The Battle of Kursk: Myths and Reality

[Andreas]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

I think after Dec 1942, you need to stop discussing what "the Germans" wanted, "the German mission", or "the German Army". By January 1943, it was all about Hitler. Everyone else was along for the ride. Hitler was the national head of state, the supreme commander of the entire military, and the head of the Army. The brilliant strategies at Kursk, Mortain, Ardennes, etc., were a result of his orders. Others may have done the strategic, operational and tactical planning, but I don't really believe anyone else had a say.

In relation to Kursk, that point has been quite thoroughly disproven. In relation to other battles as well.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Andreas:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

I think after Dec 1942, you need to stop discussing what "the Germans" wanted, "the German mission", or "the German Army". By January 1943, it was all about Hitler. Everyone else was along for the ride. Hitler was the national head of state, the supreme commander of the entire military, and the head of the Army. The brilliant strategies at Kursk, Mortain, Ardennes, etc., were a result of his orders. Others may have done the strategic, operational and tactical planning, but I don't really believe anyone else had a say.

In relation to Kursk, that point has been quite thoroughly disproven. In relation to other battles as well. </font>

[Wartgamer]

Manstein wanted to use a defensive/manuver approach to destroy the Soviets after they attacked.

Guderian is oft quoted as wanting no German offensive and wanted to compleat the German armor evolution.

Zeitsler (sp?) wanted a hootenany big blowout.

Hitler was a like a gambler on tilt because he went for the blow out. Stalin played it safe and listened to his generals.

[Andreas]

Based on Toeppel's dissertation 'Die Offensive gegen Kursk 1943 - Legenden, Mythen, Propaganda', the following took place:

1) Manstein suggested an offensive as continuation of his Charkov offensive before the Rasputitza

2) Zeitzler strongly pushed for this idea (but after the war wanted nothing to do with it)

3) von Kluge saw it as the 'best solution' as late as June, despite the repeat delays

4) Manstein discussed the offensive in 'Verlorene Siege', saying it was fundamentally correct, but offering his defensive idea as an alternative (Schlagen aus der Nachhand). Whether this was in fact feasible, is debatable.

[JasonC]

Andreas has basically covered the positions, but a few additions. Manstein supported the attack as eventually delivered, and it was basically his plan. He had originally proposed continuing the earlier spring attack immediately after the end of the mud period, but that was largely a bid for forces and logistically impractical.

Of the planned force, he said he needed 25 additional infantry divisions and if he had them it would succeed. People thought he was nuts and that they did not remotely have them. They found them soon enough, in much worse conditions, to hold a line at all after the Russian counteroffensive got going.

What Manstein knew when he made that estimate is how much the earlier German successes had depended on infantry in deep column behind the attack to widen the shoulders of penetrations, hold them open, mop up formations being bypassed, and contain and overwhelm any large forces successfully surrounded. His France 1940 plan had had that. The 1941 attacks, at least those at the border and for the first phase of the lung to Moscow in October, had that.

When one looks at how the offensive failed, by force to space at the point of attack soaring in the north (where Model was in charge), and pinching in from the shoulders in the south (where Manstein was the operational commander), it is clear Manstein knew what he was doing and what he was saying.

Model wanted a column formation because he knew the Russian depth would have to be countered, fought through, somehow. He never got a chance to use his third echelon armor because the Russian counteroffensive on his left hit first.

Manstein knew that reserves "pancaking" to at the point of main effort would thicken into a very tough front, if the attack were too narrowly focused in space. He had much greater success than Model because he hit in several locations and shifted the axes of attack imaginatively, letting tactical opportunities pull the spearheads around.

But his mobile forces spent too long clearing their flanks and failed at the edges before long, as they faced layered reserves. These were not the highest powered formations with all the specials, they were typically single IDs and standard single PDs, on the flanks of the attacking corps.

Imagine he and Model each had another dozen IDs. Model could have achieved his desired column depth without putting all the armor on one axis. Every attacking corps in the south would have had 4 IDs behind it, meaning up to a corps holding and hitting at each flank of each penetration. Clearly that would have made the local successes achieved much more lasting.

The increment in scale is also the proper magnitude if you look at the rate of expenditure of Russian reserves - if anything it may not have been enough without added armor too. The Russians had run out of them in both front-line fronts. They were just committing the reserve front, which had 32 RDs. One tank army was needed to check 1SS, while Manstein had one Pz corps in reserve. Model also had one he commited north toward Orel instead of to the attack. Steppe front had 5 other mech formations comparable to a PD in combat power.

So, within a factor of 4:3 or so, Manstein's additional force request was on target - that is how much more the Germans would have needed to have a serious shot, a chance of outlasting the Russian reserve stream with their own, and making tactical successes pay off in some larger sense. To be favored, they might have needed half a dozen additional PDs as well.

A big difference is, the manpower for 25 IDs did exist - unlike the tanks for another 6 PDs. More urgent, emergency mobilization efforts could have produced such a wave. The Germans frequently had to, to patch together a gaping hole somewhere, at later times. But no one besides Manstein thought it anything but excessive caution and trying to be sure, or thought the issue would turn on an extra couple armies worth of infantry forces. Manstein was simply told such forces were not available, that the request was impossible, and accepted it.

Guderian was the one consistently against attacking at all. But he was also without a line command at the time. As inspector of panzer troops he was trying to upgrade the tank fleet now that full economic mobilization was in swing and new types were becoming available. He saw the task as upgrading the German fleet to something the Russians could not handle. He overestimated the ease of standing on the defensive, I believe.

All the German commanders with actual responsibilty for fighting the Russians that summer, saw the matter as less than optional, and as urgent. They believed the Russians would hit them if they did not hit first, and they believed, out of strong recent experience and doctrine, that the attacker had the advantage in operational armor warfare, as long as he had any idea what he was doing.

Manstein thought a mobile defense would be practical, and advanced a detailed alternative to the attack. But most others thought conceding the initiative would be extremely dangerous. Manstein himself agreed with their arguments, that the attacker did have an edge in such things. His defensive scheme was predicated on the Russians not knowing "the ropes" yet, on luring them into a repeat of the overextension they went for at the end of their winter campaign. Clear back to the Dnepr if necessary, then a cut southeast to the Black or the Azov.

Which would mean putting practically all the German infantry in the Ukraine "en prise", vulnerable to destruction unless a German mobile counter destroyed the Russian tank forces first. Understand, nobody with front line responsibilities, knowing recent Russian strengths, thought they could stand there in the open steppe and take the Russian shot, without giving up lots of ground. They had no hope of stopping them at the start line.

So they thought the attack was their best shot. They undoubtedly underestimated the potential of armor in a mobile defense. But since they had no sound doctrine to tell them of that potential, this is not surprising. Most of the commanders were relieved when they got the attack off, before the Russians got theirs of. They did not think the defender would have an edge and they were being suckers to go first, they thought the attackers had the edge, and that the Russians fully intended to attack, but were still massing forces to make it bigger when it hit.

[ June 15, 2005, 05:30 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[Barkhorn1x]

Again, good stuff JasonC.

But I do think Dorosh has a point about Hitler - although his interventions really came to the fore AFTER Citadel (Stalingrad notwithstanding).

Do you think Hitler thought he had to get more involved in response to Citadel's failure? Kind of like - "Well, we tried it YOUR way, now we will do it MINE!"

(Of course his way - "stand fast" - would prove to be disasterous on numerous occasions - as it was at Stalingrad).

Barkhorn.

[Wartgamer]

German Plans

Manstein pressed for a new offensive based on the same successful lines he had just pursued at Kharkov, when he cut off an overextended Soviet offensive. He suggested tricking the Soviets into attacking in the south against the desperately re-forming 6th Army, leading them into the Donets Basin in the eastern Ukraine. He would then turn south from Kharkov on the eastern side of the Donets River towards Rostov and trap the entire southern wing of the Red Army against the Sea of Azov.

OKW did not approve the plan, and instead turned their attention to the obvious bulge in the lines between Orel and Kharkov. There were three complete armies in and around the salient, and pinching it off would trap almost a fifth of the Red Army"s manpower. It would also result in a much straighter and shorter line, and capture the strategically useful railway town of Kursk located on the main north-south railway line running from Rostov to Moscow.

In March the plans were settled. Walther Model"s 9th Army would attack south from Orel while Hoth"s 4th Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf under the overall command of Manstein would attack north from Kharkov. They were to meet near Kursk, but if the offensive went well they were allowed to continue forward on their own initiative, with a general plan to create a new line on the Don River far to the east.

Unlike recent efforts, Hitler gave the General Staff considerable control over the planning of the battle. Over the next few weeks they continued to increase the scope of the forces attached to the front, stripping the entire German line of practically anything remotely useful in the upcoming battle. The battle was first set for May 4, but then delayed until June 12, and finally July 4 in order to allow more time for new weapons to arrive from Germany, especially the new Panther tanks.

It is worth discussing this plan in terms of the traditional, and successful, blitzkrieg tactic used up to this point. Blitzkrieg depended on massing all available troops at a single point on the enemy line, breaking through, and then running as fast as possible to cut off the front line troops from supply and information. Direct combat was to be avoided at all costs, there is no point in attacking a strongpoint if the same ends can be had by instead attacking the trucks supplying them. The best place for Blitzkrieg was the least expected, which is why they had attacked through the Ardennes in 1940, and towards Stalingrad in 1942.

OKW"s Operation Citadel was the antithesis of this concept. The point of attack was painfully obvious to anyone with a map, and reflected World War I thinking more than the Blitzkrieg. A number of German commanders questioned the idea, notably Heinz Guderian who asked Hitler Was it really necessary to attack Kursk, and indeed in the east that year at all? Do you think anyone even knows where Kursk is?. Perhaps more surprisingly Hitler replied I know. The thought of it turns my stomach.

Simply put, it was an uninspired plan.

[Wartgamer]

Jason's Infantry Division theory seems to further fortify that Kursk was anti-blitzkrieg warfare.

Not sure if he is just throwing it in to further his 'German's didn't mobilize in time' previous theories.

One could just total up the German 'dumb' losses (Stalingrad and Afrika) and there would have been more manpower available.

The Germans could have realized as early as July 41 that they were being bled. They more than likely saw the losses early in Russia as falling in line with previous successes that would end soon.

But the Germans lost 54K KIA/MIA during July 41. They also had 'non-recoverable' WIA who would never fight again. Aug-Sep-Oct 41 showed similar bleeding but with a slight downward trend. Nov 41 should have been a decision month. They 'only' had 33K KIA/MIA this month. But Barbarossa had cost them about 25 divisions worth of manpower already. They still had the winter losses coming.

1942 saw a similar long bleed. More than likely the Germans had a heck of a time just getting replacement pools filled. 1942 capped with the debacle at Stalingrad (where panzer troops were misused by the way).

Could the Germans have really had 25 ID 'extra' by July 43? Given the way they screwed up till then? It would seem that they would have had to have raised them before Barbarossa and there was no real reason to do so. It would have required they put the war with the Soviets off for awhile also.

[ June 16, 2005, 11:43 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

[General Bolt]

Another link to some useful Kursk data.

[Wartgamer]

I havent read this yet but will throw it out there

http://etd02.lnx390.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-0604103-113808/

Abstract

The battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 was a pivotal battle of World War II. The defeat at Kursk placed the Wehrmacht on the permanent strategic defensive on the Eastern Front. The opening of the Soviet archives after 1989 has permitted more thorough analysis of that battle and produced greater appreciation of the Red Army’s performance, while casting doubt on the notion that the Germans were close to an operational victory.

Preceding the clash, both sides prepared feverishly, attempting to bring the units involved to their maximum capability by replacing personnel, upgrading equipment, and conducting training. The Germans delayed the attack several times to deploy the new armored vehicles. Soviet leaders gathered intelligence from their own sources as well as from ULTRA, which was the codename for British intelligence gained from the German Enigma machine. The Soviets, in anticipation of the onslaught, built a massive and intricate defense.

Kursk began on July 4, 1943 with a German attack in the south to gain observation for artillery. The main battle began on July 5 when the Germans attacked both shoulders of the Kursk salient. The fighting was furious. In the north the frontlines quickly stabilized, but in the south German forces made progress. The critical moment occurred when they reached the village of Prokhorovka on July 12. The II SS Panzer Corps and the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank and Fifth Guards Armies fought to a tactical draw with hundreds of tanks lost on both sides. However, the Allied invasion of Sicily prompted Hitler to transfer panzer divisions from Kursk to the Mediterranean Theater, thus seriously reducing the assets available to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the commander of the German units in the south. This decision essentially ended the Battle of Kursk.

Had Hitler given his subordinates more freedom to destroy the Soviet armored reserves, they might have mitigated the catastrophe. But the Germans at Kursk could not have achieved victory. It was a simple matter of the Soviets outnumbering the Germans in all categories, and the Red Army had improved its capabilities to the point it could execute devastating deep, combined arms operations against the Wehrmacht.

[Bigduke6]

One thing I would like to toss into the conversation: as of July 1943, the Germans had no reason to suspect a full-blown breakthrough attack on an operational level would fail.

The last two years of war had shown the Germans that, when they put their minds to it to make a deliberate breakthrough assault, the chances were extremely good the Germans would break through. They had the equipment, the doctrine, the training, and the experience to do that; and they had repeatedly busted set Russian defenses.

The Wehrmacht's defeats, in the German mindset of the day, had been pretty limited and certainly were anomolies. Stalingrad for instance obviously was a disaster, but that went down in the professional German mind very much as an urban assault that stalled and then was obliterated due to poor force dispostions and the failure of allied flank formations. Moscow and the Caucauses fit into that category as well; the German army gets so far, is running on a logistical shoestring, and then ebbs backwards when hit with bigtime Soviet reserves.

Add into that mental baggage German counterattack successes at Kharkov and Rzhev, and to me anyway the Summer 1943 attitude of the German military decision-makers (Gudarian excepted) seems pretty logical: If we Germans get the resources to put in an organized operational-level armoed attack, the odds are we are going to win. We will break through and the Soviets just are not fast enough on their feet to deal with that.

As of Summer 1943 the Germans hadn't seen a Soviet defense they could not demolish.

The Germans were aware they could get into trouble at the end of logistical tethers 2 and 3 hundred kilometers long, and Kursk was sold as a way of getting around that with geographically limited objectives. By aiming at pinching off the Orel salient, the distances Model and v. Manstein needed to cover to link up were not hundreds but dozens of kilometers. So the attack must have seemed grounded on immpecable logic: we can break through, the distances are reasonable, the battle will be relatively focused, mobile, tactical, and decisive; rather than static and attritional.

The spanner in the works of course was that the Soviets at Kursk developed an in-depth defense deeper than anything the Germans had ever seen before. Using tens of thousands of civilians to move earth, they built a defense not to hold a single static line, as they generally had in the past, but rather to force the Germans to pay in armored vehicles for every kilometer advanced. It is a bit simplistic, but one could say the Soviets at Kursk changed the focus of their anti-blitzkrieg tactics from terrain-holding to panzer-destroying.

It wasn't a sudden burst of brilliance from Stalin's or Athena's forehead that was behind the new approach. My opinion, the simple presence of large Soviet reserves was a big reason - the Soviets defended in depth against panzers at Kursk for the first time, specifically because they for the first time had the men, equipment, and ammunition to do so.

Another factor certainly was Soviet trial and error: Stalin and company had figured out a very strong defense forward was a recipe for penetration elsewhere and huges losses in a Kessel.

It is a lot, given what the Germans had seen go before, to expect them to have predicted the Soviets would pull the kind of defense they did at Kursk. Who would have thought the Soviets could come up with a way to take the steam out of full-blown panzer assaults?

If you factor in things like Hitler's promises the Panthers and Elefants would give the assault the sharpest teeth ever, an endemic Wehrmacht tendency to underestimate the brains running the Red Army, and the simple fact the Red Army had the last two years running been handed huge defeats by a German summer offensive, then it becomes clear Kursk at the outset must have seemed like a very viable operation indeed to most German officers involved.

[Xenophile]

I wonder to what extent simple psychology made the Germans attempt Zitadelle? They had invaded the Soviet Union expecting quick victory and found that it was much stronger and more resilient than they had believed. If they were incapable of achieving even the limited offensive aims of Zitadelle, didn't the conclusion follow inevitably that their nation was bound for defeat? How difficult would it have been to accept that?

[coe]

question...so all the german tank losses during kursk - were most of these repairable or written off? or abandoned during the retreat?

Conan

P.S. any decent accounts of what happened during the Orel and Mius River counteroffensives?

C.

[Andreas]

There were 248 total write offs for the Germans to mid-July on the Kursk front.

They really started losing their tanks after this, when they had to abandon vehicles in repair shops because of the Soviet advance.

[JasonC]

Whereas the reduction in runners was greater than that in the SS corps alone. At the start of the operation, nearly all AFVs in the area are operational, 90% or so. By mid July, the original strength in runners has basically been cut in half. They never come back, either. Some do cycle out of repair of course, but joined by others hit and sent into repair. Continual replacements in increasing numbers reaching the front only maintain the runners strength, well into the fall.

[Grisha]

Jason,

25 infantry divisions? That's anywhere from 5 to 8 infantry corps. That would amount to anywhere from 10-20% of the entire German forces deployed on the Eastern front. Assuming that such a weakening of the German line would not be noted by the Soviets, that is a huge amount of activity along railways, roads, and especially signal traffic--all focusing around Orel and Belgorod. How do you think the Soviets would've reacted to such activity? Who's to say that the Soviets wouldn't have pre-empted the German offensive with offensives of their own when they realized how weak the German line was elsewhere?

[JasonC]

They had to raise that much new just to hold the line by the fall. Earlier as depth behind the attack would have been better than late as stopgaps trying to hold at Kiev...