selection, like British and American paratroopers, not even on combat performance like the Soviet Guards divisions, but rather a functional elite based on learned skills: the panzer and panzer grenadier divisions. That structure was reinforced by the long-range consequences of the much-maligned Versailles Treaty. With conscription forbidden and the military production complex eviscerated, Germany was constrained to mobilize the bulk of its wartime army as foot-propelled infantry. Their vehicles were largely horse-drawn; their training levels varied downward from marginal; their armament depended heavily on what could be delivered by overstrained factories or salvaged from the Reich’s latest conquests.
That structure’s success owed much to its own quality—but no less to its obliging enemies. By 1943, the Red Army was no longer an obliging enemy. Kursk was the German army’s last major, operational-level offensive. For the rest of the war, it shifted to a defensive orientation. It did so superlatively, and that is an anomaly. States as a rule may go to war with the armies they have. Armies as a rule fight wars with the tools they begin with. The U.S. Army never overcame its internal dichotomy between mobility and firepower. British shortcomings in combined- arms operations remained a constant from the evacuation of Dunkirk to the crossing of the Rhine. But after Kursk, on both major fronts, the German army remade itself.
To a degree, that process reflected Adolf Hitler’s insistence that his commanders report operational particulars in detail—and state clearly when they failed to carry out assigned orders. His increasing micromanagement was a consequence of increasing amounts of information. The nearly instantaneous communication enabled by modern electronics gave not only Hitler but any senior officer direct access to subordinate echelons of command. That fact, however, did not automatically diminish German operational effectiveness. Initially, the most familiar response to the Red Army’s increasing offensive capability was Erich von Manstein’s concept of flexible defense: Give ground, let the enemy overreach, then hit back. When such sweeping maneuvers became impossible as Soviet numbers and flexibility increased, a new generation of Eastern Front veterans such as Erhard Raus and Walther Model developed a combined-arms zone defense that tactically frustrated the Red Army until the Reich’s final breakdown in 1945—and that depended heavily on communications that throttled initiative at higher command levels.
Materially, the German army introduced a “platoon technology” that reshaped the battlefield. The MG-42, with its high cyclic rate of fire; the MP-43 and Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifles; and the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck portable antitank rockets lifted the German infantryman to a level the rest of the world’s foot soldiers would not reach for decades. In their developed versions, the Panther and Tiger tanks, with their high- velocity guns and well-sloped armor, and their first-rate radios and optics, combined fighting power and survivability to a higher degree than their counterparts. And it was at Kursk that these formidable armored vehicles, like the army as a whole, began the paradigm shift from offensive to defensive mainstays.
Kursk was a watershed for the USSR as well. It marked the first stage of the final development of the broad-front strategic grand design Stalin had sought from the war’s beginning. Previous versions had foundered on poor coordination, inadequate logistics, limited tactical skills—and German fighting power. From Soviet perspectives, the Kursk salient was developed as a baited strategic trap: the greater the German commitment there, the more vulnerable they would be to attacks on the flanks. Operationally, Army Group Center managed to reestablish a front. In the south during that same time frame, Manstein managed a fighting withdrawal across the Dnieper. He celebrated this “heroic epic” in his memoirs. And the Russians had bought their initial victories in the Ukraine dearly, with more than a million and a half casualties. But in October, a series of attacks carried the Red Army across the Dnieper, setting the stage for Kursk’s third watershed: the Soviet Union’s valediction.
The Dnieper crossings were signposts of the Red Army’s tactical progress. The flexibility suggested during Citadel came to the fore as within a week more than twenty bridgeheads, some over twenty miles deep, pocked a river line the Germans never really established in the first place. In November, Voronezh Front thrust into Kiev, liberating “the mother of Russian cities” in an operation combining, in Vatutin’s words, the “speed and resolution” he had originally sought during Citadel. On December 24, the Red Army struck again, in force: four fronts, three and a quarter million men, and twenty-six hundred tanks acting in synchronization.
The Germans in the juggernaut’s path made their way west as best they could. Soviet spearheads cut off sixty thousand men in one pocket, over three times as many in another. The Germans responded with two epic breakouts. Neither was more than a speed bump to an offensive that, before running out of steam, tore fifty-mile gaps in the German defenses, led to Hitler’s making “stand fast” an obsession, and structured Stavka’s strategic design over the next eighteen months. That plan was based on a series of mutually reinforcing strategic offensives along several axes, beginning in early 1944. Russian accounts stress a system, with one multifront thrust in the Leningrad sector and another in the Ukraine, setting the stage for a third: Operation Bagration, a massive blow against Army Group Center with the intention of annihilating the forces in that sector and compelling the Germans in the north and south to retreat or risk envelopment. The underlying concept was political as well as strategic. If success reinforced success, the way to Berlin and Western Europe might open before the British and Americans did more than gain a foothold on the continent.
Detailed analysis of newly available records, by David Glantz in particular, presents a more complex, more opportunistic strategic pattern, with new missions and objectives assigned as the initial ones developed. Whether particular initiatives were intended to exploit success blitzkrieg fashion, improve the prospects of future, systematic offensives, or simply keep the Germans guessing remains difficult to determine, especially since unsuccessful operations tended to disappear down one of the USSR’s many memory holes. The end result was the same: compound, continuous overstretch of increasingly limited Wehrmacht resources. And whether interpreted as a fencer’s sophisticated swordsmanship or a death by a thousand cuts, the operations that carried the Red Army to the Oder River and Budapest were as spectacular as any in the history of war making. On February 26, 1944, the siege of Leningrad was lifted. Beginning on June 22, Operation Bagration erased Army Group Center, more than thirty divisions, from the German order of battle. By December, southern Russia was German-free and the survivors were trying to hold on to Budapest, on the Reich’s threshold. The two-pronged drive into Hitler’s capital in the war’s final months appears almost anticlimactic.
The Soviet Union’s strategic approach had three taproots. One was Stalin’s enduring belief that if the Germans were hit hard enough everywhere, their defenses would break somewhere—and break beyond repair. The second was an emphasis on speed and surprise that informed prewar regulations and never disappeared in the planning staffs. The third involved the field commanders’ general inability to decide when and where the decisive rupture would occur and their personal ambition to be the one who made it happen. By 1944, the Soviet front commanders had in common an appetite for status and a fear of losing it. Both mentalities were created and controlled by a leader who saw himself as all-powerful. With history itself on his side, Stalin pushed the envelope of events—all the way into Berlin.
In Kursk’s aftermath, the Red Army also completed its institutional transformation from a bludgeon—not to a rapier, but certainly to a katana. Russian commanders were learning how to coordinate their movements on a theater level and how to keep moving, without the unintended pauses and interruptions that characterized pre- Kursk offensives. American Lend-Lease jeeps facilitated communication; American 2.5-ton trucks set standards for reliability in the supply echelons. Air-ground cooperation steadily improved, as did artillery fire direction. Both started from far enough back to remain well below Western standards. But there were enough guns, Katyushas, and Shturmoviks that by 1944–45, that minimum efficiency was sufficient.
Technically, the armored force in particular moved to an advanced stage. In April 1943, an upgunned version of the T-34 began entering service. Its 85 mm gun was a battlefield match for both the Germans’ big cats, and the JS-II gave it a formidable stablemate. Named for Joseph Stalin, the tank mounted a 122 mm gun, the heaviest of any World War II tank. A new generation of assault guns emerged, carrying 122 mm and 152 mm pieces in fixed mountings on tank hulls. First used at Kursk, they were promptly and appropriately named
The importance of mechanized mobility to the Red Army of 1944–45 overshadows in much of the literature the fact that, doctrinally, throughout the war the infantry remained the primary arm. The combined-arms tactics, the massed artillery, the close air support—all were predicated on, and grew from, the infantry’s perceived needs. As late as the end of 1943, only around three hundred thousand of more than four million ground troops served in the mobile formations. In terms of technology, the infantrymen fell ever further behind the tankers, the gunners, and the airmen.
The massive losses of 1941–43 also altered the rifle units’ makeup. About a million prisoners were released
