Battle of Kursk

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Battle of Kursk holds a distinction no other engagement in all of recorded warfare can claim: it is the single largest battle in human history. It unfolded across the flat, mined plains of southwestern Russia in the summer of 1943, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union threw the bulk of their forces into a collision that would determine the course of the Eastern Front. The opening day alone, the 5th of July, became the costliest single day in aerial warfare, measured by the number of aircraft shot down. The armoured fighting that followed became the deadliest and largest tank battle ever fought. Soldiers described what they saw as hand-to-hand combat in ruined villages, as trenches changing hands again and again, as a sun blotted out by dust so thick that a witness compared it to a dark red disc barely visible through the air. What questions does all of this raise? Why did Germany choose this particular salient, at this particular moment, when its armies were already stretched and exhausted? How did the Soviet Union know the attack was coming, and what did it do with that knowledge? And what tipped a battle of this scale so decisively in one direction?

• 2. The Salient Takes Shape

  ›

  Kursk itself was retaken by Soviet forces on the 8th of February 1943, and just days later the city of Rostov fell on the 14th of February. These rapid Soviet advances opened a gap of between 160 and 300 kilometres between German Army Group B and Army Group Don, threatening to cut off the entire German southern flank. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein had been requesting what he called unrestricted operational freedom since December 1942. He met Hitler on the 6th of February at the headquarters in Gorlitz to win approval for a counteroffensive in the Donbas. On the 18th of February, Hitler arrived at Army Group South's headquarters at Zaporizhia just hours before Soviet forces liberated Kharkov, and had to be hastily evacuated on the 19th. The operation that followed, later called the Third Battle of Kharkov, began on the 21st of February. General Hoth's 4th Panzer Army drove north, retaking Kharkov on the 15th of March and Belgorod on the 18th. When the spring thaw and exhaustion brought both sides to a halt by mid-March, the front lines had carved out a Soviet salient extending 250 kilometres from north to south and 160 kilometres from east to west, centred on Kursk. That protruding bulge would become the focus of German planning for the summer of 1943.

• 3. Hitler's Gamble

  ›

  On the 13th of March 1943, Hitler signed Operational Order No. 5, authorising the offensive against the Kursk salient. By the 15th of April he issued Operational Order No. 6, setting the 3rd of May as the opening date under the codename Zitadelle, meaning Citadel. The plan called for a double envelopment: General Walter Model's 9th Army striking south from the north while Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf drove north from the south, meeting east of Kursk and trapping the Soviet defenders of five armies. Hitler's stated ambitions stretched beyond tactical gain. He believed a victory would reassert German strength and strengthen his alliances, as he feared his allies were considering leaving the war. He also hoped to capture large numbers of Soviet prisoners for use as slave labour in German armaments production. At a Munich conference on the 4th of May, Hitler spoke for around 45 minutes laying out reasons to postpone, but ended the meeting without a decision. General Heinz Guderian argued the attack was, in his words, pointless, and asked Hitler directly whether it was truly necessary to attack at Kursk that year. Hitler replied that the thought of it turned his stomach. Guderian replied, in that case, leave it alone. Hitler did not. Instead he delayed repeatedly, waiting for the new Panther tank, the Ferdinand tank destroyer, and more Tigers, pushing the launch date from May to June and ultimately to the 5th of July. Each postponement gave the Red Army more time to prepare.

• 4. The Fortress the Soviets Built

  ›

  Soviet politician Anastas Mikoyan recorded that on the 27th of March 1943, Stalin personally informed him of the anticipated German attack on Kursk. The Soviets had learned the broad outlines of the German plan through the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland, and verified those details through John Cairncross, a Soviet spy embedded at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, who forwarded raw decrypts directly to Moscow. Cairncross also supplied identifications of Luftwaffe airfields in the region. Deputy Supreme Commander Georgiy Zhukov, writing to the Stavka on the 8th of April, urged a strategic defensive first: let the Germans exhaust themselves against Soviet defences, destroy their armour, and then launch a counteroffensive. Stalin was uneasy with ceding the initiative but ultimately agreed. What followed was a feat of construction and deception unlike anything the Red Army had attempted. The Voronezh Front alone dug 4,200 kilometres of trenches; the Central Front dug 5,000 kilometres. Combat engineers laid 503,993 anti-tank mines and 439,348 anti-personnel mines. Mine densities reached 2,500 anti-personnel and 2,200 anti-tank mines per kilometre, six times the density used at Moscow. The 6th Guards Army, spread across nearly 64 kilometres of front, held 69,688 anti-tank and 64,430 anti-personnel mines in its first defensive belt alone. The combined depth of the three main defensive zones was about 40 kilometres; add the fallback belts and the Steppe Front's positions behind them and the total depth stretched to nearly 300 kilometres. More than 300,000 civilians provided the labour. Soviet deception operations were so effective that German mid-June intelligence estimated Soviet armoured strength at only 1,500 tanks, a vast underestimate of actual strength. Soldiers trained to overcome what commanders called tank phobia by having tanks driven over their trenches until no sign of fear remained; they called this exercise ironing.

• 5. Opposing Steel

  ›

  By the morning of the 5th of July the German attacking force amounted to around 777,000 men, 2,451 tanks and assault guns, and 7,417 guns and mortars. This represented roughly 70 percent of Germany's armour on the entire Eastern Front. German industry had produced 2,816 tanks and self-propelled guns between April and June; at Kursk, 259 Panthers, around 211 Tigers, and 90 Ferdinands were committed to the fight. The two new Panther battalions, the 51st and 52nd, arrived on the 30th of June and the 1st of July respectively, giving them almost no time to learn the terrain or train together. By the morning of the attack, 16 Panthers had already broken down mechanically, leaving 184 available at the start. The Soviet force was far larger. Without counting deeper reserves held by the Steppe Front, the Soviets massed approximately 1,300,000 men, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 artillery pieces, and 2,792 aircraft to defend the salient. Including the Steppe Front, the total rose to more than 1,900,000 men. The T-34 was the backbone of Soviet armour, but its 76.2 mm gun struggled against the frontal armour of Tigers and Panthers. Only the SU-122 and SU-152 self-propelled guns had the power to destroy a Tiger at close range, and they were present in very small numbers.

• 6. Five Days in the North

  ›

  At 05:30 on the 5th of July, the 9th Army opened its attack on the northern face. Model chose to lead with infantry rather than armour, hoping to breach the defences before committing his panzer divisions. Two companies of Tigers from the 505th Heavy Tank Battalion were assigned to support the 6th Infantry Division. By 08:00, lanes had been cleared through Soviet minefields, and prisoner interrogation had revealed a weakness at the boundary between the 15th and 81st Rifle Divisions. The Tigers redeployed to exploit it. Soviet armoured forces responded with around 90 T-34s, and in the three-hour battle that followed, the Red Army lost 42 tanks while the Germans lost two Tigers and had five more immobilised with track damage. Of the 653rd Heavy Panzerjager Battalion's 45 Ferdinands sent into battle, all but 12 were immobilised by mine damage before 17:00. The XLI Panzer Corps reached the small fortified town of Ponyri by the end of the first day. Over the following days, the fighting at Ponyri and the nearby village of Olkhovatka became grinding battles of attrition. The 9th Army's war diary described the fighting as a new type of mobile attrition battle; troops called it mini-Stalingrad, and military historian Paul Carell called it the Stalingrad of the Kursk salient. A concerted attack on the 10th of July by about 300 German tanks and assault guns from three panzer divisions, backed by every available Luftwaffe aircraft in the northern sector, still failed to break the Soviet line at Olkhovatka. While the operation had begun with a 45 kilometre attack front, by the 7th of July that front had shrunk to 15 kilometres. By the 10th, the Soviets had completely halted the advance.

• 7. The Southern Drive and Prokhorovka

  ›

  In the south, Hoth's 4th Panzer Army was described in German assessments as the most powerful striking force ever assembled under a single German commander. The opening bombardment expended more shells in fifty minutes than the combined total fired during the Polish and French campaigns together. The II SS Panzer Corps attacked on a twelve-kilometre front with 42 Tigers among 494 tanks and assault guns. By 09:00 on the 5th of July, the SS corps had broken through the Soviet first defensive belt along its entire front. By the evening, however, the 1st SS Panzergrenadier Division had sustained 97 dead, 522 wounded, and 17 missing, and had lost around 30 tanks. On the right, Army Detachment Kempf crossed the Northern Donets at Mikhailovka but struggled badly. Corps Raus suffered 2,000 casualties on the first day alone while crossing a 32 kilometre front without armour. A Luftwaffe strike hit the 6th Panzer Division's bridgehead in a friendly fire incident, wounding divisional commander Walther von Hundersdorff. On the 7th of July, the Stavka committed the 5th Guards Tank Army from the Steppe Front, sending it toward Prokhorovka. Its commander, Lieutenant General Pavel Rotmistrov, later described the journey: by midday, dust rose in thick clouds, settling on tanks and trucks and soldiers' faces, with the sun visible only as a dark red disc. On the 12th of July, the resulting armoured clash at Prokhorovka became a battle within the battle, a collision so large it is recognised separately as the largest single armoured engagement of the war. That same day, the Soviets launched Operation Kutuzov against the rear of Model's forces in the north. On the 3rd of August the Soviets began the Belgorod-Kharkov offensive, Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev, against German forces in the south. Both offensives belonged to the Kursk Strategic Offensive Operation, and they drove the Germans back on all sides.

• 8. Why Germany Lost the Initiative

  ›

  Allied forces landed in Sicily on the 10th of July 1943, during the battle itself. Hitler was forced to redirect troops training in France to meet the Mediterranean threat rather than committing them as a strategic reserve in the east. As a result, after just over a week of offensive operations, Hitler cancelled Citadel, partly to free forces for Italy. The three-month delay between the German decision to attack and the actual launch had been decisive. July and August 1943 together saw the heaviest German ammunition expenditure on the Eastern Front to that point: 236,915 tons in July and 254,648 in August, exceeding the previous peak of 160,645 tons in September 1942. Germany's heavy losses in men and tanks left the Red Army holding strategic initiative for the rest of the war. Kursk was the first time in the Second World War that a German strategic offensive was stopped before it could break through enemy defences into the open. It was also the last strategic offensive Germany was able to launch on the Eastern Front at all. The Red Army's counter-offensives after Kursk were their first successful summer offensives of the entire war, a reversal that would prove permanent. One German officer, during the long preparatory delay, had already called Kursk another Verdun. He was not wrong.