Hedgehog defence

American soldiers taking up defensive positions in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge

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 keeps large numbers of attacking troops tied up, attacking the well-defended strongpoints, while allowing the defenders to successfully counterattack against the units that bypass these strongpoints with their own armored reserves by cutting them off from their supporting elements.

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. The remaining forces which did apply the tactic were simply bypassed.

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. On the eastern front, Germans adopted the additional feature commonly associated with hedgehog defence--resupply of the strongpoints by air: particularly in the winter of 1941-42, the advanced "hedgehogs" effectively surrounded by the Soviets, such as the Demyansk pocket, were supplied mainly by air. Although casualities were heavy, these strongpoints held up large numbers of attacking Soviet troops and prevented them from deployed elsewhere--the successful defense of the Demyansk pocket, for example, helped stem the Soviet counteroffensive following the Battle of Moscow. Although aerial resupply reduced reliance on vulnerable ground transport, however, it inflicted enormous strain on the Luftwaffe. 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 growing weakness of the Luftwaffe and increasing combat capabilities of the Soviet Air Force made resupply of isolated strongpoints by air difficult. In particular, Hitler had hoped that the surrounded Stalingrad could be turned into a giant hedgehog, tying up vast numbers of Soviet troops, but the inability of the Luftwaffe to keep supply lines open doomed the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. After the Battle of Kursk in 1943 the Wehrmacht lacked the essential components of the tactic, the mobile armoured reserve and an air combat capability necessary to secure local air superiority for keeping open aerial supply corridor.

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.

Following the end of World War II, the concept was used again in Southeast Asia. The French were successful using hedgehog defenses against the Viet Minh in the Battle of Na San, but suffered a disaster in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu when General Giap deployed unexpectedly heavy concentration of anti aircraft artillery around the French garrison and successfully disrupted aerial resupply. The concept was again central in U.S. Marines' successful defense of Khe Sanh against the NVA.

References

• Military Improvisations during the Russian Campaign, Center of Military History, United States Army, 1951.