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By Root 1543 0

Line head-on in 1940, rather than skirting around it. Like Napoleon, who by the time of Borodino no longer cared about the lives of his men, too many decision-makers at OKW – principally of course Hitler himself – had given up worrying about how to husband troop numbers. A Materialschlacht (war of attrition) was precisely what the Germans had to avoid after Stalingrad, but it was what they got with their constant postponements of Zitadelle. Before Hitler kept putting off the attack, Kursk was an undefended town set in hundreds of miles of virgin countryside; by the time it took place it was indeed a citadel.

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The ‘bad news’ of the death of the Polish Prime Minister General Sikorski as well as his liaison officer, the Tory MP Victor Cazalet, in a plane crash at Gibraltar was broken to the War Cabinet by Churchill on 5 July 1943. Portal reported that the Czech pilot was still alive, but it was ‘impossible to say at the moment what happened’ beyond the fact that it was a ‘very serious loss to Poland and to us’. Churchill said it was the ‘Moment [for the Poles] to try and patch it up with the R[ussians]’, but the Minister Resident in the Middle East, the Australian diplomat Richard Casey, thought General Anders, though a good soldier, had ‘no political sense’ and so was unlikely to do this. ‘I’ll say something in the House,’ said Churchill, ‘quite out of the ordinary.’24 The fact that the War Cabinet privately thought Sikorski’s death a blow implies that the conspiracy theory that SIS had assassinated him (along with a Conservative MP) is absurd.

‘Soldiers of the Reich!’ read the Führer’s message to his troops for Zitadelle on Monday, 5 July 1943. ‘This day you are to take part in an offensive of such importance that the whole future of the war may depend on its outcome. More than anything else, your victory will show the whole world that resistance to the power of the German Army is hopeless.’25 Although probing attacks did begin on the afternoon of 4 July, the main German assault in the south was not finally unleashed until 05.00 the next day, and in the north half an hour later. The Russians had already heard from a Czech deserter from an engineering battalion of LII Army Corps that all ranks had been issued with a five-day schnapps and food ration, so the Germans did not even enjoy the advantage of tactical surprise. The Lucy spy ring operating from Switzerland had also furnished the Stavka with reasonably accurate reports of German capabilities and intentions, as did Ultra decrypts from Bletchley Park delivered in a suitably opaque form by the British Ambassador to Moscow. Vatutin could thus further disrupt the opening stage of Zitadelle by ordering a bombardment of the areas where the Germans were forming up, just prior to the assault.

The German attacks above and below the salient were almost mirror images of each other. In the north, Model’s Ninth Army drove southwards from Orel towards Kursk on a 35-mile-wide front against Rokossovsky’s Central Front. In the south, Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army attacked northwards from Belgorod towards Kursk on a 30-mile-wide front against Vatutin’s Voronezh Front. Zhukov decided deliberately to allow the attack to get well under way before counter-attacking its exposed flanks. The German Army elsewhere in Russia had been denuded of armour in order to provide the seventeen Panzer divisions necessary to spearhead this formidable fifty-division assault, leaving Hoth’s Panzer army ‘the strongest force ever before put under a single commander in the German Army’.26 Yet their hopes for victory due to the combination of Stuka dive-bombing, fast tank advances and close infantry support – Blitzkrieg, in effect – failed to take into account the fact that by July 1943 their enemies had finally learnt all about the tactics that had proved so devastating against Poland in 1939, France in 1940 and Russia herself in 1941–2. Furthermore, one of the essential elements of Blitzkrieg – surprise – was entirely missing from the mix.

Because the Red Army had learnt to fight on even when penetrated by