Rotmistrov was ordered to prepare for a large tank battle, but he could have had little idea of what was in store. Against the superior Tiger tanks and Ferdinand self-propelled guns of the enemy he was directed to use his T-34s in the mechanized equivalent of hand-to-hand combat. Up close the T-34s' greater manoeuvrability allowed them to attack German armour at the sides and rear, where at close range real damage could be inflicted. Two days were spent digging in the artillery and priming the tank force. German pressure mounted to the west and east of Prokhorovka, and desperate efforts were made to hold the flanks and prevent a German breakthrough before the reserve army was ready. Zhukov ordered ten regiments of artillery to set up tank-busting units around the township. Stalin ordered Vasilevsky, the Red Army chief of staff, to take over command of the battle himself. On the morning of July 12 two massive tank forces faced each other, 850 Soviet against more than 600 German, the largest tank engagement of the war.
Rotmistrov drove to a dugout in an orchard above the battlefield. Stretched below him was a vast grainfield, tinged yellow with the rising sun. Beyond lay dark woodlands where he knew the German tank force lay concealed. Scouting parties had heard the roar of hundreds of engines during the night, as the SS divisions swung into position. Now the whole scene was strangely quiet, except for the chatter of the communications lines. At exactly 6:30 the first German aircraft appeared. Half an hour later the German bomber force, massed like some swarm of alien insects, their drone growing louder and more filled with menace as they drew overhead, disgorged its bombs on the woods and the villages surrounding Prokhorovka. Before their work was finished Soviet fighters attacked them in large numbers. Aircraft of both sides began to fall out of the sky; the explosion of stricken aircraft replaced the thud of bombs. The bombers turned back to their base.35
Waves of Soviet bombers and fighters took their place, smothering the woods ahead with bomb and rocket fire. Soviet artillery opened up, shells and bombs dropping in a continuous rain on the sheltered SS troops. Then at 8:30 Rotmistrov ordered the codeword to attack – ‘steel, steel’, which in Russian is stalin. The word flashed through the force. The T-34 tanks moved from their hiding places across the fields. At exactly the same time, as if ‘steel’ had been their signal, too, German tanks and guns began to roll out of the fringe of woodland. In an area of little more than three square miles, over one thousand tanks were crashing towards each other. Neither side had intended a head-on clash, but now it was unavoidable. Tanks seldom fought other tanks in pitched battle. Now, like two prehistoric herds, they lumbered towards each other, one savage predator against another.
The ensuing battle was scarcely visible from the hill above, where Rotmistrov stood. Smoke and dust soon obscured the fight. During the day, heavy lashing rain and fierce thunderstorms added nature's portion to the drama. The tanks were soon so enmeshed that both sides had to cease artillery fire and air support. The T-34s, though outgunned, drove in as close as they could to the Tigers and Panthers to inflict real damage. When they ran out of ammunition they rammed enemy tanks. As their machines became immobilized, enemy tanks closed in. Tanks with broken treads or wheels continued firing until their ammunition ran out. When the tanks ran out of shells, Soviet soldiers darted about the battlefield, hurling petrol bombs or grenades. There was little order to the struggle. Both sides suffered debilitating losses. By the end of the day over 700 tanks lay battered and broken, caught in death in grotesque shapes, their hulls pierced, their guns askew, turrets blown off by the force of exploding ammunition or a lucky strike. Beside them lay thousands of burned and burning corpses. After eight hours both sides stopped. Everywhere there were fires burning, in the farms, in the villages, in the meadows and orchards, turned black by the endless blast. When Rotmistrov was at last able to leave his dugout that evening, the rain had cleared. The air itself seemed scorched. After the deafening thunder of battle, he heard the subdued noise of recovery and preparation. Small parties scouted the battlefield for their wounded. The German troops blew up tanks that could not be towed away for repair. A stream of ammunition, fuel and supplies was brought up by truck. Engineers laid new minefields. Rotmistrov fell asleep just before dawn and was awakened several hours later by the morning chorus of falling bombs.36
The battle was not over on the first day, but its outcome was more certain. German losses were too great to allow a decisive breakthrough. Soviet forces held the German attack, but made little progress themselves. Flanking movements by heavy German forces to right and left were repulsed. When the attacks began again the following morning, there was no mêlée of tank against tank. German forces probed Soviet defences to find a way through, but Vasilevsky and Vatutin moved their units around quickly enough to blunt German assaults. Two days of further fighting showed that the coveted breakthrough was beyond German strength. On July 15 the battle finally ended with both sides more or less where they started. The SS divisions were devastated. The Death's Head division, which bore the brunt of the fight at Prokhorovka, was withdrawn from the front. The Panzer army lost more than half its men and half its vehicles. Some divisions were down to as little as seventeen serviceable tanks. Soviet losses were also high. On the day after the tank confrontation Rotmistrov had only half his force left, though reinforcements continued to arrive from other parts of the front.37
The great tank battle left senior Russian commanders deeply affected. Marshal Zhukov arrived on July 13 to see the damage for himself. He was driven through the stark battlescape with Rotmistrov and Nikita Khrushchev, the Party representative on the Military Council of the front. He stopped the car several times to gaze at the tanks, metal locked to metal. Rotmistrov observed in his guest an uncharacteristic despondency. The man who moved whole armies on the map table was ‘awed by the scene’ of actual combat.38 When Vasilevsky, on July 12, watched the tank battle unfold in front of him, it left, he later recalled, ‘an indelible impression’. The tank clashes ‘had no equal in the war’. For weeks after the battle a whole region, thirty miles long and thirty wide, remained, as one war correspondent described it, ‘a hideous desert’; several miles away the air still reeked from the stench of hundreds of unburied bodies, bloated in the summer heat.39 Here, at Kursk, it was possible to understand the haunting expression coined by Ilya Ehrenburg to describe that summer – ‘deep war’.40
The battle of Kursk ended any realistic prospect of German victory in the east. A few days before the Prokhorovka clash an Anglo-American force invaded Italy, forcing Hitler to begin shifting valuable army units from the eastern front. On July 13 Citadel was officially cancelled, and Hoth's Panzer army was ordered to mount a fighting retreat back to the lines it had held before July 5.41 The second stage of Zhukov and Vasilevsky's plan was now activated. There seems to have been almost no suspicion on the German side that the Soviet armed forces had any formal objectives beyond stopping the German attack, nor did German commanders believe that after the exceptional cost imposed on Soviet defenders there existed any serious counter-offensive capability. Yet the real significance of the Kursk battle lay not in the steadfast defence of the salient but in the offensive to follow.
Operation Kutuzov began on the northern edge of the salient on July 12. Soviet forces in their turn had to attack a heavily defended front, with line after line of minefields, trenches, barbed wire and pillboxes. The object was to destroy the German concentrations around Orel and Briansk and unhinge the whole German central front. The attack met strong resistance, but was remarkably successful. Shock forces were concentrated on a narrow front to force open a thin gap in the German line. Strongly supported by aircraft, a combined infantry and tank assault was followed up by a whole tank army, which poured through the gap and fanned out to destroy the German defensive position, an attack that owed a great deal to the vision of Tukhachevsky a decade before. By August 5 Soviet forces recaptured Orel; on August 18 the city of Briansk was again in Soviet hands. The southern counter-offensive, code-named Operation Rumyantsev, was brought under Z
hukov's direct control. On August 3 the attack was launched using the reserve Steppe Front to bolster the tired forces that had held back the German attack in July. The objective was the city of Kharkov, where Soviet forces had twice been routed by skilful German counter-strokes. The city of Belgorod fell to the Red Army on August 5. But on the approaches to Kharkov the regrouped German Panzer divisions launched a counter-attack against exposed Soviet tank armies, threatening to repeat their earlier successes. This time Soviet forces were much more effectively deployed, the assault was parried and on August 28 Kharkov fell.
The mood throughout Russia was one of growing elation. Victory prompted Stalin to make what was to be his only visit to a Soviet front. On August 1 he left his dacha at Kuntsevo by special train. The locomotive, carriages and platform were camouflaged with branches. He arrived at the Western Front, now many miles to the west of Moscow, where he spent an uneventful night. The next day he went on to the Kalinin Front to the north, where he stayed in a peasant hut (a visit still commemorated by a plaque). He visited neither officers nor men and returned to Moscow the next day.42 His motives can only be surmised. Perhaps he hoped to impress his own entourage, though so modest a demonstration could scarcely suffice; perhaps he felt real unease that he had sent so many of his countrymen into battle zones of which he had no experience. Having accused so many others of cowardice, he had strong motives for wanting to avoid an accusing finger himself. Whatever his intention, he soon made capital out of the visit. A few days afterwards he wrote to Roosevelt to explain his delay in replying to a message: ‘I have to make personal visits to the various sectors of the front more and more often…’43 Two days after his return he ordered a victory salute in Moscow to mark the liberation of Orel and Belgorod. At midnight on August 5 twelve salvos from one hundred and twenty guns thundered over the city, the first of more than three hundred salutes by 1945. ‘Eternal glory,’ ran Stalin's communiqué, ‘to the heroes who fell in the struggle for the freedom of our country.’44
The victories of 1943 were won at a high cost in heroes, though the cost was very much less than it had been a year before. Stalingrad cost the lives of 470,000 soldiers and airmen. The battle of Kursk was won at a cost of only 70,000 dead. The German line was broken for the loss of another 183,000. But these are still extraordinary figures. In two months of fighting the Red Army lost almost as many men as the United States or the British Empire did in the entire war.45 The level of sacrifice imposed on the Soviet people might have debilitated any other society. The terrible haemorrhage of Soviet manpower had been sustained for more than two years, in which time more than 4.7 million were killed, and millions maimed or scarred. So severe was this toll that by the autumn offensives of 1943 Soviet divisions were down to as little as 2,000 men, though bolstered by a large increase in guns and tanks. During the war the labour–capital balance in Soviet military units shifted from high labour input to high capital input. It is a myth that the Soviet Union won the war because it had the endless spaces in the east from which to suck its manpower. In the east there was more space than people. The Soviet Union survived only by mobilizing two-thirds of its women to run the factories and farms, and by modernizing its armed forces so that it did not have to rely any longer on raw numbers of men, but could rely, like the American army, on mass-produced weapons.46
Unanswered questions remain, however. The central explanation for the endurance of the Soviet war effort and its final victory lies in the fact that hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens laid down their lives in the suicidal battles for Leningrad, Kiev, Moscow, Stalingrad and a dozen other cities. There exist so many stories of defence to the death that they cannot all be a product of Stalinist propaganda. Why were casualty rates so high? Why did Red Army soldiers and airmen so often fight with a stubborn disregard for the physical dangers they faced?
There are easy answers: the high death rate and fanatical resistance were a product first of an oppressive political system and second of the Soviet way of war. There is some truth in both of these contentions. The army was kept in constant touch with the Party through the political officers attached to each unit, and the large number of Communist Party members and activists in the armed forces who were under special instructions to show a uniquely socialist brand of courage. The regime regarded them as the moral cement which held the army together; their task was to maintain confidence in victory, and to instil ‘contempt for death’.47 During the war three million Party members lost their lives in combat. In addition there was the NKVD, whose three-quarter of a million troops brought the terror right up to the front line. They played a part in 1941 and 1942 in keeping the battle going.48 The ability of the political system to compel sacrifice through propaganda and force certainly played a part, but a poem by Yuri Belash, a veteran of the conflict, suggests that the link between the regime and the troops was more tenuous than might have been expected from the endless uplifting talks: ‘To be honest about it/ in the trenches the last thing we thought about/ was Stalin./ God was on our minds more./ Stalin played no part at all/ in our soldiers' war.’49
There is more to recommend the second argument. The Soviet way of war did produce excessive casualties. Even before the war there existed a harsh disciplinary code. Soviet officers took the view that the army had a task to perform; saving lives was not a priority as long as the objective was achieved. ‘In our country,’ complained another veteran, ‘results of some kind are always more important than anything else, more than people. Russia has plenty of people, she has enough of them to waste.’50 Officers applied this to their own station. During the war 973,000 officers were killed or captured, a casualty rate of more than 35 per cent.51 They spurred on the men, and, in the Russian military tradition, led by example. Yet the carnage can hardly have been their first choice. The high casualty rates were dictated more by the nature of the conflict and the demands of a political system that placed incompetent Party men in positions of military responsibility.
Faced with a brutal and efficient enemy, fighting a desperate, improvised defence, with poor supplies of weapons, widespread disorganization of command and a remarkable degree of tactical ineptitude – symbolized by the methodical tramping of rows of riflemen with bayonets fixed towards German machine-guns – losses were certain to be high. These early losses created a vicious circle. By 1942 only 8 per cent of the cadres of the army remained.52 The new recruits, both officers and men, were inexperienced and suffered further high losses as a result. Surviving officers were promoted rapidly to fill vacant senior posts, leaving insufficiently trained juniors to replace them. They were quickly hardened by battle, but inexperience took its toll. When by 1943 the supply of weapons improved and the quality of leadership and organization forged in war created growing confidence among the troops, losses dropped significantly. By the time of Kursk, the Soviet high command had created conditions of combat in which casualties could be kept at supportable levels. The Soviet theory of the ‘field of fire’, where a proper balance among artillery, tanks and infantry could reduce troop losses and multiply the effectiveness of gunfire, was well known in the 1930s. Only by 1943 were the weapons available to try to achieve it. At Kursk the casualty rate was half that at Moscow; by the battles of 1944 the rate was only one-quarter.53 Without such improvements in battlefield performance the Soviet war effort would have collapsed in 1943. The reconstruction of an almost entirely new army on the ruins of the collapse in 1941, one capable of holding its own against the attacker, ranks as the most remarkable achievement of the war.
One awkward fact makes it difficult to accept that the Soviet system as such squandered its manpower in war: the Tsarist armies between 1914 and 1917 averaged 7,000 casualties a day, compared with 7,950 a day between 1941 and 1945.54 The figures are not entirely reliable, but they give a sense of proportion. During the First World War the sacrifice of human lives, in a contest that proved unwinnable, was little less than the sacrifice of the Second. This strongly suggests that the explanation lies not
in the Soviet system, but in the traditions of Russian life, military life in particular. In the Tsarist army the readiness of the soldier for self-sacrifice was regarded as a true test of the moral preparation of the force. Dereliction of duty or desertion were treated as harshly as they were after 1941, with summary executions and ‘penal battalions’. It was General Dragomirov, a prominent pre-1914 military thinker, who argued that proper military training inculcated an ability to suppress the natural instinct for self-preservation in favour of the group.55 The distinction between the ‘we’ and the ‘I’ was symptomatic of a deeper social outlook in Russian life, where collectivism was preferred to individualism. These cultural traditions were borrowed and enlarged by Soviet Communism. Years later, in 1942, a military commissar complained about the egoism of many around him: ‘All that one can hear is: “I“, and yet again “I“. They have long forgotten about “us”.’56 This tradition alone does not explain the death rates in Russia's war, but it does suggest a shared social and cultural environment in which the individual was perceived to matter a great deal less than the whole, whether village, community or motherland.
These are, of course, abstractions. They can scarcely do justice to the suffering of the millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, more than half of them former peasants, who had to live for years in the constant shadow of violent death. ‘Mine was a noisy age,’ wrote Ehrenburg. ‘Men were swiftly extinguished…’57 Soviet soldiers coped with this reality in a number of ways. Many were already used to a way of life that was harsh and unrelenting. The physical hardships and brutality of everyday life, in the villages and in the factories, were very different from life in the West, although such differences are seldom acknowledged with sufficient force. In the course of little more than a generation much of the population had endured the upheavals of Tsarist modernization, war, revolution and a savage civil war. The ‘revolution from above’ accustomed many Soviet citizens to the death or forced migration of millions of their own kind. The state of war was an acute one, but it was endured by a tough and fatalistic people as they had endured earlier sufferings.
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