On July 5, 1943, the most ambitious battle of the Great Patriotic War began - the Battle of the Kursk Bulge. In the steppes of the Russian Black Earth Region, millions of soldiers and tens of thousands of units of ground and air equipment entered the battle. In a battle that lasted a month and a half, the Red Army managed to inflict a strategic defeat on Hitler's troops.
Until now, historians have failed to reduce the number of participants and the losses of the parties to more or less single-digit figures. This only emphasizes the scale and fierceness of the battles - even the Germans with their pedantry sometimes did not feel up to the calculations, the situation changed so quickly. And the fact that only the skill of the German generals and the sluggishness of their Soviet colleagues allowed the main part of the German troops to avoid defeat, as in Stalingrad, does not diminish the significance of this victory for the Red Army and the entire Soviet Union.
And the day of the end of the Battle of Kursk - August 23 - became the Day of Russian Military Glory.
1. Already the preparations for the offensive near Kursk showed how exhausted Germany was by 1943. The point is not even the forced mass import of Ostarbeiters and not even the fact that German women went to work (for Hitler it was a very heavy internal defeat). Even 3-4 years ago, Great Germany in its plans seized entire states, and these plans were being implemented. The Germans attacked the Soviet Union with strikes of varying strength, but across the entire width of the state border. In 1942, he gained strength to strike, albeit very powerful, but one wing of the front. In 1943, a strike using almost all forces and the latest technology was planned only in a narrow strip, which was covered by one and a half Soviet front. Germany was inevitably weakening even with the full exertion of forces throughout Europe ...
2. In recent years, for well-known political reasons, the role of intelligence officers in the Great Patriotic War has been described exclusively in a complimentary manner. The plans and orders of the German command fell on Stalin's table almost before they were signed by Hitler, etc. The scouts, it turns out, also calculated the Battle of Kursk. But the dates don't overlap. Stalin gathered the generals for a meeting on April 11, 1943. For two days, the Supreme Commander explained to Zhukova, Vasilevsky and the rest of the military leaders what he wanted from them in the region of Kursk and Orel. And Hitler signed an order to prepare an offensive in the same area only on April 15, 1943. Although, of course, there was talk of an offensive before that. Some information leaked out, it was transferred to Moscow, but there could be nothing definite in it. Even at a meeting on April 15, Field Marshal Walter Model spoke out categorically against the offensive in general. He offered to wait for the advance of the Red Army, repel it and defeat the enemy with a counterattack. Only Hitler's categoricalness put an end to confusion and vacillation.
3. The Soviet command made colossal preparations for the German offensive. The army and the citizens involved created defenses up to 300 kilometers deep. This is roughly the distance from the suburbs of Moscow to Smolensk, dug by trenches, trenches and strewn with mines. By the way, they did not regret the mines. The average mining density was 7,000 minutes per kilometer, that is, every meter of the front was covered by 7 minutes (of course, they were not linearly located, but echeloned in depth, but the figure is still impressive). The famous 200 guns per kilometer of the front was still far away, but they were able to scrape together 41 guns per kilometer. Preparation for the defense of the Kursk Bulge evokes both respect and sadness. In a few months, almost in the bare steppe, a powerful defense was created, in which, in fact, the Germans got bogged down. It is difficult to determine the front of the defense, since it was fortified wherever possible, but the most threatened areas were along the front with a total width of at least 250 - 300 km. But by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, we needed to strengthen only 570 km of the western border. In peacetime, having the resources of the entire USSR. This is how the generals prepared for war ...
4. A few hours before 5:00 on July 5, 1943, the Soviet artillerymen conducted counter-training - shelling of previously reconnoitered artillery positions and an accumulation of infantry and equipment. There are different opinions about its effectiveness: from serious damage to the enemy to the pointless consumption of shells. It is clear that on a front hundreds of kilometers long, artillery barrage cannot be equally effective everywhere. In the defense zone of the Central Front, artillery preparation delayed the offensive by at least two hours. That is, the Germans have less daylight hours by two hours. In the strip of the Voronezh Front, the enemy's artillery was moved on the eve of the offensive, so the Soviet guns fired at the accumulations of equipment. In any case, counter-training showed the German generals that their Soviet colleagues were aware not only of the place of the offensive, but also of its time.
5. The name "Prokhorovka", of course, is known to anyone who is more or less familiar with the history of the Great Patriotic War. But another railway station, Ponyri, located in the Kursk region, deserves no less respect. The Germans attacked her for several days, constantly suffering significant losses. A couple of times they managed to break into the outskirts of the village, but counterattacks quickly restored the status quo. The troops and equipment were ground under the Ponyri so quickly that in the submissions for the awards one can find, for example, the names of artillerymen from different units who performed similar feats at practically the same place with a difference of several days - just one broken battery was replaced by another. The critical day under the Ponyri was July 7th. There was so much equipment, and it burned - and the outlying houses - so abundantly that Soviet sappers no longer bothered to bury mines - they were simply thrown right under the tracks of heavy tanks. And the next day, a battle took place, which became a classic - the Soviet artillerymen let the Ferdinands and Tigers, who were marching in the first rows of the German offensive, through camouflaged positions. First, an armored trifle was cut off from the German heavyweights, and then the novelties of German tank building were driven into a minefield and destroyed. The Germans managed to penetrate the defense of the troops commanded by Konstantin Rokossovsky, only 12 km.
6. During the battle on the southern face, an unimaginable patchwork of not only their own units and subunits was often created, but also completely unexpected appearance of enemies, where they could not have been. The commander of one of the infantry units that defended Prokhorovka recalled how their platoon, being in combat escort, destroyed up to fifty enemy soldiers. The Germans walked through the bushes without hiding at all, so that from the command post they asked by phone why the guards were not firing. The Germans were simply allowed to come closer and destroyed all. A similar situation with a minus sign developed on 11 July. The chief of staff of the tank brigade and the chief of the political department of the tank corps moved with a map in a passenger car through “their” territory. The car was ambushed, the officers were killed - they stumbled upon the position of an enemy reinforced company.
7. The defense prepared by the Red Army did not allow the Germans to use their favorite practice of shifting the direction of the main attack in case of strong resistance. Rather, this tactic was used, but it did not work - probing the defense, the Germans suffered too great losses. And when they still managed to break through the first lines of defense, they had nothing to throw into the breakthrough. This is how Field Marshal Manstein lost his next victory (the first book of his memoirs is called “Lost Victories”). Having thrown all the forces at his disposal into the battle at Prokhorovka, Manstein was close to success. But the Soviet command found two armies for a counterattack, while Manstein and the higher command of the Wehrmacht had nothing from reserves. After standing near Prokhorovka for two days, the Germans began to roll back and really came to their senses already on the right bank of the Dnieper. Modern attempts to present the battle at Prokhorovka as almost a victory for the Germans look ridiculous. Their intelligence missed the presence of at least two reserve armies at the enemy (there were actually more of them). One of their best commanders got involved in a tank battle in an open field, which the Germans had never done before - so much Manstein believed in "Panthers" and "Tigers". The best divisions of the Reich turned out to be incapable of fighting, they actually had to be created anew - these are the results of the battle at Prokhorovka. But in the field, the Germans fought skillfully and inflicted heavy losses on the Red Army. General Pavel Rotmistrov's Guards Tank Army lost more tanks than it had on the list - some of the damaged tanks were repaired, thrown into battle again, they were knocked out again, etc.
8. During the defensive stage of the Battle of Kursk, large Soviet formations were surrounded at least four times. In total, if you add up, there was a whole army in the boilers. However, this was no longer 1941 - and surrounded by units continued to fight, focusing not on reaching their own, but on creating defense and destroying the enemy. German staff documents cite cases of suicidal attacks on German tanks by single soldiers armed with Molotov cocktails, bundles of grenades and even anti-tank mines.
9. A unique character took part in the Battle of Kursk. Count Hyacinth von Strachwitz in the First World War, during a raid on the rear of the French, almost got to Paris - the French capital was visible through binoculars. The French caught him and almost hanged him. In 1942, being a lieutenant colonel, he was at the forefront of the advancing army of Paulus and was the first to reach the Volga. In 1943, the Flower Count's motorized infantry regiment advanced farthest from the southern face of the Kursk Bulge towards Oboyan. From the height captured by his regiment, Oboyan could be seen through binoculars just like Paris had once been, but von Strachwitz did not reach the out-of-the-box Russian town as well as the French capital.
10. Due to the intensity and fierceness of the battle on the Kursk Bulge, there are no exact statistics of losses. You can confidently operate with figures accurate to tens of tanks and tens of thousands of people. Likewise, it is almost impossible to assess the effectiveness of each weapon. Rather, one can assess the inefficiency - not a single Soviet cannon "Panther" took a head-on. Tankmen and artillerymen had to dodge to hit heavy tanks from the side or rear. Hence, such a large amount of equipment losses. Oddly enough, it was not some new powerful guns that helped, but cumulative shells weighing only 2.5 kg. Designer TsKB-22 Igor Larionov developed the PTAB-2.5 - 1.5 projectile (the mass of the entire bomb and explosive, respectively) at the beginning of 1942. Generals, as part of it, shrugged off frivolous weapons. Only at the end of 1942, when it became known that new heavy tanks began to enter service with the German army, Larionov's brainchild went into mass production. By personal order of JV Stalin, the combat use of PTAB-2.5 - 1.5 was postponed until the battle on the Kursk Bulge. And here the aviators reaped a good harvest - according to some estimates, the Germans lost up to half of their tanks precisely because of the bombs that attack aircraft dropped on columns and places of concentration in the thousands. At the same time, if the Germans were able to return 3 out of 4 tanks hit by shells, then after being hit by PTAB, the tank immediately went into irrecoverable losses - the shaped charge burned large holes in it. The most affected by PTAB was the SS Panzer Division "Death's Head". At the same time, she really did not even reach the battlefield - Soviet pilots knocked out 270 tanks and self-propelled guns right on the march and at the crossing over a small river.
11. Soviet aviation could well have approached the Battle of Kursk, which was not ready. In the spring of 1943, military pilots managed to get through to I. Stalin. They demonstrated to the Supreme the fragments of aircraft with a completely peeled fabric covering (then many aircraft consisted of a wooden frame, pasted over with impregnated fabric). The aircraft manufacturers assured that they were about to fix everything, but when the score for defective aircraft went to dozens, the military decided not to be silent. It turned out that a poor-quality primer was supplied to the factory that was engaged in special fabrics. But people had to fulfill the plan and not receive penalties, so they pasted over the planes with marriage. Special brigades were sent to the Kursk Bulge area, which managed to replace the coating on 570 aircraft. Another 200 vehicles were no longer subject to restoration. The leadership of the People's Commissariat of the Aviation Industry was allowed to work out until the end of the war and "illegally repressed" after its end.
12. The German offensive operation "Citadel" officially ended on July 15, 1943. Anglo-American forces landed in southern Italy, threatening to open a second front. The Italian troops, as the Germans became well aware after Stalingrad, were extremely unreliable. Hitler decided to transfer part of the troops from the Eastern Theater to Italy. However, it is incorrect to say that the Allied landing saved the Red Army on the Kursk Bulge. By this time it was already clear that the Citadel could not achieve its goal - to defeat the Soviet grouping and at least temporarily disorganize the command and control of the troops. Therefore, Hitler quite rightly decided to stop local battles and save troops and equipment.
13. The maximum that the Germans managed to achieve was to wedge into the defense of the Soviet troops for 30 - 35 km on the southern face of the Kursk Bulge near Prokhorovka. A role in this achievement was played by the incorrect assessment of the Soviet command, who believed that the Germans would strike the main blow on the northern face. However, even such a breakthrough was not critical, although there were army warehouses in the Prokhorovka area. The Germans never entered the operational space, passing every kilometer with battles and losses. And such a breakthrough is more dangerous for the attackers than for the defenders - even a not very powerful flank attack at the base of the breakthrough can cut communications and create a threat of encirclement. That is why the Germans, after stomping on the spot, turned back.
14. With the Battle of Kursk and Orel began the decline of the career of the outstanding German aircraft designer Kurt Tank. The Luftwaffe actively used two aircraft created by the Tank: "FW-190" (heavy fighter) and "FW-189" (spotter aircraft, the notorious "frame"). The fighter was good, albeit heavy, and cost much more than simpler fighters. “Rama” served well for adjustments, but its work was effective only under the condition of air supremacy, which the Germans did not have since the battle over the Kuban. The tank undertook to create jet fighters, but Germany lost the war, there was no time for jet aircraft. When the German aircraft industry began to revive, the country was already a NATO member, and Tank was hired as a consultant. In the 1960s, he was hired by Indians. The tank even managed to create an airplane with the pretentious name "Spirit of the Storm", but its new employers preferred to buy Soviet MiGs.
15. The Battle of Kursk, along with the Battle of Stalingrad, can be considered a turning point in the Great Patriotic War. And at the same time, you can do without comparisons, which battle is "turning point". After Stalingrad, both the Soviet Union and the world believed that the Red Army was capable of crushing Hitler's troops. After Kursk, it became finally clear that the defeat of Germany as a state was only a matter of time. Of course, there was still a lot of blood and deaths ahead, but in general, the Third Reich after Kursk was doomed.
