The Second World War

by John Keegan

  The issue of manoeuvre, however, was not central to Citadel, where battering power alone was to count. German battering power was considerable. It was distributed between Model’s Ninth Army, which was to attack the northern face of the Kursk salient, and Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, which was to attack the southern. Together they disposed of some 2700 tanks supported by 1800 aircraft, the largest concentration of force against such a confined area yet seen on the Eastern Front. Model controlled eight Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions, with seven infantry divisions in support, Hoth eleven Panzer, one Panzergrenadier and seven infantry divisions. The plan was straightforward. Model and Hoth were to cut into the ‘neck’ of the Kursk salient, between Orel and Kharkov, join hands, and then envelop and destroy Vatutin’s and Rokossovsky’s sixty divisions.

  Into the furnace

  The attack began at 4.30 am on 5 July, a date of which Stalin’s ‘Lucy ring’ in Switzerland had apparently given him warning. Erickson has described the battle:

  Within twelve hours both sides were furiously stoking the great glowing furnace of the battle for Kursk. The armour continued to mass and move on a scale unlike anything seen anywhere else in the war. Both commands watched this fiery escalation with grim, numbed satisfaction: German officers had never seen so many Soviet aircraft, while the Soviet commanders . . . had never before seen such formidable massing of German tanks, all blotched in their green and yellow camouflage. These were tank armadas on the move, coming on in great squadrons of 100 and 200 machines or more, a score of Tigers and Ferdinand assault guns in the first echelon, groups of 50-60 medium tanks in the second and then the infantry screened by the armour. Now that the Soviet tank armies were moving up into the main defensive fields, almost 4000 Soviet tanks and nearly 3000 German tanks and assault guns were being steadily drawn into this gigantic battle, which roared on hour after hour, leaving ever greater heaps of the dead and the dying, clumps of blazing or disabled armour, shattered personnel carriers and lorries, and thickening columns of smoke coiling over the steppe.

  Rokossovsky counter-attacked Model on 6 July, trying to recapture the ground lost on the first day, but his troops were rolled back by the advancing German divisions. On 7 July the 18th, 19th, 2nd and 20th Panzer Divisions approached the high ground at Olkhovatka, thirty miles from the start-line, from which they would be able to look down on Kursk from the north and dominate Soviet lines of communication within the salient. The Soviet defenders were wiped out, but reserves arrived just in time to deny the Germans their prize. Meanwhile on the southern sector Hoth, who had three SS Panzer divisions under command, Leibstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf, as well as the 3rd and 11th Panzer Divisions and the powerful Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division, was also making dogged progress. Vatutin contemplated launching a counter-attack on 6 July but, in view of the strength the Germans deployed, decided to remain on the defensive. By the evening of 7 July Hoth’s Panzer ‘fist’ had smashed through the Soviet defensive crust to within twelve miles of Oboyan, which defended Kursk from the south. The junction of the northern and southern Panzer thrusts, on which the logic of Citadel depended, now seemed near to realisation.

  The Russian defences, however, were proving extremely costly to penetrate. The whole front was crisscrossed by earthworks, while the Soviet anti-tank batteries were organised as single units, which discharged concentrated salvoes of shot at single tanks in the German spearheads. During 10 July Hoth was obliged to bring up his armoured reserve, the 10th and SS Viking Divisions, to sustain progress on the southern sector, but the pace of advance began to slow none the less. Moreover, Zhukov and Vasilevsky, who assumed direct control of the battle from Stalin and the Stavka on 11 July, were now about to unleash the Soviet reserves in a general counter-attack. During 11 July they committed the Bryansk Front (Popov), on Rokossovsky’s right, to a drive into Model’s flank. More importantly, on 12 July they brought forward the tank reserves held under Konev’s Steppe Front to engage Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army south of Kursk. This decision was to precipitate perhaps the greatest tank battle of the Second World War. Erickson writes: ‘In the area of Prokhorovka two great bodies of armour, Soviet and German, rushed into a huge swirling tank battle with well over a thousand tanks in action. The two groups of German armour . . . mustered some 600 and 300 tanks respectively; Rotmistrov’s Fifth Guards Army [from Konev’s reserve] just under 900 tanks – approximate parity, except that the Germans were fielding about 100 Tigers.’ The battle blazed all day

  at point-blank range as the Soviet T-34s and a few KVs raced into the German formation, whose Tigers stood immobile to deliver their fire; once at close range with scores of machines churning about in individual engagements, front and side armour was more easily penetrated, when the tank ammunition would explode, hurling turrets yards away from the shattered hulls or sending up great spurts of fire. . . . With the coming of the deep night, when thunderclouds piled up over the battlefield, the gunfire slackened and the tanks slewed to a halt. Silence fell on the tanks, the guns and the dead, over which the lightning flickered and the rain began to rustle. The Prokhorovskoe poboische, the ‘slaughter at Prokhorovka’, was momentarily done, with more than 300 German tanks (among them 70 Tigers) . . . lying wrecked on the steppe . . . more than half the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army lay shattered in the same area. Both sides had taken and delivered fearful punishment. The German attack from the south and west, however, had been held. At Oboyan the attack had been halted.

  It was not only on Hoth’s southern sector that Operation Citadel failed to reach its objectives. ‘On the broad slopes of the Sredne-Russki heights on Rokossovsky’s Central Front the attack on Kursk from the north [by Model’s Ninth Army] had been halted also, and Rokossovsky had considerable reserves in hand.’

  No one was readier to admit defeat than Hitler. ‘That’s the last time I will heed the advice of my General Staff,’ he told his adjutants after a meeting with Manstein and Kluge on 13 July to decide the future of the operation, and he ordered Citadel to be closed down. Manstein was sure that he could still cut off the salient, if only he were given the last armoured reserve on the Eastern Front. Hitler would have none of it. His generals had persuaded him that the defences of the Kursk salient, despite their unparalleled depth and strength, could be penetrated by armoured assault, and they had been proved wrong. Citadel flickered on until 15 July but the decision had gone to the Russians, if at terrible cost; over half their tank fleet used in the battle was gone. The cost to the Germans, however, had also been very high: the 3rd, 17th and 19th Panzer Divisions, for example, now had only a hundred tanks between them, instead of the 450 with which they began. Moreover, these were strategic losses. German tank output, for all Guderian’s – and Speer’s – efforts, did not approach the thousand per month scheduled for 1943; it averaged only 330. More tanks than that had been lost on several days during Citadel, 160 out of Fourth Army’s Panzers having simply broken down on the battlefield. As a result, the central armoured reserve on which the Ostheer had always thitherto been able to call in a crisis was now dissipated and could not be rebuilt out of current production, which was committed to the replacement of normal losses. The Red Army, thanks to the burgeoning output of heavy industry beyond the Urals, was producing tanks at a rate which would approach 2500 a month in 1944, far greater than the rate at which tanks were lost, and so sufficient to increase its net complement of armoured formations. The main significance of Kursk, therefore, was that it deprived Germany of the means to seize the initiative in the future and so, by default, transferred it to the Soviet Union.

  The Russian exploitation of the Kursk victory was at first clumsy and tentative. A Russian attack towards Orel, north of the Kursk salient, involved Soviet armour in a heavy battle with four Panzer divisions which tried to block its advance, although the Germans suffered losses. A simultaneous drive on Belgorod, south of the salient, organised by a recently arrived commander, Tolbukhin, was counter-attacked and the troops committed forced
to retire on 1 August. However, these Russian attacks, by drawing off Kluge’s and Manstein’s remaining reserves, had exposed Kharkov to a renewed offensive which Stalin had approved on 22 July. It was launched on 3 August, with devastating effect. A single German infantry division, the 167th, was first subjected to bombardment by the massed artillery of the Soviet Sixth Guards Army belonging to Vatutin’s Voronezh Front. After several hours, when its sector had been pulverised, a Russian tank column broke through. On 5 August it took Belgorod and by 8 August had opened up a gap on the flank of the Fourth Panzer Army which led directly to the crossings of the Dnieper a hundred miles away.

  Manstein now informed Hitler that he must either receive a reinforcement of twenty divisions from the west or yield the Donetz basin, with all the mineral and industrial resources which were so valuable to the German and the Russian war effort. Hitler responded to this ultimatum not by conceding one or the other condition but by proposing a third option. Far from being able to offer reinforcements, he was actually withdrawing divisions, including the elite Leibstandarte, from Russia to Italy to protect his position there which was increasingly under threat. However in view of the deepening crisis in the east, he now conceded the desirability (which hitherto he had consistently rejected) of constructing an ‘East Wall’ to match the West Wall along the Rhine, behind which the Ostheer could defend the territory captured in 1941-2. It was to run from the shore of the Sea of Azov northward to Zaporozhe, Army Group South’s headquarters, and then along the lines of the rivers Dnieper and Desna via Kiev and Chernigov, north to Pskov and Lake Peipus until it reached the Baltic at Narva.

  He ordered work on this line, which was also to be a ‘stop’ position behind which the Ostheer was not to retreat, to begin at once. In fact both the manpower and the resources to construct it were lacking, while the Red Army would not concede the time necessary to undertake the work. Mounting simultaneous drives all along the southern sector of the front, the Red Army took Kharkov, the most fought-over city in the Soviet Union, on 23 August (it was to remain in Russian hands thereafter) and crossed the Donetz and its short tributary the Mius at the same time. These drives threatened to envelop Kleist’s Army Group A, still holding its bridgehead beyond the Crimea, and compromised the position of the Sixth Army, the southernmost formation of Manstein’s Army Group South, above the Crimea itself. On 31 August Hitler sanctioned further withdrawals in the south. But Army Group Centre’s defences had now also been penetrated in three places, and the whole lower sector of the Ostheer’s front was crumbling under the weight of the Red Army’s might. By 8 September the Russian vanguard was within thirty miles of the Dnieper and by 14 September was threatening Kiev. Kluge’s Army Group Centre was unable to sustain its defence of the Desna, designated only a month earlier as part of the ‘East Wall’, and on the same day Sokolovsky’s West Front began a drive against Smolensk in Army Group Centre’s sector, focus of the great encirclement battle of 1941 in the heyday of the Ostheer’s Russian triumphs. Next day Hitler gave permission for a retreat to the line of the Dnieper, Sozh and Pronya rivers, roughly that reached in the great Blitzkrieg of July 1941; but the instruction came too late to permit an ordered withdrawal. It developed into a race for the river positions which many German formations lost, so that by 30 September the Red Army had five bridgeheads over the Dnieper – some seized by parachute assault – including a large lodgement to the immediate south of the Pripet Marshes.

  For the Ostheer this was a disastrous outcome of the summer’s fighting, since the Dnieper, with its high western scarp slope, was the strongest defensive position in southern Russia. During five weeks of continuous combat it had been forced back 150 miles along a 650-mile front and, although Hitler had decreed that it should conduct a ‘scorched earth’ retreat, in which factories, mines, power stations, collective farms and railways were destroyed, his demolition teams had not been able to obliterate the road network along which the Red Army made its way forward. Moreover, the fortification he had decreed had made no progress at all. The ‘East Wall’ remained a line on the map, nowhere transformed into earthworks, minefields or obstacle belts.

  The growing strength of the Red Army

  For the Red Army, by contrast, the summer fighting had been a triumph. It had regained all the objectives laid down for it by Stalin and the Stavka in the aftermath of the Kursk victory and though its human losses and material expenditures continued to run at a high rate – it had expended the astonishing total of 42 million rounds of artillery ammunition in July and August – its strength and therefore its offensive capabilities continued to grow. By October its strength stood at 126 rifle corps (of two to three divisions each), 72 independent rifle divisions, five tank armies (of three to five divisions), 24 tank corps (of two to three divisions), 13 mechanised corps (of two to three divisions), 80 tank brigades, 106 independent tank regiments, and a vast array of artillery formations – 6 artillery corps, 26 artillery divisions, 43 regiments of self-propelled guns, 20 artillery brigades and 7 divisions of Katyusha rocket-launchers. To mark the advances the Red Army had made, moreover, its fronts were now renamed. The Voronezh, Steppe, South-West and South Fronts became the First, Second, Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts in the first week of October, as they paused to regroup for the next stage of their offensive. Those to their north would shortly be retitled the First and Second White Russian and the First and Second Baltic Fronts. The Red Army was on the march.

  Winter was its favoured time for attack. It was a season to which the Russian soldier was more accustomed and for which he was better equipped than his German counterpart. The German infantryman’s feet froze in his ‘diceboxes’, as the army boots were called. The Red Army man, shod in felt boots, of which 13 million pairs were manufactured to Soviet specifications in the United States during the war and shipped back under Lend-Lease arrangements, resisted frostbite; he also knew the tricks, learned painfully by the Wehrmacht, of keeping motor vehicles running at sub-zero temperatures – mixing petrol with lubricating oil was one of them – and of caring for draught animals when frost formed icicles round their nostrils. Not until this third winter, when Hitler was at last prepared to admit that victory was not imminent, did the Ostheer receive adequate supplies of cold-weather clothing (in the first winter men had stuffed their uniforms with torn-up newspaper); Soviet soldiers received sheepskins and furs as normal issue.

  As the first frosts of winter descended, the newly named Ukrainian fronts began their attacks across the lower Dnieper. The Red Army’s recent accretion of numbers and material did not suffice for an offensive along the whole front, so for the next eighteen months it was to proceed by a sequence of advances, first on the right or southern sector, then on the left or northern sector of the front; this autumn manoeuvre was to be the first of its left-hand strokes. The target presented itself. By far the most vulnerable formation in the Ostheer was the Seventeenth Army, which occupied the Crimea and its approaches. Hitler attached disproportionate importance to the possession of the Crimea, both because he had fought so hard to acquire it in the summer of 1942 and because he was obsessed by the belief that it provided the best point for aerial attack on the Ploesti oilfields. When the Fourth Ukrainian Front (Tolbukhin) opened a major attack towards it on 27 October, his first thought was to request reinforcements from the Romanians, who he believed would share his perception of the developing danger; when the Romanian leader General Ion Antonescu refused to raise his stake in the Eastern Front, Hitler simply decreed that the Seventeenth Army must hold on and fight it out. Under heavy Soviet pressure its nearest neighbour, the Sixth Army, was quickly driven back beyond the land neck which links the Crimea to the mainland (the Perekop isthmus), while landings were made from the Asiatic shore on the Kerch peninsula. By 30 November not only were 210,000 German soldiers isolated in the Crimea; they were also threatened with battle on the territory they were defending.

  Meanwhile the other three Ukrainian fronts had gone over to the offensive along the who
le length of the lower Dnieper, with results which threatened the flanks of Manstein’s Army Group South. The Third and Second Ukrainian Fronts first seized a large bridgehead near Krivoy Rog on Manstein’s southern flank; then, on 3 November, the First Ukrainian Front broke across the Dnieper below the Pripet to recapture Kiev, in the most spectacular reversal of fortunes on the Eastern Front since the encirclement of Stalingrad.

  During November the White Russian and Baltic Fronts also moved into action north of the Pripet, advancing from Bryansk to recapture Smolensk – a place of agony for the Red Army in 1941 – and threaten Vitebsk. They were now mobile on Napoleon’s route to Moscow of 1812, but in the opposite direction, and giving Hitler cause to fear for the safety of the Baltic states and the approaches to the 1939 frontier of eastern Poland.

  Unseasonably mild weather in December, which left unfrozen the network of waterways and small lakes above the Pripet, temporarily spared the Ostheer from the difficulty of defending the Smolensk-Minsk route westward across the upper Dnieper. However, Hitler had announced in Führer Directive No. 51 (3 November) that he imminently expected an Anglo-American invasion in the west and that he could ‘no longer take responsibility for further weakening in the west, in favour of other theatres of war’. Indeed, he had ‘therefore decided to reinforce its defences’; the decision meant that the Ostheer could no longer count on reinforcements from the quieter, so-called OKW sectors – France, Italy and Scandinavia – but must fight its battles with the strength it had available and such replacements as the Home Army could find.

  ‘The vast extent of territory in the east’, Hitler conceded in Führer Directive No. 51, ‘makes it possible for us to lose ground, even on a large scale, without a fatal blow being struck to the nervous system of Germany.’ This admission implied that he might be ready to accept the submissions of his eastern marshals, Manstein foremost among them, that the most profitable way of fighting the Red Army was to employ a strategy of withdrawing from territory before mounting a further attack. The implication was not to be borne out in practice. During the winter of 1943-4 the Red Army came on in even greater strength than before; but Hitler’s reluctance to concede territory proved as fixed as ever – nowhere more so than on the southern front. Hitler not only clung to the hope of retaining the mines at Nikopol and Krivoy Rog but constantly emphasised the danger of allowing the Crimea to become a Soviet air base for attack on the Romanian oilfields and – a particular obsession – argued that its loss would encourage Turkey to enter the war on the Allied side.