sectors if that became necessary. However, using the infantry, the obvious alternative, meant relying on divisions whose strength and effectiveness were so low that only one was rated as capable of all operational missions. Seven more counted as suitable only “for limited attacks,” and German staffs were extremely generous in those evaluations, at least before the shooting started.
Hitler’s response was that Citadel would throw the Russians sufficiently off balance to prevent an independent offensive. He implied that Model would be reinforced by the Panthers that instead went to Hoth. And he finally set a last, unalterable date for the offensive: July 5, 1943. His mood varied. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels noted that as the deadline approached, Hitler seemed increasingly optimistic about Citadel’s prospects. But on July 1, the Fuhrer summoned the senior generals and some of Citadel’s key corps commanders to a final conference at Rastenburg. One participant described the meeting as a monologue, with nothing convincing, let alone inspiring, about the presentation. Hitler explained the repeated delays as necessary to make up troop shortages and increase production of Panthers and Tigers. He described the attack as a gamble, a
By then, that was one point on which “the greatest warlord of all time” and his generals were in near complete agreement. If, as Kempf said after the war, Model believed the attack a poor idea, he was silent when it still might have counted. In his memoirs, Manstein concluded that it might have been a mistake not to have told Hitler bluntly that the attack no longer made sense. Writing more than a decade afterward, Mellenthin contributed a last word: “The German Supreme Command could think of nothing better than to fling our magnificent panzer divisions against Kursk, which had now become the strongest fortress in the world.” Want of civil courage and military integrity? Perhaps. Or perhaps Hitler and his generals had in common the feeling a gambler knows when he has so much in the game: the easy decision is to call the hand.
It is a familiar axiom of modern war, expressed mathematically in something called the Lanchester equations, that an offensive requires a 3-to-1 superiority. Soviet doctrine optimistically reduced that to 3 to 2, assuming the Red Army’s superior planning, staff work, and fighting power. But by the time the preparations for Kursk were complete, the Soviet defenders outnumbered the attackers in every category of men and equipment, in almost every sector. The average ratio was somewhere between 2.5 and 1.5 to 1 in favor of the Russians. Did that make Citadel a suicide run from the beginning? Given the respective rates of buildup, it nevertheless seems reasonable to argue that an early attack, mounted by the forces available in April or May, would have lacked the combat power to overcome the salient’s defenses even in their early stages. The Germans’ only chance was the steel-headed sledgehammer they eventually swung in July. And that highlights the essential paradox of Kursk. The factors that made the battle zone acceptable in operational terms also made it too restrictive to allow for the application of the force multipliers the German army’s panzers had spent a decade cultivating. Kursk offered no opportunity for operational skill and little for tactical virtuosity. Militarily, the strength of the defensive system meant the German offensive had to depend on mass and momentum—which is another way to describe a battle of attrition, the one type of combat the German way of war was structured to avoid.
No less significant was the synergy between Kursk’s geographic scale and the Red Army’s command and control methods and capacities. Since Barbarossa, those had developed in contexts of top-down battle management, reflecting both the Soviet principle that war is a science and the fact that their senior commanders lost effectiveness operating independently. Previous German offensives had found no difficulty in getting inside Soviet decision loops, which generated increasingly random responses that frequently collapsed into chaos. Kursk enabled a timely response to German moves as the defense slowed those moves down. It enabled as well a degree of management absent in previous major battles—creating in turn a confidence at all levels of headquarters that a culture of competence had replaced a culture of desperation.
Those were significant force multipliers, in a situation arguably not needing them. But the panzers had a habit of defying odds, and Stalin took no chances. He dispatched Zhukov as Stavka’s representative to the Central Front and Vasilevsky to the Voronezh Front. The marshals observed training, offered suggestions, and, not least, kept insisting on the importance of waiting for the German offensive instead of rushing the situation. “Time and patience”—Kutuzov’s mantra from 1812—would be applied to another invader.
STRIKE
FOR THE SOVIET Central Front Citadel began in the early hours of July 5. Around 2:00 A.M., the Thirteenth Army reported to front HQ that one of its patrols had picked up a German pioneer, clearing minefields to prepare for an attack he said would come at 3:00 P.M. Zhukov immediately authorized Rokossovsky to turn his artillery loose—only then did he phone Stalin with the news that this was no drill.
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Central Front’s counterbarrage opened at 2:20 A.M. But Soviet gunners had not succeeded in registering German positions with complete accuracy. Imprecise targeting produced random firing and wasted ammunition— too much of it, given the intensity of the fire plan. Waiting until the German infantry were out of their dugouts and the tanks deployed in starting positions would have inflicted more damage for less ammunition. Mistakes on that scale were accountable to Stalin himself. But if specific results were episodic, the overall weight and intensity of the shelling was nevertheless so great that the German high command agreed to delay the attack for two and a half hours in Model’s sector so that German artillery might reply.
The resulting disruption diminished the coordination so important to Model’s plan. On the other hand, the Germans benefited from the Sixteenth Air Army’s decision not to strike Luftwaffe airfields in coordination with the artillery, but to meet German air strikes as they came. The crewmen of Model’s supporting 1st Air Division received a surprise in their final briefings on July 4. The original plan for a strike against the Soviet airfields had been abandoned as unworkable based on previous experience. Instead, the Luftwaffe was to act as literal flying artillery, concentrating on strongpoints and artillery positions in the forward battle zone. This was the first time in the war that a major offensive would be made without simultaneously attacking headquarters, airfields, and supply routes in the enemy’s rear. It obviated any chance of reducing the odds by catching the Russians on the ground. It manifested as well the respect air and ground generals felt for the Red Army’s defenses.
The first sorties were mounted at 3:25 A.M.. Medium bombers and Stukas repeatedly attacked the network of gun positions around Maloarkhangelsk. Soviet fighters, deployed piecemeal, took heavy losses at the hands of the Fw-190s of Jagdgeschwader (Fighter Wing; JG) 51. Stuka groups were correspondingly able to hammer the Russians until relieved by another group, then return to base, rearm, refuel, and rejoin the fight. After an hour of that, supplemented by an artillery barrage against the same targets, the infantry went forward.
Able to take initial advantage of the pioneers’ night work clearing minefields, the
Studded with bunkers supported by dug-in tanks, the Russian position was a nightmare version of the kinds of defenses Americans would encounter two years later on Okinawa. It quickly won the nickname “Panzer Hill”— but the Germans believed they had an armored counter. In 1940, German designers had begun work on a remote-controlled wire-guided mine-clearing vehicle carrying a thousand pounds of explosives. It had performed
