Published on 29 Feb 2016
Richard “the Challenger” Cutland, ex British tankie and military specialist at Wargaming, stops by to talk about the types of tanks involved in the Battle of Kursk! Early in Operation Barbarossa, the Germans didn’t expect much from their opponents. They did not know about the T-34 and KV-1 tanks, which turned out to be superior designs. The Germans deployed a special commission to study Soviet tank designs and soon introduced the Tiger, Panther, and Ferdinand tanks which Hitler believed were key to victory. The Panther in particular was now outclassing Soviet tanks, but it had giant mechanical issues and broke down frequently. The Soviets had produced a new T-43 model tank, but it was designed to tackle the old German Panzer IV and didn’t measure up well to the new German tanks. So they preferred to focus on the trusty T-34 tanks, which made up in speed and numbers what they lacked in range and firepower. The Kursk region also played to the Soviets’ advantage in Russia: the dust storms and mudfields hindered air support from the Luftwaffe and the advance of the Wermacht. Erich von Manstein, the German commander, decided not to advance. Instead he yielded ground to the Soviets in an attempt to lure them into overextending. He successfully caught them out at the First Battle of Kharkov, but even though the Soviets suffered heavy casualties there, it wasn’t enough to make a dent in their huge army. Manstein needed to do something more drastic. Both he and the Soviets recognized that the Soviet line had a weakness where it bulged out to defend the city of Kursk, making it an obvious target for the next stage of operations.
March 23, 2016
World War II: The Battle of Kursk – II: Preparations – Extra History
March 21, 2016
World War II: The Battle of Kursk – I: Operation Barbarossa – Extra History
Published on 15 Feb 2016
In June 1941, Nazi Germany launched an attack upon the Soviet Union. The German Reich had been building up forces along the Eastern Front for a long time, but the sudden aggression caught Soviet forces unprepared. Many troops were captured and the Germans quickly conquered territory from the Soviet states. But the Soviets reorganized, improved their communication structure, and pulled together a defense at Smolensk. Although they lost again, they critically slowed the German advance and halted their race towards Moscow. Instead, the Germans tried to lay siege at Leningrad, only to be struck themselves by insufficient supply lines and a brutal winter that claimed the lives of many soldiers. With that, the Wehrmacht withdrew and redirected its efforts towards Stalingrad. Josef Stalin refused to let them take any land “further than the Volga” in Russia, and mounted a stiff defense. Even when the Luftwaffe, the German air force, reduced the city to rubble, Soviet soldiers continued to wage war from the debris. Meanwhile, the Germans were so focused on their offensive that they let their defensive lines collapse, and in October 1942 the Soviets managed to surround and pin down the German 6th Army. Their commander refused surrender terms because he didn’t want to displease Adolf Hitler, but the 6th Army’s resistance inevitably collapsed in February 1943.
July 18, 2011
Soviet tank battles
I just picked up a copy of The Battle of Kursk by David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, based on a recommendation by Jim Dunnigan in his World War II Bookshelf. While any attempt to pick the top books about the Second World War is doomed to perpetual nit-picking by second-guessers and Monday Morning Quarterbacks, I’ve generally found the works he recommended to be worth reading.
Although I’ve read much about World War II, I haven’t read much about arguably the most critical part of the entire war: the gargantuan battles pitting the Soviet Red Army against Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Some of that is just sheer pig-headedness: I used to work for the biggest wargame store in Toronto, back when wargames meant cardboard counters, vast paper hexagonal maps, and charts and tables galore. The hardest of the hard-core gamers seemed to be either Napoleonic grognards (down to the secret stash of sabres and shakos in the gaming room) or even more dedicated junkies of the “Great Patriotic War”/”Operation Barbarossa”. Some of the latter were genuinely crazy, right down to the barely contained hints that “Hitler was just misunderstood”.
On the assumption that certain forms of craziness are contagious, I avoided most of the latter as much as I could, consistent with my duty to sell them the latest and greatest game involving their particular passion.
One day, perhaps in a fit of weakness, I allowed myself to get lectured by one of the fanatics about the details of the Battle of Kursk. The fan who felt the need to bend my ear was eager to impart information about some “famous battle” that turned out to have been a serious tactical miscalculation by a Soviet officer. The story, as he told it, had a very large formation of Soviet tanks “taking a shortcut” through a major minefield, resulting in many disabled/destroyed tanks and wounded or dead men. In the telling, this kind of thing could not be admitted as having happened without some enemy contact, so it was propagandized as being a major tank battle involving significant formations of German panzer troops and/or SS units (of whom, of course, the glorious defenders of the Motherland took a greater toll than they suffered themselves).
I’d heard a couple of variations of this story by this point, but none of them could name the general who led the formation, the location of the event, or the “battle” that was supposedly re-written for propaganda purposes.
Does this story ring a bell for anyone? I’d imagine if it had really happened in a way close to the way it was told to me, it would have been documented in great detail (especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, in that brief period that both the Soviet and the Nazi records were available to western researchers without direct censorship).
