Kursk 1943

The Greatest Battle of the Second World War

Roman Toeppel

• Publisher: Helion and Company
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781912866793
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

The Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 was one of the greatest battles in military history involving more than 3 million soldiers, 10, 000 tanks and 8, 000 aircraft. While many books have been written on this allegedly most decisive battle of the Second World War, many legends live on, above all because of misleading information that recur in most publications – even in the most recent ones. Based on almost 20 years of research reassessing the primary sources, Roman Toeppel sheds light on the phase of decision-making, the preparations and the development of the battle in an engaging style that grips the reader's attention from the first page on. The author concentrates on little-known developments and events leading the reader to astonishing results. He also gives entirely new insights into the historiographic appraisal of this battle, putting thoroughly researched facts against erroneous popular beliefs, myths and legends that have been passed down among historians for generations.

1

The Strategic Context: The Preparations for the Summer Battle, 1943

The Strategic Situation of the German Reich in Spring 1943

For the German Reich, the year 1943 began with a series of catastrophic defeats. In February, the remainder of the Sixth Army capitulated in the Stalingrad pocket. The announcement of their surrender had ‘a shock effect on the German people’, as German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels admitted in his diary on 4 February 1943.1 The defeat at Stalingrad came as a shock not only to the home front, the frontline soldiers, too, were apprehensive of how things would turn out. The advancing Red Army seemed unstoppable; on 8 February Soviet troops recaptured Kursk and on 16 February the Germans had to evacuate Khar′kov. Two days later Joseph Goebbels called for ‘total war’ in his speech given at the Berlin Sport Palace. And when a platoon leader of an assault gun battery stationed on the Eastern Front, Lieutenant Ludwig Schön, wrote in a letter that the ‘fall of Stalingrad and the total war really are a test of nerves. Peace at all cost?’ he must have echoed the feelings of many other Germans.2

Yet Stalingrad was not the only portent indicating a change in the fortunes of war in favour of the Allies. After its defeats at Midway in June 1942 and on Guadalcanal and New Guinea at the beginning of 1943, Germany’s most important ally Japan was now definitely forced into a position of strategic defence. On 21 January 1943, the Allied powers moreover agreed on the Casablanca directive, a joint approach to intensifying the strategic bombing of Germany. The nature of the subsequent phase of the air war, which also saw the introduction of new technical means, first manifested itself in the Battle of the Ruhr. This battle began during the night of 6 March 1943 with a heavy air raid on Essen; when it ended on 31 July 1943, over 15,000 people in the Ruhr area had lost their lives. As Goebbels noted in his diary, Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, Chief of Aircraft Procurement and Supply, had told him on 9 April that it would probably take until November 1943 ‘to answer the English on a larger scale, and until next spring, that is a year from now, to pay them back in kind. […] Until then the British can, if they are actually able to do it, lay a large part of the territory of the Reich in ashes.’3 During the attack on Dortmund on 24 May 1943 alone the Royal Air Force dropped more than 2,500t of bombs – about as much as the Luftwaffe dropped over Britain in 1943 in total. Even towns outside of the Ruhr area were destroyed in heavy raids during the Battle of the Ruhr, such as the raid on Wuppertal in the night of 30 May 1943, which caused the first ‘firestorm’ and cost 3,500 lives.

In May 1943, the German Reich suffered two more bitter defeats: On 13 May Army Group Afrika surrendered; 270,000 German and Italian troops were taken prisoner by the Allies. Yet only two months earlier, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Kriegsmarine, Admiral of the Fleet Karl Dönitz, had told Hitler that Tunisia was a ‘first-class strategic position.’4 Now it was irrevocably lost and, as a consequence, the Allied invasion of Italy had become simply a matter of time. The same month went down as ‘Black May’ in the history of the Kriegsmarine. Through tactical and technical innovations the Allies finally managed to turn the tide of submarine warfare, even though in March 1943 the Allied merchant navy had still suffered significant losses in the North Atlantic due to German U-boats. In fact, on 2 April Goebbels triumphantly commented on this last success: ‘The U-boat war really is our ultimate weapon, which gives the English a hard fight.’5 The German leadership was all the more dismayed when in May successes could no longer be reported, while German U-boats were lost on a near daily basis – 40 boats in total until the end of the month. On 14 May, Admiral of the Fleet Dönitz reported to Adolf Hitler that the Germans were facing ‘the most serious crisis of U-boat warfare’ because the enemy not only inflicted heavy losses on the U-boats but actually kept them from fighting in the first place through the use of new tracking devices.6

In view of all these problems and of the very tense situation, Hitler reasoned that he had only one option – to bring about a military decision in the East. In a meeting on the Obersalzberg on 25 June 1943, he explained to Goebbels that whilst one would just have to patiently bear the current defensive phase, new weapons which would change the war in the air and at sea in favour of the German Reich would be ready within the next few weeks and months. The key front, Hitler stressed, was the Eastern Front. After all, the Wehrmacht had managed to bring the Soviet winter offensive to a halt and recapture Khar′kov in March 1943. This victory not only increased prestige and served to reassure Germany’s wavering allies but also gave reason to hope that the war might not just yet be militarily lost. On 14 March 1943, Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South, wrote to his wife in relief: ‘So it seems that thanks to our success we have once more survived the crisis in the East. Well, one should not assume that it is the end just because things sometimes go wrong, as many people at home surely prophesied.’7

In view of this success Hitler thought that the war might not be lost – a political compromise with the Soviet Union was out of the question for him. In a speech to Reichs- and Gauleiter on 7 May 1943, he even talked about achieving his old goal of German world domination, as Joseph Goebbels noted: ‘The Führer expresses his absolute certainty that the Reich will one day dominate all of Europe. We still have to fight a great many battles but they will doubtlessly lead to a spectacular success, from whence the path to world domination is all but predetermined. Whoever controls Europe will thereby seize the leadership of the world.’8 In an address to commanders-in-chief and commanding generals of the Ostheer (the German Army in the East) on 1 July 1943, Hitler reiterated that for Germany the battle in the East was ‘a battle for Lebensraum, without which the German Reich and the German nation cannot exist. Germany must become the hegemonic power in Europe.’9 However, the German-occupied Soviet territories were more than future ‘Lebensraum for the German people – in economic terms, Hitler considered the East as decisive for the outcome of the war. On the one hand, he believed that in the long run the war could not be continued without the rich natural resources of the Donets Basin, the coalfield in the southeast of Ukraine. On the other hand, the German economy was in constant need of new workers and largely relied on forced labourers from the occupied eastern territories. In fact, the shortage of labour began to play a crucial role even in military operational planning. Whilst in 1941/42 two million Soviet prisoners of war had been starved to death, it was an explicit objective of the German summer offensive in 1943 to capture as many soldiers of the Red Army as possible, so they could be used for forced labour. Furthermore, the eastern theatre of operations was of key importance for the German Reich also because it was here that in 1941/42 the mass murder of the European Jews had been taking place. News of this began to spread in Germany by mid-1942; the German population reacted to it mostly with a fear of retribution, a fear that was deliberately fuelled by German propaganda in order to strengthen the endurance of the Volksgemeinschaft. But their guilty conscience over the mass murder of Jews was not the only source of fear for the Germans.

The Red Army’s victories gave new hope and confidence to the Soviet prisoners of war and civilians who were forced to work as Ostarbeiter in the German Reich. A report from the SS Security Service on the morale in Germany dated 25 February 1943 states that the changes in the military situation greatly affected the ‘discipline and working morale’ of the Ostarbeiter. Now, they openly spoke about retaliation against the Germans, confident that after the Soviets’ entry into Germany they would torture and kill all Germans. Female Ostarbeiter who worked as domestic helpers for German families said they would ‘show their gratitude for good treatment by making sure the respective families would die a quick death.’10 The Germans’ fear of defeat grew even worse in the following weeks. In early 1943, the bodies of about 4,500 Polish officers were found in mass graves in the Katyn forest, west of Smolensk, who had been murdered by the Soviet NKVD (Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennykh del, People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in spring 1940. In April 1943, Goebbels used this discovery for a major propaganda campaign aimed at fuelling the German population’s fear of Soviet atrocities. At the same time, more and more Germans doubted that the war could actually still be won. Even old party members, such as the Landeshauptmann (State Governor) of the province of Westphalia, Karl-Friedrich Kolbow, became increasingly pessimistic. On 22 March 1943, Kolbow wrote in his diary that it ‘all depends on whether we can deliver the coup de grâce to Russia this summer.’11

German Strategic Considerations on the Eastern Front, 1943

Due to the heavy losses suffered during the two major offensives on the Eastern Front in 1941 and 1942 and the heavy defeats they had to face in early 1943, the German leadership had to decide which strategy it should – and still could – adopt on the Eastern Front. Should the Wehrmacht launch an early attack on the Eastern Front in spring 1943 in order to forestall the expected Soviet offensives and thus maintain the initiative? This option offered the Germans the advantage of deciding on the main focus of the battle, or whether it would be better to remain on the defensive and waiting until the Red Army attacked. In this case, the Wehrmacht could – having repelled the Soviet troops, who would then be worn out – mount a counteroffensive and advance far beyond the original positions. Manstein and other German military officers called this latter concept a ‘backhand blow’ (Schlagen aus der Nachhand).12 The Red Army had successfully applied this concept at Stalingrad in November 1942, and Manstein had used it in February/March 1943 when he stopped the Soviet winter offensive at Khar′kov, cutting off and destroying the Soviet offensive forces. Such a ‘backhand blow’ on a large scale was what Manstein had in mind for the following spring and summer. On 3 February 1943 he sent a teletype message to General Kurt Zeitzler, Chief of the Army General Staff, with his estimate of the situation ‘to be passed on to the Führer. In his assessment Manstein suggested ‘dragging the Russian southern flank along in battle to the Melitopol-Dnepropetrovsk line in order to first hit their northern front of attack and sever their northern and southern connections, taking advantage of the favourable railway network. Following this, turning to the southwest [sic!] and with cover from the north, the enemy should then be pushed towards the Sea of Azov. For this operation’, Manstein continued, ‘it is necessary that the Army Group [South] must be withdrawn in time to preserve combat strength, supply the needed personnel and to hold the area of Orël-Kursk (or at least of Bryansk-trainstation of Lgov [L'gov]).’13

However, the conditions for a massive strike as listed by Manstein were simply not there. First of all Hitler refused to pull out temporarily from the Donets Basin. Secondly, on 3 March 1943, the Red Army recaptured the important railway junction at L'gov – the junction which according to Manstein would have been vital for a German strike. Besides, Hitler did not want to launch another large-scale offensive on the Eastern Front in 1943 anyway, as he made clear in a briefing at the headquarters of Army Group South in Zaporozhe on 18 February 1943. ‘We cannot mount any major operations this year’, Hitler informed the officers present. ‘We have to avoid any risk. I think we should just take minor evasive actions (kleine Haken schlagen).’14 These actions should be carried out as initial strikes, that is, Hitler wanted to preempt the Red Army with minor offensive attacks to keep the initiative. In a briefing in the Führers Headquarters ‘Werwolf’ near Vinnitsa on 5 March, he argued that the panzer formations should be reinforced within the next few weeks so that they would be ready to attack right after the mud season; he claimed that this view was shared by Chief of Staff Zeitzler. What Hitler meant by mud season was the spring rasputitsa (literally the ‘time without roads’), which transformed Soviet streets and roads into mud, making any large-scale troop movements impossible.

As Manstein had to give up his hope of carrying out a large-scale ‘backhand blow’, he adopted the idea of an initial strike. On 8 March 1943 he drew up an estimate of the situation, in which for the first time he also elaborated on the time after the rasputitsa. Manstein recommended a joint attack of Army Groups Centre and South to forestall a Soviet offensive against Army Group South. Elements of Army Group South were to deploy from the area west of Khar′kov to the north, while units of the Second Army of Army Group Centre were to move from the area north of Sumy towards the southwest. This was the small version of a pincer attack south of Kursk (map 1). The larger version was first brought up for discussion two days later. However, it was not proposed by Manstein or Hitler, but by a general whose role in this matter has so far gone unnoticed in historical scholarship. On 10 March 1943, the commander of Army Group Centre, Field-Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge, made a phone call to the commander of the subordinate Second Panzer Army, Colonel-General Rudolf Schmidt. At that time, the Second Panzer Army was positioned south of Orël. Between this army and its neighbour, the Second Army, there was a huge gap in the front line where the Red Army had broken through to the river Desna. Kluge urged Schmidt to close the gap between the two armies before the beginning of the rasputitsa. To achieve this, Kluge planned to bring up another assault group: the Ninth Army, commanded by Colonel-General Walter Mo...