. The characteristics of an average city include tall buildings, narrow alleys,
sewage tunnels and possibly a
subway system. Defenders may have the advantage of detailed local knowledge of the area, right down to the layout inside of buildings and means of travel not shown on maps. The buildings can provide excellent
sniping posts while alleys and rubble-filled streets are ideal for planting
booby traps. Defenders can move from one part of the city to another undetected using tunnels and spring
ambushes. Meanwhile, the attackers tend to become more exposed than the defender as they must use the open streets more often, unfamiliar with the defenders' secret and hidden routes. During a house to house search the attacker is often also exposed on the streets. File:Lokajski 002.jpg|
Home Army soldiers assault a fortified house in downtown
Warsaw during the
Warsaw Uprising of 1944 File:La Libération de Paris, 1944.ogv|Film
"La Libération de Paris" shot by the French Resistance of
street fighting in Paris, August 1944 File:1941. Бой на улицах Сталино.jpg|
Italian soldiers street fighting in
Stalino, October 1941
Battle of Monterrey, Mexico The
Battle of Monterrey was the U.S. Army's first major encounter with urban warfare. It occurred in September 1846 when the U.S. Army under
Zachary Taylor invaded the town. 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. The houses at Monterrey were made of thick
adobe, with strong double doors and few windows. The rooftops were lined with a two-foot-tall wall that acted as a parapet for the defending soldiers. Each home was a fort unto itself. 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. They could not see the men hidden behind walls, loopholes, or rooftops. They tried to march straight down the street until the intense fire drove them to hide in adjacent buildings. Taylor tried to move artillery into the city but it could not hit the well-hidden defenders any better than the U.S. soldiers could. Two days later the US again assaulted the city from two sides and this time they fought differently. Not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the 21st, General William Jenkins Worth listened to his Texan advisers. These men had fought in Mexican cities before at the
Battle of Mier in 1842 and the
Battle of Bexar in 1835. They understood that the army needed to "
mouse hole" through each house and root out the defenders in close combat. 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. The typical assault on a home would include one man who would run to the door of the house and chip the door away with a pick axe under covering fire. Once the door showed signs of weakening, 3–4 other soldiers would run to the door and barge in with revolvers blazing. Worth lost few men on the 23rd using these new urban warfare techniques. 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". The battle "occupies a famous, notorious place in the history of war, particularly urban warfare. 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. 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. Much of the housing stock consisted of apartment blocks built in the second half of the 19th century. 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. In many places these apartment blocks were built around several courtyards, one behind the other, each one reached through the outer courtyards by a ground-level tunnel similar to that between the first courtyard and the road. The larger, more expensive
flats faced the street and the smaller, less expensive ones were found around the inner courtyards. Just as the Soviets had learned a lot about urban warfare, so had the Germans. The
Waffen-SS did not use the makeshift barricades erected close to street corners, because these could be raked by artillery fire from guns firing over open sights further along the straight streets. Instead, they put snipers and machine guns on the upper floors and the roofs – a safer deployment as the Soviet tanks could not elevate their guns that high. They also put men armed with
panzerfausts in cellar windows to ambush tanks as they moved down the streets. These tactics were quickly adopted by the
Hitler Youth and the
First World War Volkssturm veterans. To counter these tactics, Soviet submachine gunners
rode the tanks and sprayed every doorway and window, but this meant the tank could not traverse its turret quickly. The other solution was to rely on heavy howitzers (152 mm and 203 mm) firing over open sights to blast defended buildings and to use anti-aircraft guns against defenders posted on the higher floors. Soviet combat groups started to move from house to house instead of directly down the streets. 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. These tactics took the Germans lying in ambush for tanks in the flanks.
Flamethrowers and grenades were very effective, but as the Berlin civilian population had not been evacuated these tactics inevitably killed many civilians.
First Chechen War , January 1995 During the
First Chechen War most of the Chechen fighters had been trained in the Soviet armed forces. They were divided into combat groups consisting of 15 to 20 personnel, subdivided into three or four-man
fire teams. A fire team consisted of an antitank gunner, usually armed with a Russian made
RPG-7s or
RPG-18s, a machine gunner and a sniper. The team would be supported by ammunition runners and assistant gunners. To destroy Russian armoured vehicles in
Grozny, five or six hunter-killer fire teams deployed at ground level, in second and third stories, and in basements. The snipers and machine gunners would pin down the supporting infantry while the antitank gunners would engage the armoured vehicle aiming at the top, rear and sides of vehicles. Initially, the Russians were taken by surprise. Their armoured columns that were supposed to take the city without difficulty as Soviet forces had taken
Budapest in 1956 were decimated in fighting more reminiscent of the
Battle of Budapest in late 1944. As in the Soviet assault on Berlin, as a short term measure, they deployed
self-propelled anti-aircraft guns (
ZSU-23-4 and
2K22M) to engage the Chechen combat groups, as their tank's main gun did not have the elevation and depression to engage the fire teams and an armoured vehicle's machine gun could not suppress the fire of half a dozen different fire teams simultaneously.
Operation Defensive Shield during an exercise simulating the takeover of a hostile urban area
Operation Defensive Shield was a
counter-terrorism military operation conducted by the
Israel Defense Forces in April 2002 as a response to a wave of
suicide bombings by
Palestinian factions which claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli civilians. It was in part characterized by alleged
usage of human shields by both IDF and Palestinian militants. The two major battles were held in
Nablus and
Jenin. In Nablus, the
Paratroopers Brigade and the
Golani Brigade, backed by reservist
armour force and
combat engineers with
armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, entered to Nablus, killing 70 militants and arresting hundreds, while sustaining only one fatality. The forces deployed many small teams, advancing in non-linear manner from many directions, using
snipers and air support. The battle ended quickly with a decisive Israeli victory. L
armoured bulldozer In
Jenin the battle was much harder and fierce. Unlike in Nablus, the forces who fought in Jenin were mainly reserve forces. The Palestinian militants
booby-trapped the city and the refugee camp with thousands of explosive charges, some were very large and most were concealed in houses and on the streets. After 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in an
ambush combined with booby traps, snipers and
suicide bombers, the IDF changed its tactics from slow advancing
infantry soldiers backed by
attack helicopters to a heavy use of armoured bulldozers. 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. In total, 56 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the battle of Jenin. ==Close-quarters battle==