been scrubbed from official memory. Zhukov had not forgotten. Neither had Stalin. It nevertheless took two months for the Soviet leader to commit definitively to standing on the defensive at Kursk and wearing out the German mobile forces as the first stage in a massive strategic offensive. This was not mere stubbornness. Zhukov, Vasilevsky, and the senior commanders on the ground were confident the Red Army could hold the Germans and grind them down in the Kursk salient. Stalin was less optimistic. As repeated German delays strained his equanimity and goodwill—neither present in oversupply—he developed two simultaneous approaches.
One involved creating a massive regional reserve under Stavka command. This Steppe Front by July would be built up to five rifle armies, the Fifth Guards Tank Army, three independent tank and mechanized corps, and an air army—almost six hundred thousand men and more than sixteen hundred armored fighting vehicles, deployed in a mutually supporting semicircle around the salient as a backstop against a German breakthrough. Steppe Front was also intended as the muscle behind an eventual counterattack—not in the Kursk sector, but north of it: around Orel. The Germans were weaker there and likely to be focusing on events at Kursk. The offensive, complemented by lesser diversionary attacks elsewhere in the southern theater, would compel the Germans to transfer mobile formations away from Kursk and eventually create a tactical overstretch enabling operational breakthrough and strategic exploitation.
As an ultimate insurance policy, Stalin insisted on transforming Kursk into the most formidable large-scale defensive system in the history of warfare. Like almost all of Stalin’s initiatives in the war’s second half, the policy had an obvious agenda and a hidden one. It was designed to transform Kursk into a killing ground. It was also designed to fix the Germans’ attention. The elaborate construction work and the extensive movements of men and equipment in a relatively small area were impossible to conceal completely. So to borrow once more the metaphor of a burlesque theater, the object was to keep the mark looking in the wrong places. Let the Germans think that their opponent had committed itself to a defensive battle. Let them focus intelligence, reconnaissance, and planning on the Kursk salient. Their surprise, like that of a disappointed customer, would come when the Red Army rang down the curtain from the wings as the dance continued onstage.
The salient’s transformation into a fortress began in mid-April. Initial talk of evacuating civilians was quashed by military authorities who said that this would have an adverse effect on troop morale—and on the labor supply. By June, more than three hundred thousand civilians, most of them women, were working on roads, bridges, and airfields in the salient’s rear. Forward construction was the soldiers’ responsibility—250 engineer companies, supported by every man the infantry could spare on a given day. The defensive system was configured as a labyrinthine combination of battalion defensive sectors, antitank ditches and strongpoints, machine-gun positions, barbed wire, minefields, roadblocks, and obstacles whose positioning at times seemed almost random.
Each frontline rifle army had a forward zone, a second line, and an army defensive line, plus a trip wire of outposts and small forlorn-hope strongpoints designed to frustrate German ground reconnaissance before the attack and compel early German deployment once the offensive started. The salient’s forward zones alone included 350 battalion positions, 2 or 3 to a rifle regiment, networks of mutually supporting trenches, blockhouses, and bunkers. There were as many as six successive defensive zones, each with two or three layers. The first two zones were fully occupied, the middle ones were held by units in reserve, and the final two were left empty, as fallback positions or to be occupied by reinforcements. These extended as far as fifty miles into the salient’s rear. And behind them were two more positions constructed by the Steppe Front, which extended the zone of defensive operations to something approximating two hundred miles—an unmatched record in the history of war, and one likely to remain unchallenged.
Other statistics are no less daunting. In their final form, the defenses absorbed almost a million men. They were supported by almost twenty thousand guns and mortars, three hundred rocket launchers, and thirty-three hundred tanks. The engineers supervised the stringing of over five hundred miles of barbed wire and the laying of around 640,000 mines. There were so many minefields, and with their well-camouflaged layouts so often overlapped, it became necessary in the Soviet rear areas to post sentries and warning signs to protect unwary men and vehicles. Minefields averaged more than twenty-four hundred antitank mines and twenty-seven hundred antipersonnel mines per mile—about one mine per foot. Many of these were “box mines” in wooden casings, substitutes for scarce steel. As a rule, their explosive force was too diffused to destroy tanks, but they remained effective against treads and suspension. They also had the advantage of being undetectable by standard minesweeping equipment. Clearing such a field too often meant probing the ground with bayonets. As a deterrent to prospective heroes, the minefields also included improvised flamethrowing devices based on a mine linked to several gasoline bombs.
The minefields were laid out so as to “encourage” the panzers to move into antitank killing zones. Those were the domain of the PTOPs, the
There was no room in these crowded positions for vehicles to remove the guns. To improve concealment and make the point that withdrawal was not an option, gun wheels were sometimes removed. To maximize the advantages of fixed positions, crews were trained and ordered to hold their fire until point-blank range. The engineers devoted all their considerable skill at camouflage to conceal the entrenchments. Their success is indicated by German aerial photos taken before and during the battle that show miles of territory with only limited signs of life. Once exposed, the strongpoints could call for support from any guns and rocket launchers within range—which was most of them. But in the end, the antitank strongpoints were expendable. The watchword for their garrisons was “stand or die.” “Hold and die” was to prove no less appropriate.
The static fixed defenses were coordinated with mobile antitank and armor reserves. The former ranged from a few guns and some antitank riflemen at regimental level to a full antitank battalion, built around a dozen 76 mm guns, for an army corps. The forward infantry units could also count on direct tank support: a company for a battalion, a regiment or brigade for a division. The dispersion of armor ran against Soviet doctrine and experience. But the tankers too were expendable, there to do as much damage as they could, to keep German break-ins from becoming breakthroughs.
Kursk was projected as a managed battle, a scientific exercise. To that end, the communications network was developed with unprecedented care and precision. Radios, phones, and messengers were coordinated to complement one another. Command posts even at regiment and battalion levels became electronic centers. Landlines were buried deeply and duplicated, sometimes tripled, in critical sectors. This time, no excuses based on failure to receive orders would be accepted.
This emerging defensive maze was designed to work in three stages. The German infantry, Zhukov had argued, seemed less capable of offensive operations than in 1942. As it was worn down, the German armored forces would have to rely on their divisional infantry to lead the way and secure the rear zones. That would have the effect of separating tanks and infantry, breaking the combined-arms cohesion on which German tactics depended. And when the increasingly isolated tanks played their familiar card and maneuvered in search of weak spots, they would find that none existed—at least none that the worn-down panzers could exploit.
Deception, the
Morale was the responsibility of the front political departments. They intensified the usual high level of party
