The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [242]
In a war of men and machines, the Russians were out-producing the Germans in both. German, Hungarian, Italian and Czech factories produced a total – when added to the tanks captured in France – of 53,187 tanks and self-propelled guns of all kinds throughout the war, whereas between 1941 and 1945 the USSR produced 58,681 T-34s alone, 3,500 IS-2s (which had a 122mm cannon with a 2.5-kilometre accurate range) and 3,500 SU-100 self-propelled guns, not including the KV range of tanks. By 1943 the Russians were also turning out huge numbers of the excellent 122mm M-30 howitzers, and their standard hand grenade was as good as Germany’s M-24 classic stick grenade, which had not undergone any major improvement since 1924.
The Russian performance at Kursk, especially in the area of co-operation between different arms, brought the losses down to tolerable levels (albeit still much higher than the German). It created a new military theory and ethos for Russia, one that afforded her a glimpse of victory. The casualty rate at Kursk was half that of the Moscow battles of late 1941, and the rates for 1944 were to be one-quarter of it. ‘The reconstruction of an almost entirely new army on the ruins of the collapse of 1941’, reckons Richard Overy, ‘ranks as the most remarkable achievement of the war.’56 The Soviets had combined their arms, applied new techniques to offensive operations, exploited successes quickly and learnt how to defeat Blitzkrieg. They were still losing more men than the Germans, it was true, but they had reduced the ratio to three for two, at which proportion it was to stay until the end of the war. As a result, ‘German defeat simply became a matter of blood and time.’57 The Germans had little of either; the Russians now had plenty of both.
In the two months of fighting at Kursk, it is estimated that the Germans lost half a million men killed, wounded, taken prisoner or missing, as well as 3,000 tanks, 1,000 guns, 5,000 motor vehicles and 1,400 planes.58 Soviet losses were half as heavy again, at three-quarters of a million men, but the German retreat from Prokhorovka meant that it was a defeat, since the Russian population and levels of production ensured that the USSR could absorb the losses in a way that the Reich no longer could. Konev was thus right to describe Kursk as ‘the swan-song of the German armoured force’.59
A growing problem for the Germans was getting matériel to the front line. By the end of 1942 the pro-Soviet partisans – hitherto almost ignored by the Stavka – were being supplied with officers, mine-experts and engineers, who were parachuted in to them with orders to disrupt the German lines of communication. With thousands of miles of railway track between German factories and regimental depots deep inside Russia, the partisans were able to cause massive dislocation of supplies. They meanwhile invented instruments which could adjust Russian machine-gun barrels to the size of captured German ammunition, and special steel bars that could be welded on to railway tracks in order to derail trains, examples of which can be seen in the Armed Forces Museum in Moscow today. In the month of June 1943, against Army Group Centre alone, partisans blew up forty-four railway bridges, damaged 298 locomotives and 1,233 wagons and disrupted rail traffic 746 times.60 This had severely hampered the Germans’ ability to reinforce their fronts just prior to Kursk, and afterwards it was to get much worse, despite the extremely harsh German reprisals against local populations. By contrast, Russian matériel was flooding into the Red Army by 1943. That calendar year the Soviets produced 24,000 tanks, twice the number of Germany, and the firepower they deployed in the Kursk salient that summer underlined their immense achievement in taking losses but surviving them and replenishing their numbers.61 They had 3,800 tanks when the German attack