“I often dream of all the guys.
Friends of my war days.
Our dugout in three rolls …"
A good song, sincere, but the phrase "Our dugout in three rolls" cuts my ear. She cannot have three rolls in any way. Firstly, this is physically impossible to do, and secondly, it is absolutely meaningless, since this structure is not in any way intended to shelter soldiers from enemy shells. And this is what the songwriter means. He, like many non-military and paramilitary people, confuses a dugout with a dugout.
The dugout is a structure completely buried in the ground. It really can have three rolls, i.e. in its ceiling part there are three layers of logs called knurling (diameter from 5 to 11 cm), or logs of larger diameter. A dugout is a fortification designed to shelter personnel from enemy shells and mortars. Its secondary function is a place for rest and heating of personnel on the front line or in places where personnel can be exposed to enemy fire.
The dugout is not a fortification and cannot shelter from enemy fire! The dugout is a ground-based utility structure and is intended for various economic and domestic needs in the rear areas. Its main purpose is to perform in rear areas that do not have ordinary residential and office premises (destroyed, absent or insufficient), their role, i.e. rest and accommodation of personnel; placement of various warehouses, workshops, communication points, control points, various medical and logistical units and institutions (baths, laundries, rooms for the wounded, for operating rooms, etc.); placement of classrooms, cultural and educational institutions (clubs, libraries).
Why is this structure called a dugout?
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Because the main materials for its construction are soil and round wood.
It should be noted that if the dugout has rather harsh living conditions and is used for recreation of personnel by force, then the dugout by the standards of military field conditions creates very comfortable conditions. The platoon dugout has a capacity of 1/3 of the platoon personnel with extremely limited area and volume per person. The dugout allows you to provide personnel with an area and volume almost the same as the conditions of the barracks and accommodates the entire unit in full strength.
Dugouts, depending on the specific purpose, can have quite different sizes, however, the principle of construction and the materials used in all cases are approximately the same.
Consider a standard dugout with a capacity for a motorized rifle compartment.
First, a recess measuring 5.5x3.7 meters and a depth of 50 cm comes off in the ground. Then, along the longitudinal axis, the pit deepens to 1 meter. Its width is also 1 meter. This ditch is brought out 2 - 2.5 meters beyond the pit. This will be the floor of the dugout. At the end, steps are arranged. This will be the entrance to the dugout. The strip on the right, 5.5 meters long and 1.8 meters wide, will be a couch for 11 people. The narrower strip on the left is 2.5 meters long and 0.9 meters wide. will be a table.
Of course, if it is required to place a different number of personnel in the dugout, then the length of the pit should be increased, and if the dugout is used for other purposes (warehouse, classroom, workshop, etc.), then the stove bench can not be made, but made of the earth then, what is needed.
The second stage of the work is the installation of the support posts and the laying of the rafters, as shown in the figure on the left. The rafters in their lower part can simply burst into the ground (as in the figure) or rest on the beds (logs or knurls laid on the ground). Pillars and rafters are made of knurling (round wood with a diameter of 5 to 11 cm). It is impractical to use thicker logs, because the volume and complexity of work increases, but this does not give any gain. In the figure on the right, the pillars and rafters are conventionally highlighted in blue. This is also a hint that metal pipes, an I-beam, a channel, a corner, reinforced concrete products of the desired profile can be used as pillars and rafters. The main thing is that the strength of the material used is sufficient to withstand what will fit on them.
After that, poles (diameter 3-5 cm) are placed on the rafters, which will make up the ceiling of the dugout. It is impractical to use a knurler due to the sharply increasing load on the rafters. The poles must be laid as tightly as possible to each other. They can be nailed to the rafters or tied with wire. You can first make shields from them, and then lay the shields on the rafters. If there is no timber, then the ceiling can be made from bundles of twigs, bundles of reeds, reeds, inserting one pole into each bundle. It is possible to use boards 5-7 cm thick.
The end sides are sewn up with poles installed vertically or with boards, a knurled piece. A window with a size of 45x45 cm is made from one end, a doorway is arranged on the opposite side and a door is hung.
From above, the roof is lined with crumpled clay with a layer of at least 15-25 cm. A layer of sod is laid on top of the clay layer. In cold weather, a heating stove is installed inside the dugout. The dugout is ready.
The figure shows a dugout from the side of the entrance, to the right from the opposite side.
These are the primary compulsory work on the construction of the dugout.
Labor costs 100 person hours. Consumption of materials - knurler 12 pcs. 2.5 m long, 6 m long poles - 70 pieces, 5.5 m long. - 120 pieces, 2 m long. 12 pieces, coniferous spruce branches 5 cubic meters, wire 8 kg, roofing iron - 2 sheets, field oven - 1 piece. door - 1, window -1.
A trained motorized rifle squad builds a dugout in 1 (one) day (!!).
However, no one forbids making the window larger and making a second window from the side of the door.
Let's look inside the dugout.
Quite comfortable (for field life) conditions. You can walk in full growth in the dugout. On the couch, each soldier is 50-60cm. in width and 1.80 m in length. Duffle bags are placed at the head.
Of course, comfort can be increased by arranging a floor from the boards, laying the boards on the couch, sheathing the walls with poles.
In winter time, it is advisable to coat the end walls with clay and overlay them with turf, arrange a vestibule and hang a second door in the vestibule.
Unlike a tent, in which it is only warm while the stove is on, a dugout retains heat in the same way as an ordinary wooden house. In dugouts planned for long-term residence, the ceiling is usually whitewashed, electricity is supplied, a clay blind area and drainage ditches are made around the dugout so that surface rainwater does not flow inside. There is no need to talk about the penetration of groundwater into the dugout, which is the scourge of underground forts. the maximum depth is no more than 1 meter.
The sizes of dugouts, design features may be different. On the website of Oleg Tulnov there is an image of a dugout from the Manual on Engineering arr. 1931 year. This is a type of dugout with a capacity for a rifle platoon.
From the author. The cost of an ordinary tarpaulin camp tent is four times higher than a dugout, a modern tent made of synthetic materials is twenty times higher. Well, those that the department of Colonel-General Shoigu (Ministry of Emergency Situations) loves to flaunt so much every fifty times. The construction time and labor intensity of the dugout are small, and comparing the living conditions and comfort of a dugout and a tent is simply ridiculous.
Why is the dugout forgotten? In the author's opinion, the reason is that with the development of civilization, people become lazier and less adapted to survive in natural conditions. They become incapable of creating tolerable living conditions with the help of the simplest means at hand. A tent is a product of civilization and it takes a few minutes to put it up; to build a dugout requires hard work and skill.
Living in the field (refugees affected by earthquakes, floods, military operations) is perceived by an intelligent modern person as a short, temporary phenomenon and, in his opinion, one should only endure. They will put up tents and live. Well, they endure. They take a week, a month, a year. They tolerate and fall. Two days later, pneumonia, bronchitis. In two weeks they are already dirty and untidy, in a month lice, dysentery, typhus, scabies appear. Then comes tuberculosis.
Then they begin to cry for mercy, show everyone and all their ailments, beg for help from the government (which, by and large, does not care about them), from humanitarian organizations, the UN (who do not care even more). And for propaganda, political purposes, doing their gesheft (business) on this, they are brought in miserable, meager quantities of medicines (from which absolutely no benefit, since the cause of the disease is not eliminated), blankets that will become damp in a day, again the same tents that will rot in a month or two. And the saviors bubble with pride, journalists are touched with tears in their eyes, humanists cry from their own humanity. Well, human rights defenders have another reason to remind themselves of themselves and kick in the press this or that government they dislike.
But everything is repeated over and over again. In the new tents, everything is also cold and damp (there is no firewood), they rot in a month.
And all that is needed - one intelligent engineer lieutenant, a dozen stupid engineer sergeants (but who know how to build dugouts), a hundred - another shovels and axes, and a train of woods. And several thousand refugees (after working for two or three days) can spend the winter in relative comfort and decent conditions. The above dugout has a living area of 20.35 sq. meters, and erected by a dozen people in one day. Why not housing for a family?
You can live in a dugout for years. In the summer of 1945, after the end of World War II, the 44th Lisichansk Rifle Division, following echelons to the war with the Japanese, managed to reach only the Urals. The war is over. The division unloaded and settled in the famous Elanskie camps (this is the Kamyshlovsky district of the Sverdlovsk region).. There it lived until its disbandment in the nineties. And from 1945 to 1955, the division lived in dugouts.
In the pre-war Manuals, soldiers were allowed to live in tents only during marches (a night halt), and at summer camp gatherings, which was perceived as a kind of picnic. However, old soldiers say that in the camps, tents were more often set up only for filming, in order to show field life. And so they lived in dugouts, which did not suit the filmmakers, who found that the life of dugouts was not much different from life in ordinary barracks.
During the war, neither we nor the Germans had practically tents. The pre-war tents instantly went out of order (rotted, torn), and it was expensive to make new ones, and there was nothing to make. cotton, flax were badly needed for uniforms, making gunpowder, explosives. They completely managed with dugouts on the front line, and dugouts in the near rear.
The question arises - why did they not resort to dugouts in both Chechen wars, at least in the same camps of Chechen refugees? Nobody knows how to build them? Not true!
The soldiers who served in the post-war years and who have built more than a dozen dugouts are still alive. Descriptions of dugouts are in the latest Manual on military engineering for the Soviet Army, ed. 1984 year. The then President of Ingushetia R. Aushev was an officer and knew how to build dugouts (in Afghanistan he fought as a major). But he, for some reason, preferred to appeal to the world community for mercy, but not to build dugouts.
We observe the same at the beginning of the 21st century in the Middle East and Africa.
So, someone needs it so that people suffer in tents! This was beneficial for Maskhadov, who thus squeezed a tear out of the dull Western and our human rights defenders, and for his fighters, who, under the tears of their wives and children, squeezed bucks from fellow believers around the world. Apparently, it was convenient and beneficial for R. Aushev as well. This is the same technique used by professional beggars sitting on the asphalt in the cold outside Moscow train stations with dirty, dirty kids, only on a larger scale.
This is also beneficial for Russian journalists, who, thanks to the tents, have topics for their writings, which are so well paid in dollars. This was also beneficial to the now deceased SPS (Union of Right Forces) in the State Duma, which could swing the presidential power with the help of tents. This is also beneficial to the Zyuganovites, who, with the tears of Chechen children, can illustrate the bestial appearance of a democratic state. Obviously, this is beneficial for the president as well.
Well, that women and snotty kids are sick and dying, don't give a damn about that. There is no morality in politics, there is only expediency (This is not my thesis, Lenin's one!). In the struggle for power, any method is good if it is effective.
That is how toadstool mushrooms grow, blown by all the winds, the tent camps flooded with all the rains in the mud, sewage on the gloomy and unkind Caucasian land.
But even today in distant Belarus, peasants, going to distant mows, harvesting firewood in the forest, live happily for weeks in dry and warm dugouts in winter and cool in summer, whose predecessors, back in that war, helped out the inhabitants of Belarusian villages burned by the Nazis. And the Polissya man will not spend his money on imported tents, but will spit on his palms, take a shovel and an ax. You look, in the evening and poured smoke from a pipe sticking out over the freshly laid sod.
Author: Veremeev Yu. G.
And here is another equally famous dugout: