Kursk 1943 E-Book

Anthony Tucker-Jones

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 460

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In 1943, as war raged along the Eastern Front, the German forces attempted to push further east in the brutal Operation Citadel, which saw one of the largest armoured clashes in history: the Battle of Prokhorovka. Countered by two Soviet attacks, this operation saw the tide turn on the Eastern Front. For the first time a German offensive was halted in its tracks and the Soviets ended the conflict as the decisive victors. With a loss of over 200,000 men on both sides, this two-month clash was one of the costliest of the war. In this dramatic study, Anthony Tucker-Jones reassesses this decisive tank battle through the eyes of those who fought, using translated first-person accounts. Kursk 1943 is one volume that no military history enthusiast should be without.

Leseprobe

In my opinion the Battle of Kursk Salient was the turning point in the Great Patriotic War. It was decisive in determining the defeat of Hitlerite Germany and the ultimate triumph of our Soviet Army, our ideology, and our Communist Party.

Nikita Khrushchev

First published 2018

This paperback edition published 2023

The History Press

St George’s Place, Cheltenham

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Anthony Tucker-Jones, 2018, 2023

The right of Anthony Tucker-Jones to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75098 852 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction: ‘Dripping with fragrant juices’

Part One: Stalin Resurgent

1     Training at Saratov

2     Abdulin and Friends

3     Digging Fortress Kursk

4     Gifts from Uncle Sam

Part Two: Hitler Insists

5     Shadow of Stalingrad

6     Citadel Too Late

7     Hitler’s Armoured Fist

8     Guderian’s Zoo

9     A Flawed Plan

Part Three: Let Battle Commence

10   Stalin Shows his Hand

11   Ponyri or Bust

12   Prokhorovka Bloodbath

13   Flying Tank Busters

14   The Zoo Disappoints

Part Four: Stalin Strikes Back

15   Victory at Orel

16   Kharkov Liberated

17   Hitler’s Bitter Harvest

Epilogue: No Sword of Kursk

Dramatis Personae

Soviet Order of Battle, 5 July 1943

German Order of Battle, 5 July 1943

German Panzer Divisions at Kursk – Main Combat Units

German Panzergrenadier Divisions at Kursk – Main Combat Units

Soviet Order of Battle, 12 July 1943

Soviet Units involved in the Liberation of Orel, 5 August 1943

Soviet Units involved in the Liberation of Karachev, 15 August 1943

Soviet Order of Battle, 3 August 1943

Soviet Units involved in the Liberation of Belgorod, 5 August 1943

Soviet Units involved in the Liberation of Kharkov, 23 August 1943

Notes

Note on Sources

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

‘DRIPPING WITH FRAGRANT JUICES’

That summer a warm wind blew across the Russian steppe, nurturing the land despite the ravages of war. It was welcome recompense after the bitter winter of 1942–43. In the Kursk region the state farms found themselves in the midst of a vast fortress. The crops were supplemented by a much deadlier harvest, millions of mines sown with one intent: to kill Nazis.

It was high summer, putting some in a poetic mood. ‘If you like fancy phrases, you could say that the countryside was in full bloom, dripping with fragrant juices,’ recalled Political Commissar Nikita Khrushchev when he first arrived in the Kursk salient.1 He had seen the sappers toiling in the summer heat and been briefed on the Red Army’s extensive preparations.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sent him to act as political advisor to Lieutenant General Vatutin, commander of the Voronezh Front, holding the southern shoulder of the salient. Khrushchev was glad to be at Kursk, away from the awful killing fields of Stalingrad; it gave him fresh purpose and helped him forget his recent painful news. This was what any father dreads – the loss of a child. Earlier in the year Khrushchev stood phone in hand in a state of anguish, his fighter pilot son was missing presumed dead. At the end of 1942 and early 1943 Nikita Khrushchev was riding high following his involvement in the defence of Stalingrad. The Red Army’s stunning victory was a turning point, making up for the disastrous previous two years of conflict. For Khrushchev his failure to retake Kharkov in 1942 had been expunged.

Nikita’s relationship with Stalin was rocky, but he was a born survivor and he took great pride in his role at Stalingrad. As the Communist Party boss for Ukraine he had overseen the disastrous attempts to liberate Kharkov – Stalingrad had been a punishment posting, a much better option than the firing squad. After his moment of triumph his son Leonid had been shot down. To add to his sense of woe they could not find Leonid’s body, which led to dark mutterings that he had defected. To make matters worse Leonid’s wife, Liuba, was accused of spying and arrested. Khrushchev and the rest of his family had been left feeling politically exposed.

Nikita was now being given another chance to redeem himself over the Kharkov debacle. Having toured Kursk he noted with great optimism:

Our armies under Rokossovsky [commanding the Central Front on the northern shoulder of the salient] were supposed to start an offensive of their own on 20 July. We were sure we would be successful, that we would crush the Germans and push west to the Dnieper. We were all driven by a single desire – to break through the German lines and to liberate Kharkov.2

Khrushchev was a local, having been born in the village of Kalinovka in the Kursk region. Just for a moment he recalled his religious parents and the icons that had adorned the walls of the family home. It had been a simple life – it was not so simple any more.

Novelist Vasily Grossman, special correspondent for the Red Star military newspaper, was seated on the terrace of a dacha enjoying the company of old comrades. Although Jewish and a non-combatant, he still wore a uniform and was accepted by those around him for who he was. Besides, as a chronicler of the war against the Nazis he was very good at his job.

Grossman was also captivated by the natural beauty to be found in the Kursk salient. In early May 1943 he made a welcome reunion when he travelled to see General Chuikov’s Stalingrad veterans, who were part of the reserve Steppe Front just behind Kursk. ‘I’ve arrived at the 62nd Stalingrad Army. It is now stationed among the gardens that are beginning to blossom – a wonderful place with violets and bright green grass. It is peaceful. Larks are singing.’3

The atmosphere with Chuikov and his officers was not so peaceful. They were seething over their portrayal in a supposedly documentary film Stalingrad that was doing the rounds. Vasily, peering through his small circular wire-framed glasses, had hoped to hear of future battle plans, but instead had to listen to bitter griping. Chuikov felt that he and his men were seen as little more than sacrificial lambs while General Rokossovsky’s forces received all the glory for smashing the Axis armies around Stalingrad.

Grossman resolved to visit Rokossovsky’s headquarters to find out what was happening at Kursk. One of the perks of his job was that he was granted access wherever he went. His first port of call would be Rokossovsky’s intelligence officers, they would tell him what was going on. Or so he hoped.

Another Stalingrad veteran was Mansur Abdulin, who found himself on a rattling train en route to the Voronezh Front with the 66th Guards Rifle Division. Stopping off at the village of Dobrinka he recalled, ‘Even though in those days life was very hard, there was a festive mood in the streets, and everyone was sure that the war would soon be over.’4 He arrived before the harvest and food was scarce, but he did not mind. He was just glad to be free of the terrible lice that had plagued him and his comrades at Stalingrad. They had driven him to such distraction that he had even considered throwing himself into a blazing tank to escape their constant biting torment. His division was to deploy to the north of a place called Prokhorovka inside the Kursk salient.

Second Lieutenant Evgeni Bessonov was beginning to think that the fighting was passing him by. He was a Moscow lad born and bred. When war had broken out he and his mate were on their way to the cinema. Within days he had volunteered to help dig anti-tank defences in the Bryansk region until sent back to Moscow. During that time he had been bombed several times by the Luftwaffe. Although the bombs had fallen far away he and his fellow workers had run ‘like rabbits’. He had been conscripted in the summer of 1941 and sent to military academy, but frustratingly had seen no further action. He was assigned to a reserve rifle brigade that took no part in the counteroffensive at Stalingrad. By the spring of 1943 he was languishing at Kuchino just outside Moscow as part of the officer reserve. ‘We did almost nothing there,’ he lamented, ‘and tried to get sent to the front as quickly as possible.’5

The Soviet High Command though had plans for Bessonov and his brother officers. They were to be sent to the Bryansk Front facing the Nazi salient at Orel, which formed the northern shoulder around the Soviet defences at Kursk. Bessonov was destined to join the 49th Mechanised Brigade, which was part of the 4th Tank Army. Bessonov endured an arduous trip there: ‘We started our journey from Moscow by train, then we hitchhiked and then even had to walk.’6

Someone else, like Khrushchev and Grossman, who was glad to be in the Kursk region and free of the horrors of Stalingrad was Lieutenant Antonina Lebedeva. Known to her friends as Tonya, she had arrived at the Bryansk Front in the spring of 1943 with the 65th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment. Although her unit was predominantly male, she was not the only woman as she was joined by Klavdiya Blinova.

Lebedeva studied at Moscow State University, developed a passion for flying and joined a local club. At the outbreak of the war she signed up with the Red Air Force to become a fighter pilot. She had fought in defence of Saratov and then Stalingrad. Lebedeva was almost killed on 10 January 1943 when she tangled with two enemy fighters. Although she shot one down, her aircraft was badly damaged and while still under attack managed to make an emergency wheels-up landing.

Much further north in the Kremlin, aircraft designer Alexander Yakovlev was having a very bad day. He and other aircraft industry representatives had been summoned by Stalin because a problem with his Yak-9 fighter was holding up an ‘important operation’. The boss was furious, he had been briefed that poor quality paints and lacquers had been used on the wooden airframes. ‘You’re being made a fool of, your plane is being sabotaged and you just stand by,’ said Stalin coldly to the assembled aviation experts.7 During Stalingrad the Yak had exhibited a very nasty habit of catching fire, in addition the coatings were not protecting the aircraft from the unforgiving Russian weather.

There was tension in the room and everyone stared nervously at their shoes. ‘Our whole fighter plane force is out of commission,’ raged Stalin. ‘There have been a dozen cases of the skin separating from the wing. The pilots are afraid to fly. How has this come about?’ He was reacting to reports that the fighters gathered for the Kursk operation were now non-air-worthy after being left exposed. They were coming unglued.

Alongside Yakovlev, Pyotr Dement’ev, Deputy Commissar for Aircraft Production, bore the brunt of Stalin’s gathering fury. Yakovlev witnessed ‘Dement’ev stood there, completely flushed, nervously twirling a piece of the ill-fated covering in his fingers.’

Yakovlev was aware of the major military preparations in the Orel–Kursk area, but felt it would take up to two months to repair all the aircraft affected. Suddenly Dement’ev, in a state of sheer panic, announced the work would be done within two weeks. For a second you could have heard a pin drop; Dement’ev had committed himself and his colleagues to an impossible deadline. Flabbergasted, Yakovlev could do nothing but concede: ‘I swear that in the shortest possible time the defect will be corrected.’ Stalin seemed mollified.

Under ideal conditions the aircraft would be recalled and the problem rectified in the factory, but these were not ideal times. After frantic phone calls to the main fighter factories, special repair brigades were rapidly despatched to Kursk to commence immediate field repairs. It would be a race against time before Stalin’s ‘important operation’ commenced.

Seated in his office in the affluent Berlin district of Zehlendorf, Colonel Günther d’Alquen put down the latest copy of The Black Corps, the official newspaper of the Waffen-SS. Producing a weekly was no great hardship. His other job though was slightly more demanding as he was also responsible for the paper’s war correspondents or SS-Kriegsberichter.8 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had got word that his SS Panzer Corps was to be involved in Operation Citadel, the army’s big push this summer. Himmler had been delighted that it had retrieved the situation at Kharkov earlier in the year and had flown out personally to congratulate the men of Das Reich’s Tiger tank unit. The Reichsführer liked to be followed around by a Waffen-SS cine cameraman and d’Alquen’s photographers had been on hand to record the moment. Himmler was now determined he would get his share of the glory this time around as well.

D’Alquen’s illustrious predecessor, the writer Kurt Eggers, was a hard act to follow. He had served with a Panzer company before becoming editor of The Black Corps and commander of the SS-Kriegsberichter Battalion. Eggers was soon thirsting for combat again and had joined the 5th SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking, a unit formed from foreign volunteers fighting on the Eastern Front. He had only just come back from the Caucasus and as far as d’Alquen was concerned Eggers was going to get himself killed. His wife, Traute Kaiser, and four children would not thank him for that. Prancing around the battlefield was no place for an intellectual, after all Eggers was a poet and playwright not a real Panzertruppen.

D’Alquen now had under his command combat reporters attached to all the major Waffen-SS units.9 Typically his men were not drawn from the SS training schools at Bad Tölz in Bavaria and Braunschweig but from the media, from Germany’s thriving cinema, newspaper and radio industries. In the early days the reporters had been embedded out of harm’s way with headquarters, these days they were in the thick of it.

His men had recorded the SS Panzer Corps triumphantly rolling back into Kharkov in March 1943 and this had greatly pleased the Reichsführer. Himmler’s office had been on the line, he had given explicit instructions that his reporters and photographers were to give significant coverage to the two premier SS Panzergrenadier divisions. Again he was particularly interested in the Tiger tanks. D’Alquen was not entirely sure why so much fuss was being made about the Tiger, but he ensured that the relevant orders were passed down to his company and platoon commanders. It would be a busy summer for his SS-Kriegsberichter.

General Wolfgang Thomale put down the phone and rubbed his chin. Since the start of the year good news had been in short supply. The Nazi-controlled media had put a brave face on the loss of an entire army at Stalingrad. The press and radio had been full of heroic resistance, ultimate sacrifice on the Volga, blah, blah, but you could not just shrug off the loss of a quarter of a million men like it was of no consequence – especially when it affected so many families. Behind closed doors people were beginning to ask what was going on.

Unhappily, Wolfgang knew exactly what was going on. Their Führer, Adolf Hitler, had set his heart on a place that Germany and indeed the rest of the world had never heard of – Kursk. Wolfgang had been in the presence of the Führer on a number of occasions and struggled to understand his leader’s logic. Especially when by Hitler’s own admission the thought of Kursk made him sick to the stomach.

Hitler’s new powerful Panther tank was supposed to be the answer to all their prayers, but six months after production had started it was still being a bloody headache and had not yet even seen combat. Hitler, fed up of constantly delaying his ambitious plans, wanted it ready for the summer at all costs. Thomale had just been on the phone to the factory director. It was still not good news. The factories were supposed to be cranking out 200 Panther tanks a month, rising to 600; by now there should have been enough to equip at least three whole tank divisions. However, the first pre-production models that had appeared in late 1942 proved a complete disaster. Some 250 tanks should have been delivered by mid-May 1943, but this had not happened either. Now the director was promising 324 Panthers by the end of the month. Thomale knew the man was just saying what everyone wanted to hear, delivering was another matter.

Wolfgang Thomale, as Chief of Staff to General Heinz Guderian, was worried about his boss. The latter, in his role as head of all the Panzer forces, was constantly crossing swords with the Führer. Guderian was in a wholly unique and privileged position as he operated outside the armed forces chain of command. He answered directly to Hitler and no one else. This obviously made Guderian many enemies amongst Hitler’s inner circle. Besides his responsibility for overseeing the myriad of armoured forces and their facilities, Guderian liked to keep well informed about the strategic situation. It was this strategic awareness that had got him in trouble in 1941, when he vehemently argued the army should dig in for the winter on the Eastern Front. Hitler thought otherwise and saw Guderian’s position as flagrant insubordination. Since his new appointment Guderian had created his own command that neatly sidestepped all the very senior generals surrounding Hitler.

Wolfgang was well aware of his boss’s impetuous and hot-tempered nature. Nonetheless, Guderian was a shrewd and experienced operator. During May 1943 he had regularly lobbied Hitler not to launch a summer offensive at Kursk. Thomale had attended these meetings and was alarmed at the prospect of Guderian getting sacked again. He was also seeing the reports coming from Major Meinrad Lauchert down at Grafenwöhr regarding the troublesome Panther. This was proving to be Guderian’s Achilles heel.

Guderian was not a happy man at the best of times, but 1 June 1943 was proving to be a particularly irksome day. He had flown to the Grafenwöhr training base in Bavaria to see Lauchert and his two Panzer battalion commanders. He knew what they wanted and that was to grumble yet again about the Panther. Early in the year the mechanics and fitters from the manufacturers had done everything they could at the Erlangen training ground near Grafenwöhr to resolve the teething problems. There were serious issues with the engine, transmission and steering.

Some bright spark had decided that the Panther should be waterproofed and the engine compartment was lined with rubber. The overheating resulted in engine fires. The exasperated crews could not understand why, after so much combat experience with the other Panzers, the designers could not get it right this time round. The only thing they really liked was the very powerful gun.

In April the Panthers had been unceremoniously sent back to the factory and the crews shipped off to France. They had only just returned to Erlangen when Guderian arrived. After his visit he flew on to Berlin and was aghast to discover that Hitler had got it in his head to send their new tanks to Greece to guard against a British landing in the Peloponnese. What madness was this; it was akin to Hitler’s insistence the previous year on wasting the then new Tiger tank by sending it to fight at Leningrad and in Tunisia. It had been expended in penny packets and swiftly captured by the Allies. It was quickly pointed out that the Panther could not cope with the local Greek bridges and narrow mountain tracks.

‘I spent 15 June worrying about our problem child, the Panther,’ recalled Guderian. ‘The track suspension and the drive were not right and the optics were also not yet satisfactory. On the next day I told Hitler of my reasons for not wishing to see the Panthers sent into action in the East. They were simply not yet ready to go to the front.’10 Three days later Guderian arrived back at Grafenwöhr to listen to a litany of woe. Aside from the ongoing technical problems, not least was that crew training remained inadequate and many of them lacked battle experience.

It mattered little as Guderian had been overruled and the Panthers ordered east. All Guderian could do was commiserate with Lauchert. He told Thomale that the Panther was to fight at Kursk whether he liked it or not. If it failed to perform then it would be on Guderian to explain why.

At the beginning of April 1943 General von Mellenthin, Chief of Staff of 48th Panzer Corps, went on much-needed leave hoping to spend a brief spell at home. Instead he found himself in the Masurian Lakes region of East Prussia on the way to the fortress of Lötzen (now the Polish town of Giżycko). This was the headquarters of the Army High Command and he had been summoned by General Zeitzler, Chief of the Army General Staff. The nearby Boyen fortress was also home to Reinhard Gehlen’s Eastern Front military intelligence organisation.

He smiled to himself, knowing how much his corps commander, Otto von Knobelsdorff, would have hated this trip. It was a not unpleasant flight as the hilly and picturesque lake land contained several thousand lakes that sparkled in the sunlight. During the First World War it had been the scene of two battles with the Russians.

Mellenthin assumed he was to brief Zeitzler on the combat readiness of his corps after the fighting in the Kharkov area. In addition to this though, Mellenthin learned of ‘a great offensive in which we were destined to play a very significant part’.11 Mellenthin was enthused by Zeitzler’s plan:

As part of the 4th Panzer Army, the 48th Panzer Corps was to be the spearhead of the main drive from the south. I welcomed the idea, for our hardened and experienced Panzer divisions had suffered little in the recent thrust on Kharkov, and were fit and ready for another battle as soon as the state of the ground would permit us to move. Moreover, at this stage the Russian defences around Kursk were by no means adequate to resist a determined attack.12

Mellenthin appreciated the utility of an operation with a limited objective. However, he left the meeting feeling deflated after Zeitzler informed him that Hitler was postponing the offensive until a full brigade of Panthers was ready for action. Mellenthin knew that time was simply not on their side. Intelligence indicated that the Red Army had not yet recovered from its mauling at Kharkov and was still making good its losses. ‘A delay of one or two months,’ observed Mellenthin, ‘would make our task far more formidable.’13

Meantime, General Hermann Balck was feeling rather pleased with himself. His new temporary command, the Grossdeutschland, was shaping up rather well all things considered. It had started life as a motorised infantry unit, but earlier in the year had been converted to a Panzergrenadier division. That meant it would get tanks, but not just any old tanks. Someone further up the food chain had decided it would have almost the same organisation as Himmler’s elite SS Panzer divisions. That meant it would get the latest Tigers and Panther tanks. It helped, of course, that Reich Propaganda Minister Dr Joseph Goebbels was Grossdeutschland’s patron. After the fierce fighting around Rshev some of the men had even been summoned to Berlin to attend a reception hosted by the minister.

Despite the prospect of brand new tanks, the division’s supporting assault gun battalion had been pulling its weight. In early April Captain Hanns Magold received the Knight’s Cross for taking out five enemy tanks in a single engagement. The previous month his men had clocked up twenty-six enemy tanks and fifty anti-tank guns in the space of just under two weeks. The assault artillery detachment had also done well. Balck took pleasure in awarding its commander, Captain Peter Frantz, with the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross. A cameraman had dutifully recorded the occasion. The grinning crews in their helmets and short grey tunics had hoisted Frantz on to their shoulders. He was a man they had every confidence in.

Balck was a tough customer and had spent the last year commanding the 11th Panzer Division on the Eastern Front, which formed part of Knobelsdorff’s 48th Panzer Corps. It had helped stabilise the situation after the disaster at Stalingrad, in particular thwarting the Red Army at Rostov. Just as Balck arrived, Grossdeutschland had received a whole battalion of Tigers. The division had got its hands on a few at the start of the year and by God they were awesome. The gun could chew its way through anything and tore open armour like a tin opener. The division was also to receive a battalion of brand new Panthers. Rumour had it that the division’s tank regiment was to be boosted by another regiment made up entirely of Panthers. This would make it the most powerful division in the army and a force to be reckoned with.

There had been some light relief for Balck and his officers. When the call had come down from corps headquarters, Balck and Colonel Graf Strachwitz, his Panzer commander, had been highly amused by the request. Apparently Mellenthin had been so impressed by the Tiger he wanted to learn to drive one. They could hardly refuse.

Balck was grateful that the surviving veterans had pulled together to help the new recruits. During 1942 Grossdeutschland had been through the meat grinder and lost more than 10,000 men. Twice it had almost collapsed. Balck had helped get the division combat ready once more before he was posted. The new lads were itching for a fight, the veterans less so. He was due to hand command back to the division’s previous commander, General Walter ‘Papa’ Hörnlein, who would lead them in the coming summer operation. One of Balck’s regrets was that he would not get to see the new Panther in action alongside the Tiger. Now that would be something to behold.

The train pulled into Salzburg’s Liefering station amid the full pomp of a state visit. The band started to play the Italian national anthem. SS-Major Otto Günsche, one of Hitler’s military adjutants, straightened his uniform and stood to attention just behind the Führer. All eyes swivelled as the train doors opened and out climbed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Günsche watched as the SS honour guard very smartly presented arms.

Pleasantries were exchanged between the leaders, then they and their entourages headed to the staff cars waiting in the car park. The cavalcade, with its pennants fluttering in the breeze, made its way to the former summer residence of the Archbishop of Salzburg. Günsche was impressed by Schloss Klessheim, the baroque palace built to the west of the city. It was an ideal location for international conferences. Hitler had chosen it largely because it was only an hour’s drive from his Obersalzberg headquarters.

Günsche knew that Hitler would have to muster every diplomatic bone in his body to get through this visit and the subsequent ones by the leaders of Hungary and Romania. In the wake of Germany’s humiliating defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler was having to put a brave face on things and soothe his anxious allies. In private he was still fuming and viewed their armies as ‘a cowardly rabble’14 who were responsible for Stalingrad.

Nonetheless, he was going to have to make a grand military gesture to convince them that Germany’s military power was not waning. Günsche watched as the Führer promised ‘a grandiose new offensive that confirmed certain victory’.15 Mussolini departed believing they would win. He was delusional: having just lost one army in Russia, he was about to lose another one in Tunisia. Günsche hoped they could succeed, but he was well aware that Hitler had lied to the Italian leader and would lie to the other leaders. No one outside German circles was to know just how bad the situation was on the Eastern Front.

Hitler was putting a brave face on things. SS-Major Heinz Linge was a loyal servant to Hitler, but he was thoroughly alarmed at the sight of his Führer writhing around in agony. Hitler’s health had deteriorated since Stalingrad and the pressures of the coming summer campaigning season seemed to be making him much worse. All this talk of Kursk upset Hitler’s stomach and was making him ill. Linge called Dr Theodor Morell, who sounded vexed on the other end of the line. Morell instructed Linge to give the Führer his opium shot as that would calm him. The doctor added that he would attend Hitler after breakfast to give him his pick-me-up dose of stimulants. The Führer needed these as he was not sleeping and because of a list of other health problems.

Being Hitler’s personal assistant and valet was a great honour and responsibility. Linge saw that Hitler’s pained expression was mute testimony to the level of pain he was in. While the German public revered the Führer, his inner circle knew that he was ailing. Linge found the syringe, then helped Hitler remove his jacket and roll up his sleeve. Linge was concerned by the Führer’s growing reliance on Morell and his drug cocktails. Germany’s future rested in Hitler’s hands and his ability to make rational decisions. Linge knew that to express such concerns would be an act of unthinkable disloyalty, but he was not convinced the drugs were helping.

On the high seas Arthur Oakeshott watched as a minesweeper came alongside the cruiser HMS Scylla while still under way and deliver eighty bedraggled survivors from a torpedoed merchant ship. Arthur was a Reuters special correspondent and, looking for adventure and a good story, had got himself assigned to the British Home Fleet. During the dark days of late 1942 Britain and America helped sustain the Red Army by sending tanks and fighter aircraft while Stalin’s relocated weapons factories got back into full swing.

Arthur travelled with one of the Arctic convoys aboard HMS Scylla, the flagship of Rear Admiral Burnett. Scylla was known as ‘a toothless terror’ because she lacked heavy weaponry. However, she was bristling with anti-aircraft guns capable of giving Hitler’s Luftwaffe a good hammering. To his alarm he found himself involved in a desperate four-day battle with the Luftwaffe. When action stations sounded Arthur was soon staring at the bellies of Heinkel and Junkers bombers intent on sending the convoy to the bottom of the Barents Sea. Yeoman White, one of the crew, described it as the ‘worst torpedo bombing attack of the war’.16 The bombers were met by pom-pom anti-aircraft guns nicknamed ‘Chicago pianos’ and any other weapons the sailors could lay their hands on.

The first wave consisted of forty-two aircraft, followed by a second wave of twenty-five. During this battle Arthur even looked down on aircraft as they roared past almost at sea level. In response the gunners ricocheted tracer shells off the water and into the fuselage and cockpit. One bomber dropped its ‘tin fish’ in the direction of the Scylla. Her skipper, Captain Macintyre, turned the ship ‘with the rapidity of a motorist swerving a car’. ‘There were losses, but nothing like the Nazis hoped,’ said Arthur.17 The convoy got through.

This sacrifice helped the Red Army stay in the fight until early 1943. However, Stalin’s ingratitude was to result in an almighty and very public row with the Allies. All Stalin wanted was for Britain and America to open a second front in France, instead they were busy planning the invasion of Sicily. He firmly believed this would not take the pressure off the Red Army and he could not wait another year.

In England, Captain John Cairncross wandered through the gates and nodded acknowledgement to the bored-looking guard. Cairncross’s trousers felt uncomfortable as they were stuffed with secret documents.18 He could not believe just how lax security was at Britain’s top-secret intelligence facility, Bletchley Park. Its boffins were daily intercepting and decrypting German, Italian and Japanese coded signals, yet Bletchley was leaking like a sieve. Bizarrely and in contrast, when it came to petty pilfering of the cafeteria crockery and the length of tea breaks the authorities were positively draconian.19

Cairncross had decided that Churchill’s government was not doing enough to help Stalin, so he had taken matters into his own hands. He was of the opinion that Bletchley ought to share its intelligence with all its allies – not just the Americans. A Scottish Marxist, Captain Cairncross, known as ‘The Fiery Cross’ at Trinity College, had been recruited by Soviet intelligence in the late 1930s.20 He preferred to believe that the Soviet Union was a workers’ utopia rather than a brutal totalitarian state. His early career in the Foreign Office and then the Treasury had made him a valuable source of information.

At Bletchley the captain worked in Hut 3 and he regularly scooped the processed decrypts from the floor and, adding them to his own translations, he then hid them in his trousers. Once at the local railway station he put them in a bag and travelled to London to meet ‘Henry’, his Soviet handler.21 Curiously, Cairncross was never patted down by the guards, nor did he seem particularly surprised that he always managed to find useful stuff on the floor that would be of help to his foreign friends.

In particular he had valuable intelligence that showed Hitler was planning to pinch off the Kursk salient. Cairncross wanted to make contact with Anatoli Gorsky as soon as possible. What he did not know was that Leo Long, a militarily intelligence officer who worked in the War Office, was also leaking Bletchley intelligence on Kursk. He was doing this via Soviet mole Anthony Blunt, who worked for MI5.

Despite initial fears that it might be part of a deliberate British deception plan, Soviet military intelligence deemed the information to be ‘very valuable’.22

In Geneva, Sándor Radó had just come from seeing Englishman Allan Foote. Radó and Foote’s contact in Lucerne – known as ‘Lucy’ – had come through for them via German émigré Christian Schneider. The source was a German exile by the name of Rudolf Roessler, who was a committed anti-Nazi with extremely well-placed sympathisers in the German High Command and military intelligence. Radó had been informed of Herr Hitler’s summer plans in some detail.

Radó, Foote and Schneider were spies working for Soviet Military intelligence. Radó and his network knew secrecy was everything. Although Switzerland was neutral, should the authorities discover spy rings operating in Geneva and Lucerne, they would arrest everyone. Schneider, code name ‘Taylor’, was Roessler’s only point of contact. Roessler was a journalist and publisher who in the early 1930s had incurred the displeasure of the Nazis. He lived in fear of being handed over to Hitler’s henchmen. By way of insurance he was also working for Swiss intelligence.

Having been contacted by Schneider, Radó had instructed Foote to radio Moscow – major German offensive at Kursk imminent. Schneider had reassured him more intelligence would be forthcoming regarding troop deployments and timetables. If Hitler thought he was going to take the initiative he had another thing coming. If he tried anything at Kursk he would reap a bitter harvest.

PART ONE

STALIN RESURGENT

1

TRAINING AT SARATOV

The racket was deafening. There was the sound of hammering, drilling and riveting. Every now and then there was the clang of metal upon metal. The harsh electric lights were supplemented by the flash of welders. The elaborate girders holding up the enormous roof disappeared skyward, creating an industrial cathedral. Outside the factory building the trains rattled along the sidings day and night carrying tanks. The workers likewise toiled day and night, they were cold and hungry, but grumbling did no good. To complain was unpatriotic and subversive. Some worked for the love of the Motherland, others simply because they had to.

Whenever any Red Star or Party cameramen turned up it was all smiles and hearty waves. No one really wanted to see just how grim the conditions were in the defence factories relocated to the Urals. As well as the noise, they were cold and dirty. Much of the workforce were older men, women and youngsters. The men of fighting age had been conscripted. They had to endure sixteen-hour shifts with meagre rations to keep them going.

Each tank had up to a dozen workers bustling around it. They were dressed in overalls and caps. Subassembly took place in the other buildings until the tank hull and suspension had been complete. The body was then brought into the main production hall and lowered into the line by a gantry for the men to work on. The gantry was then used to swing the completed turret over the hull ready for installation. Once in place the twin circular turret access hatches were flung open for ease of access into the interior. Upright these made it look as if the tank had ears similar to those of a very famous American cartoon mouse.

Often young, apprehensive-looking tank crews would arrive at the factories to collect their new steeds. The T-34 tank was so durable you could drive it straight to the front, though the preferred method of transport was by train. The men had come from the tank training schools or were from decimated front-line units that were being rebuilt. The factory workers were amazed at what these young men did with their tanks, but there was no hiding the fact that they always needed more. The T-34 was a good tank but the Red Army’s losses seemed unending.

Seventy-three-year-old Yevgeny Paton smiled at the sight of the production line, it had not always been such a hive of efficient activity. When he first arrived in Nizhny Tagil it had been chaos. Moving the T-34 tank factory from Kharkov along with his staff from his Electric Welding Institute in Kiev had not been easy. Similarly, moving elements of the Kharkov and Leningrad tank plants to Chelyabinsk had equally been a giant logistical headache.1 Other tanks plants had been set up at Gorky, near Moscow, and at Stalingrad. After the loss of the latter to the Nazis, production had been moved to Sverdlovsk. In the early days machinery and workers had gone missing, trains had been rerouted or requisitioned. Nonetheless, saving the Red Army’s tank factories had been nothing short of a miracle and ultimately nothing had stopped the mass migration eastwards. Chief tank designer Alexander Morozov, also from Kharkov, had played a part in this.

Morozov was grateful for what Paton had done for the Soviet Union’s defence industries. They were now locked in a production war with Nazi Germany, which to win meant they had to produce everything faster and in greater quantities than the invaders. The armed forces needed aircraft, ammunition, artillery and tanks, as well as rifles and uniforms, in phenomenal quantities. Slowly but surely the Red Army’s losses in men and equipment were being made good.

Just before the war Paton had gone to see Nikita Khrushchev to show him the fruits of his research. Khrushchev had seized upon his welding technology immediately and urged Stalin to implement it in factories and building sites. He also saw that it had a military application. ‘Tell me, comrade Paton,’ said Khrushchev, ‘do you think your technique would work on tank steel?’2 Paton thought it possible and was packed off to the Kharkov tank factory to work with Alexei Yepishev, who was the Ukrainian Communist Party representative there. Yevgeny had been made a commissioner to the Council of the People’s Commissar’s despite not being a member of the Communist Party.

The results of Yevgeny’s work were soon apparent with the smooth welding finish on the turret of the first two versions of the T-34 tank, which was made from rolled plate armour. Some turrets though were also cast from moulds. The tank looked streamlined and modern, a worthy successor to the thousands of inadequate tanks the Nazis had destroyed on the road to Moscow.

When Hitler invaded, Khrushchev recalled, Paton ‘moved with our armour works to the Urals when we had to evacuate our industry from Kharkov early in the war’.3 In the summer of 1943 the Red Army needed yet more tanks and Yevgeny helped ensure that happened. ‘Thanks to the improvements he introduced in our tank production,’ said Khrushchev, ‘tanks started coming off our assembly lines like pancakes off a griddle.’4

The new tanks were shipped as battle replacements to the front-line units and to the Saratov Tank School. Many of the other tank training schools had been overrun during the invasion. Despite the ever-growing number of Soviet-built armour, some units found themselves equipped with American- and British-supplied tanks. Morozov was now working on a new T-34 armed with a bigger gun, but it would not be ready until the end of the year.

Summer was coming and you did not need to be a rocket scientist to forecast a big battle was imminent. The season was always campaigning time. It did not matter if the Red Army or the Wehrmacht started it, there would be fighting one way or another. That meant more tanks than ever were needed as the Red Army stockpiled its equipment ready for some big push.

In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill liked to think that he was partly responsible for this frenzied Soviet military build-up. Captain Jerry Roberts, a decoder at Bletchley Park, recalled Soviet scepticism: ‘At first, they ignored British intelligence, but we managed to find ways to send very detailed reports to the Russians … Eventually the Russians put pressure on their factories to deliver as many tanks as possible to the Kursk area. The Russians were able to deliver huge numbers of tanks …’5

Paton was a hero of the Soviet Union; at home though he had a dark secret that had worried him for a long time. It put him and his family in very grave danger. He was fairly certain that the state knew about it, but to date had chosen not to act. Yevgeny was thankful that he had escaped Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s. Hundreds if not thousands of engineers and designers had been consigned to the Gulag. Some had been released, others never heard of again. He was conscious now that his prominent profile with the war effort inevitably put the spotlight on him. He was anxious his past might catch up with him should he be denounced. His father had been a Tsarist consul at the time of the 1917 Revolution and Yevgeny had a Tsarist upbringing. This made him and his kin potential enemies of the people.

He decided if he could join the Communist Party it might at least afford him some protection. Paton resolved to put pen to paper and write to the Central Committee, saying:

I believe I have recently made a significant contribution to the wartime defense of our country by helping in the production of tanks. Therefore I feel I have earned the moral right to address myself to the Party with a request that I be accepted into its ranks. I enclose an application for Party membership, and I ask the Central Committee for its endorsement.6

Paton felt that the letter on its own might not be enough, he needed help from a well-placed sponsor. Travelling to Moscow, he sought out Khrushchev and requested to see him. As luck would have it Stalin had summoned Khrushchev to the capital. Khrushchev willingly took Yevgeny’s letter to Stalin. The issue could have gone one of two ways. Luckily for Yevgeny, Stalin issued a special decree allowing him to join the party immediately, waiving the normal two-year trial period. He was safe for the foreseeable future.

Even using Yegeny’s welding technique, by 1943 production of the T-34 tank was deemed too slow and Morozov had been tasked the previous year with looking at ways of not only speeding up production but also improving the turret armour. The solution was a hexagonal cast turret that resulted in the Model 1943 T-34, although it had gone into production the previous year. Thanks to its turret hatches the Germans had dubbed it Mickey Mouse because it looked just like the cartoon character’s ears.

Despite the enormous efforts made by the Soviet Union’s industries in the wake of Hitler’s invasion, even by early 1943 they were still struggling. In March that year, Deputy Supreme Commander Marshal Georgi Zhukov took part in a meeting ‘to discuss fuel supplies for metal production and electricity generation and for the aircraft and tank works’. He was alarmed to find ‘Their reports clearly revealed the grave situation that still persisted in industry’.7

Alexander Werth with The Sunday Times in Moscow observed:

Soviet armaments production did not reach a satisfactory level until the autumn of 1942. The evacuation of hundreds of plants from west to east in the autumn and winter of 1941 had resulted in an almost catastrophic drop in arms production, which largely accounted for the disappointing results in the Russian Moscow counter offensive in the winter of 1941–42 and the disasters of the summer of 1942.8

Monthly tank production was to average 2,000 in 1943, slightly less than the previous year. However, the production of light tanks was almost stopped in 1943, while at the beginning of 1942 it accounted for more than half the total. In 1943 Soviet weapons factories churned out 16,000 heavy and medium tanks, 3,500 light tanks and 4,000 mobile guns. This was eight and a half times more than in 1940 and almost four times more than in 1941. It was a remarkable feat.

In contrast, supplies from America were not as forthcoming as Stalin might have wished. Zhukov’s meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin showed ‘There were hold-ups in the aid under lend-lease from the USA.’9 Stalin and his advisors did not like to admit it but British and American raw materials were playing an important role in helping rebuild their weapons factories and their armies. ‘We received steel and aluminium from which we made guns, airplanes, and so on,’ admitted Khrushchev. ‘Our own industry was shattered and partly abandoned to the enemy.’10

This and other aid ironically caused great resentment in Moscow. ‘The fact remains that the Allied raw materials enormously helped the Soviet war industries,’ wrote Werth. However, he also noted, ‘But this still does not dispose of the profound emotional problem created by the simple fact that the British and Americans were losing much fewer people.’11 This sense of bitterness was to result in an almighty row with the Allies in the early part of that year. It was ill-timed in light of Stalin’s developing plans for the summer.

The Red Army had endured a tough year during 1942. It suffered a severe defeat at Kharkov in May 1942 and, although it scored a remarkable victory at Stalingrad, it needed to recuperate. Replacement soldiers had to be increasingly drawn from the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Infantry training instructor Lieutenant Evgeni Bessonov found that the quality of the replacements was often poor:

Most of the soldiers were 18 years old in 1943. They were not strong physically, mostly small and frail youngsters, so I tried to adjust the training programme to meet their physical and health capacity. Day and night we trained them for future battles.12

Language was also a problem. Amongst the recruits Bessonov received were middle-aged Azeri soldiers, some 30–35 years old. They required a translator as they could not understand orders given in Russian. However, Bessonov had no complaints about them as they proved to be tough fighters.

In particular, the Red Army needed to replenish its battered armoured units ready for the summer of 1943. Sensibly, tank training regiments were established at the main T-34 factories at Chelyabinsk, Nizhniy Tagil and Sverdlovsk. This was intended to greatly speed up getting combat replacements to the front. Nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Vasiliy Pavlovich Bryukhov received his initial tanker training at Kurgan and was commissioned in April 1943. The following month he joined his first crew at Chelyabinsk and was assigned to the 2nd Tank Corps just before Kursk. Bryukhov was lucky as Senior Sergeant Petr Kirichenko, deployed to the 159th Tank Brigade, was promoted after just a month of training.

Typically, if they survived, tank company commanders ranged from 22 to 27 years old, while platoon leaders averaged 19 to 21. The junior officers were normally recruited for their political loyalties as much as their level of education. They had usually been teenage members of the Communist Komsomol organisation and were high school graduates. The sergeants were little more than 18, while the senior sergeants were promoted where possible from surviving enlisted men.

On the whole the Soviet tank units attracted some of the best recruits because they were drawn from the towns and cities and were therefore better educated. SS-General Max Simon, who served with the 3rd SS Panzergrenadier Division Totenkopf, observed:

The Russian townsman, who is highly interested in technical matters, is just as well suited for the modern tank arm as the Russian peasant is for the infantry … It was amazing to see the primitive technical means with which the Russian crews kept their tanks ready for action and how they overcame all difficulties …

An added factor is that the Russian worker usually is a convinced communist, who, having enjoyed the blessings of ‘his’ revolution for decades, will fight fanatically as a class-conscious proletarian. Just as the Red Infantryman is ready to die in his foxhole, the Soviet tank soldier will die in his tank, firing at the enemy to the last, even if he is alone in or behind enemy lines.13

To conduct basic training tank schools were also established at Kurgan, Ufa, Ulyanovsk and Saratov. Assigned to a tank-training battalion, the men got four to eight weeks of instruction. Unlike their German counterparts the crews were not expected to show much initiative and the classes were very simple. Cross-role training did not occur very often, which meant the crews could not stand in for each other. The driver was the only one able to move the tank, while the loader was restricted to his task and the radio operator could just about turn on the radio and change the frequency. Unit training was not any larger than platoon level. Many platoon leaders were unable to map read, which could prove fatal when they went into combat.

Unfortunately for the trainee crews, T-34s were not readily available for training even in 1943, as they tended to be sent straight to the front where they were needed the most. This meant the men did their basic training on obsolete tanks. While at Kurgan Lieutenant Bryukhov was instructed on old BT tanks armed with 45mm guns and he noted that ‘Training at the base was very weak’, culminating in an exercise called ‘tank platoon in the offensive’.14

Afterwards the trainee crews were packed off to the training regiments near the T-34 factories, where they would be issued with a tank. These units could handle up to 2,000 men, who normally received another month of training. Again this was rudimentary, with the largest unit training being carried out at company level. Apart from advancing in line formation or as a wedge, little thought was given to more complex tactical procedures.

In trained hands the T-34 was quite agile and could run rings around the Panzers; in untrained hands it was a completely different matter.

Drivers were not taught to employ terrain to their benefit, such as using folds in the ground to fire and retire. Essentially tanks were cavalry and all they needed to do was charge toward the enemy. Many crews completed their training feeling they could have been better prepared.

A major drawback with the four-man crew of the T-34 was that the tank commander was also the gunner. This meant the commander had to direct his own tank, plus a platoon or company, if he was in charge, as well as find and engage enemy targets.15 In the heat of battle such multi-tasking inevitably slowed the tank’s rate of fire. The loader was also supposed to act as an observer, but usually did little more than ram shells into the breech. Tank crews were only ever to abandon their tank under two circumstances: the main gun had been damaged, or the tank was on fire.

The training regiments also ended up with the detritus from front-line units. This meant they were the focal point for survivors from destroyed tank formations, wounded tankers returning to duty and men reassigned from other branches of the army. This was a logical step, especially as the newer recruits could benefit from their experience, but sometimes it undermined morale. There would have been dark mutterings from the veterans that the newbies would have to learn on the job the hard way.

Some women were also recruited to tank units as Soviet manpower began to diminish. A few volunteered as tank drivers in early 1942, but in January of the following year a number were sent to the tank training regiments. They were posted as individual combat replacements, often to the more prestigious Guards tank brigades. Most served as drivers but a very few survived to become tank commanders. The T-34 required a lot of strength to drive, especially with the twin steering levers and the double declutching needed to change gear. Unfortunately for the drivers, they rarely escaped if the tank was hit.

Crews were not always harmonious, nor did they always stay together. Junior Lieutenant Sergei Burtsev found his first crew formed at Nizhniy Tagil had a broad spectrum of undesirable characters. His loader was educationally subnormal and panicked so much the first time they fired the gun that he scrambled out of their tank and fled. The unhappy driver was a convicted criminal and the radio operator/bow machine-gunner was a restaurant waiter. They had nothing in common other than the desire not to die the minute they went into combat.

The tank factories were constantly short of workers and sometimes the new tankers could find themselves sidetracked on to the factory floor. When Bryukhov arrived at Chelyabinsk, to complete his training with the 6th Tank Training Regiment, he ended up spending two frustrating weeks manning a lathe. ‘Nikolay and I were assigned to drilling apertures in engine cylinder blocks. Nikolay had completed a training course and was a qualified fourth-grade metal worker … Our work at the plant didn’t last for long …’16