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By Root 1499 0

and Speer spoke out against Zitadelle, Zeitzler and Kluge enthusiastically in its favour, and Manstein stated that it was hard to say whether its moment had not passed. Only a hundred Panthers had been delivered to the front, despite Speer having promised 324 by the end of May. Nonetheless, 13 June was agreed as the date the operation would take place. A week later a famous exchange took place between Hitler and Guderian, when the Inspector-General asked, ‘My Führer, why do you want to attack in the East at all this year?’ and Hitler replied: ‘You are quite right. Whenever I think of this attack, my stomach turns over.’11 Although Keitel believed that Germany needed to attack Kursk, which was by then one of the best-defended fortresses in the world, out of prestige, Guderian pointed out that few people had even heard of the city.12 As Keitel ought to have learnt from Stalingrad, prestige is rarely a good enough reason for conducting a military operation.

Meanwhile, at the end of April the Stavka had sent Zhukov to the city to assume day-to-day control of the battle, always a sign that Stalin took a particular front extremely seriously. Zhukov had sent a report warning about the salient’s vulnerability on 8 April, but had persuaded Stalin not to follow his initial instinct of striking first. Writing to Stalin (codenamed Comrade Vasil’ev), Zhukov (codenamed Konstantinov) said: ‘I consider it inexpedient for our forces to mount a preventative offensive in the near future. It will be better if we wear out the enemy in our defence, destroy his tanks, and then, having introduced fresh reserves, by going over to an all-out offensive, we will finish off the enemy’s main grouping.’13 That was the plan the Stavka adopted, and it was substantially what was to happen.

Marshal Alexandr Vasilevsky went down to Kursk with Zhukov and together they easily spotted that the Schwerpunkt for the Germans was going to be the point between Belgorod and Kursk defended by Vatutin’s Voronezh Front, which they reinforced with the Twenty-first and Sixty-fourth Armies (renamed the Sixth and Seventh Guards Armies) that had been blooded at Stalingrad, and one of the best Soviet tank formations, the First Armoured Army. To the north, Rokossovsky’s Central Front was massively reinforced as well, until it consisted of no fewer than five infantry armies. As well as the 1.3 million men under Vatutin and Rokossovsky, leaving nothing to chance Zhukov created a half-million-man Stavka Reserve Force under General Ivan Konev, later called the Steppe Front, consisting of five tank armies, several tank and mechanized corps and a number of infantry divisions.14 This front was, in the view of one historian of the Eastern Front, ‘the most powerful reserve accumulated by the Soviet Union at any time during the war’.15 If for any reason the Germans did manage to pinch off the salient, it would be able to form an entirely new front, preventing them from exploiting their victory eastwards.

With the attack postponed yet again from 13 June, by early July the Germans faced a forbidding task. In some sectors of the Russian defence, artillery regiments outnumbered infantry by five to one, with more than 20,000 guns trained on the oncoming Wehrmacht. These included over 6,000 anti-tank guns of 76.2mm calibre and 920 Katyusha multiple rocket launchers. Furthermore the cannon and armour-piercing bombs of Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft posed a mortal peril for the German tanks. By employing the entire civilian population of the Kursk region, as well as the Army, 3,000 miles of trenches were dug, and ‘countless miles of barbed wire and obstacles, some of which were electrified’, put in place, along with automatic flame-throwers.16 Overall, around 2,700 German tanks – more heavily armed and usually of higher-calibre weaponry – faced around 3,800 Russian. But it was down to the German tanks – as well as the huge Ferdinand self-propelled assault guns (Sturmgeschütze) – to try to break through the formidable Soviet defences. ‘The main defensive zones were three to four miles deep,