Against his instinct-but revealing a growing maturity within the Soviet high command-Stalin acceded to arguments that the Red Army should defend Kursk rather than launch an offensive in the area. The Soviets, meanwhile, pondered their own options in light of intelligence reports that the Germans were preparing an attack into the salient. Victory at Kursk must serve as a beacon to the world.” He directed that the offensive be launched in late spring. “Every officer and every man must recognize the significance of this attack. “We must prepare diligently but with discretion and ensure that the best formations, weapons and leaders are positioned at the points of main effort with access to plentiful supplies of ammunition,” the führer announced.
Hitler backed the plan with considerable enthusiasm. If the Wehrmacht could go on the offensive and nip it out with thrusts from the north and south, it could reignite the Supreme Command’s offensive ambitions. The bulge had a frontage of 250 miles, requiring the Red Army to commit nine valuable armies to its defense. By failing to overcome the Red Army in 1941 when the Wehrmacht was halted at the gates of Moscow, Hitler was bounced into a protracted, attritional war for which his country was neither mentally nor physically prepared.Īlthough German resources were stretched to the breaking point, Berlin was determined to regain the initiative on the Eastern Front, and the führer was immediately tempted by a plan to take Kursk when Manstein presented it to him in early March.
Germany’s intense campaigning in the Soviet Union had damaged its ability to wage war successfully. The roots of the Wehrmacht’s failure at Kursk are found not only in the battlefield’s dark Russian soil, but deeply buried in the stony ground of two years of fighting on the Eastern Front. The struggle it spawned was staggering in its scope and consequence. It reveals Kursk as a desperate gamble by Hitler to secure the future of his forces on the Eastern Front-and even Germany’s wider prospects in the war. Only recently has a clearer and more balanced perspective come into view. For decades the battle has been visible only through two distorting prisms-one held by a defeated and divided Germany, and the other by the manipulative and oppressive Soviet regime. Yet the Battle of Kursk remains controversial, with aspects of its conception, conduct, and impact still hotly debated. A Soviet round had struck me in the shoulder, shattering the bone and leaving me gasping for air.Īt the battle’s conclusion, Germany’s inspector-general of armored troops, the wily Heinz Guderian, deemed that Germany had “suffered a decisive defeat”-certainly not the outcome Hitler had in mind when he said that Operation Citadel, as the Germans called the offensive, would be “of decisive importance.” In that same instant I was knocked off my feet as though hit by a heavyweight boxer. The butt kicked and a round was sent hurtling toward a faceless Soviet soldier. I instinctively yelled a warning, dropped to one knee and squeezed the trigger of my rifle. I twisted to see a camouflaged cover being thrown off a trench. He whimpered as I moved toward him, but was silent by the time that I was at his side.
I expected to be cut down any moment or blown to smithereens by the shells that slammed about….I heard my old friend Ernst panting seconds before his right arm was torn from his body by an explosion that flung his rifle at my feet. Ivan bullets zipped around us I could hear them flying past my ears. The 20-year-old lieutenant struggled toward his platoon’s objective on the morning of July 5, 1943, against a weight of fire he had never before experienced. German infantryman Raimund Rüffer would never forget the first day of Hitler’s offensive toward the Russian city of Kursk.
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