Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of Kursk

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Dan explains Operation Citadel. In July and August of 1943, it was the last major attempt by the Nazis to turn the tide of the war in the East. Millions of soldiers and thousands of tanks would go head-to-head across the vast steppes around the Russian city of Kursk. The Soviets would emerge victorious from the bloody fighting and carry the momentum westwards, eventually reaching Berlin in 1945. So why did the Germans choose to undertake an offensive at Kursk? And how exactly did the Soviets manage to weather the storm?In this Explainer, Dan delves into the preparations for the battle and the fighting itself, drawing on first-hand accounts to bring us closer to this crucial turning point in the Second World War.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In Russia, there are three battlefields that have an almost sacred status,

known to every school child. The first is Golikovo, where Dmitry, Prince of Moscow, narrowly defeated the Mongol horde, or certainly elements of the Mongol horde, in 1380. The battle was close fought, left behind a field of corpses. It's said that they camped for days on the bones. His victory won him eternal fame and the very cool moniker Donskoy, meaning of the Don, because the battle was fought very near the banks of the Don. And after that battle, Mongol influence waned and the early Russian state could take shape. The second battle, perhaps better known in the West, is Bordino, just outside Moscow, where in 1812 Russian troops, headed by Marshal Kutuzov, slowed down Napoleon's mighty Grande Armée's invading force. The battle was something of a

stalemate, appallingly bloody, and the Russians ended up retreating from the battlefield, and a weakened Napoleon staggered into Moscow a few days later, but his army had been dealt a terrible blow. Again, that field was covered in corpses, shocking even those hard-bitten men who'd been at war nearly for a generation. The third of those sacred battlefields is Prokhorovka. It's one of the decisive clashes in what we now call the Battle of Kursk. The traditional interpretation in Russia says this is one of the largest, greatest armoured clashes in history, a moment which forced Hitler to call off his last significant offensive on the Eastern Front,

a turning point of the Second World War. Again, like the other two battles I mentioned, I think we're seeing something interesting and important about Russian military history and the memories that Russians have of past victories or clashes. The battlefield was scattered with burning vehicles, injured, wounded, screaming, dying, dead men. It's fascinating to study what battles the Jews to elevate, to celebrate, to remember. And all three of these battles have appalling casualties, massive sacrifice in common. It's as if we in Britain eulogised the Battle of the Somme rather than Agincourt, Towton and Passchendaele rather than Rorke's Drift and Trafalgar. Now, the exact numbers of tanks involved in Tanks Destroyed

has been challenged recently. You'll have heard the excellent Ben Waitley on the podcast. A little while ago, he came on to talk about the Panzers of Prokhorovka. He's just published the book as a result of his research, and I highly recommend that you go and get it. But it is clear that that traditional interpretation has some merit. The Battle of Prokhorovka and the wider Battle of Kursk, the giant clash at Kursk, was a terrible disappointment for the Wehrmacht. Its last large-scale offensive on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. And it made it very clear to

Hitler, to the generals, we know that because they've left accounts of it, it made it very clear that they knew there were going to be no more easy, dramatic, big victories on the Eastern Front like there had been over the Red Army in the first two years of the war. All that remained was a savage, attritional, grinding struggle that would lead eventually, inexorably, to the gates of Berlin itself. Kursk was fought 80 years ago this month. Nearly 4 million men took part, up to 20,000 tanks and armoured fighting vehicles, 70,000 large calibber guns, 10,000 aircraft. Kursk was hell. And this is its story. T-minus 10.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. It's the late winter of 1943. People will remember my episodes on Stalingrad earlier this year, a huge turning point in the Second World War. The catastrophic, hideous annihilation of Germany's, arguably its finest combat unit on the Eastern Front, a disaster that would see its once

unstoppable tank crews, its assault engineers, its veteran infantry either dead lying in shallow graves or staggering off in a blizzard to almost certain death in the winter snow to Russian camps. But actually, the situation was much worse for Germany than simply defeat in and around the city of Stalingrad. The Soviets had launched not one, but several mighty counterattacks. They had caved in the German front line right across south and central Russia. There were German forces in the Caucasus trying to secure the valuable oil fields, and they only just fled back into German-held territory before being cut off and avoiding a massive encirclement from Soviet troops. It appeared briefly in February and March that the entire German war effort on that eastern front might collapse. To deal with this, elite German units were thrown into action.

One of them was the SS Panzer Corps. It was made up of divisions that suffered terrible losses in 1941, early 1942, but they'd been withdrawn to the west. They'd been reconstituted as reinforced Panzergrenadier divisions, resupplied with the latest kit. In March, they were hurled into battle and they managed to stabilise the front line, particularly under the leadership of Manstein, one of Germany's most effective commanders. They actually retook some territory in eastern Ukraine. Battlefields are still being fought over today, including Kharkiv and Belgorod, which is just over the border in Russia. The German tanks in particular outclassed the Soviet T-34 tanks. The Soviets had giant numbers of these tanks. I've met veterans who served in

those tanks, and they told me that they were primitive, they were simple, but they loved them because they could fix them themselves. They required very little maintenance, and ultimately there were just plenty of them. However, they were massively outgunned by the German Panzer IV. And ultimately, there were just plenty of them. However, they were massively outgunned by the German Panzer IV. It fired a seven and a half centimetre shell through its long barrel that could penetrate T-34 armour. And there were new German tanks coming out. The Panzer VI with its 88mm gun.

They took an anti-aircraft gun designed to fire supersonic shells and hit aircraft thousands of feet above the Earth's surface. They basically stuck that on top of a tank. the Panzer VI, known as the Tiger. And the Tiger and the Panther tanks, essentially impenetrable to anything that a Soviet tank could fire at them. The Germans, at this point of the word, superior tactics. All their German tanks had two-way radios, which was not true of Soviet tanks. The command and control was excellent.

You could move them around the battlefield if you were a commander. They had fantastic optics in their turrets. They could see and target enemy tanks far more effectively, and their weapons were more accurate. And as a result, this desperate German holding action enabled the German army to survive in this part of the Southern Soviet Union. And then the spring mud came along. The thaw came along and turned the entire battlefield into mud. So there was a break while they waited for the ground to harden up. And the front lines hardened up too. And the front line had a curious feature in it. It had a bulge, a salient, it's what soldiers and military historians like to call it, A big bulge around 150 miles or so from north to south, but it extended 100 miles

into German lines from east to west. In the middle of that bulge was the city of Kursk. Now, bulges are very vulnerable because you have to keep troops in that bulge on the front line to protect that front line. But it means that your enemy, because of the nature of a bulge, are closer to your rear areas. If they launch an attack, they can pinch off, they can surround any troops in that bulge, and it's making the job of an attacking force much, much easier. And German planners knew this very well. Let's be clear. Let's zoom out for a second. In the spring of 1943, Germany had lost the Second World War. The Axis was over. They were finished. They were dead. I always think of the galaxy of crimes that Adolf Hitler committed, and indeed the Japanese government, but of the galaxy of crimes, genocide, monstrous destruction. Insisting on fighting a war that you had

absolutely no chance of winning for at least two years, the loss of millions and millions of lives for nothing is among the most tragic. There was no way that Germany could win a war against the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Americans, and all of their allies. The industrial, the demographic, just in terms of manpower, the material imbalance was simply astonishing by this point of the war. It would take a miracle to save Germany. A miracle. It would require the kind of miracle that ironically had saved Frederick the Great, a man who Hitler admired greatly during the Seven Years' War, when a Russian ruler had died and an eccentric, arguably mentally ill Russian ruler had taken over, who happened to have a fixation on Frederick the Great, switched sides and helped

him survive in the Seven Years' War. That was very unlikely to happen twice. Stalin was very unlikely to be replaced with a keen pro-Nazi leader of the Soviet Union. So failing that, Germany had few options in 1943. North Africa had fallen to the Allies. They were poised to invade Southern Europe, either Greece, the Balkans, southern France or Italy. The Battle Atlantic turned decisively against the Germans. In May 1943, the U-boat campaign was effectively called off, halted in that month after terrible losses. Japan was realising the full consequences of its insane decision to attack the United States and the Pacific as Japanese fleets and garrisons were reeling under the mighty hammer blows of the US Pacific fleet and the amphibious

forces attached. And Germany had no choice but to switch to the strategic defensive. In fact, in February 1943, Hitler stated that he was, quote, unable to undertake any large-scale operations this year, only small forays. And that bulge, that bulge in the Soviet line, was very tempting, like a ripe grape waiting to be picked off the vine. Senior German commanders envisaged a kind of defensive attack, a defensive strike against this bulge. It would eventually be known as Operation Citadel, and it was a strike against this Kursk salient. The plan was for the vaunted German armour to repeat their successes of 1941 and 1942 and launch deep penetrating thrusts through Soviet lines to meet up in a double envelopment and turn this bulge in the Soviet line

into an entirely surrounded pocket full of Soviet troops that would eventually then be killed, captured and reduced. On March the 13th, Hitler issued an operations order for this pincer attack to take place. The hope was for this double envelopment to surround and destroy five Soviet armies locked in this salient. This would inflict terrible losses on the Soviets and it might, it was hoped, disrupt their plans for their monstrous offensives that Hitler and his generals were in no doubt Stalin and Zhukov, his senior military commander, were planning for the spring and summer of 1943. It was a kind of pre-emptive strike. The northern arm of the pincer, striking down towards Kursk, was Army Group Centre's 9th Army. The southern arm would be Army Group South's 4th Panzer Army, with these new

re-equipped elite armoured divisions that I mentioned earlier. They'd still be commanded by the man who'd done much to stabilise the line earlier in the spring, Field Marshal Eric von new re-equipped elite armoured divisions that I mentioned earlier. They'd still be commanded by the man who'd done much to stabilise the line earlier in the spring, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who I mentioned before as well. This was not envisaged as the start of a great strategic thrust into central Russia. It was imagined it would last no more than about three weeks, and it would commence in the second half of April. So it'd be quick. It would throw the Soviets off balance for the rest of the summer. And that's what the objectives were. Throw the Soviets off balance, straighten the front line, which itself would mean less front line to cover. The shortest

distance between two points is a straight line. So if you've got a straight front line, you've got a shorter front line. And that means German troops could be removed from the Eastern Front and redeployed either to France, where the Germans were expecting Allied landings at any time, or Southern Europe, where they were also expecting an amphibious assault. The two-front war was coming to Europe and Germany knew it. The second objective was just try and weaken the Soviets before their avalanche-like assault in the summer of 1943. It's such a telling reflection on the paucity of German ambition that 1941, 1942, the idea was you might capture Moscow, advance deep into Asiatic Russia, taking thousands of miles of territory. Now you're talking about a three-week limited offensive

to just try and inflict casualties on the enemy that you now fear. And actually, it might have worked in that context, but it was delayed and it was delayed. Reconnaissance showed that the Soviets were building significant defences in the Kursk salient. And that meant that Hitler wanted to delay until more and more replenished units, more tanks, more of these new and better tanks could be delivered. And then you end up in a vicious cycle. Hitler was determined that his new weapons would make the difference. They'd be able to overcome these Soviet defences that they'd been spotted building, the Tiger and the Panther tanks. So he kept delaying the offensive to wait for these new tanks, which were required by the Soviet defences, which were getting stronger

the longer the op was delayed. It was all very circular. And by May, there's a huge meeting and people come together to try and work out what the heck they're going to do. Following this meeting, Heinz Guderian, one of the famous panzer commanders earlier in the war, who'd just been made the inspector of armoured troops, basically he was in charge of all training

and equipping new panzer forces, he took Hitler aside after this meeting about Kursk, and they had an extraordinary exchange. He believed that this operation would trash his new armoured force. He'd done so much to replenish and nurture. He needed that force in southern Europe, in Western Europe, to meet the Allies. He also needed it to meet the expected Soviet attacks of the summer. This was a misuse of his precious armour. You should not use armour, he believed, like a battering ram against carefully prepared defensive to smash your way into a defensive position. Armour should be unleashed

at points of opportunity where it can penetrate deep and range freely across the countryside, encircling and causing chaos. He believed his armour would be eviscerated on the anti-tank weapons of the prepared Soviet positions. He said to Hitler, is it really necessary to attack Kursk, indeed in the east this year at all? Do you not think anyone even knows where Kursk is? The entire world doesn't care if we capture Kursk or not. What is the reason that is forcing us to attack Kursk this year or even more on the Western Front? And Hitler apparently replied, I know. The thought of it turns my stomach. And Guderian said, in that case, your reaction to the problem is the correct one. Leave it alone. But Hitler was a gambler. Hitler needed victories, like a shark needing to keep oxygen over his gills

to defend, to sit back and fend off the blows of his enemies. It was simply not in his repertoire. He needed a miracle. He needed to recapture his old luck. He needed something to happen in the East, and so he gave Kirst the go-ahead. The cogs of the German war industry, battered by Allied bombing and material shortages, produced enough new tanks for Hitler to be satisfied that the operation could go ahead. A date was set for the 4th of July, and that was later delayed as well, giving the Russians even more time to repair. Friedrich von Mellenthin, he's the chief of staff of a German panzer corps, he would be involved in the fighting. He quipped, Independence Day for the United States, the beginning of the end for Germany.

In fact, it would begin the following day, on the 5th of July. Around 600,000 German troops, about 2 a half thousand tanks and mechanized guns and tank destroyers were available for the offensive is about three quarters of all German armor on the eastern front and they would be supported by 7,000 heavy guns unlike Hitler the German soldiers felt positive the great tragedy of young people at war, is they're not party to the cynical discussions of their commanders. They didn't know how awful Hitler, Guderian and others felt about it. They trained hard, they believed in each other and they believed in what they were told. Alfred Novotny was an Austrian, a Wehrmacht veteran. He was serving with the elite Grossdeutschland

Panzergrenadier Division, one of those divisions I mentioned earlier. He wrote later, we were totally convinced as soldiers that Kursk would turn the war around again in favour of Germany. We, the fusiliers and grenadiers, would do it. And a radio operator, Wilhelm Russ in a Tiger tank, wrote that nobody will be able to resist this might. We were so confident of winning as we had always done before. It was a dead certainty for all of us. There was indeed a dead certainty for German armour on the Eastern Front, but it was a very different fate to the one that Wilhelm Russ had imagined. The Soviets, well, they knew it was coming. The British had warned them, sort of officially, and also the British

had unofficially warned them through the Soviet spy John Cancross, who was at Bletchley Park intercepting German communications. He'd sent the Soviets detailed plans as to the expected German assault. And this time, unlike in Operation Barbarossa, when Stalin ignored warnings from Britain and elsewhere, this time the Soviets listened. They dragooned over 300,000 civilians into service. They were put to work. They dug massive anti-tank ditches. They erected mighty barbed wire obstacles. They sewed hundreds of thousands of mines in minefields. They built deep entrenchments for infantry and they built concrete emplacements, machine gun bunkers, mortar pits. They built not one, not two, but three defensive belts and fullback positions beyond that. The combined depth, we think, of these three defensive belts

was about 25 miles. Even if the Germans managed to break through these three defensive belts, there were additional defences built east, which meant that there were defences to a depth of more than 150 miles. The Soviets built 6,000 miles of trenches and around 1,000 miles of roads to facilitate reinforcements and resupply moving around the pocket and behind it. On the Soviet side too, there was an extraordinary number of men, around a quarter of the Red Army, over a million men, ready to meet the German onslaught. Now, as you've been hearing a lot with Ukraine at the moment, it's often said that an attacking force needs a three-to-one numerical advantage to defeat the enemy, but Soviet defenders enjoyed at least a two-to-one advantage over the attacking Germans. The Soviets had around 5,000 tanks in and around the pocket, perhaps half the tanks

of the Red Army at the time. This would be a titanic clash. The Germans knew a reasonable amount about the defences that they faced. The Waffen-SS had built a full-scale duplicate of Soviet strongpoints. They used to practice techniques for neutralising these positions. Troops were well prepared, they were reasonably well equipped at the start of this campaigning season. as we've heard, believe that after an appalling winter, this was a chance to take the German army back to those winning ways, potentially win this dreadful, elongated war on the Eastern Front. Perhaps their road home led through Kursk. At 5am on the 6th of July 1943, 80 years ago, there was a gigantic artillery bombardment. It lasted 80 minutes in the northern sector, about 50 minutes in the southern sector. And as soon as that barrage was complete, Soviet positions smashed, barbed wire churned up, troops killed, discombobulated, the ground force attacked. As they started pushing through those minefields,

close air support was provided by the Luftwaffe, Stuka dive bombers, for example, screaming down in steep dive to drop bombs on surviving Soviet units that were holding out and holding back the German advance. As the Germans moved forward, within seconds, they discovered that gone were the days of punching through substandard defences and quick advances into the open countryside beyond. To the north of the Salient, let's talk about them first, there was the German 9th Army. They actually relied on infantry more than tanks. Their tanks were being hoarded. The commander of the German 9th Army was terribly worried about the Soviet counterattacks, and he actually kept back his tanks, either to exploit breakthrough or to deal with the expected Soviet counterattack. And so infantry moved forward in large numbers,

took a long time to clear the minefields. The minefields were deeper and more expansive than the Germans had realised. And by the end of the day, they had managed to punch through one of those three defensive belts. They've ground their way around six miles into enemy territory. The accounts of this fighting are horrific. Alfred Novotny recalls that the first hours of the Kursk offensive still cause flashbacks 50 odd years later. Sometimes I think I can hear the incredible loud noise of the German weapons. Flak, artillery, mortars, Stukas, Nebelwerfers. I cannot forget the endless, terrible rain. Rain and more rain. We were totally drenched, heavily laden down with equipment, knee-deep in mud all around us. A Soviet machine gunner, Mikhail Petrik, recalls that we had the enemy pinned down, but there was little cover and they tried to attack.

Every time they moved, we shot them. A small pile of casualties grew. But then we saw they had a mortar and before I could open fire, we'd been hit. The mortar round knocked me unconscious and in so doing saved my life. When I came round that evening, my partner was dead, and I was covered in blood from a bad head wound. I was a mess, deaf, confused, unable to stand. Despite this, I can still recall the mixture of damp earth, cordite, and blood which filled my nostrils as I assessed my situation. Clearly the Germans had passed us, thinking us both dead. That evening, having gathered myself, I headed through the German lines into the arms of my

comrades where I was patched up, given a rifle and sent to a trench. I did not last long. It was only hours later that I collapsed again. A shard of metal, had unknown to me, entered my neck from the mortar. My battle was over. And I think that's how we have to imagine this period of the battle. Savage, small unit engagements like that. Strong points overcome eventually by flanking movements or bringing up mortars, pouring indirect fire on them, calling in an airstrike or tank support, then grinding it on, moving on just perhaps a few yards to the next strong point and having to reduce that as well. All the time, Soviet artillery based a little bit further back, just pouring down a hail of hot steel and high explosives on the attacking forces caught out in

the open. Von Mellenthin, who I mentioned before, attacked in the south and he said, the Russians reacted to our plans exactly as we had expected. They fortified likely sectors, built several lines of resistance, converted important tactical points into miniature fortresses. The area was studded with minefields. They converted it into another Verdun. He believed that the German army had sort of thrown away its advantage, its mobile tactics, its ability to respond, to pivot and punch. Instead, it was now fighting the Russian army on ground of their own choosing. He writes, instead of seeking to create conditions in which manoeuvre would be possible, the German supreme command could think of nothing better than fling our magnificent panzer divisions at Kursk, which had become the strongest fortress in the world.

In the north, by the 10th of July, it was clear the Germans had been stopped in their tracks. They just did not have the strength to break through the remaining fortifications. They were bogged down in extensive, nightmarish Soviet defences. The village of Poniris famously saw savage house-to-house fighting. It became known as the mini-Stalingrad for people unlucky enough to be thrown in there. Von Mellenten again writes that the Russian high command conducted the Battle of Kursk with great skill, yielding ground occasionally, taking the sting out of our offensive with an intricate system of minefields and anti-tank defences. The commander of the northern thrust, Field Marshal Modal, came under huge pressure to send in his armoured reserves,

send in his tanks. He was loathe to do this because, remember, he knew that Soviet counter-offensive was coming. And he also did not want his precious armoured reserve to be worn down in appalling fighting, such as that being reported on the front lines. He called a halt and a reorganisation on the 10th, and he told High Command that he would reorganise and send in his panzers on the 12th of July in two days time but perhaps he knew that that attack would never come. His plans drawn up on the hoof would be discarded just as quickly. You listen to Dan Snow's history don't go anywhere there's more to come.

I'm James Patton Rogers a war historian advisor, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week, every week, as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the ones shaping our future. We talk to award-winning journalists. ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We hear from the people who were actually there. The Sudanese have been incredible. They have managed to get supplies to people, to individuals who are suffering. And we learn from the remarkable historians shining a light on forgotten histories. For the most part, the millions of people who were taken to those camps

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don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. To the south, von Manstein's 4th Panzer Army did better. He did use more of his tanks up front. They were slowed down by mud and minefields, but by the end of day one they had smashed through one belt of defences. Again, close air support was vital and the Soviets launched suicidal counterattacks, waves of T-34 tanks beaten off again and again. But on each occasion, they did buy a little more time for the Soviets to respond to this German thrust. The experience for those men in those Soviet tanks must have been awful. One crewman, Anatoly Volkov, left an account. The noise, heat, smoke and dust

of battle were extremely trying. Despite wearing protectors, my ears were extremely painful from the constant firing of the gun. The atmosphere was choking. I was gasping for breath with perspiration running in streams down my face. It is a physically and mentally difficult business being in a tank battle. We expected to be killed at any second and were so surprised after a couple of hours of battle that we were still fighting, still breathing. One T-34 captain, simply known as Captain Skripkin, was in a Soviet tank that caught fire. He was wounded and pulled out of the machine by his driver, Sergeant Nikolayev, and a radio operator, Zhuranov. They all took cover in a crater,

and then a German tank started moving towards them. A lot of Soviets said that every tank they saw on the battlefield was a Tiger, I think partly because of the reputation of the Tiger, also partly because some of the Panzermarkt IVs had built up armour on the turret, so they sort of looked a bit more like tigers. And apparently Nikolayev and then a loader, Chernov, jumped back into the burning tank, started it, and sent it right towards the German vehicle, and both tanks exploded in the collision.

The concern was so great here on the southern front that Stalin authorised the sending of the Strategic Reserve. So vast numbers of new, fresh men and tanks headed to the front. And through the 8th of August, these men were thrown into battle, pell-mell, complete lack of coordination, which actually in the end possibly benefited the Soviet side because the attacks came so randomly, so thick and fast on the Germans that they were almost bewildered. The Soviet 2nd Guards Tank Corps north of Belgorod, and people will remember the name Belgorod. It's the place where those

Ukrainian-backed Russian insurgents ran across the border and sowed chaos around about a month ago. So just north of there, 80 years ago, the Soviets were moving a large number of tanks through some woods, but they were picked up by German air reconnaissance. So before they even reached German positions, they were annihilated in a German ground attack. German aircraft with anti-tank cannons mounted under their wings, something like 50 tanks were destroyed in that unit. And it's written up as the first time in military history that attacking tank formation had been defeated by air power alone. It would certainly not be the last as the Germans would discover their cost in the battles in Normandy. Through the 8th of July, you get a series of these suicide blood attacks. The landscape

littered with burning vehicles, grotesque twisted steel structures, guns, trucks and fighting vehicles were torn apart by high explosives and the ground around them would have been littered with corpses, many of them charred having been burned alive in these vehicles. The German advance was held up by the sheer weight of advancing Soviet men and army. You've got two sides both intent on attacking here and that process would reach a climax a day or two later. By the 9th of July the following day the Germans have ground forward. They are enmeshed in that third belt of Soviet defences. They have almost fought their way through those three notorious belts. The Soviet front facing them had lost over a thousand tanks and assault guns since the battle started, and yet they were able

to replenish those numbers. They were able to replace those vehicles astonishingly quickly. On the evening of the 9th, something happened far away that would shape the outcome of the Battle of Kursk, indeed the fighting on the Eastern Front. On the evening of the 9th or 10th of July, the Allies successfully landed in Sicily. This was the first time that Allied boots had hit the ground of an Axis home country. The second front in Europe had been opened up. And immediately Hitler responded by announcing that he intended to take troops away from the Eastern Front, away from the Battle of Kursk, and reinforce Axis troops in southern Italy. That's the backdrop of the clash at Prokhorovka, which took place

on the 12th of July. This is seen as the climax of the Battle of Kursk. It's certainly remembered that way in the Soviet Union and Russiak. It's certainly remembered that way in the Soviet Union and Russia today. You have a situation in which the 5th Guards Army of the Soviet Red Army had been held in reserve. They launched themselves headlong in a kind of death ride at the 2nd SS Panzer Corps of the German Waffen-SS, all under the command of Manstein, still pushing ahead, desperately trying to break through those southern defences of the Kursk salient. It's again this day on which both sides are hoping to aggressively advance, and that energy was released in the form of gigantic destruction at the front line, a meat grinder. The Soviets threw something like five tank brigades into the battle,

around 600 fighting vehicles, smashing headlong into advancing Germans. At around 8am that day, a Soviet artillery barrage opened up trying to soften up German positions. Half an hour later, the 5th Guards Tank Army Commander Lieutenant General Pavel Rostmistrov radioed his tankers, steel, steel, steel. That was the code word, the order to advance. And incredibly close quarters tank battles followed. One of the commanders of the Panzermarkt IV, Ribbentrop, whose father was Hitler's foreign secretary, he was a panzer commander on the Eastern Front, highly decorated. And he describes that day, what I saw left me speechless. From beyond the shallow rise, about 150, 200 metres

in front of me, appeared 15, then 30, then 40 tanks. Finally, there were too many to count. The T-34s were rolling forward towards us at high speed, carrying mounted infantry. That means soldiers just clinging to the outside of the tank, using them as shuttles to get into battle. Ribbentrop says, soon the first round was on its way and with its impact, the T-34 began to burn. So the Soviet plan was that they sort of overcome German advantages in armour with speed and dash. And that proved to be a death sentence for many of those crews and many of the infantry clinging to the outside. The Germans have got fewer tanks. Yes, they might be slightly better, but the Soviets thought, well, we can just rush them. Our tanks are expendable,

our crews are expendable, and we've got plenty of them. And there's plenty more where that came from. A T-34 tank commander, Vasily Bruikov that day, is 19 years old. And he recalls that the distance between the tanks was below 100 meters. It was impossible to maneuver a tank. One could just jerk it back and forth a bit. It wasn't a battle, it was a slaughterhouse of tanks. We crawled back and forth and fired. Everything was burning. An indescribable stench hung in the air over the battlefield. Everything was enveloped in smoke, dust and fire. So it looked as if it was twilight. Tanks were burning. Trucks were burning. Tanks were burning. Trucks were burning. The two tank forces just came to a kind of gridlock and battered each other at arm's length. Pavel Rotmistrov, the commander of the Soviet tanks,

recalls smoke and dust swirled all over the battlefield. The earth shook from the powerful blasts. Tanks struck each other and, having grappled, could not cut themselves loose and fought to the death or until one of them flashed a light or came to a halt with broken tracks. Tanks that had been knocked out, but whose weapons were still functioning, however, continued to fire. For some reason, it sort of reminds me of the Battle of Trafalgar, these giant warships crashing into each other and firing at each other,

with their muzzles almost touching until one of the crews was so debilitated they couldn't continue to fight the battle. You have to imagine a field packed full of these rumbling armoured beasts blasting each other. Soviet armour suffered terribly that day, contrary to the myth perpetrated, I think, by the Soviets during and after the Second World War. But the Germans weren't able to take advantage of their destruction of these Russian tanks, these Russian T-34s, because they themselves were so shocked by the impetus of the attack, they were sort of fought to a standstill. And when they did try to advance, they did come up against anti-tank ditches and brilliantly located Soviet artillery that just poured fire down on the

battlefield, carefully calibrated fire, pre-prepared because the Soviets had time to reconnoiter this ground. And it was that artillery and those rockets, I think, that did for the German advance eventually. That Soviet commander again, Rokhnistrov, describes a cyclone of fire unleashed by artillery and rocket launchers that swept the entire front of the German defences. And at the end of the day, the Germans had indeed been fought to a standstill, and that meant it was a Soviet victory. There was no breakout. Hitler already had his eye on southern Italy. He was not keen to pour more resources into this battle, which seemed to be progressing ever slower. Now, Ben Waitley, who I mentioned at the start of this battle, which seemed to be progressing ever slower.

Now, Ben Waitley, who I mentioned at the start of this podcast, has done astonishingly impressive archival research, I should go and buy his book, The Panzers of Prokofka. He's discovered that the inventory made of German armoured units, and he's actually discovered that only something like 3% of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps were destroyed between the 11th and 20th of July. That includes the Battle of Prokhorovka. And in fact, at that point, there was still a decent recovery and logistics operation in the German army. And so broken down vehicles, vehicles that went unserviceable, were able to be dragged back and refurbished and repaired. And in the days that followed the battle, he thinks something like 88% of the pre-Operation Citadel complemented tanks were still in the possession of the Germans. And he analyzes, he goes down even

further, he analyzes the actual units that took part in the battle of Prokhorovka. And he thinks that those units, they lost perhaps 12% of their vehicles on that day. So Prokhorovka was a Soviet victory, but it was not a comprehensive destruction of German armour as it's often been portrayed in Soviet and Russian history. That, though, would come through the rest of the summer and the autumn. The following day, the Germans licked their wounds. They realised that they'd struggled to break through these anti-tank defences and this savage artillery. They also realised that the Soviets still had many more T-34s they were prepared to throw into battle. So the Germans admitted reluctantly that they would be unable to advance any further on that axis. And that's effectively

the high waterline of the Germans in this battle and for the rest of the war on the Eastern Front. The Germans faced stalemate at best on the battlefield. Hitler was wrestling with a big strategic threat of Allied troops landing in Italy. And on the 12th, the day of Prokhorovka, there was another hammer blow. 3,000 Soviet tanks and assault guns were launched against that northern force. That counter-attack that the commander in the north I mentioned he was nervous about, it happened. The Soviets smashed into his flanks. The Germans at that point had around 234 operational tanks and assault guns, so they were outnumbered 10 to 1. the field marshal who'd fought Napoleon to a standstill at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. So an echo on one battlefield of a previous great Russian military moment. Within hours, within days, they were threatening the entire rear position of that German strike in the north. And it was very clear that there would be no further gains made in the north. In fact,

the Germans would be fighting desperately just to avoid making a significant retreat. Again, Operation Kutsuzov saw heavy Soviet losses, but those losses could be replaced. On the 13th of July, the following day, after the stalemate at Prokhorovka, after the launch of that Soviet counterattack in the north, Hitler himself summoned Manstein. He summoned him to his eastern front headquarters known as the Wolf's Lair. He told them in non-certain terms that Operation Citadel was to be abandoned, the triple whammy of the failure at Prokhorovka, Sicily and Operation Kutuzov meant that there was no way he could continue the offensive.

Manstein was appalled. He begged Hitler to let him launch another assault. He still said he had uncommitted reserves. He believed he could surround and destroy some Soviet units. Again, look how small these ambitions are now. There is no suggestion that you can conduct a war-winning offensive on the Eastern Front. They've given up even trying to encircle Soviet forces in Kursk. He's now reduced to arguing that he can encircle and cut off some slightly more isolated Soviet forces that are vulnerable to his advance. Hitler gave permission for Manstein to carry out some small advances, but at the same time he did take away key units to bolster Italian morale and defences. Hitler was also worried his next problem, and he was right to worry about this, was in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. The economic riches of Ukraine, the resources of Ukraine, were far more important, Hitler believed, to defend

than Manstein's promises that he could cut off and destroy some more Soviet units. destroy some more Soviet units. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hitler did concede and Manstein was allowed to launch something called Operation Roland. It commenced in the early hours of the 14th of July. It made

some advances, but it proved indecisive for the Germans. And as that was happening, vital panzer units were being withdrawn and sent to Italy, and the remainder very quickly switched to the defensive. The Battle of Kirst was really over by mid-July. The Soviets had weathered the storm, and the Germans had expended irreplaceable men, vehicles and material in trying to smash their way through impenetrable defences. Kursk, if you like, comes to an end at that point, but the fighting doesn't. That counter-attack in the north continues and the Soviets make big gains. Then in the south, the inevitable counter-attack came. Operation Romanstiev was launched on the 3rd of August. This had been intended to be the major Soviet offensive for 1943. They'd regrouped,

they'd replenished after Operation Citadel, and they started crashing through German lines in early August. They recaptured Belgagrad by the 5th. By the 12th of August, they'd reached the outskirts of Kharkov and they liberated it completely on the 23rd after appalling urban combat, great huge losses of armour and infantry. The Germans found themselves in the miserable position. Having failed in their summer offensive, they were now conducting a desperate fighting retreat. And that retreat would accelerate.

And this is really where you see those vaunted panzer units utterly destroyed, because as they're retreating, they're unable to rescue vehicles that are broken down or lost a track on the battlefield, vehicles that might conceivably be repairable. The entire logistical system is breaking down under the pressure as German troops fall back, organisation starts to crumble. And through the autumn, rather than one great battle at Prokhorovka, which destroys the panzers, there's a slow, savage, attritional falling off of panzer numbers through the rest of the year. I'll come to the rest of the year in a second, but let's quickly look at some of the statistics from the Battle of Kursk. The Germans

had thrown everything at it. They hadn't even break through Soviet lines. They'd broken into Soviet positions, but not through them. They'd advanced several miles in a day, rather than a few dozen that they might have expected just the year before. It was a catastrophic indication of the balance of fighting power, of equipment, of resolve that now existed on the Eastern Front. The Red Army probably lost around 200,000 men during the German assault phase of Kirst. Nearly three quarters of a million would be lost in the counterattacks that followed, perhaps to the end of August. It's always hard on the Eastern Front to be sure about these numbers.

The Red Army lost 6,000 tanks. Several units lost 100% of their pre-battle tank strength. They were just sacrificed to stop the German advance in its tracks. We think the Germans lost around 55,000 casualties in their assault phase, another 100,000 as the Soviets then launched offensives of their own. As I say, during the Battle of Kursk itself, according to Ben Waitley, the Germans probably only lost around 200 tanks, but many, many more were to follow. Let me just briefly summarise what happened next, because the autumn and winter of 1943 was a time of almost total destruction for German force on the Eastern Front. It's frankly amazing they managed to cling on and fight for another almost two years. A million men attacked through

the Donbass in August, very much on the same battlefields that are being fought over in eastern Ukraine today. German reserves and their best armour and things were up in the north near Kursk, and the Soviets made a strong advance along that north shore of the Black Sea. They reached a little place called Mariupol that people might be familiar with by the end of summer. Two million men followed up that attack and crashed towards the Dnieper through September through to Christmas, one of the largest offensives in the history of the world thus far. Massive attacks were launched in the north towards Smolensk in Belarus and Bryansk in August and September. By the 23rd, the Soviets managed to cross the river Dnieper, winter crossing Dnieper, terrifying on the

assistance of Stalin. They'd lost over one and a half million men. The German Army Group South, by the end of that year, had just over 300,000 men available, plus another 100,000 men, mostly very reluctant men, in Allied units or forced units made up of Soviets who had been pressed. By the end of that year, Manstein's Army Group South had only 200 operational tanks. And that is why Kursk is often listed as one of the great turning points of the Second World War to kill on the Eastern Front. It was the last time that well-equipped German forces were able to launch a major ambitious offensive on the Eastern Front. It didn't stand much chance of winning the war, but it was a huge threat to the Soviet forces opposite them. After Kursk, there would be only retreats. General Heinz Guderian, I mentioned at the start,

he's in charge of German armour at this point of the war, said that with the failure of Operation Sitzel we have suffered a decisive defeat. The armoured formations, reformed and re-equipped with so much effort, had lost heavily in both men and equipment and would now be unemployable for a long time to come. It was problematical whether they could be rehabilitated in time to defend the Eastern Front. Needless to say, the Soviets exploited their victory to the full. There were no more periods of quiet on the Eastern Front. From now on, the enemy was in undisputed possession of the initiative. On the Soviet side, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who actually would end up becoming the chief of the initiative. On the Soviet side, Alexander Vasilevsky, who actually would end up becoming the chief of the general staff of the Soviet army, but who'd been an important staff officer during the Battle of Kursk, coordinating some of the

Soviet efforts. He wrote, as a result of the Kursk battle, the Soviet armed forces dealt the enemy a buffeting from which Nazi Germany was never to recover. The big defeat at the Kursk Bulge was the beginning of a fatal crisis for the German army. Thank you for listening, everybody. We'll be marking many of these big 80th anniversaries of the Second World War battles and events. So make sure you subscribe. Thank you very much.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.