For you Kursk grogs--a post Krivosheev Master's thesis

[John Kettler]

Found this while researching Nebelwerfers and thought I'd capture it here for future study. Call it a little light reading!

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:zVfecOgLGeMJ:etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-0604103-113808/unrestricted/Klug_thesis.pdf+nebelwerfer+effectiveness+data&cd=75&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Regards,

John Kettler

[Cuirassier]

Though I have only read the abstract so far, it seems that the author is not arguing anything that much different from David Glantz. There are a couple of things that the author either puts too much focus on, or not enough, judging from the abstract. First, Manstein did get his operational freedom. It was called Operation Roland iirc, and resulted in the severe mauling of 5th Guards Tank Army.

Second, Sicily wasn't all that important to the result of Citadel. Yes, it was the reason Hitler called it off, but the offensive had already shot its bolt by then, and more importantly Kutuzov kicked off in the north. Besides, iirc, Sicily only resulted in the departure of 1 SS and II SS headquarters. Totenkopf and Das Reich were initially going to go to the Med as well, but the Soviet Mius offensive resulted in these two divisions being retained by Army Group South.

Citadel failed because the Soviets simply did better at the operational level than the Germans. Kutuzov, the Mius offensive and the herculean efforts to rebuild 1st and 5th Guards Tank Armies simply ran the German panzer reserves ragged.

[John Kettler]

Cuirassier,

I found it while looking for something else, so hurtled through it looking for that. Posted the link because it was for a relatively recent study, which I thought might be good for those stuck with earlier accounts and/or no stomach for the decidedly turgid Glantz & House. I think your points are good, but I'd add that Citadel, once delayed to the point is was, was strategically doomed in that the Russians had the German battle plan before the German field commanders did, courtesy of the Lucy Ring. This gave the Russians the opportunity to dig in on a scale never before seen, as well as the opportunity to preempt the German attack by conducting fire strikes before the German prep fire even began, thanks to capturing prisoners.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Cuirassier]

Well, at least judging by the abstract, the paper has a sane thesis. Much better than the accounts that argue the Germans actually won Kursk, or at least they would have if Manstein could have done things his way.

Regarding the Lucy Ring, I don't think that needed to doom it. Despite being well dug in, the German PK's were still eating RC's in two days. The north was of course harder, but the Germans also had a lot of depth there. They just couldn't use it all because of Kutuzov. And the prep fire by most accounts wasn't very effective. It caused delay for some hours, but the losses were trivial.

What really saved the Soviets, and was quite revolutionary for the time, was keeping huge formations, especially armored ones, in reserve without frontage and then committing them against the most successful enemy formations throughout his advance. This stopped the southern drive. The northern one was stopped by Kutuzov obviously.

[John Kettler]

Cuirassier,

Dupuy's analysis in the QJM shows quite conclusively that the massive fortifications were the sine qua non of victory. The Russians would've been trounced had they tried to fight a mobile engagement using the same forces, but the fortifications provided the critical edge in staying power and attrition, setting up both the devastating counterattack within the battle proper and laying the objective conditions for the succeeding strategic counteroffensive.

http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/armies/chapter7.aspx

Thread showing the rigor of the underlying research

http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000055.html

Master's thesis analysis of the three data sets here, sadly, not in html.

[PDF]

NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat

by R Gozel - Cited by 5 - Related articles

(QJM) [Ref. 3] are applied to three data sets that are extracted from the data on the Battle of Kursk. The ATLAS theater level simulation uses a ...

diana.nps.edu/~twlucas/Student%20theses/GozelThesis.pdf

The counterprep wasn't really about killing, more about disrupting units and the all-important time phasing thereof in generating effective combat power. The armored counterstroke at Prokhorovka pitted a fresh GTA against depleted units which had hacked and ground their way through belt after belt of the most ferocious defenses ever seen. I think it would be very interesting to see how much usable combat infantry remained available to the Germans as Op Citadel wore on. I suspect that was what would've forced the cessation of offensive ops even without Sicily, as opposed to the tank loss model.

Regards,

John Kettler

[John Kettler]

Cuirassier,

For unknown reasons, the PDF link seems not to have taken. Here's another way to get there from here and will give you a far better idea what the report's about.

http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA384597

Here's a link that should work. Simply select Gozel from the list and download the PDF.

http://edocs.nps.edu/npspubs/scholarly/theses/2000/Sep/

Regards,

John Kettler

[JasonC]

Cuirassier is right, Dupuy is flat wrong, as usual.

The decisive engagements were meeting ones or hasty defenses by fresh Russian formations slid in front of the spearheads. The Russians also badly misused their reserves in many cases, with overly aggressive tactical employment for premature counterattacks straight into the teeth of German strength. Far from enjoying an edge from fortifications, that led to very rapid loss of Russian tank forces in particular, throughout the fighting. The Germans suffered somewhat higher attrition on the first day or two in the fortified zone, but thereafter the fortifications were a minor matter at best. Russian prep and notice had their strategic effect simply through the presence of an entire Front of reserves behind the battle area. As for Russian counter prep, it was ineffective and a waste of ammo. Unsighted big shoots always are. The limit on artillery effectiveness is always rounds available; as a result, restricting firing to the best targets always drives enemy losses higher, while indiscriminate mass firing at poor targets lets the enemy live through your available shell supply with a minimum of losses.

Kursk was won by the Russians strategically because reserves in depth on a sufficient scale are a higher card in the same suit as offensive concentration of armor spearheads. The former can simply neutralize the local odds edge the latter can create, and can do so on a time scale of 48-72 hours. No deep defended zone can be fully penetrated on that time scale. In the absence of either dislocating breakthrough or any local odds edge via maneuver, all you get is a giant attrition mash up. Which will be decided by odds and exchange effeciency. The Germans had high exchange efficiency at Kursk, but low overall theater odds, and they needed the multipliers from their offensive concentration to be effectively unlimited for their plan to succeed. They weren't unlimited so it didn't succeed.

The offensive in the south failed by narrowing inward from edges that lost sufficient cutting edge armor strength, to the point where the area along which the Germans could maintain a high exchange ratio while still attack, was so narrow that nothing of any operational significance could be expected from continuing the offensive. Once 48th Panzer corps was stalled from the left, and AD Kempf was out of running heavy armor, the remaining stuff was of no more than tactical importance. In the north, the Germans again achieved high exchange ratios and the Russians tried to attack too soon. But they could not stop all the holes made by Kutuzov even after diverting the bulk of the attacking force north for mobile defense.

Attacking in the south alone on a single corps sector had no prospect of accomplishing anything. The whole operational plan was a taut rope that required success on both north and south faces and success on at last 2-mech corps scale in both places. It wasn't fortifications that prevented that. It was 3 Fronts defending by sliding reserves over to make as many new positions as the Germans could ever require, and the well timed counterstroke of Kutuzov.

There is a constant tendency to overplay the importance of tactical factors. They simply don't matter as much as the larger operational ones.

[John Kettler]

JasonC,

I don't have the German daily loss breakdowns during the defensive belt penetration phase in front of me, but I'd want to see them in detail before blithely accepting your rather sweeping pronouncement, especially in light of this letter to Sovetkaia Rossia, 13 July 1993 by an agitated Russian reader responding to reports of the U.S. undertaking of KOSAVE II. http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/avenue/vy75/sovros93.htm (Fair use)

The pertinent part says:

"Military leaders' memoirs testify that on the eve of the Battle of Kursk certain commanders were in favour of launching an offensive without waiting for the enemy's attack. And now we read Marshal Zhukov's report to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of April 8 (three months before the start of decisive events!): "Evidently, the enemy, having gathered in the first phase, his maximum forces, including 13-15 tank divisions, supported by powerful aviation forces, will launch an attack by his Orel-Kromy force to outflank Kursk from the northeast, and by his Belgorod-Kharkov force to outflank Kursk from the southeast. I consider as inexpedient the launching of a preemptive attack by our forces in the near future. It will be better, if we exhaust the enemy on our defense, knock out his tanks, and then, having committed fresh reserves, by launching a general offensive, to completely rout the main enemy force."

and later

"In 1943 at Kursk we prepared eight (!) defensive lines with an overall depth of 250-300 kilometres. Against the enemy's tank forces were concentrated three no less powerful tank armies. If in 1941 the forward movement of five combined-arms armies from the interior as a second strategic echelon had only begun, then in 1943 behind the bulge was deployed an entire reserve Steppe Front. It was namely the front's Fifth Guard's Tank Army which on July 12 stopped the breakthrough by the SS "Reich", "Death's Head" and "Adolph Hitler" tank divisions, and the Wehrmacht's III Tank Corps at Prokhorovka."

Offhand, I fail to see how such a staggering defensive array suddenly is dismissed out of hand by you. Are you going to assert that German Panzer losses were inconsequential in getting through it? Better yet, are you going to assert the Landser didn't take heavy losses? What sort of combat shape were the German formations in after breaching the last belt of immensely deep defenses, as compared to at the start of Citadel? How disorganized were the units, how fatigued the men,not just from combat but the July heat and almost 18 hour-long combat days?

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/avenue/vy75/sunmoon.htm

I'm certainly no expert, but the accounts I've read of the armor fight pre Prokhorovka mentioned only the emergency belt of dug-in tanks, after which the reserve had to be committed in order to prevent an exploitation of the German breakthrough. German heavy armor "went away" because of breakdown, fires (Panther As), mines, artillery of various types and infantry tankhunters. I think, therefore we could argue that the defenses definitely contributed to its disappearance, thus, by your own statement, the failure of the attack.

This Ferdinand, for example, got hit repeatedly, either had a track shot off or was mined, then abandoned.

http://www.battlefield.ru/en/photoalbums/category/86-german-destroyed-afvs.html

A notion reinforced by armor experts who cataloged the Ferdinand causes of loss. I see mines, AP and HE shells as the major players, with Molotov cocktail follow-on attacks, heavy artillery and tacair as minor ones. Weirdly, none were shown as technical failure and abandoned by crew.

http://www.battlefield.ru/en/documents/81-losses/255-ferdinand-destroyed-at-ponyri.html

The Panthers, though, did have a number of breakdowns, but were chiefly killed by 76 mm AP, then mines, 45 mm, a direct bomb hit and an immobilization, after which the crew blew up the tank.

http://www.battlefield.ru/en/documents/81-losses/256-panthers-destroyed-at-kursk-1943.html

Looks to me as though somebody did some serious shooting!

From Dunn's Kursk, we learn that Panther losses on July 5, 1943 amounted to 40 tanks put out of action of 200 operational when the day began. That's 20% of the entire Panther force in one day! The excerpt is also of interest in that it explicitly addresses in the Soviet portion the issue of heavy antitank battalions armed with 85 mm AA guns as a direct counter to German heavy armor.

http://books.google.com/books?id=OweCrOMU0iIC&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=panthers+at+kursk&source=bl&ots=yF13UQoB3N&sig=T5TqyTU8Udqo9aT-wFVrLOLXaGo&hl=en&ei=OaZwS_TILIussgOH7sitCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CB0Q6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q=panthers%20at%20kursk&f=false

When I have the energy, I think I'll look into the day-by-day accounts. Unfortunately, the link doesn't quantify the infantry losses, only armor. And it's precisely line infantry that is in such short supply.

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/avenue/vy75/dbd.htm

Regards,

John Kettler

[JasonC]

Choosing to stand on the defensive operationally was the right call, sure, but had nothing to do with tactical fortifications or any great effect from them.

Troops positioned up to 300 km behind the front lines are obviously not fortified, and since the fight never got there it wouldn't matter if they had been. They were reserves. Having reserves ready behind the front is exactly the operational big chess I am saying mattered. Tactical fortifications did not matter. Marginally helpful on the first day or two, that is the most one can say.

And the Russians counterattacked prematurely, especially in the north (by day 2-3), and eventually also in the south (5th Tank committed too offensively with very high resulting losses etc).

Read the actual day by day accounts of the fighting and follow the actual progress of the German spearheads and all of it becomes apparent. The Germans got through the front line rifle divisions - in the most heavily fortified zones, with the most minefields and dug in ATGs and extensive trench systems - in every case by the evening of the first day. The Russian formations hit were annihilated. German losses were higher than on later days in part due to fortifications and to Russian artillery, sure, but they were much lower than the losses of the Russian defenders in the sectors hit. All of their attacking formations broke in successfully and they were stopped nowhere.

Panthers had their mechanical problems; AD Kempf had significant problems on minefields, with its Tigers in particular; the left end of the German attack in the south had problems with water obstacles caused largely by the previous night's violent storms, partially by Russian anti tank ditch obstacles and mines etc. But all of it merely imposed some delay and nowhere changed the tactical outcome. When an entire panzer corps on a narrow frontage hit even the most dug in rifle division, the rifle division evaporated and the panzer corps penetrated intact.

What you actually see as early as the evening of the first day is the Russians forming new hasty blocking positions behind the German break ins with the operational reserve formations of the front line Armies. No these were emphatically not already prepared positions fully dug in and mined. They were lines of ATGs strung across any available gully or wood, or tank brigades thrown in the path of an advance. Hasty new minefields were being laid during the fighting itself by mobile pioneer detachments. And the reason is clear - the frontage was simply far too wide for the positions prepared earlier to amount to all that much, and they weren't concentrated enough in the sectors where the attacks went in.

Each day therefore, the Germans twist and turn and weave the point of attack for each attacking corps. The Russians are frequently strong in the wrong places, the place that looked the most threatened yesterday. They get turned out of this or that position. Sometimes they get off strong flanking fire and hold up a given German advance; the Germans try someplace else with an armored KG (brigade size) and succeed. Over and over, 1 to 3 times per day in each corps area. This is thrust and parry with reserves, not seige fighting in trenches. Everywhere there is only the normal frontage strength of RDs and attached ATGs, they lose. To stop the Germans they need a fresh division behind the one just penetrated and a tank brigade or more to boot. And that doesn't win, it just stabilizes that tiny section while the Germans hunt around for a weaker point.

Occasionally the Russians throw in an entire tank corps worth of armor in a local counterattack. Whenever they do, the German go over to the defensive tactically in that sector and shoot the crap out of them. The next day the Russians report heavy losses and the day after that they have dribs and drabs left as a brigade of armor stiffening left. The Germans have attacked elsewhere in the meantime. This is attrition brawling with reserves, and not relying on the defensive value of fortifications, tactically. Yes it wears the Germans out. It also narrows the sectors on which they can keep punching successfully (west of Ponyri but not in it, AD Kempf not making much progress, the left side of the southern drive petering out with Panzer divisions down to 30 running tanks, etc).

Compare say the importance of fortifications and a tactically defensive stance in the Somme in WW I. Fortified machineguns behind barbed wire plus registered howitzers against infantry in their shirt sleeves, are not the same effect as dug in riflemen with weak ATRs, a few ATG strongpoints with single batteries of 76mm ATGs, facing 50 to 100 attacking armored vehicles on a frontage of 1-2 kilometers with artillery support. The latter readily overcomes any tactical edge for the defender through local odds , and abundant local armor vs. limited anti tank weapons. To check such concentrations the defender slides reserves of his own armor and reserve infantry and ATG formations in front of the moving enemy spearhead. Those trade down a bit and the attacker then picks a new place to try again.

The Russians win Kursk despite an unfavorable exchange ratio tactically, because they can quickly neutralize each momentary German local odds edge with another reserve positioned in front of it - while still having a full Front worth of forces to launch their own offensive against the Orel bulge.

It is not a coincidence that the northern attack is called off the day Kutuzov goes in, nor that the "climax" in the south is typically dated to the same day. In fact the heavy fighting in the south continued for 5 more days; it just lost all strategic point once the northern pronge had to quit to go defend against Kutuzov. SS Panzer corps largely massacred 5th Tank army over that week. It just didn't matter a damn by then.

Big chess matters more than tactical anything, that is the main lesson of Kursk. Deep reserves at the entire army group scale and counteroffensives at army group scale, trump offensive concentration of armor spearheads of a few corps scale. The German plan was quite flawed anyway, requiring too much to go right in order to succeed, and granting the Russians interior lines. That they still accomplished as much as they did tactically, was due to (1) tactical defense just not helping very much with these weapons and tech (2) the Russians being overly wasteful in their own tactics, especially premature counterattacks by massed armor into strength, and (3) a persistent German edge in combined arms tactics, accentuated at this date by the largest technical armor-war edge in their favor of the whole war. But all of those factors being *tactical*, none of them mattered as much as a single *operational* factor, or as overall odds.

[John Kettler]

JasonC,

Appreciate your detailed reply! Just downloaded Glantz's Soviet Defensive Tactics, Kursk 1943. Will be better able to follow your arguments after I absorb the defensive scheme.

http://www.cgsc.edu/carl/resources/csi/glantz2/glantz2.asp

Meanwhile, here's a Panther that got hit very hard! If it's Panther 634 from the list, I think the NIIBT Poligon guys need glasses. Huge hole through the turret side!

http://ww2-pictures.com/Battle-of-Kursk-Photos/panther-tank-kursk.jpg

Regards,

John Kettler

http://www.battlefield.ru/en/documents/81-losses/256-panthers-destroyed-at-kursk-1943.html

[jtcm]

For those new to the game: JasonC did a Kurk pack a while back. I personally found it pretty difficult to fight my way through the fortified belt, even in the dawn operation (1 SS ?) playing against the AI

[jtcm]

If JasonC's right-- the fortif belts etc made little difference OPERATIONALLY, and the Russian MLRs might well simply have been in foxholes etc. Is this right ? At what level to the tactical and the operational mesh ?

[JasonC]

It was important that the Russians had mine obstacles, it channeled the German attack. (Meaning, once through them the Germans would attack from that location, they did not want to break the crust again elsewhere, which helped make it clear where reserves needed to go, etc). It was important that they had plenty of ATGs layered behind the front, and enough reserve formations to be able to create new lines of them over and over. But most of that was a consequence of their global odds.

In previous breakthrough battles, the Germans were routinely able to get through the front and into the operational rear before Russian mech forces engaged them. But those mech forces always did engage them - often too offensively, and often in too unprepared and panicked a manner. At Kursk, these engagements took place in the Russian defensive zone, and the depth and prepositioning of the reserves, their overall readiness etc, certainly helped with that. The brawls between the reserves themselves were tactically as lopsided as in the past, in many cases. That is not where the improvement in performance over past breakthrough fights was seen.

In previous breakthrough fights, the Russian mech interventions in the operational depths usually took the form of ambitious counterattacks at the flanks of the German penetrations. They frequently hit German infantry formations, or the motorized portions of the breakthrough panzer armies and corps, rather than the spearheads themselves - though both happened. The Germans sometimes had greater depth in their columns, meaning sufficient infantry divisions to hold the flanks of the drive, where at Kursk it was typical for one division out of each panzer corps to be put on the defensive to hold one of those etc.

What the Russians didn't have in previous breakthrough fights, was anything like Kutuzov waiting to be sprung. Meaning, a Front scale well prepared attack in an adjacent sector, rather than a reactive spasm trying to halt the German breakthrough itself in panic catch as catch can fashion. Obviously, they also usually didn't have an entire reserve Front behind the battle area. They did, however, drop freshly created armies on the same scale behind successful German breakthroughs - but after conceeding hundreds of miles of terrain and with it, the bulk of the forces on the previous front line.

If you compare Kursk to the summer to late fall of 1942, for example, the Russians have everything they eventually used in that sort of fight, ready to go before the Germans crossed the start line - instead of assembling each piece of it over the course of months, and wasting half of it prematurely in desperate fighting.

Steppe Front shows the margin of victory and it was large. But its role in the operational defeat can be exaggerated. Most of it did not actually engage until the Russians went over to the full offensive along the entire front, in August. They had around 25 rifle divisions in excess of what was needed to stop the assault. Interestingly enough, Manstein when first told of the attack estimated that it could succeed if the operation received 25 extra infantry divisions to give all of the attack sectors the depth available in previous successful breakthroughs. The rest of the high command thought he was nuts; they could not see any way of gathering so large a reinforcement. The course of the actual fighting shows that estimate to have been correct.

[jtcm]

I suppose (just musing here) that the point is that the Russians must, at some point (late 1942 ?? out of my hat), reach the point where individual motivation, unit morale, low-level tactical skill, equipment performance, grand tactical implementation, and logistics, are robust enough (even if not, in many categories, high performing enough to reverse completely the lopsided equations in favour of the Germans) to allow high level operational "chess"-- which is what JasonC says mattered, at Kursk. Does that sentence make sense ?

Were the Germans out-thought (if not outfought on the ground [?]) at Kursk ?

[Cuirassier]

The Germans were out-thought consistently by the Russians from the Fall of 1942 on (Vatutin's overextended run to the Dnepr early 1943 excepted). Uranus and Saturn actually played out similarly to Kursk and Kutuzov. In the former, the Russians relied on German overextension and their Caucasus adventure to smash their front. Naturally, the Germans achieved some substantial victories before becoming overextended.

At Kursk, the Russians massed reserves in the right area (not being surprised as they were when Blau kicked off) and, more importantly, used their armored formations in a massed, operationally defensive operation. Thus, the Russians managed to exhaust the Germans without having to rely on logistical overextension.

But in any case, Russian operational play was clearly superior from fall 1942 on, except during some small incidences here and there. A big part of that was undoubtedly the result of firing Halder.

[JasonC]

The Germans are out thought continually from the fall of 1942 on. The Germans sacked half their best brains in the winter of 1941-2 and sack another third or so in the late summer and fall of 1942, in both cases out of frustration about not having already won the war, not lack of success from the men concerned. Guderian and Rundstat fired in late 1941, Bock and Halder fired in 1942, etc.

The Russians moves on the map are superior from the time AG south is split to pursue the divergent objectives of Stalingrad and the Caucasus - actually somewhat before that, when the high command forces the summer offensive to wheel south for Rostov catching nothing, instead of driving east along the Don through to the Volga then clear to the Caspian as the generals leading it wanted to do.

In earlier periods, many of the Russian moves on the map at the big chess level would have made sense if the performance of the two sides were equal for units of similar composition and scale, but asked far too much of the actual performance of the Russian formations - especially the Mech formations. The mech is improving and at the same time, the expectations of the higher ups are converging toward reality. They still make hamfisted mistakes at the operational and grand tactical scale in the course of the 1942 campaign, especially overly hasty counterattacks by mech formations delivered piecemeal and into strength. Sometimes the higher ups demand offensives that have no justification at the grand tactical level and completely misunderstand the terrain and problems it causes. (E.g. frontal assaults using local packed concentrations in the Crimea, delivered over open steppe in daylight into the teeth of registered artillery on a front narrow by the coasts; wild stubborn hammering around Voronezh and north of Stalingrad later in the mid fall, etc).

Some of that is still there at the time of Kursk and Kutuzov. The details of the use of the bulk of the armor for Kutuzov on the east face of the salient is nearly as dumb as the Voronezh period in 1942, for example. But the northern face portion succeeds anyway and saves the operational result.

The way I'd put it is, at the strategic level the Russians catch up in "tempo" after Stalingrad. Before it they are frequently 2-3 moves behind and they actions are reactive and sometimes make little sense because of it. Once they have caught the Germans in tempo - which the success of Uranus and Saturn bring about - they are not "caught out" like that again. (Even Manstein's early 1943 success is not an exception, it is just typical reserve fighting against a weakening break through battle, the ordinary results of overreach, etc).

When the Russians decide to stand on the defensive before Kursk and attack only after the Germans have committed themselves, they are taking a risk that they have mastered German offensive tactics. But it is the right call and fully justified. They know what the next five moves will be to counter what the Germans will try, and instead of needing to scramble to make those five moves after the Germans are already pounding them, they make all of them ahead of time and are waiting for it. That is what I am calling a gain in tempo.

As though in chess, an enemy is attempting some combination that threatens point after point, if you have to dance to meet each threat and he always has new ones that multiply as forks faster than you can --- that is tempo edge to the attacker. When instead you have every threatened point already "overprotected" three or four times, beyond the threat to each location, you are "solid" and ahead in tempo. The attacker can exchange with you, but nothing more. And you can pick when to "counterplay" with your own prepared threats.

Now, were there doctrinal and tactical performance improvements needed to get to that point? Some yes, especially in the mech arm and especially compared to 1941, rather than say late 1942. As a prerequisite. Most of what was needed on that score is already there by late 1942 though. The Russians do go on improving, but they haven't caught the Germans yet even at the time of Kursk. They don't need to. They just need to have tank armies that don't come apart as soon as committed to action, and they need to know what they can ask of them. (In fact they still ask rather too much of them and lose a lot of material, but it is enough).

The big improvement is in the tempo-gain of the prior operational deployments (the "overprotected center", to continue the chess analogy) and in the use made of global odds. They've had better plans for nine months straight, and it shows. The Germans are still monsters tactically, and show good flexibility on defense up north. But none of it is enough to outweigh superior Russian odds, positioning, and plan.

[Cuirassier]

Just to add to what I wrote above:

The Russians did get better tactically as the war went on. By Uranus and Saturn, they had a decent idea on how to use combined arms and how to use divisional sized tank and mech formations in deep operations. But during the decisive battles of the war (fall 1942 to winter 1944) the Russians were still well behind the Germans at the tactical level.

The Russian trump card was superior operational direction, which meant the superior use of reserves that a mobilized economy could generate. So, in 1942, when the Germans send a large part of their force uselessly into the Caucasus and impale themselves upon Stalingrad, Vasilevsky is building a gigantic mech lead reaserve opposite the German flanks. They only need to punch through the Rumanians, Italians and Hungarians, which they readily do, despite numerous tactical 'stuff-ups.'

As a result, 6th Army dies along with most of the Allied armies, while other German units are severely mauled (2nd Army).

Kursk is similar. The Germans attack the heavily defended salient of Kursk, nearly exhaust themselves, then the Russians release their waiting and ready Army Group scaled reserves and weak parts of the German front, and threaten the entire defensive integrity of the German Eastern Front.

This time, the Russians are facing German armies across the board and the German panzer formations are still 30 to 50% strength, so naturally they have a harder go at it than they did at Stalingrad. But it still works and the Germans lose Orel, parts of the Dnepr, etc.

After these key events, the Russians use their odds advantage and launch offensives everywhere, in staggered fashion, always having one ready to go by withdrawing previously exhausted formations into reserve and refitting them. This main effort happens in the south up until the Spring of 1944.

Then with all German eyes on the south during the Summer of 1944, the Russians hit Army Group Center, achieving their greatest victory.

So as JasonC says, the tactical level was simply not that important. One had to be competent obviously, but that was clearly good enough considering the disparity between Russian and German operational play. 'Good enough' is all the Russians needed when they were throwing entire Army Groups spearheaded by Tank Armies against overextended infantry corps with limited tank reserves.

[jtcm]

Still musing (and remembering a quip by P J O'ROurke, that Russia is a country where chess is a spectator sport)-- interesting to see how deep strategic thinking can be even under the Stalinist system. Does it carry on into the post-WW II world ?

Interesting, too, to combine the results of this thread (good chess playing at high level) with another thread, a few years back, about how at the tactical level, even the "good enough" (Cuirassier) stuff results in v. high casualties (especially on the offensive), more than should be expected, in the tactical mash-ups. Why ? Because (I thnk JasonC argued) of DOCTRINAL choices, the holding back of armour for exploitation, rather than using it to crack open MLRs-- leaving that job to infantry formations, who take terrible casualties.

At the higher level, this matters not hugely, as long as the job gets done at the end of the day. Just as in Kursk, the tactical level of fortifs / no fortifs matters less than the results on the big map. But two thoughts:

-- there is a point where tactical competence / incompetence must start to tell at the grand level-- as in 1941; in 1942 etc, RUssian performance is just "good enough' for it not to matter *that much whether the breakthrough is effected cleanly or messily, with few casualties or horrendous ones. Is that right

-- is the doctrinal choice that results in high tactical casualties not in fact a reflection of intentions at the grand chess level ? I.e. that's the point where they mesh-- intentions and practices and even "military culture" determined from above (rather than filtering upwards from 'grunt level"). is this the right/ the only way to fight, to win, a war ?

-- why is there not a tradition of subtle, economical, 'clean' thinking at the tactical level, comparable to the deep chess played at the operational level ? Chuikov's memoirs spend a huge amt of time at the low-level, small unit tactical plane, trying to get the details just right.

Just some thoughts, maybe they make no sense at all.

Has anyone read Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon ? I haven't; just seen reviews saying that it wasn't general winter that did for Nap, but massive, well-thought out effort by the Tsarist multi-ethnic empire.

[Vark]

Just as poor tactical performance has an adverse affect on operational issues, surely overestimating the ability of your troops tactical superiority to rescue an operationally/strategically flawed plan is also an issue?

Did previous examples of German tactical superiority make the Citadel planners complacent, expecting any Russian counter to be defeated at the tactical level, which would then result in operational success.

Final point, perhaps the extensive fortifications most useful purpose was to delay the operation so that the new AFV's could be deployed to tackle them. Or if the Germans had gone earlier would the outcome have been similar?

[JasonC]

First on jtcm's questions. Vasilevsky is the Russian chess master at the strategic level. His planning fingerprints are on every major operational success of the war and missing from most of the failures. Way better than Zhukov, for example, who indulged too often in wild stubborn aggressiveness. Vasilevsky deserves to be better known than he is. He had a first rate operational brain, right up there with a Manstein.

Next as to the question, was there any tradition of tactical skill to match the operational? The answer is yes, but it doesn't propogate down through the ranks. Armies are large organizations. They don't have their best personnel or minds available at every point in the organizational chart. A marshal or general may know how to do something, without every one of his brigades succeeding in accomplishing it. He doesn't have the colonels and majors for it. Doctrine is always a compromise between a theoretical best and what can actually be learned by a whole class of 30 year old officers. Or, at the lowest levels, a 22 year old high school graduate with six months of training.

In Russian "lessons learned" training documents, the importance of tactical combined arms skills is repeatedly stressed, but the examples themselves and the praise lavished on a major who gets it right shows, that it was very far from a uniformly achieved standard. So do the casualty rolls. But here are some examples.

One way to attack with infantry is to infiltrate a battalion every night and have them shoot up outposts they have bypassed, in the morning. Relying on the German doctrine of immediate counterattacks on all scales to retake lost ground. This is way more efficient at bleeding the defenders than going over the top at dawn into waiting machineguns and registered artillery.

It is better to send small pathfinder teams of elite "recon" ahead of a main attack, to blind enemy outposts and find the gaps between his strongpoints - and then to back them up with volunteer "storm companies" of veterans, well armed with tommy guns and demo charges and flamethrowers, than to simply try to overpack the frontage with a regiment hitting on a defending company's front. The second may take the ground but the losses will be very high, and a ill timed enemy artillery barrage can butcher the attackers regardless of how thin the defenders are on the ground.

It is better to bring up small cannon and ATRs to fire at the embrasures of pillboxes, and then approach with small teams of pioneers under that cover fire, than to assault again on a frontage where a previous attack failed.

It is sometimes better to send tanks first to spare the infantry, especially when enemy AT defenses are weak, or when surprise can be achieved. Doctrine may say "save the armor for the exploitation phase", but throw it out the window when there is a tactical opportunity.

Massive artillery preps are ineffective without detailed prior intelligence and staff work to locate enemy firing positions exactly, not just general lines of resistence. When such intel work has been thoroughly done, on the other hand, the defending artillery can often be silenced in the first hours of the attack - and German strongpoint defense schemes relied on artillery fire to hold the ground between the strongpoints.

What one sees over the course of the war is individual Russian officers discover these things, they teach subordinates within their command, and try to propogate the lessons further by training documents and admonition and staff reviews. But the adoption of improved methods is quite uneven. On the ground, it is episodic, not uniform. The old mistakes persist clear to the end of the war in some cases, and around midwar remain the norm.

Sometimes the higher ups assume that things they've learned themselves and taught to one crop of subordinates will be reliably implemented, but it doesn't happen that way on the ground. Then they ask too much of the men, not realizing that at the tactical level things are being done in older and dumber ways. There are numerous examples of this in Zhukov's offensives, for example. His own training writing shows he knows this stuff. Sometimes, when he has a long time to prepare an offensive, it goes very well. Sometimes, especially in hasty ones, it gets all stuffed up and the attacks go in repeatedly anyway. Vatutin is good at this sort of thing, if you want an example of relative success at it. Some of the 1941 era "political" marshals are just awful - an example would be Budenny (hopeless), or Timoshenko (poor).

As for Chuikov on tactical detail, yes it shows the attempt to impart such lessons. But it also shows a level of micro management that happens in "command push", and that he felt was required precisely because he couldn't rely on his junior officers to just know this stuff and get all of it right.

The command push and doctrine-teaching limits of the Russian system led to a culture that influenced all of this. That reads too vague, I'll flesh it out. Under Zhukov in particular, but throughout the force, there was a division of responsibility between higher commanders and junior field officers - a division of blame for failures, a division of expectations for the part of the task each was expected to accomplish. A junior officer was not expected to be infallible, to always win, to always know the right tactical solution. He was expected to "lay his ship alongside the enemy", to use the British navy equivalent from Nelson's era. In other words, to fight, to ignore danger, to show the courage necessary to drive his men into action along the lines his seniors had mapped out. A junior officer was blameworthy if he did not make the attempt or make it "hard" enough - not if he failed. It was inexcusable to fail to implement an order without showing a long casualty list. But with one, the junior could plausibly argue he did all he could but it just could not be done.

The seniors, on the other hand, were responsible for providing the men with the tools they needed and tasks they could successfully accomplish. It was the army level and above, that was expected to know such things and to manipulate them. Failure was the measure there, and trying wasn't good enough. Blaming the men was not acceptable.

That is the sort of thing I meant by "a culture". I sometimes call it "Zhukov's school for aggression" - meaning, he wants his field officers to be tough as nails taskdrivers with the courage of lions who pride themselves on their insensitivity to hardship and eagerness to close with and murder the enemy. If they aren't geniuses he won't hold it against them. Genuises belong on the staff anyway, counting shells and running railway timetables. He wants testosterone by the bucket, not grey matter.

That has its virtues in a command push, attrition strategy military system. But tactical expertise in using the exact weapon and method for each job, is not one of them. Men trained in that culture tend to look on every asset they are given as another hammer to smash the enemy with, and their normal tendency is to throw everything straight at him and hope something sticks in his eye. They aren't surgeons picking the exact instrument off a nurse's tray to make a single incension, then switching to the next tool, etc.

[JasonC]

To Vark - the Germans did think that possession of the initiative was extremely important, more important than it actually was, because they had been so successful in the past using their formula of offensive use of concentrated armor. But I am not sure the planners of Citadel in particular can be charged with too much complacency. Model knew it would be hard, and Manstein thought he needed 25 more infantry divisions to make it work. Both were confident enough to attempt it regardless, but expected pain and difficulty. I think the atmosphere of the whole high command was that it was something of a gamble, though they were used to gambles and past ones had gone well for them.

The Germans were much more overconfident in 1942. The real sea change in the German estimate of the Russians comes with Uranus; before then they have contempt for them and expect anything they (the Germans) try to work. Such failures as occur they put down to their own mistakes or external factors (logistics, weather) rather than the Russians. A lot of that has been "cured" by mid 1943, and they have a healthy respect for how dangerous the Russians now are. But they still think the possession of the initiative is a talisman and can be worth a dead enemy army group. That expectation was "learned" from France to the 1942 summer offensive, and Kursk was the first time it wasn't true.

As for the delay imposed by the Russian fortification system, it wasn't large in practice. The Germans are through the front line rifle divisions by the evening of the first day. In the best prepared sectors, they've hit the second line hard before nightfall. That isn't exactly a lot of time. In the sectors where the mines and water obstacles do the most good, they buy about 4 hours and reduce an attacking panzer corps by something like a battalion of armor.

No, the reason the reserves reach the front in time is not that the Russians have so much longer for the breakthrough at Kursk, compared to earlier penetration battles. It is that the reserves are already close to the threatened spot, and numerous enough to put full strength forces (local odds neutralizing amounts) in front of each threatened point.

Take the south for example. The Germans hit 3 different places in corps strength. In a past offensive, even one of those breaking clear into the operational rear might be enough to dislocate the whole front, spread panic, cause ill adapted panic reactions that go in piecemeal and arrive too late, etc. But when there are sufficient reserves to neutralize the local odds edge behind all 3, and within 48 hours, no such dislocation occurs. The Germans do still make progress. They still have a chance to fight through those reserves and maintain their momentum after running the Russians out of them, locally. But in the pure tempo race of sufficient forces to each threatened point, the Russians win because they have enough reserves in the right spots (or are "deployed deep enough", overall), not because the front-line break-in takes an extra couple of hours.

[Vark]

Jason, a good summation of the command zeitgeist of the two sides, thanks. Are there any good sources about the planning of Citadel, I know that Hitler said just thinking about it made him sick to the stomach, but what were the planners thinking? I have just read Martin Middlebrook's book on Arnhem and found the first quarter, detailing the planning for the operation, fascinating. As the years creep on I find my fascination is for the operational and strategic overviews rather than the mud and blood of the tactical, in direct contrast to my younger days, when battles exerted a fascination that their campaigns never did.

On the point of the delay imposed by the fortifications I did not make myself clear, I was alluding to the operational delay caused by the wait for the Panthers/Ferdinands appearance. The latter, with its thick side armour tasked to take on Russian inter-locked AT strongpoints. Did the very presence of such an extensive defensive network cause critical months to be wasted or would the outcome, sans Uber Kitties, (Tigers excepted) have been the same?

[John Kettler]

Vark,

I think that delay cost the Germans dearly, allowing the Russians to massively dig in, stockpile munitions and bring up those staggering reserves. In return, we have the all too familiar Ferdinand saga and the less well known Panther story. Here's an extensive discussion of the sad state of the Panthers. (Fair use)

http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000003.html

"There is a quartermaster report on the 10th that reports the losses as 76 tanks up to the 10th (this is certianly the same 76 tanks as mentioned earlier). It categorizes the losses as follows:

4 Total loss

13 Lost due to engine failure

33 Fuel pump failure

4 Gun failure

4 Drive failure

18 Minor failure (with most caused by mines).

14 will be ready for action by the 10th."

Worse, the new tanks were crewed by men with very little equipment familiarity, unit cohesion or anything higher than a platoon level exercise, operating with untuned radios on unreconnoitered terrain.

http://warandgame.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/panther-debut-at-kursk-july-1943/

Here's a quick vid on the Panther's woes, together with a nice overview of the Kursk plan. Citadel was to have originally taken place in the spring, but the uberkitty delay postponed the attack until early July.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vvo93Pb-3g

On balance, I think the Germans would've done much better to have gone with the original plan.

Regards,

John Kettler

[JasonC]

The German plan was Zeitzler's. He had replaced Halder as chief of staff the previous year, when Halder was sacked. His optimism had attracted Hitler and he jumped numerous more senior men to get the post. Zeitzler was a competent but not outstanding staff officer, and weaker in presence and command bearing than most of his contemporaries of similar rank (which Hitler also valued, as pliable). He was a protege of Kleist and his main claim to previous fame was the organization of the balkans campaign in 1941 while on Kleist's staff - a difficult logistical task over a wide area with limited facilities, accomplished under great time pressure. He was not a tactican or an operational strategist, but a planning bureaucrat. He organized the offensive reasonably well, largely copying prior models, but left the method details to the army commanders.

Model was the brain behind the northern drive, as commander of 9th Army. He devised significantly new tactics for it. Assault-gun-heavy infantry formations to make the initial break in, and the panzer divisions behind them in deep column. This was a sound idea, though in the execution the reinforced IDs hit the strongest Russian sector and stalled out in a brawl, while the PDs sent in to their left did better, and were chewing through the Russian reserves when Kutuzov hit. Incidentally, the failures of the Elephants are pretty exaggerated (they killed a lot of Russian armor opposite, and their ruinous losses amount to a couple of companies; hopes pin on them had just been unrealistically high), and on the whole the assault gun spearhead idea worked OK. (It used Elephants, Brummbars, and lots of StuGs).

In the south the brain of the operation was Manstein. Arguably he attacked in too spread a manner, the AD Kempf portion in particular contributing relatively little to the overall drive. But that is largely hindsight. If any one of the hitting corps had broke through clean it would have looked smart. As it was, he had an inadequate reserve, and was unable to support the most success drive (by the SS panzer corps) sufficiently. When the wings stalled out he had only tactical achievements left as possible. It was not his best performance as an operational planner, and his actual contribution to the course of the drive itself was minimal.

The lack of infantry is especially noticable in the south, incidentally. They could have used a dozen IDs there, easy. The long front along the Donets to the Mius ate up lots of AG south's infantry and didn't leave any depth behind the attack. AG south reserves amounted to one PD and one motorized infantry division, backstopping the whole southern front. Arguably, AD Kempf in reserve at Kharkov would have been superior, as a use of existing forces, and the whole thing would have made more sense with a lot more infantry gathered from elsewhere.

It is all well and good to decry the delay in launching the attack, but the Germans were not remotely ready in May, themselves. They didn't gather adequate forces for the attack as it was. A May version would have been more of a shoestring operation. Model was the man most directly responsible for the delay - he argued that his Panzer IV equipped PDs could not penetrate the Russian ATG lines on their own without excessive losses (in retrospect, untrue, but a tactically reasonable concern). In June the operations staff recommended cancellation (Guderian already had) to build reserves, but by then Hitler was convinced of the need for the attempt. The Russians opposite had already flagged the area (Vatutin was early and gave an excellent analysis of the likely course of events, that proved spot on), and they had "Lucy" and "Magic" intel on German intentions. There was never any prospect of strategic surprise or catching the Russians with their pants down.

[John Kettler]

JasonC,

I don't have the Russian defensive buildup timetable for Kursk, but maybe you do. Granted, the Germans didn't have everything they wanted, but how much worse would it have been for the Russians without all those additional months to prepare? On balance, I think the correlation of forces would've been better for the Germans had Citadel been launched in the spring than the summer, though I agree that there was no hope of obtaining strategic surprise. Still, a most interesting what if?

Regards,

John Kettler