That left three options. One involved taking advantage of the large turret ring and robust chassis of the Mark III’s stablemate, the Mark IV, and upgrading what had been designed as a support vehicle to a main battle tank. Technically, the reconfiguration was highly successful. However, it was achieved at the expense of production numbers and repair statistics. The second possibility was copying the T-34, either conceptually or by reverse engineering. In the latter case, the Russian vehicle’s cast turret and its aluminum engine would have challenged German capacities and resources. The two-man turret diminished the crew’s effectiveness—still a German strongpoint. In any case, the lead times involved were an almost certain guarantee that when German imitations reached the front, the Red Army would be another generation ahead.
That left a new design, which became the Panther. Its design and preproduction absorbed most of 1942, and delivery projected by May 1943 was only 250. Its 75 mm L/70 was the most ballistically effective tank gun of World War II. But apart from the predictable teething troubles, two fundamental issues emerged. One was protection. Would the Panther’s well-sloped frontal armor suffice against the weapons likely to be introduced as a counter? Its side armor, moreover, was not much better than that of its predecessors. The Panther’s other problem was the engine. The tank weighed forty-five tons. Its Maybach 230 delivered a power-to-weight ratio of 15.5 horsepower per ton: low enough to strain the entire drive system and make uparmoring problematic. “Not perfect, but good enough” was the verdict rendered in the developing crisis of the Eastern Front.
The Panther’s counterpoint, the Panzer VI, better known as the Tiger I, lent its aura to the whole German armored force. Even experienced British and U.S. troops were likely to see Tigers behind every hedgerow and leading every counterattack. There have been at least a hundred books in English, French, and German devoted to the Tiger’s origins and performance. The first Tiger was a birthday present for the Fuhrer in April 1942. Its initial production runs were set modestly, at fifteen a month by September. The Russians were expected to be defeated by the time the new tanks could take the field.
“The Tiger was all muscle, a slab-sided beast as sophisticated as a knee in the groin.” Incorporating components from several firms and several design projects, it was always high maintenance. That does not mean unreliable. “Tiger was like a woman,” in the words of one old hand. “If you treated her right, she’d treat you right.” Tiger was also not a cheap date. Range on a full tank was only 125 miles. Speed was on the low side of adequate by previous panzer standards: about twenty miles per hour on roads, half that and less cross-country. But far from being a semimobile “furniture van” (
In one sense, that was Hitler’s problem—the tank and the situation fit together too well for comfort. As early as April 18, the Fuhrer inquired whether a preferable alternative might be to do the really unexpected and attack the salient’s relatively vulnerable nose. In 1914, with war only hours away, German emperor Wilhelm II reacted to a vague hint of French neutrality by saying that now the whole army could be sent to the Eastern Front. His chief of staff never recovered from the shock. Kurt Zeitzler had a stronger nervous system. The time lost in shifting forces, he replied, would impose unacceptable delay, sacrifice prospects for surprise, and encourage a Soviet attack as the Germans redeployed.
Hitler calmed down for a week. Then he received a disconcerting report from the commanding general of the army responsible for Citadel’s northern half. Walther Model is best remembered as a tactician, a defensive specialist shoring up broken fronts in the Reich’s final years. But he had made his bones with the panzers, commanding a division and then a corps before being assigned to Army Group Center’s right-flank Ninth Army in January 1942. He was also a trained staff officer, and the details of his army’s proposed mission were not reassuring. The plan allowed too little time for preparation. It took too little account of the defense system the Soviets were constructing in Model’s zone of attack. It allotted too few men and tanks to underwrite Model’s original estimate of two days to achieve a breakthrough. As corroborating evidence mounted, six days seemed a more reasonable figure.
Hitler respected this tough, profane battle captain enough to schedule a one-on-one meeting for April 27. He rejected Model’s suggestion that a preferable alternative was to shorten Army Group Center’s line and await a Soviet attack. But he was impressed by the visual aids Model proffered: aerial photos showing a spiderweb of Soviet fortifications and trench lines matching anything in World War I. He responded by postponing the start of the offensive to May 5, then to May 9; and he spoke privately with Zeitzler about dropping it back to mid- June.
In May, the Fuhrer took his concerns to a conference in Munich. The key meeting was on May 4; the principal participants were Zeitzler, Manstein, Kluge, and Guderian, plus Luftwaffe chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek. Hitler began by explaining in almost an hour’s worth of detail his reasons for postponing the attack—essentially the same ones offered by the absent Model. When called on to reply, Manstein reiterated the necessity for an early success in the East, noting that by June the Red Army’s overall abilities to mount its own offensives would be significantly enhanced. Rather than lose time reinforcing the armor, Manstein asked for more infantry—at least two divisions—to facilitate breaking through the Red Army’s defenses. Hitler responded that none were available; tanks would have to compensate.
Kluge was next, and he spoke out strongly against postponement. He described Model as exaggerating Russian strength and warned that Citadel’s delay increased the risk of a major Soviet attack elsewhere on his army group’s front. Hitler shut him down by replying that he, not Model, was the pessimist here. Guderian promptly asked permission to speak. He called the Kursk operation pointless. It would cost armor losses the Reich could neither afford nor replace. And if the Panthers were expected to make a difference, they were still suffering from teething troubles and should not be counted on. Guderian concluded by recommending that should Citadel be allowed to proceed, the armor should be massed on one front to achieve total superiority—in other words, to create a decisive point, the
By this time, Hitler had a well-developed approach to dealing with the senior officers he disliked and mistrusted. He structured conferences around his own remarkable memory for detail, bolstered by information provided directly by his staff. If he failed to carry a point by drowning it in statistics, he insisted that decisions were best made spontaneously: instinct processed data more reliably than did calculation. Almost disconcertingly, neither of these behaviors was in particular evidence on May 4. Instead, Hitler seemed to weigh events and balance prospects.
The Axis position in Tunisia was collapsing with unexpected speed. Formal resistance ended on May 13. For ten days before that, increasing numbers of Germans and Italians were on their way to POW camps. The final tally was nearly a quarter million—worse than Stalingrad, without even the possibility of spinning the catastrophe into a heroic last stand.
Hitler obsessively saw himself as working against time. In contrast with Marxist-based radicalism, which ultimately understood itself to be on the side of history, Hitler’s clock was always at five minutes to midnight. That in turn reflected Hitler’s increasing sense of his own mortality, combined with the self-fulfilling paradox that Hitler’s self-defined role had no place for a genuine successor. But his reflexive compulsion to action was in this case arguably balanced by Model’s photographs. Hitler’s identity was also shaped by his experiences as a Great War combat veteran, a
Inaction was not an option. Neither was a second failure. In the first half of May, Hitler’s thoughts—and more important, his feelings—turned to the new tanks as he increasingly came to view technical superiority as the key to defeating enemies committed to mass war. Moreover, since 1940 the panzers had been Germany’s arm of decision, challenging and overcoming space, time, and numbers in every conceivable situation; this time they would do it again.
The May 4 meeting did not result in a decision. But on May 5, Citadel’s date was reset to June 12. When Guderian warned again that the Panthers could not be made combat-ready in five or six weeks, Hitler abandoned his own initial sense of urgency, disregarded his field commanders’ emphasis on haste, and postponed the
