Since it's the anniversary of perhaps the largest single battle in human history, I thought it fitting to open up a discussion on the importance of the Battle of Kursk.
The major battles of the Eastern Front are usually forgotten in the West in discussing the war. If they are recalled at all, Stalingrad, Kursk and maybe Moscow are mentioned. Usually they are referenced as some sort of defining "turning point" of the course of the war, a decisive battle whose outcome shifted the fortunes of the war.
Kursk is often selected as the turning point. The opening phase of the battle, Operation Citadel, was the last German offensive. After the battle, they would be limited to local counterattacks and occasional counterstrokes against a Soviet Army that was constantly on the offensive, not able to even approach retaking the strategic initiative in the war.
I do not think this is the case. I contend that Germany had already lost before the first panzers rolled into battle at Kursk, that the contest had already been decided unbeknownst to its participants, and the outcome at Kursk is merely demonstrative of the fact that the Soviets were going to win the war.
So let's set the stage. The German Sixth Army has been ground to dust in Stalingrad. The Soviet counteroffensives in Operations Uranus, Mars, and Saturn had thrown Army Group South out of the Caucasus, inflicting catastrophic losses to the Axis, Germans and allies alike. When the Soviet offensives paused from exhaustion, a counterstroke in the south pushed the southern flank of the Soviet lines back in the 3rd Battle of Kharkov. The spring rasputitsa hit, turned the country into a muddy quagmire, and thus the battle lines were frozen in place through the spring.
A large salient, or bulge, juts out from Soviet held territory around the city of Kursk, 250 km from north to south, and 160 kilometers from east to west. The Oberkommado der Heer (High Command of the Army) wished to shorten German lines by destroying the Kursk salient. With Hitler's go-ahead, planning began in earnest for Operation Citadel in April.
This choice was obvious. So obvious that the Soviet military command, Stavka, were aware of German intentions even without access to decrypted German wire traffic. The choice to fight it out with the Soviet military at Kursk demonstrated the profound weakness of the strategic sense of the Heer. While they had a competent command of tactical operations (in the East, usually corps/division size or below), their understanding of the larger picture of the whole war, the strategic level, was poorly lacking.
The Soviets thus turned the Kursk salient into a fortress of men and arms while the Germans built up their forces for the attack. The determination was to stop German breakthroughs from occurring, thus preventing any encirclements or major shifts in the frontlines, defeating their attacks before they could truly become dangerous.
The Germans failed to conceal their buildup both strategically, via the comprimised nature of their wireless networks, as well as operationally. This could only ensure that the defender would set the field in their favor. An elementary military notion, first codified by Sun Tzu, is to not fight the enemy on his terms; to avoid where he is strong and attack where he is weak.
The only real objective of Operation Citadel was, for all intents and purposes, a short-sighted tactical objective. They wished to shorten the lines to economize their forces. They showed very little appreciation for what Soviet military theorists termed "the operational art", the level of doctrine that links that tactical scale with the strategic scale. Put simply, the operational art is how you string together tactical situations, both victories and defeats, to create the conditions for strategic victory.
By contrast with the German's objectives, the Soviets had come to understand the operational art through the painful lessons of 1941 and 1942, and had begun to take the theories of revolutionary military leaders of the 30s like Marshall Tukhevasky, the "deep battle" doctrine, and employ it successfully in a real war against the greatest enemy they had ever faced.
The Soviets had an operational plan for the Kursk salient. Fortress Kursk would be a rock on which the German military would expend itself, leaving it vulnerable to planned counterstrokes in adjacent sectors. Forces would be held in reserve; over a million men, thousands of tanks and assault guns, tens of thousands of artillery pieces, for the opportune moment to capitalize on the situation. The strategic goal was to cripple the ability of the Wehrmacht to hold the initiative, and begin ejecting them from the Soviet Union.
Soviet planners thus had clear plans on the tactical, operational and strategic levels at Kursk, and a realistic appraisal of the capabilities of their forces. Gone was Stalin's pompous attitude of 42, where counteroffensives were imagined to be all but war deciding. Kursk had modestly ambitious goals, realistically calculated based on the somewhat stochastic nature of the present Soviet military.
Thus, when the German offensives began on 5 July 1943, the attacking forces of Army Group Center, attacking the north of the Kursk salient near Ponyri, and the forces of Army Group South, attacking the south of the salient near Belgorod, ran into a fortress of minefields, bunkers, anti-tank guns and trenches filled with soldiers. Concentric rings of defense, layered all the way from the front-line to the city of Kursk itself, ensured a hard-fought battle that would expend men, equipment and resources for precious little gain. In nearly two weeks of constant offensive action, the Wehrmacht made very little progress.
In the north, General of the Army Konstantin Rokossovvsky utterly frustrated German efforts, holding to a maximum of 8 to 12 kilometers. Field Marshal Manstein's forces in the south fared better, penetrating to a max of 35 kilometers. This provoked Zhukov, the Stavka representative in charge of the overal battle, to make a blunder in reinforcing the Voronezh front. He committed one of the best formations available to the Soviets, the 5th Guards Tank Army (a corps sized unit, as the Soviets had deleted the corps level from organizations to simplify command and control after the disasters of 41). The 5th Guards Tank Army would charge head long into the II SS Panzer Corps near the town of Prokhorovka. This wasteful head to head battle, the largest direct tank engagement of the war, stopped the already blunted momentum of the SS Panzer Corps, but at significant cost to the Soviets.
By 16 July, the OKH and Hitler have given up on the Operation Citadel. More than just the men lost, over 58,000 casualties, many irretrievable, hundreds of tanks considered total losses, and hundreds more mission-killed, and the combat readiness of the Wehrmacht's best formations smashed, for a few kilometers of ground. Why the Soviets suffered high casualties as well, they had a far greater ability to sustain losses at this period. Remember how I talked about all those forces kept in reserve? The Soviets bring them into action. Soviet counteroffensives in the North and South begin on the 12, starting at a low tempo to halt reinforcement of the Citadel spearheads, and gaining tempo to further push the Germans back. Over nearly the next six weeks, the Soviets maul the German army along a 2,000km frontier, piling on irretrievable losses in men and material that the Germans cannot afford to lose.
In the period after Kursk, the Soviet army would be constantly on the offensive. This outcome, I contend, is not indicative of a turning point. It's indicative of a war that had already been decisively won doctrinally and logistically. The Soviets had more men and materiel to commit, even after the horrific losses inflicted in the opening stages of the war. And even while in near constant battle, they improved the organization and training of their military, while the quality of the Wehrmacht had already reached its high water mark and was continuing to deteriorate as the war progressed. The fact that the Soviets could sustain such horrific casualties in Kursk and continue unbroken chains of offensives, culminating 1 year later in Operation Bagration, which destroyed Army Group Center and broke the back of the Wehrmacht, demonstrates this. Wars are not CoD matches; K:D ratios do not determine the victor.
In summary, the outcome of the Battle of Kursk wasn't a turning point in the war; it was the battle that made it clear that the German's wouldn't just lose the war, it would mean unconditional surrender and the destruction of the Nazi regime. The Germans through their best at Kursk and failed. Even after this beating, the Soviets still had sufficient strength in reserve to progressively eject the invaders, all the way back to Berlin.
