Armor and Blood

sophisticated tactical opposition. What regiment and division commanders wanted in subordinates was tough men physically and morally, willing to lead from the front and publicly confident in even the most desperate situations. One might speculate, indeed, that a steady supply of twenty-something lieutenants with wound badges and attitudes helped older, wiser, and more tired superiors to suppress any developing doubts about Hitler and his war.

Chapter II PREPARATIONS

THE BATTLE OF KURSK developed in the wider contexts of a war that the Reich’s leadership, from Hitler downward, understood hung in the balance. In the aftermath of El Alamein, Hitler had heavily reinforced defeat in North Africa. The result was a few tactical victories, won against inexperienced troops, that proved operationally barren and strategically empty.

I

Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was worn down mentally and physically. He halted one attack when the American artillerymen facing it had a fifteen-minute supply of ammunition remaining. He managed to concentrate three panzer divisions for an attack against the British Eighth Army advancing from the east, the largest armored attack the Germans made in the entire campaign. But radio intercepts gave Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery an outline of his enemy’s intentions, with the result that the Germans ran into a multilayered, prepared defense that tore the heart out of the panzers. “The Marshal has made a balls of it,” Montgomery pithily observed, and within a day Rommel called off a battle that by all odds ranks as his most embarrassing.

Three weeks later, on March 26, 1943, the British Eighth Army enveloped the Mareth Line. On April 19, the British First Army and the U.S. II Corps attacked in the west. Despite Hitler’s continued reinforcing of failure, there could be no serious doubt of the final outcome.

Hopes for the U-boat campaign, and faith in new weapons from nerve gas to super-long-range cannon to rocket bombs, were balanced against an Anglo-American round-the-clock aerial offensive absorbing increasing amounts of the Reich’s high-tech capacities. They were further dimmed by the prospects of a cross-Channel invasion sometime in 1943 by an alliance demonstrating in North Africa an uncomfortably high learning curve, albeit on a small scale. The domestic situation was no less disquieting. In 1942, the Eastern Front alone had cost the army an average of more than a hundred thousand dead each month. Not counting the completely unfit and the indispensable war workers, as of March 1943 the Reich was down to its last half million warm bodies not yet in uniform. In 1942, the Eastern Front had also cost fifty-five hundred tanks, eight thousand guns, and almost a quarter-million motor vehicles. Two-thirds of the twenty thousand written-off aircraft had been lost in Russia. These material losses were being successfully replaced—but for how long?

Complicating the answer was Hitler’s fundamental distrust of both the German people and his own apparatus of repression and control. He believed firmly that Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by the collapse of its home front in 1918. “Total mobilization” as practiced in Russia and Great Britain—conscripting women for war work, shutting down civilian-oriented production, combing the economy ruthlessly for men—was highly risky and to a great extent beyond the capacities of the haphazard, inefficient Nazi system.

Paradoxically, from Hitler’s perspective the strategic situation seemed most promising on the Russian front. Postwar historians in general have followed the generals’ memoirs in blaming the defeat at Kursk on the Fuhrer. Hitler is indicted, tried, and convicted first for refusing to accept the professionals’ recommendations and shift to an operational defensive, replacing the losses of the winter campaign and temporarily trading space for time, while allowing the Red Army to extend itself in a renewed offensive, then for using the refitted mobile divisions in counterattacks such as Manstein’s post-Stalingrad “backhands.” Once having forced through the concept of an offensive, Hitler is described as first delaying it while the Russians reinforced the sector, then abandoning it when, against the odds, the generals and the Landser were on the point of once more pulling the Reich’s chestnuts from the fire.

Reality, as might be expected, is a good deal more complex. As early as October 1941, Japan had offered to act as an intermediary in negotiating a Russo-German peace, in the interest of focusing the Axis against Great Britain and the United States. Even before the Soviet offensive at Stalingrad, Hitler had rejected Italian suggestions for either seeking terms with Russia or shutting down the Eastern Front and transferring resources to an increasingly threatened western theater.

Hitler rejected both possibilities repeatedly and emphatically. For the Fuhrer, the Reich’s blood-bought living space was not a negotiable asset. Defeat and retreat, moreover, meant material losses were permanent, while in an offensive, damaged weapons and vehicles could often be repaired by a maintenance system whose efficiency had improved by necessity. Hitler’s specific insistence that south Russia’s resources were too significant for sustaining Germany’s war effort to be casually fought over, much less abandoned, could not be simply dismissed. Neither could his argument that the slightest hint of negotiations between Germany and the USSR would only encourage the Anglo-Americans to intensify their air offensive and step up their invasion plans.

Instead, with the turn of the year Hitler increasingly focused his strategic thinking on the East. Italy and Hungary were withdrawing their forces from Russia. Romania was reducing its commitment. Finland had always fought a parallel war. A major victory was badly needed to impress these wavering allies. Russia offered the best immediate prospect of such a victory: a victory that might convince even Turkey to join the war. And prospects for negotiations with Stalin—which seemed more likely than discussing peace with Winston Churchill—was better undertaken from a position of strength than one of stalemate. Perhaps as early as the coming autumn, when weather again closed down the front, something might be undertaken in that quarter.

By any rational calculation, the Reich’s short-term prospects of total victory were close to zero. Without Hitler’s iron determination, Germany would probably have been ready to conclude peace in 1943. But by that time, the National Socialist Fuhrer state had so far eroded the principal institutions of government, party, Wehrmacht, and society that neither institutional nor personal forums for debating the issue in any consequent way existed. Not only was no one but Hitler responsible for the whole—no one (above all, no one in the military) was willing to risk looking beyond operational factors, considering the larger strategic issues, and concluding that the war might be unwinnable, much less acting on such a conclusion. Like many another Third Reich design, the Kursk offensive would take on a half-life of its own.

In the spring of 1943, the Army High Command (the OKH, Oberkommando des Heeres), responsible for the war in Russia, was divided evenly on the specific issue of attack and defense on the Eastern Front. Heinz Guderian was one of the many generals supplanted during the Ablosungswinter (“relief winter”) of 1941–1942. In February 1943, he was restored to power and favor as the newly created inspector general of armored troops. From his first weeks in office, he argued against any major offensive during 1943 in favor of rebuilding a mechanized force that had been stretched to its limits by the fighting at the turn of the year. Wait until 1944, Guderian urged. Build a mobile reserve strong enough to hold any Western front the British and Americans could open. Then strike in the East with divisions built around a new generation of heavy tanks, with increased numbers of half-tracks, assault guns, and self-propelled artillery pieces.

Manstein, by this time the doyen and guru of the Russian front, at least in his own mind, believed Guderian took too little account of the Red Army’s growing size and effectiveness. Manstein’s answer was elastic defense: giving ground before a Soviet offensive, then striking the flanks. This, he believed, would maximize German officers’ mastery of mobile warfare and German soldiers’ fighting power. However, the concept was Manstein’s personal brainchild: barely articulated, tested over no more than a few months, and for practical purposes