Bunker Busting and armor

[Dog Soldier]

Download the free Mius 43 game for the JT website.
Mius 43

This is a good little game to hone your skills in breaking a fortified line.

For Kharkov 42, use your excellent 'A' quality Guards infantry to smash the German front line positions in the first few turns. Notice the assault values for these units is 60% higher than the S/A values. Use your artillery and air strikes to soften up an Axis position then assault. If needed spend two turns pounding a position with artillery if it is a tough nut.
Even your regular Soviet infantry receive a 56% bump when assaulting.
The optional rule for delayed disruption will not be much of a problem since the Soviets need to assault to crack the hard outer shell on the German 6th Army to get to the soft center. Just be sure to assault with as close to maximum stacking value that you can. In K42 this is 1600 men. It is entirely possible to get two or even three assaults on a single Axis held hex in a single turn. By having the most units you can cram into each adjacent hex, if one or two are disrupted by defensive fire, you still have enough troops to pull from another hex and add to the assault to still reach close to the 1600 men maximum allowed. Quantity is a quality of its own for the 1942 Soviets.
The Germans will fatigue quickly, and take larger losses even if your first few assaults are unable to drive them out of the hex. As the Soviet player you can replace yellow fatigue units with fresh troops so all are assaulting with the same morale in successive turns. This is key as only one attacking unit at lower morale will cause all assaulting units to use that lower morale value.

You do not need to take all the German positions, just a few key ones and the line breaks.

The Soviet forces in K42 are a hammer and a sickle, not a rapier.
Artillery, air strikes, and infantry assaults are the hammer. The mobile cavalry divisions and tank brigades with their truck mounted infantry are the sickle to be used after the Germans are out of their trenches and bunkers.
Blunt trauma will send the Axis troops packing for the rear. Even if the Axis defenders hold out for two whole turns, after 4 - 6 assaults they will need to be reinforced by other Axis units. When they are forced out of the hex, they will have high fatigue, and few men much smaller units left to deal with your tanks and truck mounted infantry that chase them down in the open (non-fortified hexes) to the rear of the start lines. Now your S/A and morale are on par with the enemy. You can then engage in fire fights and come away a winner as you roll towards a break out disaster for the German 6th Army and reach the gates of Kharkov city itself.

My advice is based on the following set of optional rules which work well as a set for the K42 game. Using a different set will change your tactics and the way the game plays out.

K42 Optional Rules set

Dog Soldier