“Paradigm” does not mean “straitjacket.” In the interwar years, the Soviet Union developed concepts of mobile operations that surpassed anything in the Germans’ playbook. The Red Army’s theories of deep operations, conducted on multiple echelons and in combined-arms contexts, were blitzkrieg avant la lettre. The German campaigns of 1939–40, and to an even greater extent Operation Barbarossa, incorporated synergistic calculation far ahead of anything their opponents mustered. But when “fog and friction” reduced a campaign, a battle, or a skirmish to fundamentals, the soldiers returned to their respective taproots. Shaken to the core by the initial German successes of 1941, the USSR fell back on their system, planning complex operations to defeat and destroy the Wehrmacht as a master chess player demolishes a patzer, with no serious regard for details of implementation. The Germans, blindsided on the road to Smolensk, resorted to heroic improvisation at levels that treated panzer divisions with only a couple of dozen operational tanks and a few hundred riflemen as fully combat effective in the depths of a Russian winter.
The Battle of Kursk was fought after both armies had had two years to learn—and to suffer—from their own and each other’s mistakes. Positively and negatively, neither was what it had been during Barbarossa or the struggle for Stalingrad. At Kursk, their elites met head-to-head, each with time to understand the nature of the proposed encounter and to prepare in its own fashion. The restricted size of the theater created a dueling ground. That demanded focus: neither adversary could impose its doctrine and will from the beginning. It demanded skill: slips and errors could not be compensated for by changing the battle’s parameters. And it demanded will: Which side possessed the confidence and the nerve to last the course for the five final minutes? What would be the outcome? Perihelion and aphelion, or mutual standoff in the pattern of 1916: Verdun and the Somme? The Battle of Kursk sketched the answer and opened the door to a new reality. After Citadel, there was no position the Germans could defend, no line they could maintain, if the Red Army was willing to pay the price of taking it or breaking it.
Kursk’s second watershed involved the German army’s fundamental reconfiguration. It began World War II as an instrument of offense and exploitation. The bedrock of its command system was independent authority. Given a mission, the means of accomplishing it were the commander’s responsibility. This reflected systems of training and education that meant initiative and adaptability were likely to produce favorable results at any level. It reflected a common military culture, built around the general staff. And it reflected a privileging of creativity, aggression, and major risk taking for big gains.
This mentality synergized with an institutional structure based on high-tech formations within a mass. The force multipliers developed in the 1930s, based on internal combustion engines and electronic communications, favored developing an elite—not in the racial/ideological sense of the Waffen SS, not on the basis of personnel selection, like British and American paratroopers, not even on combat performance like the Soviet Guards divisions, but rather a functional elite based on learned skills: the panzer and panzer grenadier divisions. That structure was reinforced by the long-range consequences of the much-maligned Versailles Treaty. With conscription forbidden and the military production complex eviscerated, Germany was constrained to mobilize the bulk of its wartime army as foot-propelled infantry. Their vehicles were largely horse-drawn; their training levels varied downward from marginal; their armament depended heavily on what could be delivered by overstrained factories or salvaged from the Reich’s latest conquests.
That structure’s success owed much to its own quality—but no less to its obliging enemies. By 1943, the Red Army was no longer an obliging enemy. Kursk was the German army’s last major, operational-level offensive. For the rest of the war, it shifted to a defensive orientation. It did so superlatively, and that is an anomaly. States as a rule may go to war with the armies they have. Armies as a rule fight wars with the tools they begin with. The U.S. Army never overcame its internal dichotomy between mobility and firepower. British shortcomings in combined-arms operations remained a constant from the evacuation of Dunkirk to the crossing of the Rhine. But after Kursk, on both major fronts, the German army remade itself.
To a degree, that process reflected Adolf Hitler’s insistence that his commanders report operational particulars in detail—and state clearly when they failed to carry out assigned orders. His increasing micromanagement was a consequence of increasing amounts of information. The nearly instantaneous communication enabled by modern electronics gave not only Hitler but any senior officer direct access to subordinate echelons of command. That fact, however, did not automatically diminish German operational effectiveness. Initially, the most familiar response to the Red Army’s increasing offensive capability was Erich von Manstein’s concept of flexible defense: Give ground, let the enemy overreach, then hit back. When such sweeping maneuvers became impossible as Soviet numbers and flexibility increased, a new generation of Eastern Front veterans such as Erhard Raus and Walther Model developed a combined-arms zone defense that tactically frustrated the Red Army until the Reich’s final breakdown in 1945—and that depended heavily on communications that throttled initiative at higher command levels.
Materially, the German army introduced a “platoon technology” that reshaped the battlefield. The MG-42, with its high cyclic rate of fire; the MP-43 and Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifles; and the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck portable antitank rockets lifted the German infantryman to a level the rest of the world’s foot soldiers would not reach for decades. In their developed versions, the Panther and Tiger tanks, with their high-velocity guns and well-sloped armor, and their first-rate radios and optics, combined fighting power and survivability to a higher degree than their counterparts. And it was at Kursk that these formidable armored vehicles, like the army as a whole, began the paradigm shift from offensive to defensive mainstays.
Kursk was a watershed for the USSR as well. It marked the first stage of the final development of the broad-front strategic grand design Stalin had sought from the war’s beginning. Previous versions had foundered on poor coordination, inadequate logistics, limited tactical skills—and German fighting power. From Soviet perspectives, the Kursk salient was developed as a baited strategic trap: the greater the German commitment there, the more vulnerable they would be to attacks on the flanks. Operationally, Army Group Center managed to reestablish a front. In the south during that same time frame, Manstein managed a fighting withdrawal across the Dnieper. He celebrated this “heroic epic” in his memoirs. And the Russians had bought their initial victories in the Ukraine dearly, with more than a million and a half casualties. But in October, a series of attacks carried the Red Army across the Dnieper, setting the stage for Kursk’s third watershed: the Soviet Union’s valediction.
The Dnieper crossings were signposts of the Red Army’s tactical progress. The flexibility suggested during Citadel came to the fore as within a week more than twenty bridgeheads, some over twenty miles deep, pocked a river line the Germans never really established in the first place. In November, Voronezh Front thrust into Kiev, liberating “the mother of Russian cities” in an operation combining, in Vatutin’s words, the “speed and resolution” he had originally sought during Citadel. On December 24, the Red Army struck again, in force: four fronts, three and a quarter million men, and twenty-six hundred tanks acting in synchronization.
The Germans in the juggernaut’s path made their way west as best they could. Soviet spearheads cut off sixty thousand men in one pocket, over three times as many in another. The Germans responded with two epic breakouts. Neither was more than a speed bump to an offensive that, before running out of steam, tore fifty-mile gaps in the German defenses, led to Hitler’s making “stand fast” an obsession, and structured Stavka’s strategic design over the next eighteen months. That plan was based on a series of mutually reinforcing strategic offensives along several axes, beginning in early 1944. Russian
accounts stress a system, with one multifront thrust in the Leningrad sector and another in the Ukraine, setting the stage for a third: Operation Bagration, a massive blow against Army Group Center with the intention of annihilating the forces in that sector and compelling the Germans in the north and south to retreat or risk envelopment. The underlying concept was political as well as strategic. If success reinforced success, the way to Berlin and Western Europe might open before the British and Americans did more than gain a foothold on the continent.
Detailed analysis of newly available records, by David Glantz in particular, presents a more complex, more opportunistic strategic pattern, with new missions and objectives assigned as the initial ones developed. Whether particular initiatives were intended to exploit success blitzkrieg fashion, improve the prospects of future, systematic offensives, or simply keep the Germans guessing remains difficult to determine, especially since unsuccessful operations tended to disappear down one of the USSR’s many memory holes. The end result was the same: compound, continuous overstretch of increasingly limited Wehrmacht resources. And whether interpreted as a fencer’s sophisticated swordsmanship or a death by a thousand cuts, the operations that carried the Red Army to the Oder River and Budapest were as spectacular as any in the history of war making. On February 26, 1944, the siege of Leningrad was lifted. Beginning on June 22, Operation Bagration erased Army Group Center, more than thirty divisions, from the German order of battle. By December, southern Russia was German-free and the survivors were trying to hold on to Budapest, on the Reich’s threshold. The two-pronged drive into Hitler’s capital in the war’s final months appears almost anticlimactic.
The Soviet Union’s strategic approach had three taproots. One was Stalin’s enduring belief that if the Germans were hit hard enough everywhere, their defenses would break somewhere—and break beyond repair. The second was an emphasis on speed and surprise that informed prewar regulations and never disappeared in the planning staffs. The third involved the field commanders’ general inability to decide when and where the decisive rupture would occur and their personal ambition to be the one who made it happen. By 1944, the Soviet front commanders had in common an appetite for status and a fear of losing it. Both mentalities were created and controlled by a leader who saw himself as all-powerful. With history itself on his side, Stalin pushed the envelope of events—all the way into Berlin.
In Kursk’s aftermath, the Red Army also completed its institutional transformation from a bludgeon—not to a rapier, but certainly to a katana. Russian commanders were learning how to coordinate their movements on a theater level and how to keep moving, without the unintended pauses and interruptions that characterized pre-Kursk offensives. American Lend-Lease jeeps facilitated communication; American 2.5-ton trucks set standards for reliability in the supply echelons. Air-ground cooperation steadily improved, as did artillery fire direction. Both started from far enough back to remain well below Western standards. But there were enough guns, Katyushas, and Shturmoviks that by 1944–45, that minimum efficiency was sufficient.
Technically, the armored force in particular moved to an advanced stage. In April 1943, an upgunned version of the T-34 began entering service. Its 85 mm gun was a battlefield match for both the Germans’ big cats, and the JS-II gave it a formidable stablemate. Named for Joseph Stalin, the tank mounted a 122 mm gun, the heaviest of any World War II tank. A new generation of assault guns emerged, carrying 122 mm and 152 mm pieces in fixed mountings on tank hulls. First used at Kursk, they were promptly and appropriately named zvierboy, “animal hunters,” and accounted for many a Tiger and Panther before VE Day.
The importance of mechanized mobility to the Red Army of 1944–45 overshadows in much of the literature the fact that, doctrinally, throughout the war the infantry remained the primary arm. The combined-arms tactics, the massed artillery, the close air support—all were predicated on, and grew from, the infantry’s perceived needs. As late as the end of 1943, only around three hundred thousand of more than four million ground troops served in the mobile formations. In terms of technology, the infantrymen fell ever further behind the tankers, the gunners, and the airmen.
The massive losses of 1941–43 also altered the rifle units’ makeup. About a million prisoners were released from the Gulag into the army. The diminishing of the preferred manpower pool of ethnic Russians led to increasing numbers of replacements drawn from Soviet Asia and from the newly liberated western regions. Their political reliability was questioned, on racial grounds for the Asians and from fear the Ukrainians and Byelorussians had been contaminated by their years under fascism. “They know absolutely nothing about fighting, military discipline, real soldiers’ spirit,” lamented one frustrated captain. But the Red Army’s riflemen in 1944–45 were more than handmaids to the tanks, more than follow-up and mop-up troops. At the end of the war, especially in the street fighting in Vienna, Berlin, and the dozens of other built-up sites in the Reich, Red Army infantry were an adversary more determined, and more formidable, than their British and American counterparts.
In that last context, Kursk’s fourth watershed involved determination. Since the Middle Ages, at least, war in the Western world had developed a culture of accommodation, of not making things worse than they had to be. Frequently honored in the breach, that culture nevertheless tended to reassert itself constantly, even during civil wars and insurrections, whether the opponents were long-service professionals or hastily uniformed civilians. From the first days of Barbarossa, however, German behavior at the front and behind the lines overtly denied accommodation even at basic levels. At Prokhorovka, a Leibstandarte tank crewman reflected that the Russian soldier fought bravely, “but when taken prisoner … he’d quiver like a mouse….” With no sense of irony, the same crewman described a group of Russian prisoners, forty or fifty of them, walking toward the rear guarded by a single SS rifleman. “So we asked him, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ ‘Afraid?’ he asked right back. ‘Watch.’” The guard said something in Russian. Two prisoners fell out. “Our guy gave them a burst in the stomach from his machine pistol and shouted, ‘Now there, see just how frightened I am.’”
Russian soldiers for their part were drawn from a society and a culture where suffering pain and inflicting it were the stuff of every day. A quarter century of Soviet rule refined, legitimated, and institutionalized that mentality. On July 10, a Leibstandarte self-propelled antitank gun disappeared in a wooded area. Its four-man crew was captured. The Russians asked each man to give his age. The youngest was spared, the other three summarily shot.
After Kursk, this often documented mutual brutality metastasized and metamorphosed on both sides. From a Soviet perspective, the war was, in Stalin’s words, “a just and patriotic war of liberation.” However complex the conflict’s origins, who had attacked whom on June 22, 1941, was not in question, any more than the United States could be accused of attacking the Japanese fleet at anchor on December 7, 1941. The theme of self-defense was reinforced by the history of German barbarity. Familiar to every man and woman in the Red Army, it was reinforced at political meetings, maintained through newspapers and radio broadcasts, and nurtured by the encouragement to keep personal records of atrocities noted and repaid. For anyone seeking tangible evidence, the Ukraine and Byelorussia provided scenes of devastation inconceivable even to survivors of the great famines. Home leaves and local furloughs were chimeras. Once at the front, men remained there. Mail delivery was haphazard; memories faded into dreams. The Soviet soldiers’ horizons and expectations shrank as the war moved forward. A common meme developed, however, the closer the Red Army came to the Reich’s borders. Its basis was rage at the Germans for attacking and despoiling the USSR in seeming defiance of their own immeasurably higher standard of living. Its matrix was a sense of unfettered triumph. “It was a wonderful life,” recalled a lieutenant, “… loot, vodka, brandy, girls everywhere.” Its scope was comprehensive. Civilian or soldier, German or forced laborer—it made no essential di
fference. The rapes, the beatings, the killings, the deportations were not even massively random. They were a final, universal, direct manifestation of total war.
The Germans too underwent a moral and behavioral transformation. Since 1941, a frontline culture had developed that combined convenience and indifference, embedded in a matrix of hardness. Hardness was neither cruelty nor fanaticism. It is best understood as will focused by intelligence for the purpose of accomplishing a task—at whatever the cost. It was a mind-set particularly enabling the brutal expediency that is an enduring aspect of war.
As the great retreat began after Kursk, the hardness earlier described as central to Wehrmacht frontline culture became the subtext of a wider mission, moral as well as military. German soldiers saw themselves as defending Western civilization, the German nation, and not least their own homes, against what Hoth called in a memo “an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts,” inflamed and focused by Jewish-Bolshevik intellectuals. In the West, opponents of the Nazi regime might talk of ceasing resistance, opening the front. In the East, it was war to the knife until the final days—and often after the fighting formally ceased.
War takes two basic forms. One is a matching of superiorities and inferiorities at decisive moments. The other is a test of strengths and wills, a crisis of attrition. The Battle of Kursk was the Eastern Front’s transition point—and its point of no return.
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