* Stalingrad had been a major disaster for the Reich, but the Wehrmacht still remained a powerful opponent. In the spring of 1943 Hitler initiated a plan for an offensive, codenamed Operation CITADEL, to choke off a Soviet salient in German lines around the town of Kursk. Red intelligence learned of the plan, setting the stage for the greatest armor battle of World War II, a clash that would set Germany on a course of irreversible decline in the East.
* The Soviet Union had not merely survived the German onslaught of 1942, it had crushed it. The Axis tide seemed to be going back out on all fronts:
The Murmansk convoys had been resumed in December; they would continue to be somewhat intermittent, but Lend-Lease aid from the Americans was now approaching its full flood, with the Siberian and Persian connections helping to funnel war materiel to the Soviets.
* In January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca, Morocco. On 24 January, in the aftermath of the meeting, the two leaders reaffirmed their commitment to ensure that Lend-Lease supplies were being delivered as promised to the Soviets; they also committed to a "Combined Bomber Offensive" to pound the Reich day and night. The most ringing element in the Casablanca delegation read as follows: "The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan."
The "unconditional surrender" doctrine has been argued ever since. Superficially it came across as an inflexible declaration of Allied strength and resolve, but it was driven by many considerations, one of the biggest being the need to reassure the Soviets. The deal the Americans had struck with local French authorities in the invasion of North Africa had not gone over well in the Kremlin -- or for that matter, with Roosevelt's critics back home in the USA. To be sure, the deal had no real impact on the war in the East, but it suggested to Stalin that his allies might demonstrate a similar flexibility in the future at the expense of the USSR. Put another way, "unconditional surrender" was telling Stalin that the Western Allies weren't going to sell him out to Hitler, and telling Hitler that he wasn't going to split the Allied coalition by playing them off against each other.
There was another significant context to "unconditional surrender" in that it specified as a war goal the decisive defeat of the Axis. The conflict was not anything like, say, a border dispute that could be resolved by discussion or third-party arbitration; it was total war. The Axis goal was to take by force what nobody else thought they had a right to, and crush anyone who stood in the way. The Allied goal was to defeat the Axis; concessions to, appeasement of, the Axis in the years leading up to the outbreak of war hadn't accomplished anything for the Allies -- in fact, they had been counterproductive, except to the extent of demonstrating the futility of agreements with the Axis. The Axis regimes clearly did not see treaty obligations as worth any more than the paper they were written on, and deals made with them would predictably be broken sooner rather than later.
Now that the Axis was on the defensive, their only bargaining position with respect to ending the war was to say that if the Allies stopped their attacks, the Axis would stop fighting back. That was no bargaining position; all it meant was that the fight would last until the Axis either admitted defeat, or the Allies simply wearied of the fighting and gave it up. If the Allies could continue the war, what motive did they have to stop short of conclusively defeating the Axis, except for short-sighted laziness? If deals were ruled out, the defeat of the Axis meant an escalating use of force, doing everything perceived as necessary, until the Axis caved in.
As brutal as that was, it was far preferable to the alternative. A negotiated settlement that left the Axis regimes in power could not be seen as anything more than a temporary truce that would graciously give the Axis the opportunity to re-arm and take another shot. Having absorbed the bitter lesson that the First World War had led to the Second World War, the Allies knew that it wasn't enough to beat the Axis to a standstill, then wait for them to renew the fight at the first moment of convenience. The Axis had to be completely knocked out, with the Allies then ensuring that the postwar governments of those nations would not be inclined to start another war. Did any of the Allies want to end the struggle with Hitler or his designated successor in command of an injured but intact Germany? Of course not; that would be simply winding the clock back to the 1930s, and laying the basis for a Third World War. The Axis regimes had to be put down.
In addition, Hitler had been aided in seizing power by claiming that Germany hadn't been defeated on the battlefield in World War I, it had been sold out by weak-willed German political leadership -- with the implication that German military power would have otherwise carried the day. This time around, the lesson was going to be pounded in that Axis had taken on a fight that they were provably not big enough nor bad enough to win, and so ensure that they wouldn't think of trying it again for generations.
That had the ugly implication that the message would be handed down to every citizen of the Axis so that nobody would fail to understand it. Even at the time, Allied bombing attacks on German cities were demonstrating that making war on enemy peoples was not a mere theoretical principle; it would prove even less theoretical in the continuation of the war, and the continued extension of what was considered a "legitimate target".
On the other side of that coin, it also meant that no Allied citizens would be in a position to protest in the aftermath that their leaders hadn't done the full job. The Allies had committed the people to victory, and giving them anything less would be poorly rewarding their sacrifices. The people would be given "peace with justice". The notion of unconditional surrender would prove popular -- given Roosevelt's shrewd understanding of politics, he understood its appeal from the outset.
The critics of the unconditional surrender doctrine would later claim it prolonged the war and the bloodshed. It is impossible to prove that case. Of course, in the face of the demand for unconditional surrender, the Axis regimes were compelled to keep on fighting to the limits of their capability -- but if they thought they could get a deal instead of defeat, they would keep on fighting to the limits of their capability anyway, to get the best deal they could. They were not, in either case, going to give up the fight until they simply couldn't carry it on any longer.
Finally, the phrase "unconditional surrender", though uncompromising in tone, was no more than a statement of principle, and did not define a specific policy. As anyone who gave it any real thought would see immediately, there was a loophole of sorts obvious to both sides in the unconditional surrender doctrine, in that it did not rule out the Axis asking for clarification of Allied intent for what would happen following surrender -- if they were thinking of surrendering, of course they would ask, no question of it -- and nothing to prevent the Allies from making their intent clear.
To be sure, any concessions to be made under such circumstances were entirely up to Allied discretion, with no necessary consideration of Axis demands, and once the Axis nations surrendered, their fate would be in the hands of the Allies. However, there was still definitely a fine line between such a discussion of intent and negotiating terms of surrender. Indeed, there would be debates, sometimes acrimonious, in the Allied camp up to the end of the conflict over just what sort of "unconditional surrender" would be acceptable. In any case, the policy of unconditional surrender was established for good reasons that had been thoroughly thought out, and though there was much in it to legitimately argue over, no argument could show it lengthened the fighting by a single day.
Still, for all the tough-sounding talk from his allies, Stalin was growing ever more impatient with the failure of the British and Americans to create a serious second front -- and though he had been given reassurances in 1942 that the British and Americans would invade Western Europe in 1943, their forces remained bogged down in Tunisia for the time being. The longer they stayed tied down, the less likely that it would be possible to mount the promised invasion during 1943.
BACK_TO_TOP* In early spring, a crisis arose that threatened to undermine the alliance against Hitler. Britain had gone to war with Germany over Hitler's invasion of Poland, and the independence of Poland and the other states in Eastern Europe was a matter of great importance to the British. The Polish government-in-exile in London had good reasons to distrust Stalin, since the USSR had helped carve up their country in the first place. This distrust was greatly magnified when the Germans announced on 13 April 1943 the discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers at Katyn near Smolensk.
When the mass graves were uncovered, Goebbels knew that he had a hot story on his hands. He also understood that few in neutral or enemy nations were going to believe a word he said, so an investigation was arranged under the direction of a panel that included anti-Nazis from neutral countries and even Allied prisoners of war. The evidence from the corpses dug up from the mass graves, who typically had a bullet hole in the back of the head, clearly dated the massacre back to the time when Smolensk was still in Soviet hands.
On 15 April, General Wladislaw Sikorski, the prime minister of the Polish government in exile in London, and the Polish ambassador to Britain met with Churchill. Churchill admitted he had little doubt that the Soviets were responsible for the mass executions, but pointed out that the bargaining position of the London Poles was very weak and that they should be circumspect in how they handled the issue. They weren't, going public the next day to protest and demand an investigation by the International Red Cross.
Stalin hardly seemed embarrassed by the matter at all, and in fact it played into his hands. On 21 April, he sent identical letters to Churchill and Roosevelt, denouncing the "anti-Soviet slander campaign" being orchestrated by the Germans and preposterously accused the London Poles of collusion with the Nazis. Koba said that the London Poles had, through this action, "severed its relations of alliance with the Soviet Union", which was a backwards way of declaring that he had withdrawn Soviet recognition of the Polish government-in-exile in London. The USSR now formally backed a group of Communist Poles living in the USSR, the "Union of Polish Patriots".
The Katyn revelations put the British and Americans in an impossible position. They could not get into a serious fight with their Soviet ally, however vicious Stalin might be; any action taken against the Soviets would undermine the war effort, and would accomplish nothing useful. Churchill energetically opposed any suggestion of a Red Cross investigation, and US Secretary of State Cordell Hull didn't want to press the matter, calling it a "piddling little thing". The issue was papered over, though the result was hardly a relaxation of tensions, particularly between Britain and the USSR. The British had few doubts that Stalin intended to keep the Polish territory he had seized; the real worry was that he intended to subjugate everything else the Red Army captured as well.
A few months later, General Sikorski was on a tour of Polish forces in the Mediterranean when the Consolidated Liberator bomber he was using as an air transport crashed after takeoff from Gibraltar, on 4 July 1943. Sikorski and most on board were killed; it was a major setback for the Free Polish cause,, since they lacked any other official of comparable stature and influence. There was considerable suspicion that NKVD agents had arranged the accident, but aircraft accidents were by no means uncommon during the war, and no investigation -- even one conducted by the Polish government over half a century later -- ever found evidence of foul play. However, it takes little imagination to suspect the death of Sikorski was viewed with considerable satisfaction from the Kremlin.
BACK_TO_TOP* As the weather warmed in the Soviet Union in the early spring of 1943, Red Army soldiers poured into staging areas behind the front lines, while Soviet industry exerted itself to its utmost to roll out new tanks and planes and guns to make good the losses of the campaigns during 1942 and early 1943. The dislocations caused by the transfer of Soviet factories from the path of the German invaders in 1941 to sites beyond the Urals had been largely repaired, and weapons poured off the assembly lines in increasing quantities. Yak fighters, Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft, and T-34 tanks went to the front in floods. Many would be destroyed -- but even more would be built to take their place.
Nazi Germany was also deeply engaged in the production war. Although work continued on advanced weapons, priority was placed on the manufacture of modest refinements of existing weapons to ensure that production volumes were maintained. Over a half million more men were put into uniform, mostly by eliminating various exemptions. This brought the military back up to strength, at the expense of robbing German industry of manpower.
Of course, Hitler was now fighting a war on two fronts, and though the Soviets were the immediate threat, the British were continuing the fight with characteristic doggedness and with increasing American assistance. The Americans were approaching full mobilization of their manpower and, more importantly, their industrial might; they would soon present a threat from the West approaching the magnitude of that from the massive Red Army. Hitler needed more submarines to try to cut Britain's lifeline across the Atlantic to the US, while Allied bombing raids siphoned off military resources to air defense. The weight of the Luftwaffe fighter force was gradually shifting from the East to the protection of the Reich, fighter aircraft and pilots being depleted in the process through continuous operational attrition.
Propaganda Minister Goebbels, knowing the truth could not be hidden, shrewdly did not conceal the fact that Germany had taken battlefield reverses, and used them to call on Germans to make heroic sacrifices. Still, there was only so much defeat people could tolerate before their demoralization became irreversible. Germany's weak-tea allies -- Italy, Hungary, Rumania -- had already had their fill of a war the Axis seemed unlikely to win and were quietly looking for a way out. Hitler needed major victories quickly.
Even Hitler knew that he was not in a position to give the Soviets a blow that would knock them out of the war. General Kurt Zeitzler came up with a more limited and apparently workable plan in early April 1943. The Red Army's push in February 1943 had left a great salient into German lines, centered around the city of Kursk. The salient was about 210 kilometers wide and 160 kilometers deep (130 by 100 miles), with the German side of the lines anchored at Orel in the north and at Belgorod, north of Kharkov, in the south. Zeitzler proposed that the German Army pinch off this salient with twin drives into its base, one from the north and one from the south, and wipe out all the Red Army forces trapped inside. The scheme was codenamed Operation ZITADEL (CITADEL).
It was a simple, direct plan, and it might have worked if it had been done at the earliest possible moment -- but that wasn't how it happened, it wasn't how it could have happened. The worst problem was that the Germans had lost too many tanks in the fighting up to that time, and the Mark III and Mark IV panzers that were in the ranks weren't the equal of the Soviet T-34 tank. German industry had been working along several lines to develop tanks that could beat Soviet armor:
All of these weapons were now going into production, all being plagued with manufacturing glitches and teething problems. Hitler wanted to wait until he could build up adequate stocks of these new weapons before going ahead with CITADEL. The earliest possible date for the beginning of the operation was 3 May 1943. The entire effort was planned in maximum secrecy.
* The delays were a problem, but there was a bigger problem, one that Hitler wasn't aware of: Stalin knew all about CITADEL. Soviet intelligence from the Kursk sector reported the German troop buildup, and more significantly Stalin was getting detailed intelligence on German plans from a Red spy codenamed "Lucy". Lucy was really Rudolf Roessler, an anti-Nazi German living in Switzerland, who controlled an extensive spy ring.
Lucy's information was very accurate, and it is still somewhat puzzling as to how he obtained it, since he died in the 1950s without revealing his sources. Some historians have proposed that the British might have been feeding him decrypted messages from the top-secret ULTRA codebreaking operation in England, using him as a filter to keep Stalin ignorant of ULTRA. This theory has been debunked, since there are no British records of any such activity; besides, the record is clear that the British had been feeding the Soviets sanitized ULTRA information through the British military mission from the beginning of the war in the East.
Stalin was aware of CITADEL even before the initial orders for the operation went out to German forces in the field. Stalin sent Zhukov to the Kursk sector to consider options. On 8 April, Zhukov sent a message back to the Kremlin suggesting that instead of taking the offensive against the Germans there, it would be far more profitable to discreetly build up defenses and let the Germans smash themselves to pieces against them. That would weaken the Germans, and then the Red Army could conduct an overwhelming counteroffensive. Stalin had learned a degree of respect for the abilities of his generals, and accepted the recommendations. When Zhukov returned to Moscow on the evening of 11 April, he found the general staff working at a frantic pace to put together the plan for the operation.
As the plan emerged, the defense of the northern part of the salient was to be conducted by the "Central Front", under General Konstantin Rokossovsky. He commanded five field armies, a tank army, an air army, and a number of smaller elements, facing German General Walter Model's 9th Army, part of Army Group Center under Kluge.
There were concerns in the Kremlin about Rokossovsky. He had been arrested during the purges, with the evidence presented against him including "testimony" from another officer who had actually been dead for almost twenty years, and had lost all of his teeth during his imprisonment, acquiring a full set of metal teeth as a replacement. Once released, he had proven his abilities again and again in combat, but he was overly independent, not a quality regarded as admirable in the Red Army. He was also generally pleasant and charismatic, a sharp contrast to the scowly and gruff personalities of Zhukov and most other senior Red Army officers. Zhukov kept an eye on him.
The defense of the southern part of the salient was to be conducted by the "Voronezh Front", under General Nikolai Vatutin. Its composition and size were similar to that of Rokossovsky's Central Front, and it was confronted with Papa Hoth's 4th Panzer Army, part of Manstein's Army Group South. Vatutin was a staff officer by background. He had requested a combat command in the summer of 1942. He had not distinguished himself in the fighting since that time, but he had his advocates who believed he had potential, and so he had been given command of the front. Chief of Staff Vasilevsky went to the Voronezh Front to give him direction.
The two fronts were backed up by a huge reserve force, blandly designated the "Steppe Military District", of roughly similar size and composition to each of the two fronts. It was under the command of General Ivan Konev.
The Red Army built up layers of defenses inside the Kursk salient to slow down and trap Wehrmacht assaults, which would then become the targets of massive Soviet counterattacks. The defenders worked quickly, but as it turned out they were to be given time: on 20 April, Lucy reported that CITADEL had been postponed to some time after 3 May.
On 4 May, Hitler had a strategy session with his senior generals in Munich. Walter Model gave the Fuehrer unpleasant news, showing him reconnaissance photographs of the massive Soviet buildup in the salient. Model was an aristocratic officer, even affecting a monocle, and was egotistical to the point of comical. Those who had to work with him found him mean-spirited and unscrupulous, but he was a 100% Nazi. Hitler trusted him and always would trust him.
It seemed clear to the Fuehrer that the Soviets were expecting the attack. However, Hitler did not cancel CITADEL on the spot, and a hot debate followed. Manstein and Kluge said the offensive should go forward with no further delay, with Chief of Staff Zeitzler backing them up. Heinz Guderian, now returned to duty as the inspector-general for German armored forces, was dead against it. He believed that Germany should take the time to properly rebuild armored forces before performing new major offensive operations. Hitler, resting his hopes on the power of new German armor, waffled: CITADEL would go ahead, but no schedule was given for the start of the operation.
* By the middle of the month, Hitler had been confronted by another disruption to his plans when Axis forces in Tunisia finally surrendered to the Allies on 13 May, with about a quarter of a million men taken prisoner, including roughly 100,000 Germans. Hitler had regarded North Africa as a sideshow, then funneled in resources when it was too late for him to win. The result was another painful setback for the Reich.
The number of German soldiers lost in Tunisia was relatively small compared to the Reich's forces in the East, but the Reich was at the limits of its manpower, and the loss of even a portion of the reserves of troops Hitler still had available to him was calamitous. The Luftwaffe had also suffered disproportionately in the Mediterranean, with German transport airlift being effectively destroyed. Even Stalin had to concede that his allies had won a substantial victory.
He was, however, furious when Roosevelt and Churchill informed him on 4 June that the protracted fight for North Africa had forced the postponement of the invasion of Western Europe to 1944. The British and Americans were planning a massive amphibious assault codenamed Operation HUSKY on Sicily in July, but Stalin did not regard HUSKY as a substitute for a second front. Earlier in the year, Stalin had given Molotov his opinion of the British and Americans: "The only thing they do is talk, nothing else." But for the moment, Koba had other things on his mind other than his despised allies.
BACK_TO_TOP* On the Eastern front, both sides continued to make preparations and train for the coming battle during the lull in action, but the delay helped the Red Army more. Many Soviet troops were extremely green, having been swept up by drafts and thrown into action with little if any training. With a period of idle time on their hands, the experienced soldiers, those who had survived the worst the Nazis could hit them with, were able to give them the valuable benefits of their experience.
Fortifications were constructed and minefields laid. Peasant villages that were in the way of the impending battle were relocated out of the front-line zone, a process that ended up being troublesome, with peasants fighting with pitchforks, stones, and whatever else was handy when Red Army troops tried to evict them from their homes -- with very good reason, the peasants did not believe reassurances that there would be adequate shelter and provisions waiting for them at the end of their relocation. After some mad brawls, the decision was made to use NKVD units for such evictions in the future.
One way or another, the civilians were sent out of the way; the defenses were built, and supplies, ammunition, and weapons were accumulated. Not only did the Soviets have plenty of T-34 tanks, they also had a small number of the "SU-152 self-propelled gun" or "assault gun", featuring a 152-millimeter howitzer mounted on a KV tank chassis, the gun fixed to fire forward with a limited traverse. The SU-152 was an improvisation, having been implemented in an unbelievable hurry, but it was still formidable. It was called the "Zverboi (Beast Basher)", since it had the hitting power to take out the new German heavy tanks -- though only at dangerously short range.
In the meantime, partisans operating in the German rear played hell with German supply lines, blowing bridges and wrecking trains. In a short time, partisan attacks tripled, another hint that German secrecy had been compromised.
Finally, on 1 July, Hitler sent an order to Manstein that CITADEL would begin on 5 July. Soviet intelligence knew of the order within hours. The Red Army went to full alert. The Red Army had 1.3 million soldiers, backed by 3,500 tanks and 19,000 artillery pieces. The Germans had a million troops, with 2,700 tanks and 10,000 guns. Both sides remained quiet in hopes of surprising the other. It was so silent that the loudest noise was the sound of the wind rippling through the grass of the plains.
* On the afternoon of 4 July, Hoth performed a probe into Soviet lines to seize some hills that presented an obstacle to his line of advance. Things went quiet again for the night, though few were getting much sleep since last-minute preparations were under way on both sides. German planning envisioned drives forward using "armored wedge" formations, with heavy Tiger armor at the tip of the wedge; Panther, Mark III, and Mark IV tanks behind; with panzergrenadiers and mortar teams in half-tracks in the rear. The wedges would be supported by artillery and Stuka tank-busters fitted with a 37-millimeter cannon under each wing, Germany's somewhat improvised answer to the Red Il-2 Sturmovik.
Soviet planning in turn involved large antitank minefields that would channel the German advance into "kill traps" plugged by dug-in batteries of antitank guns. The guns were backed up by heavy artillery and Katyusha rocket launchers, along with mobile armored formations that could respond to threats as needed. The Soviets had made full use of their skills at combat engineering and concealment to make their traps as devious as possible.
Soviet artillery began the fight in the small hours of the morning, blasting away at the Germans with heavy guns and Katyusha launchers in a pre-emptive attack. Since the fire was not generally directed at highly specific targets, it was more noisy than dangerous, but it did interfere with German organization. At dawn, the German tanks went forward under the cover of Stukas. Although the Red Army had been expecting the assault, the weight of the German attack was so great that the front lines of the Soviet defenses crumbled. Still, there were further layers to the defenses and as the Germans drove into them, the momentum of the assault gradually ground down.
The Red Air Force was out in numbers and contesting the Luftwaffe for air supremacy, with roughly 2,000 German warplanes against 3,000 Soviet aircraft. The Germans still held the edge in the sky, with generally better equipment and superior training, but their advantage had narrowed greatly from the early days of the war in the East.
Sturmoviks and other attack aircraft pounded German armor and positions. Soviet mobile formations were sent to threatened sectors, while Red combat engineers swiftly laid minefields ahead of the Wehrmacht advance. The Tigers proved hard to kill, but the Panthers were vulnerable, since they were still unreliable and their crews were poorly trained. The Elefants were even less useful, being not merely prone to breakdowns, but also slow and painfully vulnerable to attacks by Red Army anti-tank pioneer teams armed with explosive charges. By the time the sun went down, the southern prong of the German advance had advanced all of 18 kilometers (11 miles) into Soviet lines. The northern prong had advanced only 10 kilometers (6 miles).
Still, the Germans had yet to commit all their forces. Model kept up the pressure from the north, only to meet stubborn resistance that piled up bodies and wreckage on both sides. By 10 July, the northern prong had spent its force, having advanced only another 10 kilometers. Both sides continued to fire on each other, with both sides stubbornly refusing to give any ground.
On the southern side of the salient, the Germans made better progress, spearheaded by the elite 2nd SS Panzer Corps under Hausser. On 12 July, Hoth began a major push with his armor, only to find that, by coincidence, the Red Army had also planned a big armored push in precisely the opposite direction. The resulting head-on collision was one of the biggest tank battles of the war.
On the early morning of 12 July 1943, 850 tanks of the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army, under Lieutenant General Pavel Rotmistrov, ran into the 600 tanks of the 2nd SS Panzer near the village of Prokhorovka. The Soviets were mostly equipped with T-34s, while the German force featured about a hundred Tigers. Although the Tigers could in principle stand off at long range and destroy T-34s with impunity, due to the surprise of the engagement and the nature of the terrain -- dotted with hedges and small clumps of trees that provided cover -- the T-34s were able to close with the German armor, resulting in a chaotic and violent close-quarters brawl.
Soon the battlefield was hazy with dust and the smoke of burning tanks. Luftwaffe and Red Air Force close-support aircraft and fighters streaked overhead, contributing to the confusion. An armor-piercing round slamming into a tank would set off its ammunition and blow its turret off, sending it flying through the air. T-34s were able to isolate and destroy Tigers, pounding on the relatively thin side and back armor from close range. By afternoon, there were hundreds of dead tanks and tankers on the field. Hausser's panzers had been forced to pull back to a defensive position, where they held their ground against repeated attacks by Red armor.
Hoth wanted to commit General Werner Kempf's 3rd Panzer Corps, with about 300 tanks, to the battle, but that prong of Hoth's offensive had been trying to grind forward against stubborn opposition and was mostly on the wrong side of the Donets river, to the southeast of the battlefield.
3rd Panzer had been able to get a bridgehead over the river at the town of Rzhavets the night before, 11 July, through a trick. A Major Franz Baeke led a small column of armor through Soviet lines, with a captured T-34 in the lead to deceive Red Army sentinels. It worked, but then the T-34 broke down, blocking the road. The Germans had to get out and push the steel monster off the road, while Soviet troops in the area idly watched the Germans laboring in the dark. Some of the Germans even forgot themselves and muttered "scheisse! (shit!)" and the like, but nobody caught on.
Farther up the road, Baeke's column passed a column of T-34s heading the other way. The Germans held their breath and the two columns passed, but then the Soviets got suspicious, and a number of T-34s turned around to investigate. There was a very tense moment -- and then firing broke out, resulting in a confused fight at point-blank range. Baeke's column managed to make its way into Rzhavets and hold on until reinforcements arrived in the morning.
However, 3rd Panzer spent most of 12 July simply reassembling, and wasn't able to join 2nd SS Panzer until the morning of 13 July. Fighting had died down by that time, with each side having suffered the loss of about 300 tanks. 3rd Panzer's arrival more or less made good German losses and it is likely that a renewal of the battle would have not gone well for the Soviets, but then the order came down to the Germans: break off combat. The operation had been called off by the Fuehrer.
That day, 13 July, Kluge and Manstein had been summoned to Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia, where they found the Fuehrer in a nasty mood and the staff officers sunk in gloom. Hitler briefed Manstein on the situation, which was not good: HUSKY, the Allied landings on Sicily, had begun on 10 July. The Italians were not putting up much effective resistance, and in fact it seemed very likely that Italy was going to throw in the towel in the near future.
Kluge was happy to recall Model, since his efforts in the Kursk salient were going nowhere and, as discussed later, the Red Army was exerting pressure on Army Group Center to the north. Manstein protested, since he believed that if he broke off combat the Soviets would simply hit him farther to the south, where Army Group South was more vulnerable. Hitler granted Manstein permission to keep on fighting, and the struggle on the southern flank of the Kursk salient went on for another six days, with the battle increasingly bogged down in driving rains until it fizzled out.
* That was the end of CITADEL. The Germans had lost about 100,000 men, with about a third of them killed, and Soviet losses were at least as great. However, the Red Army could afford such losses much better than the Germans. The Germans had lost too many panzers; they would never be able to rebuild their armored forces to adequate levels.
The battle of Kursk was, in a sense, the high point of the war in the East. Enormous battles lay ahead, but in the global reportage of the time and in histories afterward, they would not seem so prominent. Events elsewhere would steal headlines -- and besides, whatever the scale of operations conducted by the Red Army for the rest of the conflict, the outcome was an almost completely forgone conclusion: the Germans would be ground steadily down towards defeat. The number of German soldiers who had doubts of this inevitable outcome had passed the tipping point, and would increase in time until only the most fanatical and deluded could claim any hope of victory.
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