What if the Germans didn’t fight the Battle of Kursk?
I just finished an excellent book (“The Battle of the Tanks”-by Lloyd Clark).
I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to know all about this battle.
As I see it, engaging the Russian Army at Kursk was a major tactical and strategic mistake. The German defeat resulted in:
-The loss of the German Army’s best soldiers (experienced NCOs and junior officers)-over 50,000 dead, and over 120,000 seriously wounded
-the loss of over 500 tanks, and hundreds of guns, trucks and other vehicles
-The destruction of the Luftwaffe-the diversion of it to Russia was a major reason why allied bomber strikes were reducing German cities to ashes
It was really a turning point in the war-the German Army lost the initiative, and despite the best generals (Model, Manstein), they never engaged in any significant offensives in Russia, after Kursk.
Plus, I think that this defeat gave Hitler the support he needed to take over total control of the army-thus ensuring ultimate defeat
From this point on, the Germans were faced with experienced Russian commanders, and their unlimited supply of tanks.
The German general Guderian was totally against Kursk-he predicted a bloody stalemate.
My question: had the Germans NOT fought this battle, would they have been able to check the Russian advance? Could they have kept fighting into 1946, perhaps?
I don’t know much about the specific battle. Thus, I will be hitting up my library for your excellent sounding book recommendation.
However, I know that by 1945, short of the Nazi’s suddenly getting The Bomb, not a force on the planet was capable of stopping the Red Army.
If anything, your numbers understate the losses at Kursk (Wikipedia article).
IMHO the main reason the Germans lost at Kursk was that their plan was anticipated by the Soviets. It was probably too obvious to begin with, but that was exacerbated by the Stavka having finally shed its ideological blinders. The Soviets knew where the Germans would attack – without needing confirmation from Ultra intercepts – and the Germans gave them plenty of time to prepare. The result was a numerically inferior attack on an alerted, fully fortified position – historically an almost certain recipe for failure.
Anything else would have been a better plan.
I doubt the Soviets could have brought Operation Bagration forward a year, so it certainly wouldn’t have shortened the war. At a strategic level the Germans had already lost the initiative after Stalingrad, Kuersk was a line-straightening exercise (by eliminating the salient) rather than a break through drive to Moscow or the Caucasus. Even without the losses from Kursk I can’t see how the Germans could have stopped the Soviets, so at most no-Kursk simply prolongs the war by a month or two.
Considering they still did the battle of the bulge even after Kursk, it gets into the usual ‘what if the nazis werent nazis’ problem.
Otara
Some of the desperate things the nazis did were clear mistakes and failed. However, the desperation was justified: if they do nothing, they lose.
The German goose was cooked outside Moscow in 1941. Kursk undoubtedly an important battle, but look at the the trend across the three summers of 41, 42 and 43. In 1941, the Germans attacked across three large and spaced out fronts. In 1942, it was in just one front (Army Group South’s sector) and in 1943 it was* one part* of one front. The Germans were in a war of attrition, one they could not win. Admittedly they were cognizant of this fact and were hoping in each case to somehow land a knockout blow and by late 1942, they had to commit significant forces against the Western Allies for the first times since 1940, however the Germans were like Manny Pacquiao against Lennox Lewis, they needed to land a killer punch and win the thing and each attempted killer punch was more and more weak.
As I recall, the Soviets were originally planning a major offensive of their own. Then they became aware of the signs that the Germans were planning a major offensive at Kursk. So the Soviets decided to change their plans - they would prepare a huge defensive force at Kursk and build up a big reserve. They’d stop the German offensive and then launch their reserves as a counter-attack when the German attack was played out. Which is pretty much how it happened - the Soviets kept a huge pool of reserves standing aside because they didn’t need them to stop the Germans; that’s a sign of how badly the German situation was getting.
So if the Germans hadn’t started an offensive at Kursk, they would have been fighting a major battle anyway - at a time and place of Soviet choosing. I can’t see how that would have gone much better for the Germans than reality did.
Well there was fighting near Moscow in the Spring of 1943. Which eventually resulted in the German threat to Moscow being removed…finally.
Look, I’m so sorry to be that person, but “hadn’t fought”, surely?
IIRC, Stalin wanted to go ahead with the offensive, but Zhukov talked him into the defensive build-up at Kursk to bleed the Germans dry as a preliminary to unleashing a follow-up Soviet offensive.
In reality, the follow-up Soviet offensive gained a lot of ground back, but was not decisive – they’d been forced to expend a bit too much of their reserve (especially too much armor) stopping the Germans at Kursk.
Thanks for the replies.
The thing I didn’t understand-the German commanders (Model and Manstein) were topnotch strategists. When their “blitzkrieg” attacks didn’t punch through the Russian lines, they just kept throwing their reserves into (futile) frontal attacks.
I would have thought that these generals would have re-evaluated their strategy, after 2-3 days of zero results.
Or perhaps they knew that Hitler would use their failure to jstify firing them, so they decided to go for broke.
Another question: the German people back home were being fed a diet of propaganda-but enough wounded and soldiers on leave must have brought the bad news home.
It is interesting that around this time (July 1943), top Nazi Martin Bormann stopped having his picture taken (official photos)-maybe he saw the writing on the wall?
Yeah, the goose was cooked. But a debacle of this epic size likely hastened the end of the war. Without Kursk, the Germans might have held on until we bombed Hiroshima.
In practise they made it so it still was a battle of soviet choosing anyway though, by giving so much advance warning of their intentions.
Absent a few mistakes on the Russian side it would have been even more crushing than it was. They pretty much threw away hundreds of tanks and still came out ahead.
Otara
The main source for Germans military intelligence in the Soviet Union was aerial reconnaissance - and by the time they were preparing Kursk, the Luftwaffe was no longer able to supply that on a regular basis. The Soviets, in addition to aerial reconnaissance, were able to gather intelligence about German activities from the partisans who were operating behind German lines. The Germans had no similar eyes on the ground behind Soviet lines. So the Soviets knew what the Germans were doing but the Germans didn’t know what the Soviets were doing - a major imbalance.
Also, the Soviets could read maps too. Kursk was the obvious place to attack with that big bulge sticking into the German lines. And the Soviets prepared for it.
Best thing the Germans could have done in 1943 would have been to dig in, go on the defense and try to build their forces back in hopes of a negotiated peace or coming up with a better idea in 1944.
Even if Germany had won the battle, it would have shortened their lines a bit, but in exchange for lots of men and equipment. Not a good trade-off for Germany in 1943.
True. The German planners were making a big mistake in assuming the Red Army of 1943 was like the Red Army they fought in 1941. They figured if they got a bunch of soldiers together, they could just break through the Soviet lines and have a major victory at relatively low cost because the Soviets would respond so incompetently. But the Red Army had been learning and improving - it might still lose a battle but it was no longer losing battles because of incompetence. Any German victories would be hard-won from now on and with the growing imbalance of resources, even hard-won victories would become scarcer.
The days of offensives in Russia were over by Winter of 1942, what with the defeats outside Moscow and the Stalingrad debacle. Even so, there was a much greater commitment elsewhere, with an Army Group plus being stationed in the West and another one soon to be lost in Africa (275.000 men, 1100 aircraft around 2500 AFV’s if memory serves). Kursk was a battle where even the best case scenario was unacceptable for the Germans. In 1943 the Germans would have been better advised to be on the offensive, the Soviets still did not have the hang of that till Bagration and I think Dnieper and Second Kiev could have really bled the Soviets, even more then the actually did. What the Germans needed were more local actions like Second Kharkov.
I also read that Hitler delayed the battle, in order to have more of the new Tiger and Panther tanks available.
This didn’t help the Germans, because the delays allowed the Russians to beef up their defensive minefields (mines were planted in 3 belts, each over a mile deep).
Plus, the new German panzers were excellent-but they only had about 400 Tigers, which broke down frequently and were not enough to turn the tide.
I am quite sure that the Germans had a deep awareness (after Kursk) that there was no chance of victory anymore…just a slow and certain defeat.
Not sure if I should quote a book of fiction but in Herman Wouk’s “War and Remembrance” the fictional Armin von Roon says that Manstein accepted command of this battle like a top notch actor will accept a bad script, convinced that his talent can make it work.