Armor and Blood

279 Pages·2013·1.99 MB·English

by  Dennis E. Showalter

Copyright © 2013 by Dennis Showalter
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R H and the H colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
ANDOM OUSE OUSE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Showalter, Dennis E.
Armor and blood: the battle of Kursk: the turning point of World War II / Dennis E. Showalter.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-8129-9465-0
1. Kursk, Battle of, Russia, 1943. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Tank warfare. I. Title.
D764.3.K8S56 2013 940.54′2735—dc23 2012047086
www.atrandom.com
Maps by Robert Bull
Jacket design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Jacket photograph: © The Dmitri Baltermants Collection/Corbis
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
List of Maps
Introduction
Order of Battle, Operation Citadel
Chapter I: G
ENESIS
Chapter II: P
REPARATIONS
Chapter III: S
TRIKE
Chapter IV: G
RAPPLE
Chapter V: D
ECISIONS
Chapter VI: H P
ARD OUNDING
Chapter VII: C
ROSSOVERS
Conclusion: W
ATERSHEDS
Photo Insert
Acknowledgments
Guide to Further Reading
Notes
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
LIST OF MAPS
Eastern Front: Beginning of March 1943
Kursk Sector: July 4
The Citadel: Soviet Defenses and the Kursk Salient
German Assault on the Northern Sector of the Kursk Salient
Manstein’s Sector: July 5–17
Alternative: Prokhorovka
Vatutin’s Projected Counterattack: July 12
Army Detachment Kempf at the Close of July 12
Prokhorovka: July 12
Operation Kutusov: July 13
To the Dnieper: July–September 1943
INTRODUCTION
is a continuing paradox. On the one hand, it is regularly described as
THE BATTLE OF KURSK
a military epic: history’s greatest armored battle, the first stage on the Red
Army’s road to Berlin, an ultimate test of Nazi and Soviet military/political
systems. On the other, it is strangely blurred. Compared with Stalingrad or
Barbarossa, it remains obscure, its narrative fostering myth as much as history.
In the context of Western, particularly English-language, writing on World War
II, Kursk is part of an imbalance that focuses on Anglo-American operations.
The sheer scale of the fighting, the absence of significant cultural and political
reference points, and an understandable interest in the deeds of one’s own
countries combine in a literature acknowledging the Russo-German War after
Stalingrad as a vital factor in the war’s development and outcome but restricting
it to the periphery in terms of page counts.
A recent development in the historiography of the Russo-German War
integrates it into the related perspectives of total war and genocide. Sometimes it
becomes pivotal, as in Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World and in Timothy
Snyder’s Bloodlands. In other works, such as Stephen Fritz’s Ostkrieg or
Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War, Kursk, when it appears, becomes a footnote
in a wider story of Armageddon and apocalypse.
In the context of the Russo-German War as a subject of military analysis,
Kursk remains blended with what Germany’s Military History Research
Institute, the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, calls the “forgotten year”
(from summer 1943 to summer 1944), a time of inglorious retreats on the
German side and inglorious victories for the Soviets—both achieved at excessive
cost and neither offering much inspiration or value to students of the
art/science/craft of war. In that sense, Kursk becomes a counterpoint to
Passchendaele and Chemin des Dames in World War I, or the American Civil
War’s Wilderness: a tribute to uninspired hard fighting and colossal human
suffering.
Well before John Keegan’s The Face of Battle focused military writers’
attention away from the map movements of abstract red and blue blocks to the
mechanics of battle as they apply to men at the sharp end, Kursk generated
accounts of memory and explanation. Two master narratives emerged. The
German version depicted a heroic struggle, wearing down massively superior
Soviet defenders, climaxing with the SS Panzer Corps’s destruction of the Fifth
Guards Tank Army at Prokhorovka—only to have their victory thwarted by
Hitler’s micromanaging and indecision. The Soviet counterpart depicted a
German attack first ground down by a scientifically created, dauntlessly
defended fortification system, then defeated by the intrepid attack of the Fifth
Guards Tank Army at Prokhorovka.
Addressing the contradictions between the two memes has been complicated
until recently by a virtual German monopoly of Eastern Front narratives. The
USSR’s determination to control the story of the Great Fatherland Patriotic War
was complemented by a discouraging of memory and memoir at every rank from
private to marshal of the Soviet Union. The improved post-Soviet access to
archives, memories, and battlefields has combined with postreunification
developments in German military historiography to revitalize, indeed
revolutionize, the academic and general-audience writing on Kursk and its
matrices.
The general intention of this book is to synthesize the material and the
perspectives that have in some cases been upheld and in others modified,
reshaped, or revised. It is operationally structured, but not operationally focused.
The events of the battle are used to contextualize wider issues of operations and
strategy, institutional structure and state policy, and to convey some of the
Eastern Front’s human dimension.
This work has a specific purpose as well: to structure and clarify the newly
available mass of detail, official, tactical, and personal, on the fighting. Kursk
was a battle before it became anything else. That makes it worthwhile knowing
who did what, where, when, with what, to whom, and above all why. This
requires collating, comparing, and critiquing official and personal accounts,
contextualizing them in a geography significantly unfamiliar to all but a few
potential readers, then presenting the results in a way that is comprehensible
without being condescending.
For the sake of clarity, the text uses Russian orthography for geographic
features. It addresses the two-hour difference between German and Russian
official time by citing the time noted by the subjects of the narrative: German
when the actors are German, Russian for Russian. The text also minimizes
references to the obscure villages and low heights that were the usual foci of
orders and reports and challenge the most detailed and costly tactical maps. In
each case of this kind of judgment call, the author acknowledges any
misjudgments and requests charity.
For the sake of another kind of clarity, the linguistically and orthographically
complex ranks of the Waffen SS have been translated into their U.S. Army
counterparts.
The same acknowledgment and the same request apply to the book’s subtext.
That is, to avoid “war porn,” whether in contexts of heroism, pathos, horror, or
voyeurism. Should it succeed in nothing else, may that objective stand.
ORDER OF BATTLE, OPERATION CITADEL
GERMAN
A G C
RMY ROUP ENTER—
F M G K
IELD ARSHAL ÜNTHER VON LUGE
9th Army—General Walter Model
XX Corps
45th, 72nd, 137th, 251st Infantry Divisions
XLVI Panzer Corps
7th, 31st, 102nd, 258th Infantry Divisions
XLVI Panzer Corps
2nd, 9th, 20th Panzer Divisions, 6th Infantry Division
XLI Panzer Corps
18th Panzer Division, 86th, 292nd Infantry Divisions
XXIII Corps
78th Assault Division, 36th, 216th, 383rd Infantry Divisions
A G S M E M
RMY ROUP OUTH—FIELD ARSHAL RICH VON ANSTEIN
4th Panzer Army General Hermann Hoth
XLVIII Panzer Corps
3rd, 11th Panzer Divisions, Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland, 167th Infantry Division
II SS Panzer Corps
SS Panzer Grenadier Divisions Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Totenkopf
LII Corps
57th, 255th, 332nd Infantry Divisions
A D K G W K
RMY ETACHMENT EMPF— ENERAL ERNER EMPF
III Panzer Corps
6th, 7th, 19th Panzer Divisions
XI Corps
106th, 320th Infantry Divisions
XLII Corps
39th, 161st, 282nd Infantry Divisions
RUSSIAN
C F K R
ENTRAL RONT—GENERAL ONSTANTIN OKOSSOVSKY
13th, 48th, 60th, 65th, 70th Armies, 2nd Tank Army, 9th, 19th Tank Corps
V F N V
ORONEZH RONT—GENERAL IKOLAI ATUTIN
6th, 7th Guards Armies, 38th, 40th, 69th Armies, 1st Tank
Army, 35th Guards Rifle Corps, 2nd, 5th Guards Tank Corps
5th Guards Army, 5th Guards Tank Army assigned from Steppe
Front during Citadel as reinforcements
Chapter I
G
ENESIS
one SS trooper grimly noted in his diary on July 5, 1943,
“IT’S TIME TO WRITE THE LAST WILL:”
while awaiting the order to advance. Across the line, Soviet soldiers swapped
their own grim jokes—like the one about the tanker who reported that almost
everyone in his unit had been killed that day. “I’m sorry,” he replied, “I’ll make
sure I burn tomorrow.”
Everybody on the long-designated battlefield knew what was coming. In
mounting Operation Citadel, Adolf Hitler and his generals were seizing a high-
risk window of opportunity: a last, best chance to regain the initiative in Russia
before Soviet material power grew overwhelming and before the Western Allies
could establish themselves in Europe. The Russians faced a graduation exercise:
a test of their ability to handle a major and intricate combined-arms battle
against a first-class, heavily armored, and experienced enemy.
For weeks, the Germans and the Russians had been massing men, tanks, guns,
and aircraft from every sector of the Eastern Front into and around a hundred-
mile salient centered on the Ukrainian city of Kursk, about four hundred miles
south of Moscow. All that remained indefinite were the starting time and the
precise locations, which Soviet intelligence had been unable to determine. Adolf
Hitler had postponed the date repeatedly. At least three times the Soviet high
command, known as the Stavka, had issued false warnings. Then, on the evening
of July 4, 1943, the Germans sent their men the infallible signal: a special ration
of schnapps. An Alsatian serving in the Waffen SS promptly deserted—and
convinced a high-status interrogation team, including Voronezh Front’s
commander, General Nikolai Vatutin, and a forty-nine-year-old political adviser
named Nikita Khrushchev, that the German offensive would be under way
before dawn on July 5. Giving the Germans the advantage of tactical surprise
might be fatal. Khrushchev promptly reported to Moscow. Joseph Stalin returned
the call and—according to Khrushchev—asked for his opinion. Khrushchev