On July 22, Hitler had agreed to an elastic defense on Model’s immediate front. On July 26, he summoned Kluge and informed him that the SS Panzer Corps was to be transferred to Italy immediately. Other unspecified divisions would be taking the same route. This meant, the Führer asserted, that the Orel salient must be evacuated, also immediately. When a shocked Kluge mentioned that the fallback positions for that contingency were barely under construction, Hitler stood firm. On July 28, the OKH issued the specific orders.
Army High Command and the Führer had responded to the Red Army’s southern offensive by dispersing not only Manstein’s long-sought reinforcements, but the core of the Fourth Panzer Army. SS Wiking was assigned to the First Panzer Army. The 23rd Panzer was sent to the Mius. It was followed by the SS Panzer Corps—minus Leibstandarte, which was eventually dispatched to Italy. Grossdeutschland, pulled out of the line at short notice, initially went north to reinforce the hard-pressed Army Group Center. On a tactical level, Citadel’s dismantling went unpredictably smoothly. From corps to companies, a sense of relief at getting out of Citadel’s killing ground is palpable alike in official reports and private communications. From the Russian perspective, events were progressing sufficiently according to plan that no pressure was applied for close pursuit. In particular, Voronezh Front and its component armies had taken the kind of mauling that made even dedicated Communist warriors require some breathing space—like the Union army after Gettysburg.
The same might be said for Manstein. Hitler’s orders brought him back to his kind of war—both against the Russians and against his superiors. He recorded his perceptions in his memoirs. The Russians facing his army group enjoyed a seven-to-one superiority in men and material, providing the capacity to strike at will. They had a related capacity to replace losses that the Reich could not match. The Germans still possessed a qualitative edge, though it was wearing thin in the crucial categories of experienced frontline soldiers, company officers, and (not least) field officers. From Citadel’s beginning to the end of August, Army Group South alone lost 38 regimental commanders and no fewer than 252 battalion COs.
Such assets must be expended with care, for maximum advantage—not wasted in last stands for lost outposts. And that was the responsibility of the senior commanders. Bean counting and number crunching had never characterized the German way of war. What mattered at high command levels was willingness to forget odds and trust one’s virtu. If that meant clashes with superiors and subordinates, so be it. Germany’s ultimate assets, at least in their own opinions, were generals like Erich von Manstein. “If,” he informed Zeitzler, “the Führer has a commander or an army group headquarters that has better nerves … that shows more initiative … that improvises better … I am ready to give up my post.” He concluded the message by declaring, “As long as I am at this post, I must have the possibility of using my own head.”
For a few days, Army Group South seemed to be fighting Manstein’s war. The SS restored the Mius sector. The First Panzer Army mounted a locally successful counteroffensive. But Manstein and his staff were incorrect in their estimate of the time required for the full-scale Soviet attack to materialize. Fog and friction were in fact omnipresent on the Russian side. Citadel’s losses in men and equipment had been made up haphazardly, if at all. Written orders did not appear until two days after the attack began—and the Red Army was not precisely geared to verbal transmission. Operation Rumyantsev nevertheless commenced in earnest on August 3, with nine armies, two tank armies, and two air armies. The initial sector was well chosen. Its defenders, still worn from Citadel, had spent two weeks retreating—not to prepared positions, but to whatever the Landser could scratch out of the earth and the tankers could improvise. Their logistics and their maintenance were not much better than those of the Russians. Their replacement situation was worse, especially in the infantry divisions. In a day, Voronezh Front opened an eight-mile gap between the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf. It was a fitting coda to Citadel, a valedictory for the rejuvenated Red Army. It was also only a beginning.
For the next two months, Manstein shored up sector after sector as the Soviet offensive steadily expanded. Citadel’s stalwarts, Totenkopf, Das Reich, and a once more hastily redeployed Grossdeutschland, played central roles in a one-way process. They bought days—but not time. In Robert Citino’s trenchant words, “The situation maps were a blizzard of red arrows heading west.” On August 8, Zeitzler paid an unannounced visit to Manstein’s headquarters, to be confronted with two stark alternatives. Either transfer no fewer than twenty divisions to Army Groups South and Center or conduct a fighting retreat to the Dnieper River. When Hitler authorized a reinforcement of half a dozen divisions, Manstein dismissed this as temporizing. Instead of committing every available division to sustaining the southern Russian front, Hitler was fretting where the next Allied blow in the Mediterranean would fall—a contingency Manstein dismissed as “just as improbable as it was unimportant.”
With the Orel salient’s evacuation successfully in progress, Hitler flew to Vinnitsa on August 27 and met with Manstein. After some preliminary fencing, the field marshal repeated his alternatives: Either immediately reinforce Army Group South with at least twelve divisions or abandon the Donets area. According to Manstein, Hitler agreed to provide whatever could be spared from other sectors in Russia. In the context of other developing Soviet offensives, that turned out to be nothing. Manstein compared experiences with Kluge, who had received essentially the same response. On September 2, he warned Zeitzler again that delaying reinforcements until the Allies committed to a second front risked immediate disaster in the East. And on September 3, Kluge and Manstein met with Hitler at Rastenburg. They made a common point: Either send substantial reinforcements to their army groups or authorize “mobile operations”—anodyne language for organized withdrawals screened by local counterstrikes. This time Hitler was entirely uncooperative, denying his subordinates both reinforcements and initiative. He was even less responsive to their suggestion of addressing the emerging problems of a strategically expanded war in the East and a two-front war emerging in the West by creating a unified high command.
Hitler’s renewed intransigence reflected events on the other side of the continent. On September 3, the British Eighth Army landed in Calabria, at the tip of the Italian boot. The same day, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies. And on September 7, Manstein informed the OKH that unless something was done immediately, Army Group South might not remain “in control of the situation.” The next day, Hitler visited Manstein’s headquarters—behavior at least susceptible of interpretation in context as the mountain coming to Muhammad. Manstein responded with a detailed briefing that focused on the situation facing his army group. Hitler reacted by allowing the Sixth and First Panzer Armies to withdraw and by once more promising reinforcements to the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf, now retitled the Eighth Army. He repeated that promise as he boarded his plane.
Manstein nevertheless followed the meeting with a message reiterating the need for prompt and major reallocation of forces on the Eastern Front and between the East and the war’s other theaters. That same day, September 9, British airborne troops seized Taranto, and elements of the U.S. Fifth Army landed at Salerno. And on September 14, Manstein informed the OKH that either it authorize a withdrawal or the entire army group would fall back across the Dnieper on his authorization. He received the reply not to act until the matter was discussed with Hitler. Manstein in turn demanded a private meeting with the Führer, with only Zeitzler attending. The next day he flew to Rastenburg, where he made his points with a slight but significant spin. He described retreat to the Dnieper as a consequence of previous promises of reinforcements not being kept and of orders to send them not being obeyed. Manstein declared himself confident, however, that the orders he intended to issue next day would be obeyed. No doubt remained what those orders would entail.
This was a glove not thrown at Hitler’s feet
, but flicked across his face. Manstein’s foremost military biographer correctly comments that no dictator can accept such a challenge. Nor can a leader of a democracy accept this kind of defiance with equanimity: the Korean War’s Truman-MacArthur controversy comes to mind. Faced with the alternative of dismissing Manstein on the spot, Hitler authorized retreat to the Dnieper. He also spoke again of reinforcements. But even had the Führer suddenly become willing to denude occupied regions of their garrisons, there was no time left to shift them to Russia. Nor were there many quiet sectors left in “Fortress Europe.” As a particularly ironic counterpoint, the 16th Panzer Division, sent to Italy only in June, came close to throwing the Salerno landing into the sea on August 14.
Since mid-July, at least, Kluge and Manstein had acted from a common matrix. They agreed the Reich’s strategic and grand strategic circumstances were sufficiently desperate to require a major change in the Wehrmacht’s high command structure, with the immediate aim of restoring the military situation in Russia and the long-term one of concluding the war in an acceptable fashion—a Teutonism for some kind of compromise peace. It was an open secret that both headquarters contained men more or less aware of the resistance. Colonel Rudolf von Gersdorff, of Army Group Center’s intelligence staff, had gone so far as to attempt to assassinate Hitler by immolating himself as a suicide bomber. He described Kluge as sending him to Manstein with a proposition. After a successful putsch, Kluge would offer his colleague the post of chief of the Wehrmacht general staff—in other words, supreme command of the armed forces.
Gersdorff was sufficiently cautious to couch his message initially in terms of the need for a united command and the curbing of Hitler’s propensity to control everything himself. Manstein agreed but said he lacked Hitler’s trust, especially since “foreign propaganda” described him as seeking high command for himself. Only Kluge or Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt had the seniority, the gravitas, and the influence to approach the Führer with this kind of proposal. According to Gersdorff’s memoirs, the discussion sharpened when he suggested to Manstein that the field marshals should confront Hitler and “hold a gun to his chest”—presumably metaphorically. Manstein’s alleged answer, that Prussian field marshals do not mutiny, has become a trope for the mentality of the entire senior officer corps. His emendation that Hitler’s removal would lead only to chaos was accompanied by his assurance to Kluge that he, Manstein, would always stand loyally at the service of legitimate state authority.
For Manstein, the stated subtext of this encounter was his expressed belief that the war was not yet lost—not quite. He repeatedly insisted in his memoirs that he was fighting for a draw—a Remis-Frieden. Remis is a word usually associated with chess and sports. The Russo-German War, and, indeed, all of Germany’s World War II, fit neither category. How was such a draw to be achieved politically? What would be its terms? On those points, the “simple soldier” is simply silent.
An alternate subtext may well have been a common one among the Wehrmacht’s senior officers after 1942: self-imposed tunnel vision, focusing on immediate problems that were daunting enough in themselves, legitimated procrastination. In terms of character, this reflected a doubled-down commitment to what Isabel Hull calls “one-sided actionism”: combining intellect, will, and recklessness to make the best of a desperate situation. This lofty echoing of the Nibelungenlied’s heroes was likely to be accompanied by the consideration that should the war be lost, colonels and generals would become shoeshine boys and bellhops—the lucky ones, that is. And the two combined to obscure a moral question. Is an oath one-sided? Can—indeed, must—an oath be defined in context: to whom it is given and how it is used?
It was easier not to think about it—easier to fight a war. As Army Group South and Army Group Center fell back, they scorched the earth. Neither Manstein, Model, nor Kluge considered it necessary to consult higher authority. Apologists declared they were only following precedents set by the Russians themselves in the first months of Barbarossa. A clearer precedent had been established by a Führer order in Stalingrad’s aftermath: Should withdrawals be necessary, destroy anything materially useful; evacuate all men between fifteen and sixty-five. This was no mere torching of villages and looting of houses, but the systematic destruction of anything, in Manstein’s words, that might afford concealment or shelter to enemies; anything that might remotely assist Soviet war production. In total war, that meant everything. The swath of devastation covered hundreds of square miles. What was not burned was blown up. As an occupying power, Germany was required to protect civilians under its control. Instead, thousands were driven west with what they could carry, with the alternative of risking execution as suspected partisans or simple shooting at random. The Russians, in the words of one of Manstein’s infantrymen, “should find nothing but a field of rubble.”
Files labled “Protests” and “Refusals” are conspicuously absent from otherwise well-kept German records. What was important was that the despoliation be carried out in an orderly fashion and under command. German soldiers were not mere brigands. Believing that required Orwellian levels of doublethink. And it is reasonable to suggest that, like any example of doublethink, believing it required shutting off elements of mind and spirit that are crucial to generalship at its highest levels.
Manstein conducted his retreat with consummate professionalism. The Red Army stayed on Army Group South’s heels. Vatutin aphorized its motive: “They are burning our bread.” Few Soviet soldiers had not experienced hunger. By the time Army Group South reached the Dnieper, it was down to fewer than three hundred operable tanks. The average infantry division’s frontline strength was around a thousand men; its average sector was around twelve miles. The men were so tired and apathetic that a report from the elite Grossdeutschland Division said its men no longer cared whether they were shot by the Russians or their own officers.
Army Group Center was in no better condition. By September 1944, one of its army commanders said his total rifle strength had been reduced to no more than seven thousand. An auto accident on October 12 took Kluge out of action; he never returned to the Eastern Front. Only Russian regression to tactics making Passchendaele and the Somme appear sophisticated eventually enabled the Germans to stabilize—more or less—that sector for part of the winter. But wherever the Red Army drove forward, it was with renewed determination to carry the fight to a finish, as long as it took and whatever its cost.
Conclusion
WATERSHEDS
IN EVALUATING AND CONTEXTUALIZING KURSK, a spectrum of issues meriting consideration remains. First come statistics. In terms of material, the Soviet claims were of almost 2,800 tanks and assault guns destroyed. German archives provide a figure of around 250. Only 10 of those were Tigers. Similar exploration of Soviet records gives 536 total AFV losses for Central Front, between 1,200 and 1,400 for Voronezh Front and the reinforcements from Steppe Front. Put together, the totals vary between 1,600 and over 2,000—about eight to one. More than 54,000 Germans were killed, wounded, or missing. Total Russian casualties exceeded 320,000.
These figures help address some of Kursk’s prevailing myths. The German army on the Eastern Front was neither bled white nor demodernized by Citadel’s human and material losses. Its Tigers were masters of the field wherever they appeared. Even the often denigrated Ferdinands did yeoman service in Model’s sector when used appropriately, in their intended antitank role. Intangibles may well be another story. Whether in a context of irreplaceable combat experience lost to death and wounds or irreplaceable confidence lost in a battering confrontation that left the Russians standing and the Germans on one knee, after Kursk it was the Germans reacting to Russian initiatives.
For the Red Army, Kursk was one of its bloodiest and least sophisticated battles, one that drew in corps and armies originally part of Stavka’s grand offensive design and arguably set back the projected Russian victory for a year. Whether as a function of the Soviet system, of Stalin’s ruthless culling of the senior office
r corps in the years of defeat, or of German tactical and operational skill, Kursk showed what the Red Army would become—not what it was.
As for Prokhorovka, both combatants’ master narratives are true; both are incomplete. The Waffen SS won a tactical victory on July 12—Prokhorovka was not a Tiger graveyard, but a T-34 junkyard. Operationally, however, the palm rests with the Red Army. Prokhorovka took what the Germans had left to give. Citadel’s turning point was not July 12, but July 13, when the Germans flailed desperately and vainly, like a dazed boxer, to regain even the local initiative. Operations Kutuzov and Rumyantsev would thwart them.
That leads to another myth. It has been called the myth of victory denied. It might better be described as the myth of XXIV Panzer Corps. From Citadel’s beginning, Manstein saw those divisions as the lodestone of victory and bewailed their absence as the key to defeat. Apart from their crucial roles in stabilizing the sectors of Manstein’s two other armies when the Soviet offensive began, nothing in the details of Citadel’s final days indicate that Wiking and 23rd Panzer would have done more than commit even more of the irreplaceable mobile divisions to an already limited battle zone—from which they would have been withdrawn in any case.
As indicated throughout this text, Erich von Manstein was not a gambling man. Perhaps if poker had been his recreation, he might have remembered the game’s key axioms: “Know when to hold and when to fold; know when to walk away and when to run.” Like Lee at Gettysburg, he stayed for one card too many.
Winston Churchill described Kursk as heralding the downfall of the German army on the Eastern Front. This work presents Citadel as a watershed on multiple levels. Four stand out. Institutionally, the Battle of Kursk was the crossover point between two of the most formidable instruments of war the world has ever seen, built around fundamentally different paradigms. The Red Army understood war as a science, following abstract principles amenable to reason and thus dependent on planning. To the Germans, war was ultimately an art form, whose mastery required what amounted to an aesthetic sense. Fingerspitzengefühl, Tuchfühlung, and similar words dot Germany’s military literature at critical points—euphemisms for cultivated, focused intuition.
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