Hitler calls off Operation Citadel

On 13 July 1943, eight days after the start of Operation Citadel, Adolf Hitler summoned to his headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg (Kętrzyn), the two field marshals conducting the offensive against the Kursk salient: Günther von Kluge, commander of Army Group Centre, and Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South. He told them that the operation had to be brought to an end. The last great German offensive on the Eastern Front was over, although the fighting in the Kursk salient went on for more than another month – now on the Red Army’s initiative.

An offensive that stalled

The plan for Citadel envisaged two blows against the base of the Kursk salient, which jutted westwards: from the north by the Ninth Army of General Walter Model, and from the south by the Fourth Panzer Army of General Hermann Hoth and Army Detachment Kempf. The pincers were to close near Kursk and cut off five Soviet armies. After a week of fighting it was clear that this would not succeed.

In the north, Model’s troops penetrated the defences of the Central Front of General Konstantin Rokossovsky by a mere dozen or so kilometres, and from 9–10 July they were stuck in front of the hills near Olkhovatka and the village of Ponyri. In the south progress was greater – the II SS Panzer Corps broke through two defence belts of the Voronezh Front and reached Prokhorovka – but there too the Germans failed to break the third belt. On 12 July the 5th Guards Tank Army struck the SS corps in the Battle of Prokhorovka. Soviet tank losses that day were very heavy, but the German attack on Prokhorovka was halted.

Even more important was what happened that same day to the north of the salient. On the morning of 12 July, after a massive artillery preparation, the Western Front of General Vasily Sokolovsky and the Bryansk Front of General Markian Popov launched the Oryol offensive, code-named Kutuzov. Its target was the Oryol salient – the bulge in the front north of the Kursk salient from which Model’s attack had been launched. The most dangerous blow was that of General Ivan Bagramyan’s 11th Guards Army from the north, which tore open the defences of the weakened Second Panzer Army on the very first day. Within twenty-four hours the Soviet spearheads had driven a dozen or so kilometres deep, and in places more than twenty. Army Group Centre had to take panzer divisions away from Model on the Kursk front and throw them northwards; on 13 July Model himself also took command of the Second Panzer Army. The Ninth Army was threatened with being cut off from its rear.

Three days earlier, on the night of 9–10 July, the Western Allies had landed in Sicily. In many places the Italian units on the island surrendered without a fight, and in Berlin there were growing fears that Italy would soon drop out of the war.

The conference at the Wolf’s Lair

What took place at the meeting of 13 July is known mainly from Manstein’s account, written after the war in his memoirs Verlorene Siege (Lost Victories), and from the records of the two army groups. Hitler began with Sicily. He said that the situation on the island was serious, that the Italians were not fighting and that the island would probably have to be given up. The enemy’s next step might be a landing in the Balkans or in southern Italy. To counter it, new armies had to be formed, and the forces for them could only be taken from the east. Citadel must therefore be called off.

Kluge accepted the decision without objection. His Ninth Army had made no progress for several days, and now that the Soviet attack on the Oryol salient had begun he needed every division to prevent a disaster in the rear. He declared that Model’s attack could not be continued in any case and that his forces had to be withdrawn to their start lines.

Manstein took a different view. He believed that in the south the battle had reached its climax, that the Russians had committed almost all their operational reserves, and that breaking off the attack at that moment meant letting victory slip from their grasp. He wanted at least to destroy the Soviet armoured forces that had come out against him, and proposed committing XXIV Panzer Corps, which was being held in reserve. Hitler agreed that Army Group South could continue a limited attack, but the very next day he sent XXIV Panzer Corps south to the Donets, where a Soviet blow against the First Panzer Army was expected.

On the night of 13–14 July Manstein issued orders for Operation Roland. On the morning of 14 July the SS division Das Reich attacked eastwards, and III Panzer Corps, advancing from the south, moved to meet it. The pincers closed on 15 July south of Prokhorovka, but most of the Soviet units had managed to withdraw from them. On 16 July the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf began preparing to retreat, and on 17 July the Army High Command ordered the II SS Panzer Corps to be pulled out of the line. That same day Soviet attacks began on the Donets near Izyum and on the Mius, in the sectors of the First Panzer Army and the re-formed Sixth Army. The Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler division was to go to Italy – in the end it went without its tanks, which it handed over to the corps’ other divisions – while Das Reich and Totenkopf were sent south against the new Soviet bridgeheads. By 23 July the Germans on the southern face of the salient had returned roughly to the line from which they had set out on 5 July.

Sicily or Oryol?

Hitler justified his decision by Sicily, and that is how the German generals later presented it. Manstein maintained to the end of his life that Hitler had robbed him of victory “at the moment when it was within reach”. Historians treat this view with caution. The German military historian Karl-Heinz Frieser, author of the volume of the German official history devoted to the Eastern Front in 1943, considers that what was decisive was not the landing in Sicily but the Soviet counter-offensive at Oryol and the expected blows on the Donets and the Mius. The landing in Sicily merely provided an argument for breaking off an offensive that could not have succeeded anyway. The American scholars David Glantz and Jonathan House take a similar view: the Voronezh Front had indeed suffered heavy losses, but behind it stood further armies of the reserve Steppe Front of General Ivan Konev, of whose strength German intelligence had a very incomplete picture. Even if the SS corps had taken Prokhorovka, Kursk was still more than a hundred kilometres away, and the Ninth Army had not advanced for several days.

The losses of both sides in the defensive phase of the battle are still being researched. According to Frieser’s calculations, based on German records, the Wehrmacht lost some 54,000 men killed, wounded and missing during Citadel. The Russian historian Grigoriy Krivosheev, drawing on Soviet archives, gives almost 178,000 Red Army soldiers killed, wounded and missing for the defensive phase of the battle (5–23 July) – and some researchers consider even these figures too low. Despite such unequal losses, it was the Germans who had to abandon their objective, while the Soviet command still had enough strength to go over to the offensive.

The Soviet counter-offensives

Hitler’s decision did not end the battle, but it changed its character. The Soviet command – the operations of the fronts were coordinated on behalf of the Stavka by Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky – had planned from the outset first to bleed the German assault groupings white on the defensive and then to go over to the attack. The Oryol offensive was the first of two planned counter-offensives. On 15 July Rokossovsky’s Central Front joined it, striking the Ninth Army from the south in the direction of Kromy. Model, now commanding both armies in the salient, defended himself skilfully, shifting panzer divisions from one threatened sector to another, but he was forced back further and further.

At first Hitler forbade any retreat. Only on 26 July, the day after the overthrow of Mussolini in Italy, did he agree to the evacuation of the entire Oryol salient and the withdrawal of the troops to the hastily prepared Hagen position east of Bryansk – he wanted to free divisions for Italy in this way. The retreat began at the end of July. On 5 August the Red Army entered Oryol; on 15 August it took Karachev, and on 18 August, at the Hagen position, the Oryol offensive came to an end. According to Krivosheev it cost the Red Army some 430,000 killed, wounded and missing – more than repelling Citadel itself.

On the southern face of the salient, the Voronezh Front of General Nikolai Vatutin and Konev’s Steppe Front needed several weeks to make good their losses. In the meantime German reserves were tied down by attacks on the Donets and the Mius, which drew south the panzer divisions taken from Prokhorovka. On 3 August the two fronts launched the Belgorod–Kharkov offensive, code-named Polkovodets Rumyantsev. Belgorod was liberated as early as 5 August. That evening, for the first time in the war, an artillery salute was fired in Moscow in honour of the troops who had liberated Oryol and Belgorod – twelve salvoes from 120 guns. From then on such salutes were to be repeated after every major victory. Near Bohodukhiv and Okhtyrka Manstein still inflicted heavy losses on the Soviet tank armies, but on 23 August Konev’s troops entered Kharkiv – this time for good. Russian historiography regards that day as the end of the Battle of Kursk.

Significance

On 13 July 1943 the Germans abandoned a great strategic offensive in the east for the last time in the war – and for the first time such an offensive had been halted before it could break through the Soviet defences. At Moscow and Stalingrad the Red Army had won its victories in winter, after the German attacks had exhausted themselves. At Kursk it stopped the Wehrmacht in summer, at the height of the campaigning season, and then went straight over to an offensive that the Germans could no longer stop. From that moment the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front belonged to the Red Army, and it did not return to the Germans for the rest of the war. Oryol and Kharkiv were followed by the liberation of Left-Bank Ukraine, Smolensk and the Donbas, and in the autumn of 1943 the Red Army crossed the Dnieper and in November recaptured Kiev.

The decision of 13 July also links two fronts that had until then been fought separately. The landing in Sicily was not the only reason for calling off Citadel, but it was in these days that the war in the Mediterranean for the first time directly affected the course of a great battle in the east. From then on Hitler had to divide his reserves between fronts each of which demanded more than it could get – and in 1944 a third, in France, was added.