as suspected partisans or simple shooting at random. The Russians, in the words of one of Manstein’s infantrymen, “should find nothing but a field of rubble.”
Files labled “Protests” and “Refusals” are conspicuously absent from otherwise well-kept German records. What was important was that the despoliation be carried out in an orderly fashion and under command. German soldiers were not mere brigands. Believing that required Orwellian levels of doublethink. And it is reasonable to suggest that, like any example of doublethink, believing it required shutting off elements of mind and spirit that are crucial to generalship at its highest levels.
Manstein conducted his retreat with consummate professionalism. The Red Army stayed on Army Group South’s heels. Vatutin aphorized its motive: “They are burning our bread.” Few Soviet soldiers had not experienced hunger. By the time Army Group South reached the Dnieper, it was down to fewer than three hundred operable tanks. The average infantry division’s frontline strength was around a thousand men; its average sector was around twelve miles. The men were so tired and apathetic that a report from the elite Grossdeutschland Division said its men no longer cared whether they were shot by the Russians or their own officers.
Army Group Center was in no better condition. By September 1944, one of its army commanders said his total rifle strength had been reduced to no more than seven thousand. An auto accident on October 12 took Kluge out of action; he never returned to the Eastern Front. Only Russian regression to tactics making Passchendaele and the Somme appear sophisticated eventually enabled the Germans to stabilize—more or less—that sector for part of the winter. But wherever the Red Army drove forward, it was with renewed determination to carry the fight to a finish, as long as it took and whatever its cost.
WATERSHEDS
IN EVALUATING AND CONTEXTUALIZING KURSK, a spectrum of issues meriting consideration remains. First come statistics. In terms of material, the Soviet claims were of almost 2,800 tanks and assault guns destroyed. German archives provide a figure of around 250. Only 10 of those were Tigers. Similar exploration of Soviet records gives 536 total AFV losses for Central Front, between 1,200 and 1,400 for Voronezh Front and the reinforcements from Steppe Front. Put together, the totals vary between 1,600 and over 2,000—about eight to one. More than 54,000 Germans were killed, wounded, or missing. Total Russian casualties exceeded 320,000.
These figures help address some of Kursk’s prevailing myths. The German army on the Eastern Front was neither bled white nor demodernized by Citadel’s human and material losses. Its Tigers were masters of the field wherever they appeared. Even the often denigrated Ferdinands did yeoman service in Model’s sector when used appropriately, in their intended antitank role. Intangibles may well be another story. Whether in a context of irreplaceable combat experience lost to death and wounds or irreplaceable confidence lost in a battering confrontation that left the Russians standing and the Germans on one knee, after Kursk it was the Germans reacting to Russian initiatives.
For the Red Army, Kursk was one of its bloodiest and least sophisticated battles, one that drew in corps and armies originally part of Stavka’s grand offensive design and arguably set back the projected Russian victory for a year. Whether as a function of the Soviet system, of Stalin’s ruthless culling of the senior officer corps in the years of defeat, or of German tactical and operational skill, Kursk showed what the Red Army would become—not what it was.
As for Prokhorovka, both combatants’ master narratives are true; both are incomplete. The Waffen SS won a tactical victory on July 12—Prokhorovka was not a Tiger graveyard, but a T-34 junkyard. Operationally, however, the palm rests with the Red Army. Prokhorovka took what the Germans had left to give. Citadel’s turning point was not July 12, but July 13, when the Germans flailed desperately and vainly, like a dazed boxer, to regain even the local initiative. Operations Kutuzov and Rumyantsev would thwart them.
That leads to another myth. It has been called the myth of victory denied. It might better be described as the myth of XXIV Panzer Corps. From Citadel’s beginning, Manstein saw those divisions as the lodestone of victory and bewailed their absence as the key to defeat. Apart from their crucial roles in stabilizing the sectors of Manstein’s two other armies when the Soviet offensive began, nothing in the details of Citadel’s final days indicate that Wiking and 23rd Panzer would have done more than commit even more of the irreplaceable mobile divisions to an already limited battle zone—from which they would have been withdrawn in any case.
As indicated throughout this text, Erich von Manstein was not a gambling man. Perhaps if poker had been his recreation, he might have remembered the game’s key axioms: “Know when to hold and when to fold; know when to walk away and when to run.” Like Lee at Gettysburg, he stayed for one card too many.
Winston Churchill described Kursk as heralding the downfall of the German army on the Eastern Front. This work presents Citadel as a watershed on multiple levels. Four stand out. Institutionally, the Battle of Kursk was the crossover point between two of the most formidable instruments of war the world has ever seen, built around fundamentally different paradigms. The Red Army understood war as a science, following abstract principles amenable to reason and thus dependent on planning. To the Germans, war was ultimately an art form, whose mastery required what amounted to an aesthetic sense.
“Paradigm” does not mean “straitjacket.” In the interwar years, the Soviet Union developed concepts of mobile operations that surpassed anything in the Germans’ playbook. The Red Army’s theories of deep operations, conducted on multiple echelons and in combined-arms contexts, were blitzkrieg
The Battle of Kursk was fought after both armies had had two years to learn—and to suffer—from their own and each other’s mistakes. Positively and negatively, neither was what it had been during Barbarossa or the struggle for Stalingrad. At Kursk, their elites met head-to-head, each with time to understand the nature of the proposed encounter and to prepare in its own fashion. The restricted size of the theater created a dueling ground. That demanded focus: neither adversary could impose its doctrine and will from the beginning. It demanded skill: slips and errors could not be compensated for by changing the battle’s parameters. And it demanded will: Which side possessed the confidence and the nerve to last the course for the five final minutes? What would be the outcome? Perihelion and aphelion, or mutual standoff in the pattern of 1916: Verdun and the Somme? The Battle of Kursk sketched the answer and opened the door to a new reality. After Citadel, there was no position the Germans could defend, no line they could maintain, if the Red Army was willing to pay the price of taking it or breaking it.
Kursk’s second watershed involved the German army’s fundamental reconfiguration. It began World War II as an instrument of offense and exploitation. The bedrock of its command system was independent authority. Given a mission, the means of accomplishing it were the commander’s responsibility. This reflected systems of training and education that meant initiative and adaptability were likely to produce favorable results at any level. It reflected a common military culture, built around the general staff. And it reflected a privileging of creativity, aggression, and major risk taking for big gains.
This mentality synergized with an institutional structure based on high-tech formations within a mass. The force multipliers developed in the 1930s, based on internal combustion engines and electronic communications, favored developing an elite—not in the racial/ideological sense of the Waffen SS, not on the basis of personnel
