The Second World War

by John Keegan

  Vatutin’s decision on 12 February to ‘broaden’ the offensive, in accordance with the Stavka’s general directive, would therefore have been incautious even against a normally competent opposing commander who retained a modicum of tank reserves. Against Manstein – a supreme master of what both the German and the Russian armies called the ‘operational’ level of command – the broadening of the offensive was foolhardy. Even before the height of the crisis had been reached, Hitler had ordered seven divisions from France to his front, where he himself arrived to confer with Manstein on 17 February. The pretext was to oversee the unleashing of a counterstroke by Army Group South and to rally the Ostheer to the concept of ‘total war’, which Goebbels proclaimed to the German people in an inflammatory speech at the Berlin Sports Palace the next day. ‘The outcome of a crucial battle depends on you,’ Hitler wrote in an order of the day. ‘A thousand miles from the Reich’s frontiers the fate of Germany’s present and future is in the balance. . . . The entire German homeland has been mobilised. . . . Our youth are manning the anti-aircraft defences around Germany’s cities and workplaces. More and more divisions are on their way. Weapons unique and hitherto unknown are on the way to your front. . . . That is why I have flown to you, to exhaust every means of alleviating your defensive battle and to convert it into ultimate victory.’ In reality the counterstroke was not Hitler’s conception but Manstein’s. Not only had he extracted permission to launch it from Hitler during an urgent visit to Rastenburg on 6 February. He had also found the necessary armoured striking force – of a strength to make Popov’s look insignificant – by concentrating all available Panzer reserves under his reconstituted Fourth Panzer Army and positioning it alongside the First Panzer Army, in the neck of ground between the Donetz and the Dnieper across which Vatutin’s South-West Front was seeking to break its way into the German rear.

  So dangerous was Vatutin’s manoeuvre, threatening as it did to cut off Army Group A in its bridgehead on the Asiatic shore of the Sea of Azov, that Hitler had actually granted permission for troops to be airlifted from it to join Manstein. Over 100,000 were to be sent in that way; but before they or any of the divisions alerted in the west arrived Manstein had struck. On 20 February his two Panzer armies mounted convergent attacks on the flanks of Popov’s Front Mobile Group, still advancing to the crossings over the Dnieper less than fifty miles away. The Russian higher command failed altogether to grasp the gravity of the changed situation. It urged Popov onward and on 21 February the General Staff even ordered Malinovsky’s Southern Front on Vatutin’s flank to join more actively in the offensive: ‘Vatutin’s troops are speeding on at an extraordinary pace . . . the hold-up on his left is due to the absence of active operations on the part of your front.’ In fact Popov was already threatened with encirclement, had begun to run out of fuel and was stopped in his tracks. By 24 February, when despite reinforcements he had only fifty tanks left, over 400 German tanks were operating against his left flank alone. By 28 February, when German tanks reached the banks of the Donetz, his group and much of the rest of Vatutin’s South-West Front were surrounded, and such units as escaped did so only because the river was still frozen.

  Manstein renews the offensive

  The collapse of Popov’s offensive now allowed Manstein to unleash the second phase of his plan, for the recapture of Kharkov. The Fourth Panzer Army had now begun to receive the reinforcements sent from the west, including the SS Totenkopf Division (originally formed from concentration camp guards) which went to join Leibstandarte and Das Reich in I SS Panzer Corps. Their loss of Kharkov the previous month rankled savagely with these ideological warriors who, in formidable strength, opened their attack to retake the city on 7 March. By 10 March the northern suburbs were the scene of savage fighting, and two days later the city was effectively surrounded, together with numbers of Soviet units struggling to sustain the defence. Now the Germans threatened the Red Army’s centre with envelopment at exactly the spot from which they had hoped to begin the encirclement of Hitler’s. So dangerous did the situation suddenly appear to the Stavka that rather than send reinforcements to help their beleaguered formations at Kharkov they rushed them instead to the neighbouring Voronezh Front, south of Kursk, where they succeeded in holding a sector which was to become the southern face of what would soon be called the Kursk salient. With the commitment of these troops to the defensive rather than the offensive, the Soviet spring offensive of 1943 could be seen to have failed, like that which followed victory in the Battle of Moscow the year before. Some Russians had already foreseen that outcome. As Golikov, the commander of the Voronezh Front, had signalled to a subordinate at the height of the Red Army’s effort: ‘There are 200-230 miles to the Dnieper and to the spring rasputitsa there are 30-35 days. Draw your own conclusions.’

  The rasputitsa, the twice-yearly wet season caused by the autumn rains and the spring thaw, which turns the dirt roads to quagmires and the surrounding steppe to swamp, had worked to Germany’s disadvantage in 1941 and 1942, delaying the advance on Moscow, into the Ukraine and on Stalingrad. Now it brought a welcome breathing space. With all the Ostheer’s reserves concentrated in the south, the Red Army was able to reopen a land route to Leningrad and to move against the force isolated since the Battle of Moscow in the northern Demyansk pocket – though not to prevent its escape. It was also able to sustain sufficient pressure on the Vyazma salient west of Moscow to persuade Hitler to sanction an uncharacteristic withdrawal to a short front, prepared in advance and called the ‘Buffalo Line’. However, while the wet season lasted, and despite the immense losses it had inflicted on the enemy – 185,000 among the Italians, 140,000 among the Hungarians, 250,000 among the Romanians and, by the Wehrmacht’s own reckoning, nearly half a million among the Germans – it could not find the strength to resume the offensive on any major sector.

  Operation Citadel

  Despite the hair’s breadth by which the Ostheer had escaped disaster on the southern front during the Stalingrad winter, Hitler and his generals were nevertheless turning to a resumption of the offensive at precisely the moment that the Red Army was admitting defeat. ‘The real struggle is only beginning’, Stalin warned in his message to his soldiers on Red Army Day, 23 February 1943. He and the Stavka knew that it had exhausted its current strength, and that until the awaited donations of Lend-Lease aid and output from the relocated Urals factories had been received, until the next inflow of young conscripts and older ‘comb-outs’ had been trained, Russia could not form the reserve of force which would safely allow her generals to go over to the attack. The German calculation was precisely contrary. Because the rasputitsa and the Red Army’s exhaustion had granted the Ostheer a breathing space, it must attack as soon as possible, or suffer the consequences of inactivity.

  The question was: where? It was an issue which, for the last time during the war, the generals were largely to settle between themselves. Hitler’s confidence, his sense of personal credibility in the eyes of his commanders, had been so shaken by the outcome of his insistence on holding Stalingrad as a ‘fortress’ that he had temporarily lost the will to dictate strategic terms to his subordinates. During his visit to Manstein’s headquarters on 17-19 February, before the Kharkov counterstroke, he had listened to a review of the opportunities which might flow from its success. The discussion between Kleist (Army Group A), Jodl, Zeitzler, the new army chief of staff, and Manstein was far more free-ranging than any he permitted on home territory at Rastenburg. Towards the end of the three-day meeting, conducted at times to the sound of Russian gunfire, he had intervened decisively to quash a typically bold proposition by Manstein for a ‘one step backward, two steps forward’ manoeuvre north of the Crimea, since it entailed the temporary surrender of ground, something to which he was temperamentally opposed. The alternative proposition, for a concentric attack on the developing salient of Kursk, he did not reject but left to Zeitzler and the generals of the Ostheer to put into executive form.

  During the lul
l imposed by the rasputitsa in March and April, the longest the soldiers of both sides on the Eastern Front were to enjoy throughout the war, the staffs of both the German and the Red armies busied themselves with detailed planning for the great battle which summer must bring, while their overlords, in an uncanny convergence of mutual doubt, sought to modify their proposals, even to temporise with the inevitability of action. Stalin seemed unable to follow the logic of his generals’ strategic analysis, believing that the whole Soviet front was threatened but particularly the sector opposite Moscow, and argued for using available strength in a ‘spoiling’ attack which would at least ensure that the Germans did not win a third summer victory in 1943. In a meeting with his senior commanders on 12 April he agreed that the construction of deep defences in the Kursk salient should be given priority, but also insisted that defences be constructed on all the main axes of advance open to the Germans. Stalin’s outlook diverged from the opinion of such now highly experienced generals as Vatutin and Zhukov, who had concluded that Kursk was certainly the sector on which the Ostheer would attack, that the correct Soviet response was to fortify that front as strongly as possible to absorb the Panzer offensive, but that reserves accumulated by the Stavka should not be committed exclusively to Kursk but be apportioned to provide a masse de manoeuvre with which the Red Army might subsequently unleash a counterstroke on its own account. As Zhukov put it to Stalin on 8 April, ‘An offensive on the part of our troops in the near future aimed at forestalling the enemy I consider to be pointless. It would be better if we grind down the enemy in our defences, break up his tank forces and then, introducing fresh reserves, go over to a general offensive to pulverise once and for all his main concentrations.’

  Hitler, though committed in principle to the concept of an attack on the Kursk salient, was changeable about date and still oddly indecisive about the form of the attack. Although on 15 April he signed the order committing Army Groups South and Centre to an attack on the Kursk bulge on 3 May, he almost immediately had second thoughts and proposed to Zeitzler that the attack be launched against the nose of the salient. The suggestion was in defiance of all military orthodoxy – which holds that troops in a salient must always be cut off rather than attacked frontally – and Zeitzler was able to talk him out of it on 21 April. Then Model, who was to command one of the two armies consigned to the convergent attacks, persuaded him that the observed strength of the Russian defences would require more time for penetration than the plan allowed unless he got extra tanks. Hitler accordingly approved a postponement of some days while Guderian, his new Inspector of Panzer Troops, found the extra tanks. With the involvement of Guderian (by title a mere administrator) in operational planning, delays began to lengthen. Guderian was well informed about both the quantity and the quality of Soviet tank production, and it was his purpose to raise Germany’s production to match it. On 2 May he outlined to Hitler a schedule of tank deliveries which made postponement look advisable. He promised not only more tanks – over 1000 a month on a rising scale, ten times Germany’s annual output in 1939 – but better tanks, including the new Panther Mark V and the ‘family’ of 88-mm gun-carriers, Hornets, Tigers and Ferdinands, which were believed to be invincible on the battlefield; but he – not Speer – warned that the Panther, on which Hitler counted heavily for the success of Kursk, had not yet shed development ‘bugs’. On 4 May, after yet another conference with his leading generals at Munich, Hitler accordingly postponed the Kursk attack, now codenamed Citadel, until mid-June.

  Soviet industry, however, was not only continuing to turn out tanks at twice the German rate but in addition to the outstanding T-34 was now producing heavier models, including the KV-85, with an 85-mm gun, the first mark of the super-heavy Joseph Stalin, which would eventually mount a 122-mm gun, and various equivalents of the turretless assault guns which the Germans favoured. Russian production of anti-tank weapons was even more impressive. Over 200 reserve anti-tank regiments, equipped with powerful 76-mm guns, had been formed, while 21,000 lighter anti-tank guns had been issued to infantry units. ‘By the summer of 1943’, Professor John Erickson judges, ‘the Soviet infantryman [was] equipped as no other for anti-tank fighting.’ As well as armoured and anti-armoured resources the Red Army now had enormous quantities of artillery. ‘Artillery is the god of war,’ Stalin had said. It had always been the leading arm of Russian armies, and by the summer of 1943 the Red Army’s artillery was the strongest in the world, in both quality and quantity of equipment. During 1942 whole divisions of artillery had been formed – an entirely novel military concept – and equipped with the new 152-mm and 203-mm guns. They included four divisions of Katyusha rocket-launchers; with this revolutionary weapon each division could fire 3840 projectiles weighing 230 tons in a single salvo. The Katyusha, which the Germans were hastily to copy, became one of the most feared weapons of the eastern battlefront, dazing and disorientating infantrymen who were not directly disabled by its tremendous blast effect.

  This re-equipment of the Red Army, made possible by the regeneration of production in the factories transported eastward behind the Urals during the terrible Barbarossa months, spelt great danger to the Ostheer. More ominously, in accordance with the appreciation made by the Stavka on 12 April, huge quantities of material were poured into the Kursk salient during April and May, including 10,000 guns, anti-tank guns and rocket launchers. The civilian population of the salient – about 60 by 120 miles in area – was mobilised to dig entrenchments and anti-tank ditches, while army engineers laid mines in a density of over 3000 to each kilometre of front. The troops defending it, the Centre Front (Rokossovsky) and the Voronezh Front (Vatutin), laid out their own defensive positions, each consisting of a forward line three miles deep and two rearward positions. Eventually, with 300,000 civilians labouring in the rear, the Kursk salient was to contain eight defensive lines, echeloned to a depth of 100 miles. Nothing like it had ever been seen on a battlefield, not even on the Western Front at the height of trench warfare.

  Hitler’s prevarication over choosing a date for Operation Citadel reflected his doubts about the feasibility of the operation – and those of commanders committed to carrying it out, like Model of the Ninth Army. Model had originally asked for the plan to allow two days for his armour to penetrate the northern face of the salient. On 27 April, however, he arrived at Berchtesgaden, where Hitler was holidaying from the forest dankness of Rastenburg, with air photographs of the Russian defences at Kursk and a request for more tanks and more time. ‘When Model told me,’ Hitler recalled a year later, ‘that he would need three days – that is when I got cold feet.’ Cold feet or not, Hitler took no decisive action to cancel Citadel. His self-confidence remained weakened, while Zeitzler’s was strong. The fighting infantry subaltern of the First World War was bent on doing ‘something’ during 1943, and for him that meant fighting a battle on the Eastern Front, his sole area of responsibility. Hitler also agreed that something had to be done, if the Red Army was not to grow unchecked in strength for a major offensive in 1944. However, besides the persisting depression caused by Stalingrad, he had other things on his mind: not only the worsening situation in Tunisia, ended by the surrender of the German-Italian army in May, but the increasingly precarious position of Mussolini, the uncertainty over where the Allies would strike next in the Mediterranean, and the growing civil defence crisis in Germany, where the British Bomber Command and the US Army Air Force were making heavier and deeper strikes each week. Three times during June he postponed Citadel again: on 6 June, when Guderian demanded more time to accumulate tank reserves, on 18 June, and again on 25 June, when Model raised more objections. Finally on 29 June he announced that he would return to Rastenburg and that Citadel would begin on 5 July. As he explained to his staff when he arrived on 1 July, ‘The Russians are biding their time. They are using their time replenishing for the winter. We must not allow that or there will be fresh crises. . . . So we have got to disrupt them.’

  The demand for ‘disru
ption’ was a far cry from the trumpet call to Blitzkrieg uttered in the summers of 1941 and 1942. It revealed how much Hitler had narrowed his horizons during the two years of the Russian war, how strong the Red Army remained despite the devastation he had inflicted on it and how weakened the Ostheer was by the relentless programme of offensives and ‘standfasts’ to which he had committed it in the previous two years. The Red Army numbered 6.5 million at the beginning of July 1943, an actual increase since the outbreak of the war, despite the loss of over 3 million men as prisoners alone; the Ostheer, by contrast, fielded 3,100,000, a net decrease of 200,000 since 22 June 1941. The number of its divisions was static at about 180, but all establishments, of both men and equipment (except in the favoured SS divisions), were below strength. In the Red Army divisional establishments were also low, about 5000 men each, but the number of its divisions equalled the German, was rising, and was complemented by large numbers of ‘non-divisional’ units, including the specialised artillery formations. Moreover, while the German army was dependent exclusively on the output of home industry to supply its needs, the Russians were now the beneficiaries of a growing tide of Lend-Lease aid, including vast numbers of vital motor supply vehicles; no less than 183,000 modern American trucks had arrived by mid-1943 alone. Meanwhile war was destroying the Ostheer’s means of transport, the horse; by the spring of 1942 it had lost a quarter of a million horses, half those with which it had entered Russia, and losses had continued at an equivalent rate ever since.