I was reading about the June, 1943, battle of Kursk, in the Russian Campaign. It was a disaster for the German Panzer Armies-they ost thousands of tanks, including many of the new Tigers and Leopards. As well, they took severe casualties. The Russians planned well-they waited and anticipatd the German’s every move. My question: why were generals of the caliber of Gen. Walter Model taken in by this? Model’s army made little progress, and parts of his advance force were wiped out. Outwardly, the Germans held some very good cards-fresh troops, new tanks, and good air support. Yet, the Russians inflicted punishing loses, and seemed to have lured the Germans into a trap.
In many ways, Kursk was a worse disaster than Stalingrad-Hitler never intererfered in the general’s strategy.
After Kursk, the Germans found themselves continually outfought-and they had to contend with getting older and older soldiers-they youngest and best had been killed off.
So, was it better Russian intelligence? r German ineptitude. As I say, you can’t blame this one on Hitler. Or had Russian technology finally overtaken the Germans?
Coupla things. Hitler diverted crucial force to Greece in order to save Mussolini’s bacon. Given Greece’s insignificance, this was one of a series of Hilter’s Greatest Blunders.
And yes, the German armor was vastly superior, tank by tank, to the Russian armor. But the Russians didn’t spend their resources on superior tanks but one more of them. They produced as many “bare bones” T-series tanks as they could, and this proved to be an effective strategy. The Germans fielded BMW’s, the Russians Volkswagens.
Finally, Hitlerian arrogance: if he had prepared to fight a defensive battle in retreat, he might have done so effectively, perhaps even exhaust the Russians to the point of a seperate peace. But he didn’t, he was wholly convinced that German Aryan superiority coupled with a relentlessly aggressive strategy would crush the sub-human Slavs. Duh.
While Kursk was a setback for the Germans, it wasn’t nearly as much of a disaster as Bagration, which was a catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions. All of Army Group Centre was annihilated. German casualties, including seriously wounded and POWs, are estimated at over six hundred thousand. Soviet casualties were a fraction of that number, so they didn’t even lose much in achieving victory. Enormous swaths of land were taken.
It might actually, in raw numbers, have been the most catastrophic military defeat in human history. It’s forgotten to the West largely because it started just after the invasion of Normandy.
That’s not really true, actually.
Until the kinks were worked out of the Panther, the Russian T-34 was better than any German equivalent (those being mainly the Pz III and IV.) The Panther itself was not introduced to the battlefield until the battle of Kursk and it didn’t work for shit; it broke down at an almost comical rate - at any given time almost all of them were broken - and proved to have serious vulnerabilities. After the battle the kinks were worked out and it ended up being a hell of a tank, but the Soviets immediately countered with the T-34/85, which matched it in most respects (the main upgrade was a newer, bigger gun) although it was a smaller tank and not quite a perfect comparison - the Panther was somewhere between a medium tank, like the T-34, and a heavy tank, like the Tiger or the IS-2.
The German’s biggest tank, the Tiger, on the other hand, was a peice of shit. It was big and scary - and almost never worked and had all the mobility of a parking garage. It was also very cost ineffective even as compared to other German armored vehicles, not just to Soviet vehicles. Just dirving from one place to another caused substantial casualities in a Tiger-equipped unit because you couldn’t even drive them from place to place without lots of them breaking down. If you were right in front of it and it actually worked it was a frightening thing to fight, especially if it was in a good defensive position and operated by a skilled commander who knew how to use it, but because it was so slow and prone to not working, that didn’t happen as much as the Germans might have hoped.
OVerall, to Soviet armored force was, in any meaningful sense, technically superior to their German counterparts, on average over the course of the war. They were much more reliable and incorporated some critical design elements, such a speed and sloped armor, earlier than the other combatants.
Just as an aside, I’d say in terms of sheer level of defeat, Operation Bagration probably trumps Kursk:
Which I said, but screwed up my coding.
Mods, could you fix my post?
Ah, so you did. Missed it in there :).
Stalingrad was more devastating, at least in terms of morale if not manpower. The Germans did lose more equipment at Kursk at least, but without Stalingrad the next summer’s battles
are completely different.
I’d venture to suggest that Operation Barbarossa was the greatest military mistake the Germans ever made.
As soon as they stepped into Russia they were as good as fucked
True, but Bagration was also very nearly the end of the war. German forces had already been worn down and pushed back and suffering under low morale, and the campaign might never have started at all had Kursk not occured.
I’m not sure I can agree with this. The problem was that the Soviets tanks were even greater disasters. Horrendous manufacturing quality, constant breakdowns. The only reason any of them were on the field was that they made so many, mostly with American and British aid.
Regarding german morale: i belive that close to 1.2 MILLION germans had been either killed or captured, by the time of Kursk (July 1943). the individual germans MUST have known that the kursk defeat was the beginning of the end. i wonder what the desrtion rates were, after the bad news came out?
But where are you going to desert TO? Surrendering to the Soviets is essentially a death sentence. You can’t melt into the civilian population because you’re in the middle of the Ukraine, and the partisans will find you. You can’t go back to Germany because you won’t have papers.
And besides, the Russians are advancing on Germany. At this point it isn’t about ideology or lebensraum, it’s about hoping that you can somehow keep the Russians from reaching Germany and enslaving and killing everyone.
Kursk was an important battle and the largest battle of armored units in WWII. However the turning point in the war was thebattle of Stalingrad. In that battle the Germans and their allies lost an extimated 850000 total killed, wounded or captured. Not only that, they lost the initiative. From then on the Soviets dictated where and how the action woult take place putting the Germans on continuous defense and retreat.
As to the quality of armor, everything I’ve read, except here, says the the T-34 Soviet tank was superior to most German tanks if not all. For an example of swamping the enemy with overwhelming numbers of inferior, although more reliable, tanks all you need to point to is the US with the Sherman tank.
When the T-34 was introduced, it mopped the floor with existing German designs. By the end of the war, the T-34 was outclassed by several German tanks, but the Germans only had a few of those tanks and they had very poor reliability. But Stalin’s orders were that any design change to the T-34 had to be personally approved by him, which meant that the production lines continued to pour out T-34s uninterupted in enormous numbers, compared to the dozens and dozens of custom German designs and design changes and upgrades and remodels. So the T-34 was not only technically superior but also produced in much higher numbers.
Of course, during the later war the Soviets had heavy tanks that could compete against the newer German tanks, but these were new designs rather than constantly upgrading the T-34 design.
So, this was one case when a dictator’s micromanagement worked?
Well it wasn’t exactly micromanagement, the point was that Comrade Stalin would say “no” to any but the most crucial design changes. And this was done because Comrade Stalin wanted tanks rolling off the assembly line, not assembly lines sitting idle retooling. Once the assembly line was set up, it was expected to pour out the exact same tank non-stop. So the effect of the order was that no one was allowed to tinker with the assembly lines.
German war production was famously hamstrung because designers treated war production as their private playgrounds. Sure, lots of innovative designs were produced, but at a cost of lowered production overall. And this produced products like the Tiger, which had great armor, great weapons, but broke down if you drove it across the street. New innovative technology is great if it works, but usually these things need to have the kinks worked out. So if your brand new tank design is rolling off the assembly line straight to the eastern front, the kinks get exposed during battle. And then the solution is to redesign the product to eliminate the known problems, but now we’ve got a great new idea, let’s add this in, and that in, and change this. You see how this works. Each innovation might be a good idea, but you never get a really good design, because each design contains good innovations and bad innovations. And so the Tiger, which kicked ass but hardly ever got to fight because it was broken down somewhere a couple of miles away, or got the wrong shipment of ammo.
Does anybody know how these monsters fared? they were self-propelled guns, sporting a fixed cannon-how often were these things able to hit an enemy tank? I’ve heard that they were so heavy, they sank into the Russian mud like a stoen in the ocean. Surely NOT one of Germanie’s better designs?
So true, and the Soviets learned it in 1941. During Operation Barbarossa, it was not uncommon to find T-34s going into combat with a spare tranny on their rear deck. If the T-34 had a weak point, the transmission was it (AFAIK, the T-34 was the only tank for which a sledgehammer was a necessary tool for the driver to shift gear).
They were with Model’s 9[sup]th[/sup] Army on the northern shoulder of Kursk. They were good target practice for the Soviet infantry, since they didn’t have any machine guns for close in defense :eek:
One of the bigger problems they had was a lack of any machine gun for anti-infantry defense (at least at Kursk). But they also had so many bugs they mostly broke down after they started in Kursk. The ones that made it to the Soviet lines were swarmed by infantry.
Its an odd duck, since most German Tank Destroyers were quite effective devices.
German casualties at Kursk have been drastically exaggerated for many years and it was common for many historians to write of the destruction of the German panzer divisions. The casualties at Kursk especially in tank losses were actually fairly moderate and the divisions were not only not ‘destroyed’ by Kursk but continued on with operations throughout the rest of 1943. Recent works by Nipes and Glantz (the latter is probably the best historian of the eastern front) have among other things examined the actual strength returns of the divisions involved and in total they lost less then 200 tanks through Citadel.
What did ultimately destroy the panzer divisions wasn’t a single operation like Kursk but the sheer unrelenting scale and tempo of the battles of the last half of 1943. They were ground down in battle after battle.
As for Kursk itself the Russians had very good intelligence pre-warnings of the coming attack from the ‘Lucy’ spy ring and had ample opportunity to fortify the salient.
Despite it failing in its grand strategic aims Manstein did not percieve the operation as a failure and wished to continue it to engage and destroy Russian armoured reserves. Hitler however ordered a halt to the operation as the western Allies had just invaded Sicily and it was considered that the panzer divisions would need to be redeployed to Italy.