Battle of Kursk

The Battle of Kursk was the largest battle of the summer of 1943 on the Eastern Front and the Wehrmacht’s last great strategic offensive against the Soviet Union. On 5 July 1943 two German army groups struck from the north and the south at a huge bulge in the front around Kursk, intending to cut it off and destroy the Soviet forces inside it. The Red Army, forewarned of German intentions since the spring, awaited the blow in the deepest defences it built in the entire war. After a week of heavy fighting the German pincers stalled, having advanced a dozen or so kilometres in the north and some 35 kilometres in the south. Soviet counter-offensives at Oryol and Belgorod then turned into a general advance that ended on 23 August with the liberation of Kharkiv.

Having lost the winter campaign at Stalingrad, the Germans lost the summer campaign at Kursk – the season in which until then they had always set the pace of operations. From then until the end of the war the initiative in the East remained with the Soviets.

Name and dates

Polish and Soviet historiography use the name “Battle of the Kursk Bulge” (Russian Курская битва, “the Battle of Kursk”) for the whole campaign from 5 July to 23 August 1943. It comprised three operations:

• the German Operation Citadel (Unternehmen Zitadelle), 5–16 July: the attack of the 9th Army from the north and of the 4th Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf from the south; in Soviet terminology the “Kursk defensive operation” (5–23 July, that is, until the ground lost in the south had been recovered);
• the Soviet Operation Kutuzov, or the Oryol offensive operation, 12 July – 18 August: the attack of the Western, Bryansk and Central Fronts on the Oryol salient north of the bulge;
• the Soviet Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev, or the Belgorod–Kharkov offensive operation, 3–23 August: the advance of the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts on Belgorod and Kharkiv. The Germans call it the Fourth Battle of Kharkov.

The opening and closing dates are not in dispute: 5 July was the day of the German attack (fighting for observation posts on the southern wing had already begun on the evening of 4 July), and 23 August was the day on which troops of the Steppe Front took Kharkiv. Western studies more often restrict the name “Battle of Kursk” to Citadel alone and describe the Soviet counter-offensives as separate operations. The whole can nevertheless be treated as a single battle, as the Soviet command treated it, having planned the defence and the counter-stroke from the outset as one design.

Background

In the winter of 1942–1943 the Red Army destroyed the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and went over to the offensive along the whole southern wing of the front. In February it took Kursk and Kharkiv, but the overextended, exhausted Soviet armies were caught off guard by Manstein’s counter-offensive. In the Third Battle of Kharkov Field Marshal Erich von Manstein smashed the Soviet groupings between the Donets and the Dnieper and in mid-March retook Kharkiv, and then Belgorod. The spring thaw halted both sides on a line where, between the German salients at Oryol and Belgorod, a great Soviet bulge remained around Kursk, some 200 kilometres from north to south and 150 kilometres deep to the west.

For the Germans the bulge was an obvious target. Cutting it off would shorten the front, free a dozen or more divisions and destroy two Soviet fronts before the Red Army could launch its own summer offensive from it. On 13 March Adolf Hitler signed Operations Order No. 5, and on 15 April Order No. 6, which directed an attack under the code name Citadel, to begin “on 3 May or soon after”. The plan was simple: Colonel General Walter Model’s 9th Army, part of Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s Army Group Centre, was to strike south from the Oryol area, while Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army from Manstein’s Army Group South, covered on its eastern flank by General Werner Kempf’s Army Detachment Kempf, was to attack north from Belgorod. The pincers were to close east of Kursk.

The date, however, was postponed again and again. On 27 April Model showed Hitler aerial photographs revealing how deeply the Russians were digging in, and demanded reinforcements. Hitler wanted to throw the new tanks into the battle: the Panther medium tank, the Tiger heavy tank and the Ferdinand tank destroyer, whose production and teething troubles were causing delays. At a conference in Munich on 3–4 May Heinz Guderian, Inspector General of Armoured Troops since March, and the armaments minister Albert Speer warned that the new vehicles were not ready; Manstein thought that once surprise had been lost the attack made no sense, while Kluge and the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Kurt Zeitzler, wanted to go ahead. Hitler postponed the operation first to 12 June, then successively to 20 June and 3 July, and finally, on 1 July, set the date as 5 July. In the meantime the war in North Africa had ended with the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia, and the German command expected an Allied landing in Italy or the Balkans.

The Wehrmacht concentrated about 780,000 men around Kursk, of whom the three attacking armies had about 440,000 front-line troops, together with some 2,400–2,700 tanks and assault guns (including about 200 Panthers, over 130 Tigers and 90 Ferdinands) and about 1,800 aircraft of Luftflotte 6 and Luftflotte 4 – the figures given by different authors vary. In the south, where Manstein had three Waffen-SS divisions in General Paul Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps and the Großdeutschland Division, the armoured strength was markedly greater than in Model’s 9th Army.

Intelligence and defence in depth

The Soviet command learned of Citadel early and in detail. Information came from many sources: aerial and front-line reconnaissance, partisans in the rear of Army Group Centre, the “Lucy” ring in Switzerland, and John Cairncross, a Soviet agent at the British codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park who, according to most historians, passed raw decrypts of Luftwaffe signals to Moscow, including the locations of German airfields. How much each of these sources contributed remains disputed; what is certain is that the Stavka knew the general intention and the axes of attack and, in the last days before the offensive, its date as well.

On 12 April, after a meeting between Joseph Stalin, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, and his deputy, General Aleksei Antonov, a decision was taken that was unusual in the Red Army’s practice up to then: not to forestall the Germans with an attack of its own, but to receive their blow in prepared defences, bleed the German panzer divisions white and then go over to the counter-offensive. Some commanders, above all General Nikolai Vatutin, commander of the Voronezh Front, pressed for an earlier attack, and Stalin wavered several times. Zhukov and Vasilevsky persuaded him to wait.

The northern part of the bulge was held by General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Central Front, the southern part by Vatutin’s Voronezh Front; together they had some 1.3 million men in 12 armies. In the rear, behind the bulge, the Stavka assembled a strategic reserve, from which General Ivan Konev’s Steppe Front was formed on 9 July – another half a million men, including General Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army. In all, the Red Army had about 1.9 million men in the battle area, some 5,000 tanks and self-propelled guns (mostly T-34s, but about a third of them light tanks), more than 25,000 guns and mortars and more than 2,500 aircraft. Zhukov, as representative of the Stavka, coordinated operations in the north, Vasilevsky in the south.

Between April and July soldiers and hundreds of thousands of mobilised inhabitants of the surrounding villages built three main defensive belts on each wing of the bulge, with a combined depth of about 40 kilometres, and further belts behind them to a total of 130–150 kilometres; together with the belts of the Steppe Front and those along the Don, the system reached almost 300 kilometres in depth. The Central Front dug about 5,000 kilometres of trenches and the Voronezh Front about 4,200. Sappers laid a total of some 500,000 anti-tank and 440,000 anti-personnel mines, in the first belt as many as 2,000 or more of each type per kilometre of front. The defence was built around anti-tank strongpoints, in which a few guns, anti-tank rifles and sappers with mines blocked the routes by which tanks might come; mobile obstacle detachments were to mine the roads in front of the advancing columns during the battle itself.

Course of the battle: Operation Citadel

The pre-emptive strike and the first day

On the evening of 4 July, on the southern wing, German infantry seized the hills from which the artillery was to direct its fire; Vatutin replied with a barrage on the German jumping-off positions. In the north, after a prisoner confirmed that the attack would begin at dawn, Rokossovsky, with Zhukov’s approval, opened an artillery counter-preparation at about 2 a.m. on 5 July. It delayed the German attack by roughly two hours but inflicted no great losses on the Germans. A Soviet dawn raid on German airfields also failed: according to Western research the Soviet air force lost some 175 aircraft that day, the Luftwaffe 26. Until 10–11 July the Germans held air superiority over the southern wing, while over the northern wing the struggle for supremacy went less well for them; Henschel Hs 129 ground-attack aircraft and Ju 87s armed with anti-tank cannon inflicted heavy losses on Soviet tanks.

The northern wing: Model at Ponyri and Olkhovatka

Model’s 9th Army moved off at 5.30 a.m. on 5 July on a front about 45 kilometres wide, its first echelon consisting mainly of infantry supported by Tigers and Ferdinands; unlike Manstein, Model wanted to keep his panzer divisions back to exploit a breakthrough. The Ferdinands drove into minefields: of the 45 vehicles of one battalion, more than 30 had been immobilised by evening, most of them by mines. Even so, the XLVII Panzer Corps drove 8–10 kilometres into the first defensive belt of the 13th Army, and the XLI Panzer Corps reached the heavily fortified station and settlement of Ponyri, a key road and rail junction in the second belt.

On 6 July Rokossovsky threw the 2nd Tank Army (PL) and Guards corps into a counter-attack. Poorly coordinated – only part of the force went into action – it broke against the Tigers, but it checked the German momentum. From 7 to 10 July Model fought for two points that both sides regarded as decisive: Ponyri, where for several days there was fighting for every house, the water tower and the school, and the heights at Olkhovatka and Teploye, which dominated the road to Kursk. On 10 July some 300 tanks and assault guns of three panzer divisions, with full air support, failed to break through the defences at Olkhovatka. The width of the German attack shrank day by day, until on 8–9 July it was a mere two kilometres.

On the evening of 9 July Kluge and Model concluded that the 9th Army would not break through to Kursk. The attack came to a halt after a dozen or so kilometres, and on 12 July the Soviet offensive against the Oryol salient forced Model to pull divisions away from Kursk to save his own rear.

The southern wing: Hoth and Kempf on the road to Oboyan

In the south Manstein and Hoth attacked with massed armour from the start. At dawn on 5 July the XLVIII Panzer Corps, with the Großdeutschland Division and the 3rd and 11th Panzer Divisions, attacked the 6th Guards Army along the Belgorod–Oboyan–Kursk road. The Panthers, which had reached the front only a few days earlier, proved a disappointment: some caught fire on the march, others got stuck in a mined, marshy ravine near the village of Cherkasskoye, and after two days only about 40 of the 184 were still running. To the corps’ right the three divisions of the II SS Panzer Corps – Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Das Reich and Totenkopf, led by a spearhead of several dozen Tigers – broke through the first defensive belt on the first day and forced their way into the second.

Army Detachment Kempf fared worst, as it first had to force a crossing of the Donets at Belgorod under fire from the 7th Guards Army. Its III Panzer Corps advanced slowly, so that the right flank of the SS corps remained exposed for the whole week and its divisions had to detach forces to cover it. Vatutin committed one reserve after another, including General Mikhail Katukov’s 1st Tank Army, which he dug in as fixed firing positions, against the views of the tank men themselves, as well as tanks and artillery sent by the Stavka from other fronts.

By 8 July the SS corps had advanced some 30 kilometres and broken through the first and second belts, while the XLVIII Panzer Corps was approaching the third, thinly manned belt in front of Oboyan. Each day, however, cost the Germans dozens of tanks, and Soviet counter-attacks against their flanks forced them to disperse their strength. On 9 July the first SS units reached the Psel (Psyol) river. Hoth then, in accordance with a plan prepared before the battle, swung the main thrust away from Oboyan to the north-east, towards the railway station at Prokhorovka, where he expected to meet the Soviet armoured reserves and where he wanted to link up with Kempf. On 10 and 11 July Totenkopf seized a bridgehead across the Psel, and Leibstandarte came within three kilometres of Prokhorovka. On the night of 11–12 July Kempf’s 6th Panzer Division captured a bridge over the Donets at Rzhavets by a ruse and at last pushed north.

Prokhorovka, 12 July

On the morning of 12 July Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army, reinforced by two tank corps, launched a massive counter-attack on the SS corps from Prokhorovka. The tanks of the 18th and 29th Tank Corps, carrying Guards paratroopers on their hulls, drove down the slopes into a narrow corridor between the Psel and a railway embankment, straight into the fire of the anti-tank guns and tanks of Leibstandarte, which had been waiting in defensive positions for two days. The Soviet crews tried to close the distance as quickly as possible to cancel out the advantage of the German guns, and some of them drove into their own anti-tank ditch. To the north Totenkopf was fighting for the bridgehead across the Psel, and it was there that it suffered the largest share of German losses that day; to the south Das Reich was beating off the attacks of two tank corps.

For decades the Soviet Union presented the battle of Prokhorovka as “the greatest tank battle in history”, in which several hundred tanks fought on each side, as many as 1,200–1,500 in all, and in which Rotmistrov smashed the German armoured fist. More recent research, above all by the Russian historian Valeriy Zamulin and the German historian Karl-Heinz Frieser, based on the archives of both sides, paints a different picture. Rotmistrov committed some 600 tanks and self-propelled guns against the SS corps, which on the evening of 11 July had 294 serviceable tanks and assault guns. According to Zamulin, the 5th Guards Tank Army lost about 340 vehicles destroyed or damaged and more than 3,500 men on 12 July; the SS corps reported 842 killed, wounded and missing, and of its several dozen damaged tanks it lost a few at most for good, since the battlefield remained in its hands and damaged vehicles could be towed away and repaired. According to many historians, a larger number of tanks fought in June 1941 in the tank battle of Dubno, Łuck and Brody, in the first days of Operation Barbarossa.

Tactically, therefore, Prokhorovka was a defeat for the Red Army, and that evening Stalin called Rotmistrov sharply to account. Operationally, however, the counter-attack achieved its aim: the SS corps did not break through the last defensive belt and did not reach open country.

Hitler calls off Citadel

On 10 July the Allies landed in Sicily, and on 12 July the Soviet offensive against the Oryol salient began. On 13 July Hitler summoned Field Marshals Kluge and Manstein to his Wolf’s Lair headquarters near Rastenburg (today Kętrzyn) and declared that, in view of the situation in Italy, he had to withdraw some forces from the Eastern Front and the operation would have to be broken off. Kluge, whose 9th Army the Russians were just then getting behind, accepted this with relief. Manstein argued that he was close to destroying the Soviet armoured reserves and that breaking off the fighting at that moment would mean handing the initiative to the Russians; he obtained permission to continue the attack in the south in a limited operation, Roland (14–16 July), which was to encircle the Soviet forces between the SS corps and Kempf. The very next day, however, Hitler took away his reserve, the XXIV Panzer Corps, and on 17 July ordered the SS corps out of the line; Leibstandarte left for Italy, the other two divisions went south to the Mius and the Donets, where the Red Army had attacked as a diversion.

In his memoirs, Lost Victories (Verlorene Siege), Manstein claimed that Hitler had robbed him of victory just when it was within his grasp. Most historians regard this as an illusion: the Steppe Front was largely intact, and the German divisions were too exhausted to reach Kursk. By 23 July the Germans in the south had fallen back to the positions from which they had started on 5 July.

Course of the battle: the Soviet counter-offensives

Operation Kutuzov: the Oryol salient

On 12 July, with Model’s attack stalled, General Vasily Sokolovsky’s Western Front, with General Ivan Bagramyan’s 11th Guards Army, struck from the north and General Markian Popov’s Bryansk Front from the east at the German salient around Oryol, held by the overstretched 2nd Panzer Army. On 15 July Rokossovsky’s Central Front joined the attack from the south. Bagramyan broke through to a depth of several dozen kilometres and threatened the Oryol–Bryansk railway, the only supply artery of both German armies. Hitler gave Model command of the 2nd Panzer Army as well; Model brought up division after division from the Kursk front and defended himself skilfully, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers – the Soviet tank armies, including General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army, lost tanks faster than they had in the defensive battle.

On 26 July Hitler agreed to abandon the salient and to withdraw to the Hagen Line, then being prepared across its base east of Bryansk. On 29 July the Red Army took Bolkhov, and on 5 August it entered Oryol. On 18 August Soviet troops came up against the Hagen Line and the operation came to an end. The front had moved some 150 kilometres to the west, and the German threat to Moscow from the Oryol area had gone for good.

Operation Rumyantsev: Belgorod and Kharkiv

The Voronezh Front, bled white in the defensive battle, needed three weeks to replenish. In the meantime, from 17 July, the South-Western and Southern Fronts attacked on the Donets and the Mius, drawing German panzer divisions there, including two SS divisions from Prokhorovka. On 3 August, after a massive artillery preparation, Vatutin and Konev struck at the junction of the 4th Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf north of Belgorod. The 1st Tank Army and the 5th Guards Tank Army, rebuilt after their July losses, broke through to a depth of several dozen kilometres, and on 5 August troops of the Steppe Front took Belgorod.

That same evening, 5 August, Moscow for the first time in the war celebrated a victory with an artillery salute: 12 salvoes from 120 guns in honour of the troops who had liberated Oryol and Belgorod. From then on the salute became a regular ritual, announced in Stalin’s orders of the day after every major success.

In the second week of August Soviet spearheads reached Bohodukhiv and Okhtyrka, cutting Kharkiv off from the west. Manstein brought up the SS panzer divisions Das Reich, Totenkopf and Wiking from the south, and in heavy tank battles at Bohodukhiv and Okhtyrka (11–20 August) they inflicted severe losses on Vatutin’s tank armies and stopped the outflanking of the city. Konev, however, was attacking Kharkiv itself, and Manstein, against Hitler’s demand that the city be held at all costs, ordered it to be abandoned so as not to allow another corps to be encircled. On 23 August troops of the Steppe Front took Kharkiv, which had already been liberated once in February and lost again in March – this time for good. It was the end of the Battle of Kursk and at the same time the beginning of the general Soviet advance towards the Dnieper.

Losses

The losses of both sides are hard to establish, and the figures differ according to the source and the method of counting; the most frequently cited estimates are as follows.

The Red Army. According to the study by the team of General Grigori Krivosheev, based on Soviet archives, the three fronts lost about 178,000 men in the Kursk defensive operation (5–23 July), including about 70,000 killed and missing. In the Oryol operation losses reached about 430,000 (more than 112,000 of them irrecoverable), and in the Belgorod–Kharkov operation about 256,000 (more than 71,000 irrecoverable); for the battle as a whole this gives more than 860,000 killed, missing and wounded, more than 250,000 of them irrecoverable. Some historians, among them the German scholar Roman Töppel and the Russian Boris Sokolov, consider these figures too low and give as many as 1.2 million or more; Sokolov’s estimates, however, are disputed by many researchers. Equipment losses were enormous: in the defensive phase alone some 1,600 tanks and self-propelled guns were destroyed or damaged, and in the two counter-offensives more than 4,000 in total – many of them were repaired and returned to action.

The Wehrmacht. Karl-Heinz Frieser, author of the volume of the German official history devoted to the Eastern Front in 1943, calculates from medical reports that German losses during Citadel amounted to about 54,000 men (including about 11,000 killed and missing), and in the whole battle, including the Soviet counter-offensives, to about 170,000, including about 46,500 killed and missing. Other authors, among them Chris Bellamy, regard these figures as too low and put German losses in the Kursk area as high as several hundred thousand. According to German data, irrecoverable losses of tanks and assault guns in Citadel alone came to about 250–320 vehicles, with several hundred damaged; for the battle as a whole Frieser puts them at about 760 and Töppel at as many as 1,200. The ratio of armour losses was thus clearly in the Germans’ favour: according to various estimates, from three to five Soviet vehicles for every German one. Frieser also puts Luftwaffe losses at about 520 aircraft; Soviet losses are estimated at anywhere from about 1,600 (official figures) to over 3,000.

The figures do not tell the whole story, however: the USSR could make good its losses and Germany no longer could. Soviet factories were then turning out more than 2,000 tanks a month, and the tank armies decimated in July were attacking again in August.

Significance

The Battle of Kursk closed the period in which the Germans could still determine the course of the war in the East, even locally. After their defeat before Moscow in the winter of 1941–1942, the Wehrmacht struck once more in the summer of 1942, towards the Caucasus and Stalingrad, and in the spring of 1943 at Kharkiv showed that it could still inflict a painful defeat on the Red Army. At Kursk, for the first time, a great German summer offensive failed to break through the Soviet defences even tactically. The Germans never again mounted a strategic offensive on the Eastern Front; their counter-attacks – at Kiev in the autumn of 1943, in Hungary in 1945 – were no more than local attempts to halt the Soviet advance. The strategic initiative passed to the Soviet side and stayed there until the end of the war.

The battle also showed how much the Red Army had changed since 1941. The Stavka foresaw the enemy’s intention, was able to refrain from a premature attack, built defences on which elite panzer divisions bled themselves white, and launched two counter-offensives from the reserves that had come through the defensive phase. The cost was enormous, and Soviet armoured forces were still inferior to the German ones in training and command, but superiority in numbers and production became decisive. For the Wehrmacht, Kursk meant the loss of the armoured reserves rebuilt with great difficulty after Stalingrad, which it was never able to re-create.

The battle was also bound up with the war on other fronts. The Allied landing in Sicily on 10 July and the fall of Mussolini on 25 July forced Hitler to transfer divisions to southern Europe and contributed to the decision to call off Citadel; in turn, the Battle of Kursk tied down forces that the Germans lacked in Italy. In the summer of 1943 the Wehrmacht for the first time had to fend off great offensives in the East and in the South at once, while an ever heavier bombing offensive raged over the Reich.

After Kursk the Red Army went over to a general offensive along the front from Velikiye Luki to the Black Sea. In September Bryansk, Smolensk and the Donets Basin were liberated; at the end of September Soviet troops forced the Dnieper, and on 6 November they entered Kiev. The German command, which in the spring had still hoped to straighten the front and seize the initiative, went over to a defensive that was to last until May 1945.