On 5 July 1943, the last great German offensive on the Eastern Front began. It was directed at the destruction of the Kursk salient in the eastern Ukraine and constituted a last, supreme effort by the Germans to stabilise the Eastern Front in the face of ever burgeoning Soviet military power. It failed. Thereafter, with the strategic initiative having been irrevocably lost, the Germans began a fighting retreat that did not end until two years later when the Red Army stormed Berlin and Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.
This was not the outcome envisaged by the German leader when he penned War Directive Number 21, in December 1940. In that document he assumed, as did the senior commanders of the Wehrmacht, that a ‘rapid campaign’ against the Soviet Union would be little different in outcome and just a little longer in duration than that which had brought France, Belgium and Holland to defeat in six weeks half a year earlier. Indeed, Operation Barbarossa – the codename adopted for the invasion of Russia in June 1941 – was based upon a number of fatally erroneous assumptions about Nazi Germany’s eastern ally. Hitler and the Wehrmacht’s low opinion of the Soviet state and its armed forces, his hatred of its communist ideology and above all, his racist perception of its Slavic people as untermenschen – sub humans – all served to feed his conviction that the USSR was ‘a colossus with feet of clay’ such that we ‘have only to kick in the front door and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.’
In the months between the invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 and March 1942, the Wehrmacht had conquered large areas of the western USSR and captured and killed over five million Red Army soldiers. But it had also suffered its first strategic reverse, which served to puncture the reputation for invincibility that the Wehrmacht had acquired since September 1939. The Red Army counter offensive begun on 5 December, which had hurled the German forces back from the approaches to Moscow, had then grown into an effort that embraced the full extent of the Eastern Front by the end of January 1942. When, at the end of March, it petered out owing to the thaw and the exhaustion of the combatants, the Soviet Union was far from being finished, and Nazi Germany a very long way from realising victory over erstwhile ally.
The massive reduction of German military strength incurred in the first ten months of the Eastern Campaign brought about a contraction of Germany’s strategic aspiration for the summer of 1942. Hitler would have no truck with a defensive posture and with the onset of the wider war, it was deemed imperative that the USSR be defeated in 1942. It was to service Germany’s wider war aims and also secure Russia’s collapse that Hitler eschewed any renewed attempt to take Moscow. Rather, the German offensive effort was to be directed towards the realisation of primarily economic objectives. As early as January, Hitler had indicated that the priority objective for the coming summer campaign must be the capture and exploitation of the oilfields of the Caucasus, without which, he told one audience: ‘I must end this war.’ It was for this reason that a secondary objective of Case Blue – as the 1942 offensive had been named – was to bring the city of Stalingrad under fire so as to interdict the oil supplies taken by barge from Baku northward along the river Volga.
It was against this backdrop that Case Blue opened on 28 June. Once more the panzer divisions gobbled up space and advanced headlong across the steppe in the face of what appeared to be a totally demoralised Red Army. But this was more apparent than real as by October the German advance had ground to a halt along the foothills of the Caucasus and Sixth Army was embroiled in a ferocious battle of attrition amidst the ruins of the city of Stalingrad. One month later and the chickens came home to roost. On 22 November, the Red Army launched a major offensive and encircled the city. Hitler’s response was to order Sixth Army to remain in place, ‘on the Volga’.
Hitler now appointed Field Marshal Erich von Manstein to oversee Army Group Don – a new and hastily assembled command – and tasked him with relieving Stalingrad. The day before this formation’s subsequently abortive attack began on 12 December, German forces began their withdrawal from the Caucasus. By the end of the month, the German line along the Don, to the north of Stalingrad, was disintegrating as Axis armies succumbed to the widening Soviet offensive. On 10 January 1943, the Red Army launched the final reduction of the Stalingrad pocket. Hitler ordered 1st Panzer Army out of the Caucasus on 24 January to reinforce Manstein’s weakened forces protecting the Donetz industrial region. Along the Don front, a number of Soviet Fronts had vanquished the remnants of Axis forces, such that by 2 February, the Voronezh Front had crossed the Donets and was threatening Kharkov. Strength returns indicated that as of 23 January, the Ostheer could only field 495 operational tanks.
It was against this backdrop that on 6 February, just three days after the surrender of Stalingrad was announced in Germany, Manstein met with Hitler at his headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Among the items discussed was the strategy to be adopted by the Heer for the summer. Of the two operational options he proffered to Hitler, Manstein was in favour of the ‘backhand’. This presumed that the Red Army would launch a massive offensive in southern Russia in the summer that should be allowed to mature, with German forces falling back so as to permit the Soviets to overextend themselves. At the right moment, a massive armoured counter attack would be launched, catching the Red Army on ‘the backhand’. This would then drive southward and pin them against the Sea of Azov. The outcome of such a victory would, Manstein believed, generate the conditions whereby the Soviets would be forcibly encouraged into some sort of political arrangement to end the war. Manstein never revealed this political dimension of his proposal, as he knew Hitler would have baulked immediately as the German leader would have no truck with such thinking.
Manstein’s proposals to Hitler for 1943. (A) The backhand – await the Russian summer offensive then defeat it. (B) The forehand – an early offensive to destroy the Kursk salient drawing the Red Army’s teeth for the rest of the summer by the infliction of catastrophic losses.
Manstein’s alternative option, which he called the ‘forehand’, turned on the Germans seizing the offensive initiative to inflict an early and heavy defeat on the Red Army as soon as the weather and ground were dry enough to allow the panzers to operate. Not surprisingly, with the front in the south seemingly on the verge of disintegration, this discussion was not taken further. Nonetheless, a seed had been planted in Hitler’s mind with the ‘forehand’ proposal and this would bear fruit within months with the issue of plans for a limited offensive in the early summer.
By 9 February, Soviet forces were approaching Kharkov from the north and south. Two days later, the SS Panzer Corps had been pushed back into the city. On the 11th, German forces were ordered by Hitler to hold the city ‘at all costs’, whilst in the gap that had opened up in the German front between Kharkov and Orel, General Vatutin, the commander of the Voronezh Front, was prompted by Stalin into ordering his 6th Army to advance and take Zaporozhye. As of 13 January, this vital city crossing point over the Dnieper had become the site of Manstein’s headquarters in his new role as commander of Army Group South.
Matters in Kharkov now came to a head. On the 15th, with the total encirclement of the city in prospect and the inevitable loss of his units in consequence, Obergruppenführer Hausser unilaterally ordered his force to begin withdrawal from the city, only to receive yet another ‘hold’ order. On this occasion Hausser ignored his immediate superior as well as Hitler. The withdrawal proceeded. In an act of unprecedented disobedience, the head of the SS Panzer Corps had chosen to save his force notwithstanding his allegiance to Hitler. By his action, Hausser saved his force to fight another day, and indeed, what was to follow – the German counter offensive that within the month saw the re-capture of Kharkov – would not have been possible had he not done so.
Hitler visited von Manstein for a second time in at Zaporozhye on 10 March 1943. The subject of the summer campaign was discussed.
Hitler now flew out to see Manstein at his headquarters. After days of hard debate, the Führer conceded to the Field Marshal’s demand that in the face of the dire situation facing Army Group South, he be given ‘ a free hand’ to conduct operations as he saw fit.
Manstein now began a concentration and re-deployment of his forces, unleashing his mobile formations on 18 February against a surprised enemy who had totally misinterpreted German intentions. Lulled by wishful thinking, Stavka had attributed the German withdrawals as signs of their imminent complete collapse and evidence of a full-scale retreat westward across the Dnieper. In a classic demonstration of mobile warfare, 1st Panzer Army and Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army, the latter with the three divisions of the SS Panzer Corps operating as its cutting edge, excised enemy mobile spearheads, forcing the remnants of the Soviet South-Western Front and then the Voronezh Front into a hasty retreat on the city of Kharkov and the line of the river Donets. Though it took until 14 March for SS troops from the 1st and 2nd divisions to clear all Soviet opposition from inside Kharkov. Three days later 48th Panzer Corps and the SS Panzer Corps began their drive northward from Kharkov and advanced on the city of Belgorod.
Panzers of the I SS Panzer Grenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler move into Kharkov after its recapture, March 1943.