activists. Political officers, Communist Youth, and party members were expected to set examples in everything from weapons care to combat training. Though the ultimate sanctions were not abolished, they faded into the background as the Kursk salient prepared for a finish fight.
Partisan operations were also part of the general plan. By 1943, the Soviet presence behind enemy lines had developed into a formidable mass movement, supplied, armed, and above all controlled from Moscow. A central partisan headquarters coordinated local and regional operations. Partisans had to screen groups and individuals for loyalty as a matter of both ensuring operational effectiveness and maintaining a connection with Moscow that was increasingly crucial as a source of supplies and legitimacy. Soviet values and norms also proved useful to the partisans for coping with the psychological and social stresses of encirclement and isolation by an enemy who gave no quarter.
These problems were particularly salient in southern Russia, where the terrain offered limited opportunities for safe zones compared with the forests farther north, and where the German presence on the ground was proportionally larger in the run-up to Kursk. The region’s partisans nevertheless effectively supported the long- range reconnaissance patrols that kept the German rear areas under observation. Civilians played an increasing role in intelligence operations. Local youths between eight and fourteen were particularly favored as agents, many of whom underwent four-week training programs. They showed remarkable talents for observation and espionage.
Since January, partisan operations against the railroads in the rear of German Army Group Center had been disrupting troop and supply movements. On June 14, Stavka initiated a comprehensive “rail war” focused on the lines into the Kursk sector. Raids destroyed bridges, disabled rolling stock, and diminished train crews’ morale and effectiveness. They created traffic jams offering profitable targets to Red Air Force night bombers, who in turn were for practical purposes unopposed because night fighters, guns, and their supporting electronic systems were increasingly needed for the defense of the Reich itself.
Weapons and fortifications are nothing without fighting men. The Kursk salient was held by two entire Soviet fronts, the counterpart of Western army groups. The northern sector was the operational zone of the Central Front. From right to left—or base to tip—it deployed five rifle armies. Most of the heavy fighting would be done by the Forty-eighth, with seven divisions and 84,000 men; the Thirteenth, with twelve divisions and 114,000 men; and the Seventieth, with eight divisions and 96,000 men. The two armies wrapped around the salient’s nose, the Sixtieth and Sixty-fifth, had fifteen rifle divisions between them. Facing infantrymen like themselves, they were projected to have an easier time than the other three, at least at first.
Front reserves were built around four tank corps plus a nearly uncountable number of smaller tank and artillery units. When all the figures are calculated and collated, the Central Front controlled eleven thousand guns and mortars and eighteen hundred tanks. Under its command and on call were the assets of the Sixteenth Air Army: 1,150 aircraft as of July 4. Almost a quarter of them were the formidable Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmoviks, one of the war’s finest ground-attack aircraft. Another quarter were twin-engine bombers (including a number of Lend- Lease American Douglas Havocs), and the rest was a mixed bag of single-engine fighters. An indication of the Red Air Force’s improved effectiveness was maintenance statistics showing almost 90 percent of the planes as serviceable.
Commanding this formidable instrument of war was General Konstantin K. Rokossovsky. Born in what was then Russian Poland in 1896, he still spoke Russian with a marked Polish accent but had served the revolution and the Soviet Union since 1917 as a cavalryman. He was commanding a division in 1937 when he was arrested and charged not only with being a saboteur, but with spying simultaneously for Poland and Japan! He spent two and a half years as a guest of state security, returning to duty in 1940 with a mouthful of metal teeth—courtesy of his interrogators.
Beginning with Barbarossa, Rokossovsky established a reputation as one of the Red Army’s rising stars. As hard a man as any in a system where any kind of vulnerability was a career killer, he got the best out of subordinates with strong wills and limited skills. This was particularly useful when handling the new generation of Red Army generals, still learning their craft on the job but expected to act as if they knew what they were doing. Rokossovsky had shone in front command during the Battle of Stalingrad and taken the final German surrender. One of his recent tasks had combined business with pleasure by getting rid of a large number of Seventieth Army’s NKVD officers unable to make the transition from brutalizing their countrymen to fighting Germans. Kursk’s northern sector could have been in no better hands.
Rokossovsky’s counterpart in the south was more of an establishment figure. Nikolai Vatutin joined the Red Army as a private in 1920 and spent the next two decades developing an awareness of technological innovation and a reputation as a systematic planner not afraid to make decisions. Given the many top-level vacancies created by Stalin’s purges of the senior officer corps, it was hardly surprising when Vatutin became the general staff’s chief of operations in 1940 and its deputy chief a few months later.
Vatutin was one of the first to develop a sense of how comprehensive a disaster Barbarossa was and one of the few to inform Stalin of the blunt, unvarnished truth. He did well commanding the Southwestern Front in the Stalingrad counteroffensive. He was enough of a risk taker to overbet his hand against Manstein during the Kharkov operation of January–February 1943. But Vatutin was not the only Soviet general who had a similar experience. With Vasilevsky’s support he survived, and in March he was given command of the Voronezh Front in the Kursk salient’s southern half.
Vatutin initially advocated a preemptive attack as soon as possible. The longer the Germans delayed their own offensive, the more strongly Vatutin argued for “getting off our backsides.” He telephoned Stalin himself, calling for an offensive no later than early July and by some accounts sufficiently reinforced Stalin’s own anxieties that had Vatutin been on the spot instead of at the far end of a phone line, plans might have been changed even at that late date. Such aggressive determination made Nikolai Vatutin the kind of senior general both Zhukov and Stalin wanted at the sharp end: better to rein in the spirited stallion than try to inspire a mule, especially as Vatutin did not face a walk in the sun. His front would eventually commit more than 450,000 men: four rifle armies, a tank army, and two tank corps. The Thirty-eighth and Fortieth Armies, thirteen divisions and four tank brigades, covered the southern half of the salient’s nose.
The Sixth and Seventh Guards Armies, which extended Vatutin’s line to the salient’s base, were expected to receive the first German assault. Each had seven rifle divisions, nearly seventeen hundred guns and mortars, and a number of armored fighting vehicles. They had been especially favored in the matter of minefields and antitank strongpoints and were expected to need both. The terrain in their sector was the most open on the salient’s front and included the Kharkov–Kursk highway: the shortest paved distance between the two points. Both armies, moreover, had, at thirty-five to forty miles apiece, larger sectors than their Central Front counterparts.
Vatutin responded by concentrating his reserves behind the Sixth and Seventh Guards Armies: the Sixty- ninth Army’s five divisions, the three divisions of the 35th Guards Rifle Corps, the First Tank Army, and two more Guards tank corps under his direct command. It was an impressive sector reserve in both numbers and quality, and First Tank Army’s commander, Mikhail Katukov, was easily the best tank man in the salient. He had given Guderian a serious bloody nose during Barbarossa; he had helped rebuild the armored force in 1941–42; and he had come out of the fighting around Rzhev with a record of combining Soviet hardness with enough situational awareness not to insist on the impossible. He would prove a good man in the right spot.
III
As the ground pounders counted down the days, the battle for air supremacy over the salient took center stage. The Red Air Force had taken a brutal beating in the early weeks of Barbarossa. But enough aircraft were destroyed on the ground that their crews survived to man the new generations of aircraft and train the new generations that flew them. Designers and engineers, some released from the Gulag, produced state-of-the-art designs whose airframes, like that of the British Spitfire, had a capacity for improvement as opposed to needing replacement by entirely new models.
But by mid-1943, quality still lagged. Key to the air battle over Kursk were single-engine air superiority fighters. By mid-1943, the most common Soviet fighters, the Lavochkin La-5 and the Yakovlev Yak-1 and Yak-7, were still about a half generation behind the Messerschmitt Me-109Gs and Focke-Wulf Fw-190s that were their
