But the price of recent Soviet success had been high. The Germans, against expectations, had staged another remarkable recovery. Stalin might cultivate an image as Vozhd, supreme leader, source of all wisdom and authority. He may have been able to strike mortal fear into the most senior of generals and party officials. But he had learned the risks of taking immediate counsel of his own confidence. As Chief of Staff Vasilevsky noted, Stalingrad in particular added an operational dimension to his chief’s thinking. In an Order of the Day issued in February, Stalin acknowledged the German army’s recent defeat, but noted that there was no reason to assume it could not recover: “It would be stupid to imagine the Germans will abandon even a kilometer of our country without a fight.”
Like many of the Red Army’s common soldiers, Stalin understood, viscerally if not always intellectually, that the long retreat during the summer of 1942 could not be repeated, whatever the prospective advantages of further overextending the invaders. For practical purposes, there was nowhere left to go. Stalin understood as well, however unwillingly, that the kinds of strategic offensives the Red Army had conducted since the winter of 1941 had a way of turning into poorly coordinated, systematically mismanaged, hideously costly sector attacks, no matter how heavy Stalin’s hand might lie on the responsible generals.
Should a reminder have been necessary, the still-incomplete relief of Leningrad was a depressing account of operations depending primarily on mass impelled by callousness and brutality, grinding forward a few miles, then stalling as much from internal frictions as from any German efforts. Commanders and formations alike showed repeated, glaring ineptitude in reconnaissance, communications, and combined-arms operations.
One of the Soviet Union’s major advantages to date had been the ability to renew its forces to a degree impossible to the overextended Wehrmacht. But even Russia’s resources, human and material, were not infinite. Significant evidence indicates Stalin seriously considered the prospects of a separate peace with Hitler, or with a successor government willing to respond. Tentative contacts between the respective diplomats, most of them indirect, began in Sweden during the spring of 1943 and continued for most of the year. Germany had worked out an agreement with the Soviet Union in 1939, and the USSR had demonstrated beyond question that it could defend itself essentially from its own resources. A separate peace, even temporary, would provide time for recovery. The second front long promised by the Western Allies still consisted of promises and substitutes. The suitably leaked possibility of an end to the fighting might impel Great Britain and the United States to step up the pace of their operations. And if the capitalist powers continued their war with one another, that as well would be to the USSR’s long-term advantage.
Nothing came of the prospect, but while the diplomatic theater played itself out, military developments began focusing Stalin’s attention elsewhere. On March 16, Stalin sent Zhukov down from Leningrad, where he had been assigned to organize an operation to relieve the city for good, to restore the situation at Kharkov. It was too late for that, but the transfer put Zhukov on the site as ground patrols and aerial reconnaissance, information provided by partisans and deserters, reported a rapid and increasing buildup in the Kursk sector. By early April, Zhukov was confident of enemy intentions as well as capabilities.
Rudolf Roessler, a German Communist who had relocated to Switzerland, had been running a spy ring that allegedly possessed high-level contacts in the Wehrmacht. The exact nature of the relationship of the “Lucy ring” to those contacts, and to Swiss military intelligence, remains obscure. But Lucy had established its credibility during 1942, repeatedly transmitting accurate and actionable information on the German offensive Operation Blue. Put temporarily out of business during the Kharkov operation, when Manstein limited his electronic connection to Hitler, by March Roessler was able to transmit an increasing amount of raw data on both German plans for an offensive at Kursk and the new material they were planning to deploy.
British intelligence passed on through the Military Mission in Moscow similar information, describing a projected May attack against the Kursk salient. The intelligence had been obtained as part of the Ultra operation, the intelligence coup based on cracking the codes of the “unbreakable” German Enigma cipher machine. Ultra was Britain’s ace in the hole: the last strategic advantage retained by an overextended and exhausted empire. Its paradox was that its value depended on secrecy. Should the Germans even suspect Enigma was compromised and fundamentally reconfigure its electronic communication system, Ultra would have the value of a buggy whip.
Anglo-American intelligence cooperation may have been a necessary relationship, but it was also a cautious collaboration. The British were as determined as any ecdysiast to secure reciprocity in return for revelation. That attitude governed as well their dealings with the USSR. On June 12, 1941, the Soviet ambassador to London was presented with detailed information on not merely the projected German attack, but its precise starting date. British intelligence forwarded similar information through a double agent, the deputy head of the Soviet espionage network in Switzerland. The underlying hope was to frustrate Hitler’s designs and in the process improve currently distant relations with the USSR. But Stalin ignored the information, as he did most of the “Very Special Intelligence” subsequently made available to Moscow—with its origins carefully camouflaged. Stalin was in principle suspicious of any clandestine material that came from the West. The comprehensively obsessive secrecy generated by the Soviet secret police system kept information closely compartmentalized and tightly wrapped, restricting the development of alternative channels that might have compensated for Stalin’s refusal to share. So the British turned off the taps—until Churchill, recognizing the sovereign importance of keeping Russia in the war, ordered the Kursk material forwarded, albeit with its sources camouflaged.
Stalin’s doubts were overcome because the data was not only confirmed but enhanced by a Soviet agent inside the Ultra project itself. John Cairncross was the “fifth man” in the Cambridge spy ring, whose highly placed traitors fed Soviet intelligence from the world war into the Cold War. Assigned to Ultra in mid-1942, he delivered to his handlers weekly decrypts of the same material Ultra was processing. This was the kind of information from multiple sources that Stalin found difficult to resist.
Zhukov was in another category of credibility. He was not only a field commander, but a Stavka troubleshooter, sent from crisis to crisis with near plenipotentiary powers: “the high justice, the middle, and the low,” disciplining, dismissing, or executing as deemed necessary. By this time Stalin’s ace troubleshooter, Zhukov impressed the Vozhd himself with his ruthlessness. So when on April 8 he sent a message predicting that the end of the rasputitsa would be followed by a major German offensive against the Kursk salient as the first stage of a renewed drive on Moscow, Stalin was not prone to dismiss it as defeatism. Zhukov’s recommended action was a different story. Preempting the German attack, he argued, was to invite a repetition of the recent defeat of Kharkov. Instead, reinforce the salient with every available man and gun, button up, dig in, and deploy major armored forces outside the immediate zone of operations. Wear out the Germans, wear down their tanks, and then shift to a counterattack as part of a full-scale, end-the-war counteroffensive. Vasilevsky, who was at Stalin’s side when the dispatch came out of the teleprinter, fully endorsed his colleague’s recommendations and the reasoning behind them. Stalin was not so sure. He saw the Kursk salient as a springboard and proposed to use the two fronts occupying it in a preemptive strike toward Kharkov and into the rear of the German Army Group Center. He called for a top-level conference.
On the evening of April 12, Zhukov and Vasilevsky entered Stalin’s study—his “power room,” whose layout and furnishings were configured to intimidate anyone not already intimidated and to silence anyone not inflexibly convinced of his position. This time, according to Zhukov, Stalin listened “more attentively than ever before” when Zhukov made his c
ase. The Germans faced a grim paradox. Because mobile war was their best force multiplier, the increasingly irreplaceable losses suffered in the winter of 1942 compelled them to attack. Because their reserves were so limited, the attack could be made in only a limited sector of the front. And a cursory study of the situation map showed that German armored and motorized formations were steadily concentrating around the Kursk salient.
A Soviet offensive, whether the general operation originally bruited about or a more focused preemptive strike, made correspondingly no strategic or operational sense. The Germans still had a decisive edge in encounter battles, and the kind of concentration taking place around Kursk only enhanced that advantage. Rzhev might have been scrubbed from official memory. Zhukov had not forgotten. Neither had Stalin. It nevertheless took two months for the Soviet leader to commit definitively to standing on the defensive at Kursk and wearing out the German mobile forces as the first stage in a massive strategic offensive. This was not mere stubbornness. Zhukov, Vasilevsky, and the senior commanders on the ground were confident the Red Army could hold the Germans and grind them down in the Kursk salient. Stalin was less optimistic. As repeated German delays strained his equanimity and goodwill—neither present in oversupply—he developed two simultaneous approaches.
One involved creating a massive regional reserve under Stavka command. This Steppe Front by July would be built up to five rifle armies, the Fifth Guards Tank Army, three independent tank and mechanized corps, and an air army—almost six hundred thousand men and more than sixteen hundred armored fighting vehicles, deployed in a mutually supporting semicircle around the salient as a backstop against a German breakthrough. Steppe Front was also intended as the muscle behind an eventual counterattack—not in the Kursk sector, but north of it: around Orel. The Germans were weaker there and likely to be focusing on events at Kursk. The offensive, complemented by lesser diversionary attacks elsewhere in the southern theater, would compel the Germans to transfer mobile formations away from Kursk and eventually create a tactical overstretch enabling operational breakthrough and strategic exploitation.
As an ultimate insurance policy, Stalin insisted on transforming Kursk into the most formidable large-scale defensive system in the history of warfare. Like almost all of Stalin’s initiatives in the war’s second half, the policy had an obvious agenda and a hidden one. It was designed to transform Kursk into a killing ground. It was also designed to fix the Germans’ attention. The elaborate construction work and the extensive movements of men and equipment in a relatively small area were impossible to conceal completely. So to borrow once more the metaphor of a burlesque theater, the object was to keep the mark looking in the wrong places. Let the Germans think that their opponent had committed itself to a defensive battle. Let them focus intelligence, reconnaissance, and planning on the Kursk salient. Their surprise, like that of a disappointed customer, would come when the Red Army rang down the curtain from the wings as the dance continued onstage.
The salient’s transformation into a fortress began in mid-April. Initial talk of evacuating civilians was quashed by military authorities who said that this would have an adverse effect on troop morale—and on the labor supply. By June, more than three hundred thousand civilians, most of them women, were working on roads, bridges, and airfields in the salient’s rear. Forward construction was the soldiers’ responsibility—250 engineer companies, supported by every man the infantry could spare on a given day. The defensive system was configured as a labyrinthine combination of battalion defensive sectors, antitank ditches and strongpoints, machine-gun positions, barbed wire, minefields, roadblocks, and obstacles whose positioning at times seemed almost random.
Each frontline rifle army had a forward zone, a second line, and an army defensive line, plus a trip wire of outposts and small forlorn-hope strongpoints designed to frustrate German ground reconnaissance before the attack and compel early German deployment once the offensive started. The salient’s forward zones alone included 350 battalion positions, 2 or 3 to a rifle regiment, networks of mutually supporting trenches, blockhouses, and bunkers. There were as many as six successive defensive zones, each with two or three layers. The first two zones were fully occupied, the middle ones were held by units in reserve, and the final two were left empty, as fallback positions or to be occupied by reinforcements. These extended as far as fifty miles into the salient’s rear. And behind them were two more positions constructed by the Steppe Front, which extended the zone of defensive operations to something approximating two hundred miles—an unmatched record in the history of war, and one likely to remain unchallenged.
Other statistics are no less daunting. In their final form, the defenses absorbed almost a million men. They were supported by almost twenty thousand guns and mortars, three hundred rocket launchers, and thirty-three hundred tanks. The engineers supervised the stringing of over five hundred miles of barbed wire and the laying of around 640,000 mines. There were so many minefields, and with their well-camouflaged layouts so often overlapped, it became necessary in the Soviet rear areas to post sentries and warning signs to protect unwary men and vehicles. Minefields averaged more than twenty-four hundred antitank mines and twenty-seven hundred antipersonnel mines per mile—about one mine per foot. Many of these were “box mines” in wooden casings, substitutes for scarce steel. As a rule, their explosive force was too diffused to destroy tanks, but they remained effective against treads and suspension. They also had the advantage of being undetectable by standard minesweeping equipment. Clearing such a field too often meant probing the ground with bayonets. As a deterrent to prospective heroes, the minefields also included improvised flamethrowing devices based on a mine linked to several gasoline bombs.
The minefields were laid out so as to “encourage” the panzers to move into antitank killing zones. Those were the domain of the PTOPs, the protivtankovye opornye punkte, antitank strongpoints. Sited in checkerboard fashion, usually a half mile apart and in zones up to five miles deep, they included infantry and engineers tasked with using hand-carried explosives to finish off disabled tanks. But their core was the 76 mm gun. This high-velocity, flat-trajectory piece was both the army’s standard light field gun and a formidable antitank weapon, able to penetrate the frontal armor of any armored vehicle the Germans had deployed to date. Some strongpoints included as well self-propelled versions of the 76, artillery pieces up to 152 mm gun-howitzers, and prepared positions for T-34 tanks. The heavy weapons were supported by large numbers of antitank rifles and light 45 mm guns. Both were long obsolescent. Both were most useful at close range. Both were proof of Stavka’s commitment to a finish fight on the steppe.
There was no room in these crowded positions for vehicles to remove the guns. To improve concealment and make the point that withdrawal was not an option, gun wheels were sometimes removed. To maximize the advantages of fixed positions, crews were trained and ordered to hold their fire until point-blank range. The engineers devoted all their considerable skill at camouflage to conceal the entrenchments. Their success is indicated by German aerial photos taken before and during the battle that show miles of territory with only limited signs of life. Once exposed, the strongpoints could call for support from any guns and rocket launchers within range—which was most of them. But in the end, the antitank strongpoints were expendable. The watchword for their garrisons was “stand or die.” “Hold and die” was to prove no less appropriate.
The static fixed defenses were coordinated with mobile antitank and armor reserves. The former ranged from a few guns and some antitank riflemen at regimental level to a full antitank battalion, built around a dozen 76 mm guns, for an army corps. The forward infantry units could also count on direct tank support: a company for a battalion, a regiment or brigade for a division. The dispersion of armor ran against Soviet doctrine and experience. But the tankers too were expendable, there to do as much damage as they could, to keep German break-ins from becoming breakthroughs.
Kursk was proje
cted as a managed battle, a scientific exercise. To that end, the communications network was developed with unprecedented care and precision. Radios, phones, and messengers were coordinated to complement one another. Command posts even at regiment and battalion levels became electronic centers. Landlines were buried deeply and duplicated, sometimes tripled, in critical sectors. This time, no excuses based on failure to receive orders would be accepted.
This emerging defensive maze was designed to work in three stages. The German infantry, Zhukov had argued, seemed less capable of offensive operations than in 1942. As it was worn down, the German armored forces would have to rely on their divisional infantry to lead the way and secure the rear zones. That would have the effect of separating tanks and infantry, breaking the combined-arms cohesion on which German tactics depended. And when the increasingly isolated tanks played their familiar card and maneuvered in search of weak spots, they would find that none existed—at least none that the worn-down panzers could exploit.
Deception, the maskirovka at which the Red Army had come to excel, was comprehensively employed to obscure details. Dummy airfields, simulated communications centers, and false gun positions saturated the salient. Daylight movement was kept to a minimum. Planes flew into forward bases at twilight, hugging the ground. Rear-echelon supply and maintenance units were sited in the narrow valleys and gorges that dotted what seemed to be the steppe’s open grasslands. In 1914 and again in 1941, Russian communications security had often been an oxymoron. At Kursk, radio security was rigidly maintained, and ground lines and messengers did most of the work. Even the frontline visits of senior party members and generals were discouraged—in some cases forbidden.
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