Introduction

The Battle of Kursk was the greatest land battle the world has ever seen on a fighting front that epitomized ‘total war’. Here was a barbaric campaign of passion and intensity, which was deeply rooted in ideology and centred on annihilation. It was a confrontation characterized by hideous excess and outrageous atrocities, involving the two largest national armies ever amassed, and fought over four years in operations stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea. It concluded with Germany having incurred nearly three million military dead and the Soviet Union a staggering 10 million. The Soviet losses alone equated to the total number of dead from all belligerent nations on all fronts during the Great War. Every week Stalin’s armed forces accumulated a football stadium’s worth of dead, and every three months mourned as many lives as the United States did in the entire war. Seventeen million civilians also perished as a direct result of the fighting between 22 June 1941 and 8 May 1945, in a conflict that set new standards in depravity and inhumanity. It was a war that proved to be another national trauma in a turbulent century for the Soviet Union’s ill-fated population, one that placed the enemy on the outskirts of their capital city and demanded seemingly endless sacrifice before it was over.

Although the Russo-German war changed the world forever, its significance is not well represented in the national consciousnesses of the United Kingdom, Commonwealth countries and the United States. The general public of these nations does not seem to identify with the scale and importance of the fighting in Russia when compared with the more modestly influential northwest European campaign. While the Normandy landings during the summer of 1944 did mark a major turning point in the war in Europe, we should remember that by the end of that year, 91 Allied divisions in northwest Europe faced 65 German divisions across a 250 mile front, while at the same time in the East, 560 Soviet divisions fought 235 German divisions across 2000 miles.

The lack of appreciation for the Eastern Front in the West, although regrettable, is, however, understandable. For those nations not involved in that particular fight, the historical vista that it presents is unlikely to be one with which their populations are particularly well acquainted. People are naturally influenced by their own nation’s campaigns and battles – ‘our history, our heritage, our war dead’ – but in so doing are in danger of overemphasizing the importance of that fighting on events and outcomes. To the people of the United Kingdom, for example, the confrontation between the Soviet Union and Germany not only lacks the immediacy of the liberation of France, but also an obvious relevance to their everyday lives. Here is a campaign fought by soldiers speaking in foreign tongues led by vile autocrats on battlefields many hundreds of miles away. What is more, there have been very few cultural reference points connected with that conflict for the population to soak up and share. Books about the Eastern Front – although not totally absent from the shelves of bookshops and libraries – have been severely under-represented in the history sections, the media has not shown any great appetite for the subject and, although some programmes about the war in Russia are to be found tucked away on ‘specialist’ television channels, very few mainstream films have been set in the East. Over the decades since the end of the Second World War, therefore, people living in the countries of the old Western Alliance have not been particularly likely to happen upon material – academic or otherwise – to raise their awareness of the Russo-German war.

In the last 20 years there has been a slow but gradual improvement in this situation. The lowering of the Iron Curtain heralded a haphazard erosion of the restrictions placed on the free flow of information and ideas that had previously so stifled a wider understanding of the Eastern Front. Now, nearly a generation since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world is gaining a fuller, more accurate, better balanced and more vibrant picture of the fighting there than ever before. The nations of the former Soviet Union have a new outlook, which is reflected in a diminution of state bureaucracy, the opening of archives and closer links with foreign academic institutions. A new spirit of cooperation has been born. Nurtured by the email boom and given strength by low-priced air travel, circumstances have developed that are far more conducive to the undertaking of a fundamental reassessment of the Russo-German conflict than had previously been the case. It has been a slow and sometimes painful process, but its success should be measured not merely by the weight of the academic papers produced under the new conditions, but also by new initiatives, such as British, American and French units joining 10,500 Russian troops marching across Red Square to mark the 65th anniversary of the end of the war.

For students of the Eastern Front, the improvement in access to state documents, veterans of the conflict and the old battlefields has been thrilling and has encouraged a new generation of writers to take up the challenge of interpreting the campaign. The subject has been vitalized by a plethora of ground-breaking studies by academics such as David Glantz, and popularized by bestsellers from the pen of Antony Beevor. Thus, slowly, the West’s historical landscape has begun to broaden to incorporate the fighting in the East, which has persuaded historians not only to explore that campaign in greater breadth and depth, but also to re-evaluate the course, outcome and consequences of the Second World War. Kursk was partly prompted by the new energy that currently surrounds the study of the Russo-German war, but was also born of my frustration at being unable to find a text that placed the battle in its proper context and with the requisite detail. There are plenty of books that make sweeping generalizations about the fighting in the Kursk salient, and many that provide such mind-numbing technical information about formations and equipment as to render it impossible to deduce what happened, but precious few that provide a satisfying overview. It is peculiar that such a massive confrontation (which eventually occupied four million men, 69,000 guns and mortars, 13,000 tanks and self-propelled guns and almost 12,000 aircraft) should remain so relatively obscure. Even more so when one considers the exceptional influence that the battle had on subsequent events. In the words of historian John Hughes-Wilson, that Kursk is ‘one of the most decisive battles of the world is no exaggeration . . . [it had] epic significance.’

This volume, therefore, seeks to provide the overview that places the Battle of Kursk in the context required to do justice to its pivotal position in the course of the fighting on the Eastern Front. To do this, Kursk does not just take a snapshot of the campaign in July 1943 and provide highlights of the previous year’s combat, but subjects Germany and the Soviet Union to a political, economical, military and social examination from the last days of the Great War onwards. By charting the rise of Hitler and Stalin into determined, aggressive and ruthless dictators able to bend the equally vulnerable Germany and Soviet Union to their wills, we will be able to achieve some understanding of both the political motivations and the ideological fervour behind their ambitions. Through an examination of how these autocrats sought to achieve their goals, it will also be possible to assess how well prepared their nations were for the tasks that their leaders handed to them. The chances of success depended greatly on the belligerents’ mental and physical preparedness for the trials ahead along with the critical relationships between state, economy, armed forces and people. Such factors also helped to shape and determine the fighting methods that the combatants deployed. In blitzkrieg the Wehrmacht had a totemic operational technique, but by 1943 the improving Soviets had not only identified ways of countering it, but were also on the verge of re-establishing their own manoeuvre-warfare credentials. Critical to both was the ability to sustain the campaign and operations over protracted periods. This was not just a case of securing the vital raw resources and manufacturing facilities to turn iron into tanks and oil into fuel, but ensuring that necessities got to where they were needed in time to make a difference. Such issues constantly challenged the leading political and military figures of the day and had a seismic influence on strategy, but also had a direct impact on the hapless soldier at the sharp end trying to carry out his duty. As a result, although Kursk maintains the necessary focus on the decision makers, it has the fighting man at its heart. It should be remembered that those who fought to secure a brighter, safer future for their children in the Great War were the fathers who watched their sons march off to fight in an even more devastating conflict. By endeavouring to unravel the tangled skein of issues that surround the Battle of Kursk, it is hoped that we might take a step closer to understanding the reasons why another doomed generation were dragged from their families and sent to fight in hell.