The Battle of Kursk

After Stalingrad: the making of the Kursk salient

When the German 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943, the Red Army widened its offensive along the whole southern front. In Operations Star and Gallop, begun in January, Soviet forces retook Kharkov, Belgorod and Kursk; Kursk was liberated on 8 February and Rostov on 14 February. A gap 160 to 300 kilometres wide opened between German Army Group B and Army Group Don, threatening to trap everything south of the Don, including Army Group A in the Caucasus. The Bryansk and Western Fronts and the newly created Central Front were even preparing an offensive to encircle Army Group Centre between Bryansk and Smolensk. By February the German southern front was in strategic crisis. 1 2

Erich von Manstein, commanding Army Group South, won from Hitler the freedom to counterattack. Gathering the SS Panzer Corps, just arrived from France, and armour withdrawn from the Caucasus, he struck the flanks of the Soviet mobile forces from 19 to 21 February, with Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army in the lead. The overextended Soviet spearheads were cut off and destroyed, and the Germans retook Kharkov on 15 March and Belgorod on the 18th. This Third Battle of Kharkov cost the Red Army an estimated 90,000 casualties, and the house-to-house fighting in Kharkov left the SS Panzer Corps itself with some 4,300 killed and wounded. 1 2

In mid-March the spring thaw, the rasputitsa, turned the roads to mud and both armies were exhausted, so operations stopped. The result was a Soviet salient centred on the city of Kursk, 250 kilometres from north to south and 160 kilometres from east to west, jutting into German-held territory. To its north lay the German-held Orel salient, to its south the Belgorod and Kharkov area. The shape offered both sides an opportunity. For the Germans it invited cutting the base of the bulge from north and south and encircling the Soviet forces inside; for the Soviets it was a springboard for flanking the German forces at Orel and Kharkov. 1 3

Operation Citadel: the plan and its repeated postponement

Losses since Operation Barbarossa had left the German army 470,000 men understrength, short above all of infantry and artillery, so any offensive in 1943 would have to be carried by the panzer divisions. On 10 March Manstein proposed pinching off the salient in a quick blow as soon as the thaw ended, and on 13 March Hitler authorised several offensives, Kursk among them, in Operational Order No. 5. But Günther von Kluge of Army Group Centre refused Manstein's request for an immediate attack from the north, judging his forces too weak, and by mid-April the offensives were postponed. On 15 April Hitler ordered Operation Citadel to begin on or soon after 3 May in Operational Order No. 6, drafted by Kurt Zeitzler, the Army Chief of Staff. 1 4

The plan was a double envelopment. In the north, Walter Model's 9th Army of Army Group Centre would break through the northern face and drive south; in the south, Hoth's 4th Panzer Army and Werner Kempf's Army Detachment Kempf of Army Group South would drive north, meeting east of Kursk and trapping five Soviet armies. The main blow in the south fell to Paul Hausser's II SS Panzer Corps. On 27 April, however, Model went to Hitler with reconnaissance showing the Red Army building very strong positions at the shoulders of the salient, and warned that the longer the preparation lasted the less the operation could be justified. He recommended abandoning Citadel and waiting to defeat the coming Soviet offensive, or radically revising the plan. Manstein, who had thought the offensive profitable in mid-April, shared these misgivings by May. 1 5

At the Munich conference of 4 May opinions divided. Manstein argued for an early attack and asked for two more infantry divisions; Kluge spoke strongly against postponement and discounted Model's intelligence; Armaments Minister Albert Speer described the difficulty of rebuilding the armoured formations; and General Heinz Guderian called the attack pointless. When Guderian asked Hitler on 10 May whether anyone even knew where Kursk was, Hitler replied, "The thought of it turns my stomach." Yet he did not abandon the operation. Waiting for the new Panther tank, the Ferdinand tank destroyer and more Tigers, he postponed the start to 12 June, then 20 June, then 3 July, and on 1 July announced 5 July. By June pessimism had grown so far that Alfred Jodl of the OKW told the propaganda office to present the operation as a limited counteroffensive. 1 6

During the three-month lull the Germans trained their assault troops and refilled the panzer divisions. The attacking force came to about 777,000 men, 2,451 tanks and assault guns (70 per cent of German armour on the Eastern Front) and 7,417 guns and mortars, and the battle would draw in more than 70 per cent of Germany's military force in the east. Infantry divisions, however, were badly lacking. The 200 Panthers for which the attack had been delayed reached the front only days before it began, with no time for terrain reconnaissance or battalion radio training, and still suffered transmission faults; by the morning of 5 July sixteen had broken down, leaving 184. 1 6

The Soviet choice: intelligence and defence in depth

The Soviet leadership knew the German plan early. The "Lucy" ring in Switzerland, run by the German exile Rudolf Roessler, passed word of German concentrations at Orel and Kharkov and of the planned Kursk offensive to Moscow through Sándor Radó's Soviet military intelligence network. The Soviets confirmed it through their own agent at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, John Cairncross, who smuggled out raw decrypts of high-level German traffic. According to Russian accounts, at the end of April Cairncross passed on a German general's signal preparing the southern attack, giving its timing, forces, new equipment and airfield locations. Who Lucy's sources were is still unclear. Some have argued that Britain deliberately used Lucy as a channel, but Harry Hinsley, the official historian of British intelligence, denied it. 7 1 8 9

Stalin and some commanders wanted to strike first once the thaw was over. But Georgy Zhukov, the Deputy Supreme Commander, wrote to Stalin and the Stavka on 8 April that the Germans would strike Kursk from Orel and Belgorod with 13 to 15 tank divisions, and that it would be better not to attack first but to let the enemy exhaust himself against the defences and then go over to a general offensive with fresh reserves. A Stavka meeting on 12 April, attended by Stalin, Zhukov, Chief of the General Staff Aleksandr Vasilevsky and his deputy Aleksei Antonov, adopted this course. Konstantin Rokossovsky's Central Front held the northern face, Nikolai Vatutin's Voronezh Front the southern face, and Ivan Konev's Steppe Front stood in reserve behind them, while Zhukov and Vasilevsky coordinated the fronts as representatives of the Stavka. 1 8

From late April to early July each of the two fronts built three main defensive belts, using the labour of more than 300,000 civilians. Minefields, barbed wire, anti-tank ditches, trenches, dug-in tanks and machine-gun nests formed an interlocking web. The three main belts were about 40 kilometres deep, the six belts on either side 130 to 150 kilometres, and with the Steppe Front's lines the defences reached nearly 300 kilometres. Engineers laid 503,993 anti-tank and 439,348 anti-personnel mines, a density six times that used in the defence of Moscow. Infantry overcame their fear of tanks by having tanks driven over their trenches. Dummy airfields, false radio traffic and movement only at night concealed the build-up so well that German estimates in mid-June put Soviet tank strength at only 1,500. 1

Behind the German lines partisans cut railways and communications. In June partisans behind Army Group Centre destroyed 298 locomotives, 1,222 railway wagons and 44 bridges, and in the Kursk sector alone there were 1,092 attacks on railways. Not counting reserves, the Soviets massed about 1,300,000 men, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 guns and 2,792 aircraft in the salient, 26 per cent of the Red Army's manpower, 35 per cent of its aircraft and 46 per cent of its tanks; with the Steppe Front the total reached about 1,910,000 men. The T-34 was the main tank, but a third of the armour was light tanks, and the T-34 with its 76.2 mm gun could hardly penetrate the frontal armour of the Tiger and the Panther. 1

The northern face: Model's 9th Army and Ponyri

The battle opened on the evening of 4 July, when German infantry on the southern face seized high ground for observation posts. Reports of the imminent attack reached Central Front headquarters in the north, and at about 02:00 on 5 July Zhukov ordered a pre-emptive bombardment, which delayed the Germans somewhat but did not upset their timetable. That morning a Soviet air raid on German airfields failed, and the VVS lost 176 aircraft on 5 July against 26 for the Luftwaffe; the day is reckoned the costliest in the history of air warfare in aircraft shot down. The Germans opened their own barrage at about 05:00, 80 minutes long on the northern face and 50 minutes on the southern, and then the ground forces advanced. 1

To save his panzer divisions for exploitation after a breakthrough, Model made his first attacks with infantry divisions reinforced by assault guns and heavy tanks. At 05:30 the 9th Army struck the Soviet 13th and 70th Armies with nine infantry divisions and one panzer division. On the first day the XLVII Panzer Corps got about 10 kilometres in and the XLI Panzer Corps reached the fortified village of Ponyri in the second belt, which commanded the roads and railway south to Kursk, at a cost of 1,287 killed and missing and 5,921 wounded. Mines took a heavy toll of the Ferdinands: of 45 sent in, all but 12 had been immobilised by mines before 17:00. Rokossovsky's counterattack the next day was poorly coordinated, with only the 16th Tank Corps of about 200 tanks going in; it lost 69 tanks to the Tigers. 1

From 7 to 10 July Model concentrated on Ponyri and on Olkhovatka, which stood on high ground, while Rokossovsky pulled in forces from other sectors. Ponyri changed hands several times in house-to-house fighting and the troops called it a "mini-Stalingrad"; the 9th Army war diary described "a new type of mobile attrition battle". On 10 July about 300 tanks and assault guns of the 2nd, 4th and 20th Panzer Divisions, with all the Luftwaffe support available, attacked Olkhovatka and failed to break through. The attack frontage shrank from 45 kilometres on the first day to 2 kilometres on 8 and 9 July, and a meeting of Kluge and Model on 9 July concluded that the 9th Army lacked the strength to break through. The deepest German advance in the north was 8 to 12 kilometres. 1

The air war showed the position of each side as well. After Stalingrad the Luftwaffe had lost strength to North Africa and pulled fighters home against the Allied bombing, so that by the end of June only 38.7 per cent of its aircraft remained in the east. It therefore gave up raids on enemy airfields to concentrate on direct support of the ground forces, sending in tank-busters such as the Stuka with 3.7 cm cannon pods and the Hs 129. The Luftwaffe held air superiority over the southern face until 10 to 11 July and flew 27,221 sorties during Citadel for 193 combat losses, but fuel shortages meant it could not sustain an intensive effort for more than a few days. Over the northern face the balance tipped to the VVS from 7 July, and the Soviet air forces, with Yak-9 and La-5 fighters, masses of Ilyushin ground-attack aircraft and reserves of replacements, made good their losses at once. 1

The southern face and Prokhorovka

The main blow in the south was delivered by Hoth's 4th Panzer Army. Holding some of the finest divisions in the German army, it was called "the most powerful striking force ever assembled under a single German commander", and in fifty minutes on the morning of 5 July its guns fired more shells than the Germans had fired in the Polish and French campaigns combined. On the left, in the XLVIII Panzer Corps, the Großdeutschland Division with its new Panthers ran into a minefield where 36 Panthers were immobilised; on the right, the II SS Panzer Corps, 494 tanks and assault guns led by 42 Tigers, broke through the first belt of the Soviet 6th Guards Army by 09:00. But Army Detachment Kempf, which was to cover its right flank, was held up from the crossing of the Donets onward, and even the 7th Panzer Division, its most successful unit, advanced only 10 kilometres on the first day. 1

By the evening of the 6th the Voronezh Front had committed nearly all its reserves, and only the second belt stood before the XLVIII Panzer Corps on the Oboyan axis. The Stavka handed Vatutin the 5th Guards Army and Pavel Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army from the Steppe Front, its strategic reserve. Konev objected to this premature, piecemeal use of the reserve, but a personal call from Stalin silenced him. The counterattack Vatutin ordered on 8 July with about 600 tanks broke down into a series of uncoordinated attacks, and the 2nd Guards Tank Corps, hidden in a forest, was caught by German ground-attack aircraft armed with 30 mm cannon and lost at least 50 tanks, the first time an attacking tank formation had been defeated by air power alone. Still, the counterattack held up the SS panzer corps for the day. 1

On 9 July the leading German units reached the Psel River, and Hoth turned the SS panzer corps from Oboyan to the north-east, towards Prokhorovka. Whether this turn was a late improvisation (Glantz and House) or had been planned since May (Steven Newton) is still debated. On the night of 11 July Kempf's 6th Panzer Division seized a bridge over the Donets and began to approach Prokhorovka from the south as well. At 08:30 on 12 July Rotmistrov radioed the order "Steel, Steel, Steel!" Tanks of the 18th and 29th Tank Corps, carrying airborne infantry, came down the slopes west of Prokhorovka into the 1st SS Panzer Division, while to the north the 3rd SS Panzer Division lost half its armour to minefields and hidden anti-tank guns. By nightfall the Soviets had fallen back to their start lines, but the Germans had not taken Prokhorovka. 1 10

The losses at Prokhorovka are still disputed. A 5th Guards Tank Army document of 17 July recorded 334 tanks and self-propelled guns irrecoverably lost and 212 under repair for 12 to 16 July, with 7,607 casualties. The Russian historian Valery Zamulin counts 3,563 personnel losses and 340 tanks and self-propelled guns damaged or destroyed on 12 July alone; Glantz and House estimate at least 400 tanks lost. The II SS Panzer Corps, which held the battlefield, recovered most of its disabled vehicles; its permanent losses on 12 July were at most three tanks, with an estimated 60 to 80 tanks and assault guns damaged or destroyed. The Germans destroyed many Soviet tanks, but they did not get past Prokhorovka and break the last heavily fortified belt. 10

The end of Citadel and the Soviet counteroffensive

On the 12th, the day of Prokhorovka, the Soviet Operation Kutuzov began in the north. Markian Popov's Bryansk Front attacked the eastern face of the Orel salient and Vasily Sokolovsky's Western Front its northern face, the Western Front's assault led by Ivan Bagramyan's 11th Guards Army. On the first day the 11th Guards Army advanced some 23 kilometres and threatened the rear of Model's 9th Army, and the Germans had to turn panzer divisions meant for Kursk against it. Model was given the 2nd Panzer Army as well and so commanded all German forces around Orel; by 18 July the 9th Army was back at its starting line. 1 11

Two days earlier, on 10 July, Anglo-American forces had landed in Sicily. On the evening of the 12th Hitler summoned Kluge and Manstein to his East Prussian headquarters, and at the meeting on the 13th he said the offensive must stop so that forces could meet further landings in Italy or southern France. Kluge welcomed this, but Manstein insisted that the enemy must not be let go until his mobile reserves were completely beaten. Hitler let the attack continue for a while in the south only, and Operation Roland, begun on 14 July, was halted on the 17th. The SS panzer corps was ordered to withdraw; the Leibstandarte went to Italy and the other two divisions south to meet new Soviet offensives. In his memoirs, Lost Victories, Manstein blamed Hitler for stopping at the height of the battle, but the Soviet reserves were far larger than he knew. 1 12 8

The Germans in the Orel salient were pushed back despite Hitler's ban on retreat. Soviet forces liberated Bolkhov on 29 July and Orel on 5 August, and by 18 August reached the Hagen line east of Bryansk. In the south the Voronezh Front, badly mauled at Prokhorovka, finished refitting and on 3 August opened Operation Rumyantsev together with the Steppe Front. Mikhail Katukov's 1st Tank Army and Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army widened the breakthrough, and Belgorod was liberated on 5 August. That evening Moscow fired the first artillery salute of the war in honour of the liberation of Orel and Belgorod. The Soviet advance was checked for a time by counterattacks of the SS panzer divisions, but Kharkov was retaken on 23 August, the last time the city changed hands. 11 13 14 8

Operation Rumyantsev had been prepared by the Stavka as the main Soviet offensive of 1943. The Voronezh and Steppe Fronts massed about 1,144,000 men, 2,418 tanks and 13,633 guns and rocket launchers, against about 210,000 Germans with 237 tanks and assault guns. Before it, on 17 July, the Southwestern and Southern Fronts launched diversionary attacks across the Donets and Mius into the Donbas, and Manstein moved the II SS Panzer Corps and XXIV Panzer Corps south to meet them. As intended, the diversion dispersed the German reserves, and the 5th and 6th Guards Armies, which had borne the brunt of Citadel, again led the breakthrough. Having lost Orel and Kharkov, the Germans fell back behind the Dnieper in Ukraine, opening the way to the battle for Kiev that autumn. 13

Assessment

Kursk was the first battle in which a major German offensive was stopped before it could break through, and the last strategic offensive the Germans launched in the east. In the counteroffensives that followed the Red Army won its first successful summer offensive, and it held the initiative for the rest of the war. Guderian wrote, "With the failure of Zitadelle we have suffered a decisive defeat ... There were to be no more periods of quiet on the Eastern Front," and Manstein called the operation the decisive turning point of the war in the east. Soviet historiography holds that Kursk and the crossing of the Dnieper that followed completed the "radical turning point". Whether Stalingrad or Kursk was the true turning point remains a matter of disagreement among historians. 1 8

Few battles show casualty figures as divergent as Kursk. Grigoriy Krivosheyev, working from the Soviet archives, put Soviet losses during the German offensive at 177,877 and in the two counteroffensives, Kutuzov and Rumyantsev, at 685,456. Karl-Heinz Frieser, reviewing the German records, calculated 54,182 German casualties during Citadel and about 170,000 for all three operations. The German historian Roman Töppel, however, argues that official Soviet losses are understated by 40 per cent and gives about 1.2 million, while German reporting has also been criticised as too low because vehicles awaiting repair were kept off the loss rolls. The ratio of tank losses favoured the Germans heavily, but the Soviet Union's larger industry and manpower made good its losses. 1

The image of Prokhorovka as "the largest tank battle in history" has also been revised. Accounts of 1,200 to 1,500 or even 2,000 tanks clashing came from inflated Soviet intelligence estimates and postwar memoirs. Rotmistrov wrote that the Germans lost 350 to 400 tanks that day, and Nikita Khrushchev, member of the Voronezh Front's Military Council, sent a report on the battle personally to Stalin on 24 July. Comparing Soviet and German archives, the armoured vehicles engaged around Prokhorovka numbered only about 910. Kursk as a whole is reckoned the largest battle in the history of warfare, but postwar accounts of Prokhorovka inflated German losses many times over. 10 15 8

The claim that the Sicily landing ended Citadel also needs examining. Manstein's memoirs say Hitler stopped an offensive on the verge of victory because of Italy, but the OKW war diary's reference to the meeting of 13 July has Hitler announcing he would "suspend" the operation until the situation in Italy was clear, with Kluge in full agreement. The 9th Army in the north had already stalled, and only one SS division actually left for Italy. What made Manstein drop his plan to continue in the south was the Soviet offensive on the Mius and Donets that began on 17 July. Sicily hastened the German decision, but the fundamental reason the offensive stopped was the Soviet defence and reserves at Kursk. 8 1

Kursk also exposed the two sides' ways of command. Hitler had chosen the place, plan and timing of the attack, yet he blamed the defeat on his General Staff and interfered ever more in military matters. Stalin, by contrast, having accepted Zhukov's case for defending first, trusted his commanders' judgement and stepped back from operational planning. There were regrets on the Soviet side too: Rokossovsky complained that at Orel the enemy had only been pushed out instead of encircled, and according to Zhukov, Stalin said that the task was to drive the Germans from Soviet soil quickly and that encirclement could wait until they were weaker. In August 1943 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff assessed that while two German divisions faced the British and Americans in Sicily, the Russian front was holding some 200. This is why historians conclude that more than 80 per cent of all combat in the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front. 1 11 8 3

The people who fought left their record too. At Kursk 239 Red Army soldiers received the title Hero of the Soviet Union, among them two women Guards senior sergeants serving as combat medics, Mariya Borovichenko and Zinaida Mareseva, both honoured posthumously. The war correspondent Vasily Grossman reported the battle of Kursk after Moscow and Stalingrad. More than 300,000 civilians dug trenches and anti-tank ditches for months, and Belgorod, Kursk and Orel later became the first Russian cities to receive the title "City of Military Glory". 1 16 8