With the coming of thaw and rain in March 1943 both sides sat back to consider the strategic options for the coming year. Hitler was far gloomier about German prospects than he had been a year before, and, like Stalin, he gave his commanders a greater latitude in defining and planning operations. Field Marshal von Manstein formulated a plan which was given the code name Citadel. The operation was aimed at the large Soviet salient around the city of Kursk that formed a bulge into the German front 120 miles wide and 60 miles long. Here was concentrated the main weight of the Red Army. Manstein planned to envelop the bulge with two heavily armed pincers that would cut the neck of the salient from north and south. The aim was to destroy a large part of the Red Army at a critical juncture of the front, allowing German forces either to recapture the southern area, or to swing north-east behind Moscow. Manstein was eager to attack in April or May, before Soviet forces had had time to regroup and dig in, but Hitler was anxious to avoid another risky campaign, and insisted on waiting until June, when more tanks would be available. He eventually postponed the launch of the offensive until early July to be more certain of prevailing.
Soviet commanders faced a critical challenge. Twice before, in 1941 and in 1942, they had miscalculated where the weight and direction of German attack would come. This time the guess had to be right. The General Staff put themselves in Hitler's shoes. They could see from the available secret intelligence that German forces were not yet ready for a full-scale campaign. From the concentration of German forces around Orel to the north of the Kursk salient, and Kharkov to the south, it seemed evident that the main thrust would come there. From their two-year experience of German battle planning they correctly assumed that the attack would be made by two strong armoured thrusts to cut the salient in the rear and encircle Soviet armies strung out across the bulge. Zhukov assumed that Moscow was the ultimate target. No one dissented from the evaluation. For the first time the Soviet high command guessed right.20
The more difficult decision was how to respond. Stalin followed his instinct and called for a pre-emptive offensive before the German line had solidified. Zhukov used his head and argued for defence in depth, absorbing the German right and left hooks, wearing down the enemy strength before delivering a knockout punch from large reserve forces hurled forward from the rear – the strategy that some senior soldiers had advocated in 1941. The outcome of the disagreement demonstrated a very different Stalin. On 8 April 1943 he was with the General Staff when the report arrived from Zhukov rejecting Stalin's plans for ‘a pre-emptive offensive' and confirming the intelligence that the Kursk salient was the German target. Stalin expressed no view, nor, as Shtemenko recalled, did he resort to the usual complaints about misinformation and deception he had thrown at intelligence assessments of the enemy's intentions in 1941 and 1942. Instead he called a conference for April 12, where he listened carefully to the analysis of German intentions, took account of the reports from front-line commanders, all but one of whom supported the Zhukov option, and finally approved the Zhukov plan. He became agitated only when it was suggested that the probable German aim was to encircle Moscow. Zhukov was instructed to create an unbreachable defence along the central front around Kursk.21
Stalin's uncharacteristic willingness to bow to the experts almost certainly saved the Red Army from yet another disastrous summer campaign. The Zhukov plan prevailed (if indeed it was his plan). As with the Stalingrad counter-offensive, there remains doubt about who originated the concept that served as the foundation for the Kursk battle. The important point is that Zhukov, whatever he owed to the local front commanders, was able to persuade Stalin, in defiance of Stalin's own preferences, that this was the right course. The plan represented a return to the traditions of Soviet, indeed Russian, military thinking expressed in the concept of ‘deep battle’. The defensive field was prepared with a depth and thoroughness hitherto denied to Soviet forces. It was designed to maximize Soviet firepower and to allow the defensive forces to manoeuvre effectively to counter German thrusts. The buildup of reserves in the rear to inflict the counter-punch provided the General Staff with difficult challenges of co-ordination and timing. The whole operation rested upon the precise management of a battlefield larger than any Soviet commander had mastered before.22
Preparations began at once. The main burden of the defence fell on the Central and Voronezh Fronts, which held the north and south of the salient. The Central Front was commanded by General Konstantin Rokossovsky, the man who had reduced the Stalingrad pocket and who was among the most distinguished wartime commanders on either side. Like Zhukov, with whom he had an awkward rivalry, he was the product of a Russian working-class background. The son of a train driver, he was orphaned at fourteen and started work as a building labourer. He saw service in 1914, was promoted to a cavalry sergeant and joined the Red Army in 1918 at the start of a career as a cavalry officer that took him to command of a corps by 1936. This was prominence enough to bring him into the purge net. He was imprisoned for three years, an experience which left him scarred with a deep loathing for the political officials who hovered around the edges of the armed forces, searching for prey. He was a powerful and outspoken man, one of those who dared to cross Stalin when he thought it necessary, and Zhukov, too. The commander of the Voronezh Front, Nikolai Vatutin, was closer to Zhukov, and had served as his deputy in 1941. He worked as a General Staff officer until he was sent to command the key front for the counter-offensive at Stalingrad. He played a central part in planning that campaign and was, at Zhukov's urging, moved to command the front at Kursk because of his proven strategic capability, one of many senior commanders who won their spurs in the Russian tradition, on the basis of success in the field.
Into the bulge around Kursk, Vatutin and Rokossovsky crammed seven armies. To the north and south of the salient the Briansk and South-western Fronts were reinforced to provide the springboard for the counter-offensive. More than 150 miles from the front line the reserve forces were concentrated in the Steppe Front – a tank army, two infantry armies and the 5th Air Army under the command of General Konev, whom Zhukov had saved from Stalin's vengeance in 1941. The defensive zone consisted of six lines inside the salient, with a further two defence belts in front of the reserve armies. The population of the salient were ordered to stay where they were. They were needed to help the troops dig more than 3,000 miles of trenches, which were laid out in a criss-cross pattern to allow defenders to move easily from one firing position to another. The salient bristled with anti-tank traps made from stakes cut from the local forests. Artillery and anti-tank guns were set so that German armour would be met by a veritable ‘curtain of fire’. Over 400,000 mines were laid.23 Streams were dammed up, so that floodwaters could be released, trapping enemy tanks. A gigantic obstacle course stretched out for miles across the rich farmlands and orchards. Dotted here and there were a hundred and fifty airfields; fifty dummy air bases were built to draw the attention of the enemy. When all was complete, 1,336,000 men, 3,444 tanks, 2,900 aircraft and 19,000 guns were moved into place. ‘It was,’ recalled Vasilevsky, ‘a huge, truly titanic task.’24 Across the front line they were faced by 900,000 German soldiers organized in fifty divisions, with 2,700 tanks, 2,000 aircraft and over 10,000 guns.25 They were about to fight the largest set-piece battle in history.
Both sides sensed that the fight when it came would be a decisive one. The Red Army had 40 per cent of its manpower and 75 per cent of its armoured forces compressed into the battle zone. The loss of these forces would have spelled disaster. On Hitler's part the success of Citadel was critical, which is why he postponed its starting date until he was more confident of German strength. The German leader was now forced to balance the war in the east with the demands of the wider war effort. By the summer of 1943 Germany faced heavy bombing raids from British and American bomber forces, which tied down growing numbers of men, aircraft and guns that would otherwise have been available for the eastern front. In the Mediterranean the gamble in North Afri
ca had failed, and Axis forces were finally defeated in Tunisia in May, with the surrender of 150,000 German and Italian troops. While Citadel was in preparation, German leaders were aware that the Western Allies might well use North Africa as a springboard for the opening of a southern front in Italy or the Balkans. The initiative still lay with German forces in the east, but it would be dissipated entirely by a summer defeat.
Soviet forces needed to know one thing above all: when would the German attack begin? There began to appear in May strong hints of an imminent German offensive. The Soviet defensive fronts were not yet complete, but a high state of alert was ordered. Hitler, however, postponed the attack, planned for May 3, to June 12. The Soviet high command became increasingly edgy. They launched air strikes against German positions and airfields to disrupt their preparations. A fresh scare arose from each new piece of intelligence: an attack was predicted between May 10 and May 12, then between May 19 and 26. Stalin became nervous and irritable as each scare subsided, to be replaced by another.26 His urge for action was hard to restrain. The intelligence that began to come in from beyond Soviet borders painted the same pattern of contradictions that Stalin had been faced with in 1941.
One source was a Communist spy ring in Switzerland, which indicated an offensive around June 12, which was correct, but then began to pass on German disinformation that suggested that Citadel had been postponed. Soviet intelligence had access to British Ultra decrypts of German messages from two sources. One was the Communist spy John Cairncross (the ‘fifth man’ in the Cambridge spy ring that included Burgess, Philby, Blunt and Maclean), who had succeeded in getting a job at the British cipher and code centre at Bletchley Park. On his days off he drove to London in a car supplied by his NKVD recruiter, Anatoli Gorsky, to hand over details of Luftwaffe airfields on the eastern front. This information provided the basis for the pre-emptive strikes against German bases that destroyed 500 German aircraft in three waves of attack. Cairncross could not stand the constant strain and abandoned his task before the battle started. The British Government also passed on details of Citadel, including the code name, on April 30, but later used intercepted comments from
the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, Hiroshi Oshima, to suggest to Moscow that Citadel had been abandoned.27
The longer they waited the more disconcerting the German delay became. For the men in the Kursk salient the lull meant weeks of oscillating between a nerve-racking state of alert and spells of dull military routine. The wait of over two months strained the morale of troops who knew that the hurricane was coming and that many of them would be swept away by it. In the last week of June the army's own intelligence services detected a sudden change. From intercepted messages and captured German soldiers, snatched by Soviet patrols, it was clear that the enemy was preparing for battle stations. A state of high alert was declared. The attack was expected between July 3 and July 6. On July 2 the Soviet forces went on full alert.
Then suddenly on July 4 activity on the enemy front ceased. An unbearable silence descended. A prisoner captured on the southern front of the salient confessed that the German offensive was timed for dawn on July 5.28 General Vatutin's Voronezh Front, which held the line opposite Belgorod and Kharkov, was ordered to begin an artillery barrage to disrupt the German front. In the north, where Rokossovsky's Central Front held the line, Zhukov was at the army headquarters to co-ordinate the battle. Around two o'clock in the morning of July 5 news came that a captured German infantry engineer had yielded the precise time. At three o'clock the German force was to attack. Without waiting for Stalin, Zhukov ordered air and artillery strikes. No one could rest. Stalin's own anxiety was evident to Zhukov when he telephoned to Moscow. At half past two in the morning there could be heard ‘a terrible rumbling’. The noise of guns, rockets and bombs all merged together, to Zhukov's ears, into a ‘symphony from hell’.29
The German commanders were caught completely by surprise. For some time they thought that they were the victims of a Soviet offensive of which they had had no inkling. When it became evident that they had been the object of nothing more than a spoiling attack, the order went out to proceed. At half past four on the morning of July 5 Citadel was unleashed. Field Marshal Walther Model's 9th Panzer Army, supported by heavy Tiger tanks and the new Ferdinand self-propelled gun, moved forward in force on a narrow front to pierce a hole in Zhukov's fortress wall. They were met by a web of defensive fire unlike anything the German army had yet encountered. Tanks and men were pinned down while they waited for aircraft to batter a way through. They edged forward a few yards at a time. The hundreds of obstacles were reinforced by mobile anti-tank commandos who launched suicidal attacks on enemy tanks with petrol bombs and crude jamming devices to immobilize them before anti-tank guns could be brought to bear on the more vulnerable rear and sides of the machines. Soldiers hid in ditches and hurled grenades under passing vehicles. The heavy armour of German guns and tanks forced Soviet units to engage them at close range. After the first day the attack had reaped four miles of ground.
On July 6 Model brought up more tanks. A force of 3,000 guns and 1,000 tanks attacked on a front only six miles wide. The movement of armoured reserves from deeper in the salient held the attack and inflicted high losses. The following day proved to be decisive. On July 7, having moved on more than seven miles, the German tanks were turned on the village of Ponyri. The battle was continuous. The thunder of guns and bombs and the heavy smoke soon made it difficult either to hear or to see, German armour was pushed against the main defence line and ground to a halt. The following day a second village, Olkhovatka, was singled out for the German breakthrough. The concentration of tanks in the narrow approaches to the village made them easy prey to the waiting Soviet dive-bombers and the concentration of accurate crossfire from anti-tank guns and heavy artillery. On July 9 German forces in the north reached their limit. Zhukov told Stalin that the time had come. The counter-offensive in the north was timed for July 12. When it began, the German attack crumbled. Rokossovsky's divisions, reinforced by a flood of supplies and men brought in on new rail lines built for the campaign, forced the attackers back over the pits and trenches they had breached a week before, past the grim detritus of a lost battle.30
On the southern front of the salient the situation was less encouraging. Although Soviet intelligence on German intentions had been more complete than a year before, the distribution of German forces had
Caption
Map 7 Battle of Kursk, 1943
been badly miscalculated. The main weight of the attack was expected in the north, and Soviet defences were stronger there. German forces were in fact more powerful in the south. General Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army fell on the less well-defended of the two Soviet fronts. The Red Army fought to hold the enemy with all the frantic energy displayed to the north, but General Vatutin lacked the weight of armour and density of artillery fire with which Rokossovsky ensnared Model. Hoth had nine Panzer divisions, the cream of the German forces, led by the three most powerful units in the German army, the SS Panzer divisions ‘Death's Head’, ‘Reich’ and ‘Adolf Hitler Guards’. So hard did they hit that in two days of ferocious fighting they drove almost twenty miles towards the key Oboyan–Kursk road. At German headquarters Manstein waited with mounting confidence for the Soviet front to crumble as it had done so often before.31
This time the Soviet enemy stood firm. On July 7 the SS divisions reached the main defensive line, after a gruelling assault against what were only the preliminary obstacles. In their way now stood a full force, the 1st Tank Army. The pace slowed to a crawl. On July 9 the Panzer divisions grouped themselves into a powerful armoured fist and punched one more hole in the line. They crossed the small Psel river, the last natural barrier between the Germans and Kursk. The advance units of the Death's Head division dug in to a small bridgehead. It was the furthest point they reached, the last gasp of a German offensive that had begun two years before. Unable to make further progress, Hoth swung the weight o
f his attack north-east, towards a small rail junction at Prokhorovka.32
The five days from July 9 were the most critical of the whole Kursk battle. The SS armoured corps regrouped and prepared for what was expected to be the decisive manoeuvre against a Soviet force whose heavy losses of men and machines could be seen in the charred bodies and buckled guns that smothered the blackened landscape. More than 500 heavy tanks, many of them the powerful Tigers and Panthers, which could outgun the T-34, rolled forward. The Soviet command had reacted by calling in some of the precious reserve, held back far behind the battle in readiness for the decisive counter-stroke. On July 6 Stalin in person telephoned the commander of 5th Guards Tank Army, General Pavel Rotmistrov, to order the advance towards Prokhorovka, a gruelling three-day forced march of more than 230 miles. It was Rotmistrov's birthday; a dinner had been arranged. When his guests arrived they found nothing but a table covered with maps. Rotmistrov delivered the details for the march. His health was drunk in champagne captured from a German unit, and at half past one in the morning of July 7, the 5th Guards Tank Army began to move.33
The trek was arduous. The army had to march by day and night, despite the threat from German Ju-87 dive-bombers, armed with tank-busting cannon, which had already taken a heavy toll of Soviet armour. The Soviet air force flew overhead to keep German aircraft at bay. Rotmistrov travelled with his men in trucks converted into headquarters, controlling the whole body by radio, as it moved forward in a vast phalanx, twenty miles wide. The commander of the reserve front, General Konev, followed in an airplane at a discreet distance to watch the reinforcements in action. It was the first time that a whole tank army had moved under its own power rather than by rail. Conditions soon deteriorated. The heat was already unbearable by eight o'clock in the morning. The endless stream of vehicles threw up a thick, grey dust that covered men, vehicles and horses with a grimy film. The soldiers were soon soaked with sweat and oppressed by a choking thirst. It proved to be a remarkable test of the ruggedness and durability of Soviet vehicles. Surprisingly few were lost despite the rough terrain and the dust. When the army halted on July 9, sixty miles from the front, it was still an intact fighting force. That day Rotmistrov was ordered to bring his force to battle stations and to advance the remaining distance at once. On July 10 the exhausted troops reached the front.34
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