63
KURSK
By Harry Turtledove
“My stomach turns over.”
After Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered the last ninety thousand starving, freezing Germans in Stalingrad at the end of January 1943, anyone with eyes to see should have understood that Hitler would never beat Stalin on the Eastern Front. (Paulus was promoted to field marshal just before the surrender, to persuade him to shoot himself instead of giving up—no German field marshal had ever surrendered. It didn’t work. Only about five thousand of those Germans ever saw the Vaterland again. He was one of them.)
As the winter of 1942–1943 wore on, what wasn’t obvious was whether the entire German position in the southern USSR would go to pieces. It didn’t, thanks in large measure to some inspired generalship by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Hitler, perhaps feeling the hangover from Stalingrad, was uncommonly willing to let von Manstein give ground and lure the Red Army into overextending itself, in turn.
This the eager Soviet generals duly did, and the German field marshal chopped their columns to pieces one by one. The Germans even retook the key town of Kharkov (now Kharkiv, in Ukraine), which had fallen to the USSR not long before. Soon the Red Army, not the Wehrmacht, was the force eager for the spring thaw to glue both armies into position for several weeks.
When the snow melted and the mud came, the front was in about the same place it had been a year before. The major difference was that the Red Army held a large salient centered on Kursk, north of Kharkov. The Soviets had conducted successful operations during both the last two winters. The two previous summers, though, had belonged to Germany. Hitler was determined that the summer of 1943 should, as well.
A glance at the map showed that biting off the Kursk salient would be a good way to get back the strategic initiative. It would shorten the front the Germans had to hold and would free up several divisions to be used as a strategic reserve or—more likely—to go fight somewhere else. Thus, Operation Citadel was born, and scheduled by von Manstein for mid- to late April 1943—as soon as the ground dried out enough to let armor and men move freely.
There were two problems with this. One was that Stalin and Zhukov could also glance at a map. In case they couldn’t, the Soviet spy ring code-named Lucy would have filled them in. Had the German attack gone in on April 15 or 25, none of that would have mattered much. But the attack didn’t happen.
Delays were repeated. The Germans committed more and more to the assault. Hitler wanted to add the new Panther tank to the armored force . . . but the Panther had teething troubles. At one staff meeting, Guderian urged Hitler not to attack at all, but to build up resources for the big fight ahead in the west. Even the Führer had qualms. “When I think of this attack, my stomach turns over,” he said. But he didn’t call it off; he only postponed it again, this time to June 12. It ultimately began on July 5.
Meanwhile, Red Army soldiers and dragooned civilians dug mile upon mile of trenches and antitank ditches. They planted mines by the tens of thousands. The Soviets brought in guns and rocket launchers and tanks and men of their own. When the attack went in, it failed. On the northern flank, Model never got far. In the south, von Manstein came closer to success, but his armored thrust was stopped at Prokhorovka in the biggest tank battle the world had ever seen. The USSR could afford that kind of massive losses far better than Germany could. The Wehrmacht never regained the strategic initiative. After Kursk, the end of the war was still almost two years away, but it was all downhill from then on.
Even if the Germans weren’t going to win in the east, could they have husbanded men and matériel well enough to force a draw there? Could they have killed enough Red Army soldiers and destroyed enough Red Army T-34s to make even a cold-blooded butcher like Stalin decide peace was a better bargain than more slaughter? If they could, how?
Besides biting off the Kursk salient early, while it still could have been pretty easy, another way was to let the Soviets charge ahead, temporarily yield some ground, and then counterattack, taking advantage of superior German technical ability. That was what von Manstein had done when he rescued the situation after Stalingrad. He wanted to try it again.
This time, though, Hitler rejected his plan. Hitler always hated retreat, even temporary retreat for military reasons. This was almost certainly a mistake, and a bad one. Germany needed to conserve what soldiers and machines it could. The third largest economy in the world, it was fighting number one (the USA), number two (the USSR), and number four (the UK). Under any circumstances, those were bad odds. The colossal expenditures of Operation Citadel—one historian has termed it “panzer hara-kiri”—only made them worse than they would have been otherwise.
Had the Führer handed the military reins to von Manstein and the other high-ranking officers, who actually knew what they were doing, could they have inflicted enough casualties on the Red Army to knock it out of the war? It seems unlikely. The USSR had two and a half times Germany’s population, and far more than two and a half times Germany’s natural resources. It had powerful allies. And Soviet generals, while perhaps not up to von Manstein’s exacting standards, got steadily better at their trade throughout the war. Once the Wehrmacht failed to knock the Soviet Union out in the early rounds, it was going to lose the fight.
Given a more intelligent conduct of the war from 1943 on, could Germany have lasted longer than it did? Yes, probably. Hitler’s refusal to retreat, no matter what, and his fortress cities that trapped and destroyed the garrisons condemned to hold them, wasted manpower and threw away tanks and guns. A more mobile defense would have been harder for the Red Army to smash.
Such a defense might well have kept the Nazi regime fighting into the summer of 1945, instead of collapsing in the spring. And that would have gotten Hitler and his cronies exactly what they deserved, for who can doubt that atomic fire would have incinerated Berlin and, as necessary, other German cities with it? And who can doubt that a world with the Nazis literally seared out of existence would have been a better place?