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By Root 1151 0

Stalin’s armies suffered a relentless haemorrhage of deserters, many of them “Eldash” or “Youssefs”—Asians. Nikolai Belov recorded his own battalion’s losses on 13 June 1943: “Two more men have deserted to the enemy, making a total of eleven, most of them Eldash.” Red Army statistics showed 1,964 of its soldiers deserting to the enemy in April 1943, 2,424 in May, 2,555 in June. The usual penalties were imposed on those caught making such an attempt. Belov wrote of one execution: “Today a Youssef was shot in front of the unit for trying to desert to the Germans. Creepy feeling.” On 2 June he recorded laconically: “Two more men tried to desert today. Luckily they got blown up on mines and were dragged back.” Like many Red officers, he felt able to rely only on his own racial group, writing after reinforcements reached the unit: “They are greenhorns, born 1926. Such youngsters. But what is good about them is that they are well-trained and all of them Russian. These men won’t desert.”

The enemy had his own morale problems. Belov was astonished to learn from a neighbouring unit that two Wehrmacht soldiers, one of them a sergeant, had surrendered. “This is the first time I’ve heard of Germans coming over to us. Their lives are not so good, then.” Capt. Pavel Kovalenko had the same experience on 31 March: “A German deserter appeared completely out of the blue. There was a knock at the door. ‘Who is there? Come in!’ The door opened and a Fritz appeared. Everyone grabbed their guns. He took out a gold watch and gave it to one soldier, handed a gold ring to another, his rifle to a third. Then he raised his hands. He is from Westphalia, a coal miner, aged twenty-two. His father had told him to desert.”

But some Germans did not despair, even when they fell into Russian hands. Nikolai Belov cited the example of a prisoner brought in by his reconnaissance platoon, “a big fellow of twenty-two. Where do these scoundrels get such youths from? He said that they will launch an offensive in a month, and want to finish the war this year. Germany will of course win.” Hitler scraped together reinforcements which enabled him by June 1943 to deploy in Russia just over 3 million German troops. He acknowledged that a general offensive remained impracticable, but insisted on a single massive thrust. His attention focused upon the bulge in the Soviet front west of a monosyllabic place-name that would enter the legend of warfare: Kursk. The scale of the eastern conflict is emphasised by the fact that the salient was almost as large as the state of West Virginia, nearly half the size of England. It featured some low hills and contained many ravines and streams, but most of the region was open steppe—dangerous ground for a tank advance against effective antitank fire. Underground iron-ore deposits caused wild compass variations, but this scarcely mattered when neither side had cause for uncertainty concerning the whereabouts of the enemy.

For the Kursk attack, Hitler concentrated much of the combat power of the Wehrmacht, together with three fresh SS panzer divisions, 200 of his new Tiger tanks and 280 Panthers. Yet the limited scope of Citadel, as his operation was code-named, contrasted with the sweeping offensives of 1941 and 1942 and emphasised Hitler’s diminished means. The Russians readily identified the threat, aided by detailed intelligence provided by their Swiss-based “Lucy” spy ring. At a key Kremlin meeting on 12 April, Stalin’s generals persuaded him to allow the Germans to take the initiative. They were content for the panzers to impale themselves on a defence in depth, before the Red Army counterattacked. Through spring and early summer, Soviet engineers laboured feverishly to create five successive lines studded with minefields, bunkers and trenches, supported by massive deployments of armour and guns. They massed 3,600 tanks against the attackers’ 2,700; 2,400 aircraft against the Luftwaffe’s 2,000; and 20,000 artillery pieces—twice the German complement. Some 1.3 million Russians faced 900,000 Germans.

Manstein, commanding Army Group