red Army by 1942) included not only road work, but traffic regulation, discipline control, as well as providing personnel on the road with food, medical and technical assistance.
Deep ruts were inevitable during the thaw. However, they helped traffic
Directly during the war years, the road troops ensured the transportation of equipment and personnel on roads with a total length of 300 thousand km. The total length of the repaired roads exceeds 97 thousand km, and the number of restored bridges is close to 1 million.
A feature of the work of the road workers at the front was the variety of natural zones in which the hostilities took place. In the southerly direction, in the summer, the roads were laid through the fields, which provided ample room for maneuver. At the same time, the spring-autumn thaws sharply complicated the operating conditions, which required the repair of roads and a complex organization of traffic. In the central part of the front, in the course of hostilities, the most difficult-to-pass road sections, of which there were many in all seasons, had to be reinforced with various materials of low strength. A brick battle was used from destroyed buildings, as well as boiler and steam locomotive slag. During preparations for the Battle of Kursk, with the help of the population, the Yelets-Livny-Zolotukhino road was strengthened with gravel and brick fighting. The total length of the repaired roads in the Kursk Bulge area was about 3 thousand km. The swamps of the northern part of the front forced the road workers to make considerable efforts to erect wooden road surfaces. Moreover, roads, dams and embankments across the swamps became targets of offensive operations of the opposing sides, which had a very bad effect on their safety. Nevertheless, under enemy fire, the road workers of the Red Army quite quickly provided the troops with a hard road surface. So, in Europe, at the Mangushevsky bridgehead on the Vistula River, road workers had to provide 200 km of roads, of which 150 were ruts, and 30 were railroad.
View of a forest road along which equipment and ammunition were transported to the front edge of the Volkhov Front
How was the repair of the road going in the front-line life of the Great Patriotic War? Firstly, it was leveled with picks, the correct profile was drawn, and if possible, stones, gravel or broken brick were added. Secondly, they rolled with road rollers, but such an opportunity was far from always and not everywhere. Therefore, the main seal was made by transport, and there was plenty of it during the war years. On average, a dirt road before the war had to cope with 200 cars per day, each weighing 4 tons. If the road was reinforced with stone (gravel or stone), then the threshold for daily throughput increased to 600 cars. Naturally, all these standards went to pieces in the very first days of the war - 4-5 thousand.cars in 24 hours became commonplace at the front. The destruction of roads was aggravated by muddy roads - they became impassable. Usually road workers fought against soaking, loosening the surface layer of soil by 15-20 cm, and then kneading sand and clay into it. Further, it was required to punch through an impromptu road and seal with improvised means.
In peacetime, the edges of the road were dug in with drainage ditches, which successfully coped with the soaking of the soil. However, the very first days of the war showed that during the Luftwaffe raids, the columns did not have time to disperse over the squares and got stuck in ditches. In addition, the lateral 25% slopes of the roadway had a negative impact - the cars simply rolled off the primers after the first rain. During the first few months of the war, the road troops of the Red Army had a lot of recipes for adapting roads to the new harsh conditions - they had to learn in combat conditions. Firstly, they tried to breed tracked and wheeled vehicles in different parallel directions. Secondly, military road builders had to take into account the steepness of descents and descents when laying dirt roads - in muddy roads they could become impassable for any transport. In addition, the wind blowing of the road had to be taken into account, which often seriously lengthened the routes. Thirdly, in the dry period, the road workers strengthened the "limp" sections with a flooring of logs, poles, stones, slag, and after the summer rains they covered the roads with sand, creating a dense rolled layer. During the thaw period, this made it less slippery. Fourthly, the road workers welcomed the formation of a track on the road - this saved the equipment from drifts. In fact, the movement did not stop until the differentials of the trucks touched the ground of the inter-track roller. Usually, in this case, a new primer was laid next to the old one. So, in the spring of 1944, when nature in Ukraine was especially raging, methodically eroding roads, the width of the areas affected by the passage could reach 700-800 meters. As soon as the track on the dirt road became impassable, it was thrown (at best, the water was drained) and a new one was organized nearby. And so several dozen times. Also, in addition to the above, military road workers near the roads dug evaporation pools and absorption wells, in which water seeping from the ground accumulated. In some parts of the front, dirt roads began to turn into real trenches, the depth of which reached one and a half meters. This was the result of the constant excavation of liquid mud by road troops. Dumps were formed along the edges of these trench roads to help retain water.
In the book by VF Babkov, "Development of Road Construction Technique", data are given according to which it can be said that difficult road conditions were not only on the Eastern Front - the allied troops faced the same problems in Normandy. And European dirt roads in the fall of 1944 were transformed as a result of constant cleaning of mud from them into deep one and a half meter trenches, which were flooded after rains. On such lakes, wheeled vehicles went exclusively with the help of tracked tugs. But, of course, a much more developed network of paved roads in Europe ensured a fairly high speed of movement of Anglo-American troops in the theater of operations.
At the end of the first part of the cycle, one cannot but cite diametrically opposed assessments of the Germans and Russians about the quality of front-line roads. Karl Tippelskirch, a German historian, describes the roads of Russia in the fall of 1941:
“A period of complete thaw has come. It became impossible to move on the roads, the dirt stuck to the feet, to the hooves of animals, the wheels of carts and cars. Even the so-called highways have become impassable."
Manstein echoes his fellow tribesman:
“From the mainland to Simferopol there is only a“country road”that is often found in this country, where only the carriageway is leveled and ditches are dug on the sides. In dry weather, such roads on the clay soil of southern Russia are very passable. But during the rainy season, they had to be closed immediately so that they did not fail completely and for a long time. Thus, with the beginning of the rains, the army practically lost the ability to provide its supply with auto-carriage, at least in the section from the mainland to Simferopol."
But Marshal Georgy Zhukov assesses the quality of our primers and country roads as follows:
"… neither frost and snowy winter, nor torrential rains and impassable spring roads did not stop the course of operations."
