Armor and Blood PDF
Preview Armor and Blood
Copyright © 2013 by Dennis Showalter All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. R H and the H colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. ANDOM OUSE OUSE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Showalter, Dennis E. Armor and blood: the battle of Kursk: the turning point of World War II / Dennis E. Showalter. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-0-8129-9465-0 1. Kursk, Battle of, Russia, 1943. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Tank warfare. I. Title. D764.3.K8S56 2013 940.54′2735—dc23 2012047086 www.atrandom.com Maps by Robert Bull Jacket design: Gabrielle Bordwin Jacket photograph: © The Dmitri Baltermants Collection/Corbis v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright List of Maps Introduction Order of Battle, Operation Citadel Chapter I: G ENESIS Chapter II: P REPARATIONS Chapter III: S TRIKE Chapter IV: G RAPPLE Chapter V: D ECISIONS Chapter VI: H P ARD OUNDING Chapter VII: C ROSSOVERS Conclusion: W ATERSHEDS Photo Insert Acknowledgments Guide to Further Reading Notes Other Books by This Author About the Author LIST OF MAPS Eastern Front: Beginning of March 1943 Kursk Sector: July 4 The Citadel: Soviet Defenses and the Kursk Salient German Assault on the Northern Sector of the Kursk Salient Manstein’s Sector: July 5–17 Alternative: Prokhorovka Vatutin’s Projected Counterattack: July 12 Army Detachment Kempf at the Close of July 12 Prokhorovka: July 12 Operation Kutusov: July 13 To the Dnieper: July–September 1943 INTRODUCTION is a continuing paradox. On the one hand, it is regularly described as THE BATTLE OF KURSK a military epic: history’s greatest armored battle, the first stage on the Red Army’s road to Berlin, an ultimate test of Nazi and Soviet military/political systems. On the other, it is strangely blurred. Compared with Stalingrad or Barbarossa, it remains obscure, its narrative fostering myth as much as history. In the context of Western, particularly English-language, writing on World War II, Kursk is part of an imbalance that focuses on Anglo-American operations. The sheer scale of the fighting, the absence of significant cultural and political reference points, and an understandable interest in the deeds of one’s own countries combine in a literature acknowledging the Russo-German War after Stalingrad as a vital factor in the war’s development and outcome but restricting it to the periphery in terms of page counts. A recent development in the historiography of the Russo-German War integrates it into the related perspectives of total war and genocide. Sometimes it becomes pivotal, as in Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World and in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. In other works, such as Stephen Fritz’s Ostkrieg or Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War, Kursk, when it appears, becomes a footnote in a wider story of Armageddon and apocalypse. In the context of the Russo-German War as a subject of military analysis, Kursk remains blended with what Germany’s Military History Research Institute, the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, calls the “forgotten year” (from summer 1943 to summer 1944), a time of inglorious retreats on the German side and inglorious victories for the Soviets—both achieved at excessive cost and neither offering much inspiration or value to students of the art/science/craft of war. In that sense, Kursk becomes a counterpoint to Passchendaele and Chemin des Dames in World War I, or the American Civil War’s Wilderness: a tribute to uninspired hard fighting and colossal human suffering. Well before John Keegan’s The Face of Battle focused military writers’ attention away from the map movements of abstract red and blue blocks to the mechanics of battle as they apply to men at the sharp end, Kursk generated accounts of memory and explanation. Two master narratives emerged. The German version depicted a heroic struggle, wearing down massively superior Soviet defenders, climaxing with the SS Panzer Corps’s destruction of the Fifth Guards Tank Army at Prokhorovka—only to have their victory thwarted by Hitler’s micromanaging and indecision. The Soviet counterpart depicted a German attack first ground down by a scientifically created, dauntlessly defended fortification system, then defeated by the intrepid attack of the Fifth Guards Tank Army at Prokhorovka. Addressing the contradictions between the two memes has been complicated until recently by a virtual German monopoly of Eastern Front narratives. The USSR’s determination to control the story of the Great Fatherland Patriotic War was complemented by a discouraging of memory and memoir at every rank from private to marshal of the Soviet Union. The improved post-Soviet access to archives, memories, and battlefields has combined with postreunification developments in German military historiography to revitalize, indeed revolutionize, the academic and general-audience writing on Kursk and its matrices. The general intention of this book is to synthesize the material and the perspectives that have in some cases been upheld and in others modified, reshaped, or revised. It is operationally structured, but not operationally focused. The events of the battle are used to contextualize wider issues of operations and strategy, institutional structure and state policy, and to convey some of the Eastern Front’s human dimension. This work has a specific purpose as well: to structure and clarify the newly available mass of detail, official, tactical, and personal, on the fighting. Kursk was a battle before it became anything else. That makes it worthwhile knowing who did what, where, when, with what, to whom, and above all why. This requires collating, comparing, and critiquing official and personal accounts, contextualizing them in a geography significantly unfamiliar to all but a few potential readers, then presenting the results in a way that is comprehensible without being condescending. For the sake of clarity, the text uses Russian orthography for geographic features. It addresses the two-hour difference between German and Russian official time by citing the time noted by the subjects of the narrative: German when the actors are German, Russian for Russian. The text also minimizes references to the obscure villages and low heights that were the usual foci of orders and reports and challenge the most detailed and costly tactical maps. In each case of this kind of judgment call, the author acknowledges any misjudgments and requests charity. For the sake of another kind of clarity, the linguistically and orthographically complex ranks of the Waffen SS have been translated into their U.S. Army counterparts. The same acknowledgment and the same request apply to the book’s subtext. That is, to avoid “war porn,” whether in contexts of heroism, pathos, horror, or voyeurism. Should it succeed in nothing else, may that objective stand. ORDER OF BATTLE, OPERATION CITADEL GERMAN A G C RMY ROUP ENTER— F M G K IELD ARSHAL ÜNTHER VON LUGE 9th Army—General Walter Model XX Corps 45th, 72nd, 137th, 251st Infantry Divisions XLVI Panzer Corps 7th, 31st, 102nd, 258th Infantry Divisions XLVI Panzer Corps 2nd, 9th, 20th Panzer Divisions, 6th Infantry Division XLI Panzer Corps 18th Panzer Division, 86th, 292nd Infantry Divisions XXIII Corps 78th Assault Division, 36th, 216th, 383rd Infantry Divisions A G S M E M RMY ROUP OUTH—FIELD ARSHAL RICH VON ANSTEIN 4th Panzer Army General Hermann Hoth XLVIII Panzer Corps 3rd, 11th Panzer Divisions, Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland, 167th Infantry Division II SS Panzer Corps SS Panzer Grenadier Divisions Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Totenkopf LII Corps 57th, 255th, 332nd Infantry Divisions A D K G W K RMY ETACHMENT EMPF— ENERAL ERNER EMPF III Panzer Corps 6th, 7th, 19th Panzer Divisions XI Corps 106th, 320th Infantry Divisions XLII Corps 39th, 161st, 282nd Infantry Divisions RUSSIAN C F K R ENTRAL RONT—GENERAL ONSTANTIN OKOSSOVSKY 13th, 48th, 60th, 65th, 70th Armies, 2nd Tank Army, 9th, 19th Tank Corps V F N V ORONEZH RONT—GENERAL IKOLAI ATUTIN 6th, 7th Guards Armies, 38th, 40th, 69th Armies, 1st Tank Army, 35th Guards Rifle Corps, 2nd, 5th Guards Tank Corps 5th Guards Army, 5th Guards Tank Army assigned from Steppe Front during Citadel as reinforcements Chapter I G ENESIS one SS trooper grimly noted in his diary on July 5, 1943, “IT’S TIME TO WRITE THE LAST WILL:” while awaiting the order to advance. Across the line, Soviet soldiers swapped their own grim jokes—like the one about the tanker who reported that almost everyone in his unit had been killed that day. “I’m sorry,” he replied, “I’ll make sure I burn tomorrow.” Everybody on the long-designated battlefield knew what was coming. In mounting Operation Citadel, Adolf Hitler and his generals were seizing a high- risk window of opportunity: a last, best chance to regain the initiative in Russia before Soviet material power grew overwhelming and before the Western Allies could establish themselves in Europe. The Russians faced a graduation exercise: a test of their ability to handle a major and intricate combined-arms battle against a first-class, heavily armored, and experienced enemy. For weeks, the Germans and the Russians had been massing men, tanks, guns, and aircraft from every sector of the Eastern Front into and around a hundred- mile salient centered on the Ukrainian city of Kursk, about four hundred miles south of Moscow. All that remained indefinite were the starting time and the precise locations, which Soviet intelligence had been unable to determine. Adolf Hitler had postponed the date repeatedly. At least three times the Soviet high command, known as the Stavka, had issued false warnings. Then, on the evening of July 4, 1943, the Germans sent their men the infallible signal: a special ration of schnapps. An Alsatian serving in the Waffen SS promptly deserted—and convinced a high-status interrogation team, including Voronezh Front’s commander, General Nikolai Vatutin, and a forty-nine-year-old political adviser named Nikita Khrushchev, that the German offensive would be under way before dawn on July 5. Giving the Germans the advantage of tactical surprise might be fatal. Khrushchev promptly reported to Moscow. Joseph Stalin returned the call and—according to Khrushchev—asked for his opinion. Khrushchev
Description:The list of books you might like
