The Battle of Bakhmut, in which Russian invaders try to capture a town in eastern Ukraine, has been going on for the past 9 months, 1 week and 6 days. In comparison, the largest urban warfare battle ever, the Battle of Stalingrad in the Second World War, lasted 5 months, 1 week and 3 days.
What is the longest duration urban warfare battle ever?
Assuming traditional sieges (where the defenders hold the urban bits inside the walls and the attackers non-urban bits outside, and when if there is urban fighting it’s short and brutal) don’t count. Possibly the Battle Leningrad might? Ii lasted over two years and I think a lot of the fighting did happen in the surrounding suburbs:
The Siege of Leningrad seems to have been more of a siege/blockade, with the Germans aiming to starve and bombard the city into submission, rather than assaulting it directly in urban warfare. After a year’s besieging, Hitler appears to have ordered a final assault on the city, Operation Nordlicht (1942), but it was cancelled due to a Soviet counteroffensive.
Ironically, Putin’s family was affected by the Siege of Leningrad firsthand. His father was seriously wounded during the battle to defend the city, his mother was a survivor of the siege, and his older brother, Viktor, died from diphtheria during the siege at just one year old. Putin himself, born seven years after the war ended, was brought up in the battle-scarred city.
Leningrad was purely a siege though; there was no urban fighting. Finland refused to go past the pre-war border and attack the city from the north, and Hitler specifically forbade any attempt to actually take the city by force, ordering it to be left to starve.
Depending on your definition of ‘urban warfare battle,’ the Siege of Sevastopol (yes, that Sevastopol) lasted 8 months and 4 days from 30 October 1941 – 4 July 1942 when the city finally fell to the German 11th Army under von Manstein. This wasn’t constant urban fighting, of course, or even constant ground attacks on Sevastopol’s defenses. During the course of the fighting, the Soviets conducted an amphibious landing at the Kerch peninsula in December 1941 as part of the 1941-42 Winter Counteroffensive which the Germans had to clear out in May 1942 before beginning the final assault on Sevastopol. The 800mm railway gun Schwerer Gustav was used in the siege along with numerous smaller super-heavy artillery pieces. The final ground assault on the defenses of Sevastopol didn’t begin until June 7th 1942.
According to Homer the siege of Troy lasted almost ten years.
Closer to present times the Battle for Madrid during the Spanish Civil War lasted two and a half years. From the wikiarticle:
The siege of Madrid was a two-and-a-half-year siege of the Republican-controlled Spanish capital city of Madrid by the Nationalist armies, under General Francisco Franco, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The city, besieged from October 1936, fell to the Nationalist armies on 28 March 1939. The Battle of Madrid in November 1936 saw the most intense fighting in and around the city when the Nationalists made their most determined attempt to take the Republican capital.
BTW; this siege is historically the origin of the concept of the “fifth column”, though the story of who said the term first and when is murky.
Class Warfare.
Rich vs Poor & Middle Class.
Thousands of years.
Still ongoing.
Moderator Note
While this does use the word “warfare”, these are socio-economic issues and do not really fit the definition of “urban warfare” as given by the example in the OP. If you want to discuss socio-economic issues feel free, but not in this thread.
I think the Siege of Sarajevo has got to be in contention.
How long was the fighting in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war?
According to wikipedia, it went from June 14 to August 21. So a bit over two months.
I’d generally take urban warfare to mean people fighting in the streets, surrounded by multi-story buildings.
My guess would be that most of the fighting in Bakhmut (and Ukraine, in general) has been one of:
Since the attack on Kyiv, I’d assume that Russia has largely avoided getting into any significant amount of urban fighting. The defender is in too strong of a position, until you’ve flattened everything. It’s better to reduce it all to rubble before advancing.
One wonders if there is some sort of intrinsic limit to the duration of an urban combat. For urban combat to be “worthwhile” in a strategic sense, all hostile parties have to see the city (by which I mean the actual physical buildings) as worth preserving. If you don’t actually care about the utility of the city’s construction, you might as well just bomb it or flatten it with artillery and skip the whole “urban combat” part. And then if all hostile parties actually want to hold and occupy the city (or make use of it after fighting ceases,) urban warfare of sufficient duration might very well destroy the city’s buildings to the point where it’s inhabitable anyway.
To summarize my ramble: How long can two armies run around a city shooting at eachother and blowing things up before it ceases to be urban combat anymore because the urban environment is destroyed?
“(Streetfighting) is a bad misnomer, because the last place you see any sane man is in a street where every yard is usually covered by a well-sited machine gun. It should be called house-to-house fighting, which it literally is.”
–Denis Johnston, BBC Correspondent, On the Front Lines, John Ellis, pg 90
Therein lies the problem with urban warfare; pounding buildings into rubble with high explosives doesn’t actually reduce their defensibility. If anything, the rubble is a better defensive position than the buildings were since you can’t collapse the rubble on the heads of the defenders like you could when the rubble was still in building form.
A destroyed city still makes a good defensive position. So the defenders still have incentive to continue the fight, as long as the attackers remain.
An attacker can withdraw, but almost never does an attacker enter into urban operations with no intentions beyond “pound it flat” because, as you note, that doesn’t require an active ground engagement. So that withdrawl would come down to “we give up, you can have your rubble.” They would be giving up on the objectives of taking ground and forcing out or capturing their opponents.
There was a good scene concerning this in the series Band of Brothers. One of the Airborne troops was trying to tell a British tank commander about a German tank hidden up ahead, and how if he just took a shot through this one wall, he’s take the tank out. The Brit said he had orders to avoid any “unnecessary destruction” in the town, so he had to advance until he actually saw the tank before he could shoot it.
Of course his tank ends up getting shot first. By that evening, most of the town had ended up as rubble.
Hatfields and the McCoys - around 30 years.
That was only one phase of the ongoing Lebanese Civil War. Arguably the city was a war zone for fifteen years: Green Line (Lebanon) - Wikipedia
Not really “urban” by any meaningful sense, though.
The sieges of Ceuta lasted 26 years but we are not counting sieges?
Does the Battle of Verdun count? That was a city and the battle lasted 9 months, 3 weeks and 6 days.
The Battle of Verdun, 21 February-15 December 1916, became the longest battle in modern history. - SOURCE
I’d be shocked if there were longer battles in ancient history (if we do not count sieges).
Verdun never reached the city proper; the fighting took place entirely in the Fortified Region of Verdun ( Région Fortifiée de Verdun) and the hills north of the city.
