Ironically, the Russians were coming to a similar conclusion. The Soviet victories at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus had not been won in isolation. On January 18, the Red Army had opened a corridor to the besieged city of Leningrad. Small-scale actions in the central sector had also favored the Soviets. Evaluating the results, Stalin interpreted the success of Manstein’s post-Stalingrad counterattack as anomalous. He believed Soviet forces could shift directly to the offensive and win decisively. In response, the Soviet high command initially planned a major offensive: a deep battle, initiated by sequential attacks on a front extending from north of Smolensk down to the Black Sea, followed by theater-scale mechanized exploitation.
But the price of recent Soviet success had been high. The Germans, against expectations, had staged another remarkable recovery. Stalin might cultivate an image as Vozhd, supreme leader, source of all wisdom and authority. He may have been able to strike mortal fear into the most senior of generals and party officials. But he had learned the risks of taking immediate counsel of his own confidence. As Chief of Staff Vasilevsky noted, Stalingrad in particular added an operational dimension to his chief’s thinking. In an Order of the Day issued in February, Stalin acknowledged the German army’s recent defeat, but noted that there was no reason to assume it could not recover: “It would be stupid to imagine the Germans will abandon even a kilometer of our country without a fight.”
Like many of the Red Army’s common soldiers, Stalin understood, viscerally if not always intellectually, that the long retreat during the summer of 1942 could not be repeated, whatever the prospective advantages of further overextending the invaders. For practical purposes, there was nowhere left to go. Stalin understood as well, however unwillingly, that the kinds of strategic offensives the Red Army had conducted since the winter of 1941 had a way of turning into poorly coordinated, systematically mismanaged, hideously costly sector attacks, no matter how heavy Stalin’s hand might lie on the responsible generals.
Should a reminder have been necessary, the still-incomplete relief of Leningrad was a depressing account of operations depending primarily on mass impelled by callousness and brutality, grinding forward a few miles, then stalling as much from internal frictions as from any German efforts. Commanders and formations alike showed repeated, glaring ineptitude in reconnaissance, communications, and combined-arms operations.
One of the Soviet Union’s major advantages to date had been the ability to renew its forces to a degree impossible to the overextended Wehrmacht. But even Russia’s resources, human and material, were not infinite. Significant evidence indicates Stalin seriously considered the prospects of a separate peace with Hitler, or with a successor government willing to respond. Tentative contacts between the respective diplomats, most of them indirect, began in Sweden during the spring of 1943 and continued for most of the year. Germany had worked out an agreement with the Soviet Union in 1939, and the USSR had demonstrated beyond question that it could defend itself essentially from its own resources. A separate peace, even temporary, would provide time for recovery. The second front long promised by the Western Allies still consisted of promises and substitutes. The suitably leaked possibility of an end to the fighting might impel Great Britain and the United States to step up the pace of their operations. And if the capitalist powers continued their war with one another, that as well would be to the USSR’s long-term advantage.
Nothing came of the prospect, but while the diplomatic theater played itself out, military developments began focusing Stalin’s attention elsewhere. On March 16, Stalin sent Zhukov down from Leningrad, where he had been assigned to organize an operation to relieve the city for good, to restore the situation at Kharkov. It was too late for that, but the transfer put Zhukov on the site as ground patrols and aerial reconnaissance, information provided by partisans and deserters, reported a rapid and increasing buildup in the Kursk sector. By early April, Zhukov was confident of enemy intentions as well as capabilities.
Rudolf Roessler, a German Communist who had relocated to Switzerland, had been running a spy ring that allegedly possessed high-level contacts in the Wehrmacht. The exact nature of the relationship of the “Lucy ring” to those contacts, and to Swiss military intelligence, remains obscure. But Lucy had established its credibility during 1942, repeatedly transmitting accurate and actionable information on the German offensive Operation Blue. Put temporarily out of business during the Kharkov operation, when Manstein limited his electronic connection to Hitler, by March Roessler was able to transmit an increasing amount of raw data on both German plans for an offensive at Kursk and the new material they were planning to deploy.
British intelligence passed on through the Military Mission in Moscow similar information, describing a projected May attack against the Kursk salient. The intelligence had been obtained as part of the Ultra operation, the intelligence coup based on cracking the codes of the “unbreakable” German Enigma cipher machine. Ultra was Britain’s ace in the hole: the last strategic advantage retained by an overextended and exhausted empire. Its paradox was that its value depended on secrecy. Should the Germans even suspect Enigma was compromised and fundamentally reconfigure its electronic communication system, Ultra would have the value of a buggy whip.
Anglo-American intelligence cooperation may have been a necessary relationship, but it was also a cautious collaboration. The British were as determined as any ecdysiast to secure reciprocity in return for revelation. That attitude governed as well their dealings with the USSR. On June 12, 1941, the Soviet ambassador to London was presented with detailed information on not merely the projected German attack, but its precise starting date. British intelligence forwarded similar information through a double agent, the deputy head of the Soviet espionage network in Switzerland. The underlying hope was to frustrate Hitler’s designs and in the process improve currently distant relations with the USSR. But Stalin ignored the information, as he did most of the “Very Special Intelligence” subsequently made available to Moscow—with its origins carefully camouflaged. Stalin was in principle suspicious of any clandestine material that came from the West. The comprehensively obsessive secrecy generated by the Soviet secret police system kept information closely compartmentalized and tightly wrapped, restricting the development of alternative channels that might have compensated for Stalin’s refusal to share. So the British turned off the taps—until Churchill, recognizing the sovereign importance of keeping Russia in the war, ordered the Kursk material forwarded, albeit with its sources camouflaged.
Stalin’s doubts were overcome because the data was not only confirmed but enhanced by a Soviet agent inside the Ultra project itself. John Cairncross was the “fifth man” in the Cambridge spy ring, whose highly placed traitors fed Soviet intelligence from the world war into the Cold War. Assigned to Ultra in mid-1942, he delivered to his handlers weekly decrypts of the same material Ultra was processing. This was the kind of information from multiple sources that Stalin found difficult to resist.
Zhukov was in another category of credibility. He was not only a field commander, but a Stavka troubleshooter, sent from crisis to crisis with near plenipotentiary powers: “the high justice, the middle, and the low,” disciplining, dismissing, or executing as deemed necessary. By this time Stalin’s ace troubleshooter, Zhukov impressed the Vozhd himself with his ruthlessness. So when on April 8 he sent a message predicting that the end of the
On the evening of April 12, Zhukov and Vasilevsky entered Stalin’s study—his “power room,” whose layout and furnishings were configured to intimidate anyone not already intimidated and to silence anyone not inflexibly convinced of his position. This time, according to Zhukov, Stalin listened “more attentively than ever before” when Zhukov made his case. The Germans faced a grim paradox. Because mobile war was their best force multiplier, the increasingly irreplaceable losses suffered in the winter of 1942 compelled them to attack. Because their reserves were so limited, the attack could be made in only a limited sector of the front. And a cursory study of the situation map showed that German armored and motorized formations were steadily concentrating around the Kursk salient.
A Soviet offensive, whether the general operation originally bruited about or a more focused preemptive strike, made correspondingly no strategic or operational sense. The Germans still had a decisive edge in encounter battles, and the kind of concentration taking place around Kursk only enhanced that advantage. Rzhev might have
