Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [129]
Kursk was the greatest tank battle in the war. The Germans used nearly 3,000 tanks, the Russians about the same number. In the southern part of the pincer, under General Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army, nine of the best divisions in the Wehrmacht, massed along a short thirty miles of front. It was blitzkrieg on a massive scale. But it was still the same old thing, and the Russians, with their larger numbers, had now learned how to handle it. The new tanks were a disappointment; the Panthers burned too easily. The Tigers were stronger but their defensive armament was limited; they were the dreadnoughts of the tank era. When they outsurvived or outpaced the smaller tanks who acted virtually as escorts, the Russians were all over them. Proof against anti-tank guns, they were defenseless against Russian infantry who clambered over the still-moving monsters, squirted flamethrowers in their vents, and dropped grenades down their hatches. The Russian artillery never let up, and the Russian tanks proved as good as and better than the Germans. Operation Citadel, as the Germans called Kursk, marked the graveyard of the great Panzer armies. The German mobile forces never recovered their verve after that.
If Kursk did not use up the Germans’ last reserves, it definitely weakened them for the battles to come. The Russians were now free to attack as they chose and they alternated blows from one end of the line to the other. A variety of appealing choices lay open to them. In the north they were on the point of driving back into the Baltic states and eventually to East Prussia; in the center they could move toward Poland and Germany itself; and in the south they could head for the Balkans and the fulfillment of the age-old Russian dream of closing up on the Dardanelles. They chose to do all three.
In the fall they hit Manstein’s Army Group South. The Germans hoped to hold the line of the Dnieper River down to its bend, and then across country to Melitopol, which would secure their access to the Crimea. Instead, the Russians pushed them back to the river along its whole length, and the end result was the isolation of the German 17th Army in the Crimea. That was by the end of November. Farther north the Russians had taken Kiev, and were pushing south of the Pripet Marshes. The fall rains and effective German defensive tactics slowed them down, and at last the Wehrmacht got a chance to catch its breath.
It was no more than a slim chance, though. In January of 1944 the Russians shifted their attention northward and set off an offensive near Leningrad. This had been quiet since last spring, and the Germans were weak and unprepared. In February the Germans were back in Estonia, around Lake Peipus, where Alexander Nevsky had defeated the Teutonic Knights in 1242.
As if to show that they had a plethora of men and matériel and could do whatever they pleased whenever they pleased, the Russians then returned their attention to the south. In January the battles began again. The Dnieper Line was gone, and in March the Russians crossed the Bug, rolling toward the Rumanian frontier. In April they put massive forces into the Crimea. Hitler wanted it held; from the Crimea, Russian bombers could reach the Rumanian oil fields. But by May the last of the Germans there were gone, most saved by sea, as the Russian