For the Kursk attack, Hitler concentrated much of the combat power of the Wehrmacht, together with three fresh SS panzer divisions, two hundred of his new Tiger tanks and 280 Panthers. Yet the limited scope of Citadel, as his operation was codenamed, contrasted with the sweeping offensives of 1941 and 1942, and emphasised Hitler’s diminished means. The Russians readily identified the threat, aided by detailed intelligence provided by their Swiss-based ‘Lucy’ spy ring. At a key Kremlin meeting on 12 April, Stalin’s generals persuaded him to allow the Germans to take the initiative. They were content for the panzers to impale themselves on a defence in depth, before the Red Army counter-attacked. Through spring and early summer, Soviet engineers laboured feverishly to create five successive lines studded with minefields, bunkers and trenches, supported by massive deployments of armour and guns. They massed 3,600 tanks against the attackers’ 2,700; 2,400 aircraft against the Luftwaffe’s 2,000; and 20,000 artillery pieces – twice the German complement. Some 1.3 million Russians faced 900,000 Germans.
Manstein, commanding Army Group South, spent three months assembling his forces, but few Germans other than the Waffen SS formations deluded themselves about Citadel’s prospects of success. Lt. Karl-Friederich Brandt wrote wretchedly from Kursk: ‘How fortunate were the men who died in France and Poland. They could still believe in victory.’ Manstein no longer aspired to achieve the Soviet Union’s defeat; he sought only a success which might oblige Stalin to acknowledge stalemate, a strategic outcome that would persuade Moscow to accept a negotiated peace rather than fight to a finish.
The Russians Exploit Victory at Kursk
Russian soldiers advanced to the defence of Kursk through lands laid waste by their enemies. Eighteen-year-old Yuri Ishpaikin wrote to his parents: ‘So many families have lost their fathers, brothers, the very roofs over their heads. I have only been here a few days, but we have marched far through a devastated country. Everywhere lie unploughed and unsown fields. Only chimneys and stone ruins survive in villages. We saw not a single man or beast. These villages are real deserts now. At night the whole western side of the sky is lit up, copper-red. It makes the soul rejoice to pass an undamaged village. Most houses are empty, but chimney smoke curls from a few, and a woman or boy comes out onto the porch to watch the Red Army pass.’ Ishpaikin, like many others, would never leave the Kursk battlefield.
‘It grew hot as early as 0800 and clouds of dust billowed up,’ wrote Pavel Rotmistrov, commanding a Guards tank army as its long columns moved into the salient. ‘By midday the dust rose in thick clouds, settling in a solid layer on roadside bushes, grainfields, tanks and trucks. The dark red disc of the sun was hardly visible through the grey shroud of dust. Tanks, self-propelled guns and tractors, armoured personnel carriers and trucks were advancing in an unending glow … Soldiers were tortured by thirst and their shirts, wet with sweat, stuck to their bodies. Drivers found the going particularly hard.’ Those who could write penned last letters, while illiterate men dictated to comrades. Twenty-year-old Ivan Panikhidin had survived a serious wound in the 1942 fighting. Now, approaching the front again, he professed pride about taking part in a struggle vital to his country: ‘In a few hours we shall join the fighting,’ he told his father. ‘The concert has already begun, we just need to keep the music going: I write to the accompaniment of the German barrage. Soon we shall attack. The battle is raging in the air and on the ground … Soviet warriors stand firm in their positions.’ Panikhidin was killed a few hours later.
The Luftwaffe battered the Russian lines for days before the assault, achieving a direct hit on the billet of Rokossovsky, who was fortunately absent. German artillery fire was met by a Russian counter-barrage, blasting the ground where formations were massing to advance. On 5 July Model’s forces lunged forward from the north, while in the south Fourth Panzer Army struck. From the outset, each side recognised Kursk as a titanic clash of forces and wills. Stuka dive-bombers and SS Tiger tanks inflicted heavy losses on Russian T-34s. Many of the new German Panthers were halted by breakdowns, but others forged on, crushing Soviet anti-tank guns in their path, while panzergrenadiers grappled with Zhukov’s infantry, using flame-throwers against trenches and bunkers. Both sides’ artillery fired almost without interruption.
After three days, the northern German armies had advanced eighteen miles, and seemed close to breakthrough. Rokossovsky’s army withstood savage assaults, but some of its units broke. A Smersh report denounced officers whom it deemed blameworthy: ‘The 676th Rifle Regiment showed little appetite for combat – its second battalion commanded by Rakitsky left its positions without orders; other battalions also succumbed to panic. The 47th Rifle Regiment’s Lt. Col. Kartashev and the 321st’s Lt. Col. Vokoshenko panicked, lost control, and failed to take necessary steps to restore order. Some senior officers showed themselves cowardly and deserted the battlefield: the 203rd Artillery Regiment’s CO Gatsuk showed no interest in his unit’s operations and with telephonist Galieva retired to the rear areas, where he resorted to drink.’
But others held fast, and Model’s armour suffered massive attrition, especially from Russian minefields. In the south, by 9 July almost half of Fourth Panzer Army’s 916 fighting vehicles were disabled or wrecked. Across the vast battlefield, a jumble of armour and men milled, surged, clashed, recoiled. Flame and smoke filled the horizon. Commanders heard a confusion of German and Russian voices competing in urgency on their radio nets: ‘Forward!’, ‘Orlov, take them from the flank!’, ‘Schneller!’, ‘Tkachenko, break through into the rear!’, ‘Vorwärts!’. Correspondent Vasily Grossman noted that everything on the battlefield including food became black with dust. At night, exhausted men were unnerved by the sudden descent of silence: the cacophony of the day seemed more acceptable, because more familiar.
On 12 July Zhukov launched his counter-thrust, Operation Kutuzov, against the northern Oryol salient. A German tank officer wrote: ‘We had been warned to expect resistance from PaK [anti-tank guns] and some tanks in static positions … In fact we found ourselves taking on a seemingly inexhaustible mass of enemy armour – never have I had such an overwhelming impression of Russian power and mass as on that day. The clouds of dust made it difficult to get support from the Luftwaffe and soon many of the T-34s had broken through our screen and were scurrying like rats across the battlefield.’ In the mêlée of armour, some tanks of the rival armies collided, halting in a tangle of tortured steel; there were many exchanges of fire at point-blank range. Across hundreds of miles of dusty plain and blackened wreckage, the largest armoured forces the world had ever seen lunged at each other, twisting and swerving. Turret traverse was often a lethal race, in which survival was determined by whether a Russian or German tank gun fired the first round. By nightfall on 12 July, rain was falling; the two armies embarked on the usual struggle against the clock, exploiting darkness to recover disabled tanks, evacuate wounded and bring forward fuel and ammunition.
The important reality was that German losses were unsustainable: Manstein’s assault had exhausted its momentum. Even where the Russians were not advancing, they held their ground. That same day 2,000 miles away, the six US and British divisions that had landed in Sicily began to sweep across the island. Hitler’s nerve broke. On 13 July, he told his generals he must divert two SS panzer divisions, his most powerful formations, to strengthen the defence of Italy. He aborted Citadel. Zhukov surveyed the battlefield with Rotmistrov. The tank general wrote: ‘It was an awesome scene, with battered and burned-out tanks, wrecked guns, armoured personnel carriers and trucks, heaps of artillery rounds and pieces of track lying everywhere. Not a single blade of grass was left standing on the darkened soil.’ The Germans kept attacking for a few days more, in hopes of salvaging something that Berlin might claim as a victory, but they were soon obliged to desist. Manstein’s reputation for invincibility was among the casualties of Kursk, though he never accepted responsibility for failure.
Behind the front, partisans staged fierce attacks on
German communications, executing 430 rail demolitions on 20–21 July alone. Hapless train crews, Russians conscripted by the occupiers, were summarily shot when they fell into guerrilla hands. By mid-1943 the Russians claimed to deploy 250,000 partisans in Ukrainian and other eastern wildernesses beyond German control. Their guerrilla activity made far more impact than that of any western European resistance movement, aided by Moscow’s indifference to Wehrmacht reprisals against the civilian population. ‘The Germans sent tanks, aviation and artillery against this partisan region,’ wrote a Russian correspondent when he visited a liberated area, ‘and they crushed it. Every village has been reduced to ashes. Their inhabitants fled into the forest … Partisan detachments dispersed, because it was impossible for big groups to survive. They are unable either to hide (the Germans keep combing the woods) or to support themselves. Food is very scarce. Sivolobov’s detachment has lived exclusively off the meat of slaughtered cows and horses for two months. They couldn’t stand the sight of meat any more. There was no bread, no potatoes, nothing … Civilians are better off. They have managed to tuck some food away, for instance burying stuff in fake graves. The enemy realised that something was going on, but when they started digging one up, they found only a dead German! The terror is awful. In some places they are shooting boys no older than ten as “Bolshevik spies”.’
Model’s army maintained a tigerish defence in the Kursk salient until 25 July, then started to fall back. On 5 August, the Germans lost Oryol and Belgorod. On the 25th the Russians regained Kharkov – and this time kept it. Soldier Alexander Slesarev wrote to his father: ‘We’re crossing liberated territory, land that has been occupied by the Germans for two years. People emerge joyfully to greet us, bringing apples, pears, tomatoes, cucumbers and so on. In the past, I knew Ukraine only from books, now I can see with my own eyes its natural beauties and many gardens.’ The resumption of Soviet rule was not an unmixed blessing for Stalin’s people. ‘It is a shame, when you travel around liberated villages, to see the cold attitude of the population,’ wrote a soldier. The Germans had permitted peasants to sow and harvest their own plots; the returning Soviets reimposed rigorous collectivisation, which provoked some protest riots recorded by Lazar Brontman. Every tractor and almost every horse was gone, so that land could be tilled only with spades and rakes, sometimes by women pulling ploughs. Even sickles were seldom available.
Local communities struggling for subsistence displayed bitter, sometimes savage hostility to refugees who passed by – in their eyes, such people were locusts. A peasant woman wrote from Kursk province: ‘It’s hard now that we don’t have cows. They took them from us two months ago … We’re ready to eat each other … There isn’t a single young man at home now that they’re fighting at the front.’ Another woman wrote to her soldier son, lamenting that she was reduced to living in the corridor outside her sister’s one-room flat. Yet another told her soldier husband: ‘We have not had bread for two months now. It’s already time for Lidiya to go to school, but we don’t have a coat for her, or anything to put on her feet. I think Lidiya and I will die of hunger in the end. We haven’t got anything … Misha, even if you stay alive, we won’t be here.’ In the village of Baranovka, which had been occupied by the Germans for seven months, Lazar Brontman found only a few farm buildings still standing. The former manager of the local collective farm was living in a cowshed with his wife and three small daughters. Their stomachs were distended by starvation.
The man told the correspondent, ‘We’ve seen no bread for three months. We eat grass.’ Then he asked fearfully, ‘Will the Germans come back?’ Brontman gave them a kilo of bread, which they gazed on as a precious delicacy. Another family, whom Brontman invited to share a brew of tea, refused the offer; they had lost the habit of such luxuries, they said dully. Yet these people lived in what was once one of Russia’s greatest agricultural regions. Censors intercepted a letter from a mother named Marukova in liberated Oryol, to her son in the Red Army: ‘There is no bread, to say nothing of potatoes. We are eating grass and my legs refuse to walk.’ Another mother named Galitsina in the same district wrote likewise: ‘When I get up in the morning I don’t know what to do, what to cook. There is no milk, bread or salt, and no help from anyone.’
The Germans staged their initial withdrawal from Kursk in good order, but no one on either side doubted that they had suffered a calamitous defeat, sustaining half a million casualties in fifty days of fighting. Stalin, triumphant, displayed his revived self-confidence by issuing new orders to rein in Zhukov and Vasilevsky. After the triumph of Stalingrad, five subsequent attempts to achieve matching envelopments of German armies had failed. In future, he decreed, the Red Army would launch frontal assaults rather than encirclements. By the end of August, eight Soviet fronts were conducting nineteen parallel offensives towards the Dnieper along a line of 660 miles from Nevel to Taganrog. On 8 September, Hitler authorised a withdrawal behind the river, where the Russians were improvising crossings with any means to hand. They staged one of their few massed air drops of the war on the west bank, landing 4,575 paratroopers, of whom half survived.
The Russian armies drove forward in the same desperate fashion in which they had retreated in the previous year, numbed by daily horrors. Victory at Kursk meant little to a soldier such as Private Ivanov of 70th Army, who wrote despairingly to his family in Irkutsk: ‘Death, and only death awaits me. Death is everywhere here. I shall never see you again because death, terrible, ruthless and merciless is going to cut short my young life. Where shall I find strength and courage to live through all this? We are all terribly dirty, with long hair and beards, in rags. Farewell for ever.’ Private Samokhvalov was in equally wretched condition: ‘Papa and Mama, I will describe to you my situation, which is bad. I am concussed. Very many of my unit have been killed – the senior lieutenant, the regimental commander, most of my comrades; now it must be my turn. Mama, I have not known such fear in all my eighteen years. Mama, please pray to God that I live. Mama, I read your prayer … I must admit frankly that at home I did not believe in God, but now I think of him forty times a day. I don’t know where to hide my head as I write this. Papa and Mama, farewell, I will never see you again, farewell, farewell, farewell.’
Pavel Kovalenko wrote on 9 October: ‘We passed through the area where the 15th Regiment had been trapped. There are corpses everywhere and smashed carts. Many bodies have their eyes poked out … Are the Germans human? I cannot come to terms with such things. People come – and they go. Senior Lieutenant Puchkov got killed. I am sorry about the lad. Last night a cavalryman trod on a mine. Both soldier and horse were blown to pieces. When night fell I sat shivering by the fire, my teeth chattering with wet and cold.’
Next day, his unit trudged into a Belorussian settlement named Yanovichl. ‘What’s left of it? Just ruins, ashes and charred remains. The only living souls are two cats, their fur scorched. I stroked one of them and gave it some potatoes. It purred at me … Everywhere there are lots of unharvested potatoes, beetroot and cabbage. Before driving away the population, the Germans suggested that they bury their belongings. Now, these pitiful relics of domestic felicity lie scattered in gardens. The Germans have taken everything useful. One house has survived out of three hundred, the rest succumbed to flame. An old woman sits grieving. Her eyes are lifeless, gazing frozen into the far distance. She has nothing left, and icy winter is almost upon us.’
Day after day as the Red Army advanced, such scenes were repeated. ‘I was shaken by the ferocity of the tank battles,’ said Ivan Melnikov. ‘What did people feel in those steel boxes under fire? I once saw ten or eleven burned-out T-34s in one place, a ghastly sight. Almost all the bodies lying nearby were badly burnt, while those who had stayed in their tanks had turned into firebrands, lumps of charcoal.’ One night a reconnaissance section from his unit was caught in the open under German flares; four of its six men were killed, and next day the Germans amused themselves by using the bodies for target practice. ‘[They] were a
terrible sight by evening: shapeless, torn by bullets, their faces blown off, arms severed.’
Commanders drove units so far and fast that horses pulling baggage carts became too weary to eat their hay. Many animals lay dead by the roadside amid rows of hastily dug German graves, skulls, half-decayed corpses, abandoned sledges, burnt-out vehicles. ‘We march in the footsteps of war,’ mused Kovalenko. ‘Chaos is majestic in its way. I contemplate this vista of destruction and death with pain and helplessness in my soul.’
As snow once more closed down the battlefield in the last months of 1943, the Russians held a large bridgehead beyond the Dnieper around Kiev, and another at Cherkassy. The Germans lost Smolensk on 25 September, and retained only an isolated foothold in the Crimea. On 6 November, the Russians took Kiev. Vasily Grossman described an encounter with infantrymen near the shattered city that day:
The deputy battalion commander, Lieutenant Surkov, has come to the command post. He hasn’t slept for six nights. His face is heavily bearded. One can see no tiredness in him, because he is still seized by the terrible excitement of fighting. In half an hour, perhaps, he will sink into sleep with a field bag under his head, and then it would be useless to try to wake him. But now his eyes are shining, and his voice sounds harsh and excited. This man, a history teacher before the war, seems to be carrying with him the glow of the Dnieper battle. He tells me about German counter-attacks, about our attacks, about the runner whom he had to dig out of a trench three times, and who comes from the same area as he, and was once his pupil – Surkov had taught him history. Now, they are both participating in events about which history teachers will be telling their pupils a hundred years from now.
All Hell Let Loose Page 53