Hedgehog defence
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In warfare, the hedgehog defence is a military tactic for defending against a mobile armoured attack, or blitzkrieg. The defenders deploy in depth in heavily fortified positions suitable for all-around defence. The attackers can penetrate between these "hedgehogs", but each position continues to fight on when surrounded. This channels the attacking tanks into salients between the hedgehogs, allowing the defenders to use their mobile armoured reserve to cut off the enemy armoured spearhead, separating it from its infantry support and allowing it to be destroyed in detail.
The tactic was proposed by General Maxime Weygand during the Battle of France in 1940. However Allied forces in 1940 were unable to successfully apply the tactic before they sustained heavy losses and France capitulated.
On the Eastern Front the German army used the tactic successfully during the Soviet winter advances, notably in the Battle of Moscow in 1941, in the Second Rzhev-Sychevka Offensive in November 1942, and in the battle around Orel during Operation Saturn in February 1943. The successful holding of forward positions in these battles led Adolf Hitler to insist for the remainder of the war on static positions being held to the last man, but after the Battle of Kursk in 1943 the German army lacked the essential component of the tactic, the mobile armoured reserve.
The tactic was also used effectively by the Americans during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, utilizing a hedgehog defence at Bastogne in Belgium to divert and slow the German 5th Panzer Army.
[edit] References
- Military Improvisations during the Russian Campaign, Center of Military History, United States Army, 1951.
