Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk: The Turning Point of World War II

316 Pages·2013·3.47 MB·English

by  Dennis E. Showalter

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.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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: 978-0-81299465-0
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: GENESIS
Chapter II: PREPARATIONS
Chapter III: STRIKE
Chapter IV: GRAPPLE
Chapter V: DECISIONS
Chapter VI: HARD POUNDING
Chapter VII: CROSSOVERS
Conclusion: WATERSHEDS
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
I
NTRODUCTION
is a continuing paradox. On the one hand, it is regularly
THE BATTLE OF KURSK
described as 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.
O B , O C
RDER OF ATTLE PERATION ITADEL
GERMAN
A G C F M G K
RMY ROUP ENTER— 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