CHAPTER SIX

ENDGAME

THE BATTLE OF Kursk established the conditions for the rest of the Russo-German War. It developed in the wider contexts of a war that the Reich’s leadership, from Hitler downward, understood now hung in the balance. In the aftermath of El Alamein, Hitler had reinforced defeat in North Africa, committing two panzer divisions plus a number of Tiger tanks to Tunisia, creating a new panzer army headquarters to command them. The result was a few tactical victories, won against inexperienced troops, that proved operationally barren and strategically empty.

Rommel, worn down mentally and physically, halted one attack when the American artillerymen facing it had a fifteen-minute supply of ammunition remaining. He managed to concentrate three panzer divisions for an attack against 8th Army, which was advancing from the east—the largest armored attack the Germans made in the entire campaign. But ULTRA intercepts gave Montgomery an outline of his enemy’s intention. Rommel ran headlong into a multilayered, prepared defense that tore the heart out of the panzers. “I have six hundred antitank guns, four hundred tanks, and good infantry holding strong pivots,” Montgomery commented. “The man must be mad.” After less than a day Rommel ordered a withdrawal from the battle that, by all accounts, ranks as his greatest embarrassment.

Were these events stumbling blocks or straws in the wind? Hopes for the U-boat campaign and faith in new weapons, from nerve gas to super-long-range cannon to rocket bombs, were balanced against an aerial offensive absorbing increasing amounts of the Reich’s high-tech capacities and the prospects of a cross-channel invasion sometime in 1943 by an alliance demonstrating an uncomfortably high learning curve.

I

PARADOXICALLY, CIRCUMSTANCES SEEMED more promising in the East. The victories at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus initially encouraged the Soviet High Command to plan a major offensive on a front extending from north of Smolensk to the Black Sea. But the price of success had been high. The Germans, against expectations, had come back strong and added a new high card to their order of battle in the SS Panzer Corps. The second front long promised by the western Allies still consisted of promises and substitutes. Significant evidence indicates Stalin seriously considered the prospects of a separate peace with Hitler, or with a successor government willing to respond. Tentative contacts, most of them indirect, began in Sweden during the spring of 1943 and continued for most of the year.

By any rational calculation, the Reich’s short-term prospects of total victory in Russia were close to zero. The concluding volume of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweiten Weltkrieg summarizes a project begun thirty years ago by suggesting that without Hitler’s iron determination, Germany would probably have been ready to conclude peace in 1943. But by that time the National Socialist Führer State had so far eroded the principal institutions of state, Wehrmacht, and party, that neither institutional nor personal forums for discussing the issue existed. No one but Hitler was responsible for the whole. No one—above all no one in the military—was willing to risk considering the whole and acting on the results. Like many a plan before it, Operation Citadel would take on a pseudolife of its own.

Postwar historians in general have followed the generals’ memoirs in blaming Kursk on Adolf Hitler. He is indicted, tried, and convicted first for refusing to accept the professionals’ recommendations and shift to an operational defensive, temporarily trading space for time while making good the losses of the winter campaign, allowing the Red Army to extend itself in a renewed offensive, then using the refitted panzer divisions to “backhand” it a second time. Once having accepted the concept of an offensive, Hitler is described as first delaying it while the Russians reinforced the sector, then abandoning it when, against the odds, the generals and the Landser were on the point of once more pulling the Reich’s chestnuts from the fire.

Reality, as might be expected, is a good deal more complex. Hitler badly needed a major victory to impress his wavering allies—perhaps even to convince Turkey to join the war. And his argument that south Russia’s resources were significant for sustaining Germany’s war effort could not be simply dismissed. The army high command, moreover, was not precisely of one mind on the issue. Guderian, restored to power and favor, argued against any major offensive during 1943 in favor of rebuilding a panzer force stretched to the limits by the fighting at the turn of the year. Wait until 1944, he urged, then strike with full-strength panzer divisions built around Panthers and Tigers, with increased numbers of half-tracks and assault guns and a mobile reserve strong enough to hold any second front the British and Americans could open.

For his part, Manstein believed Guderian took no account of time. His often-cited advocacy of an elastic defense taking full advantage of German officers’ mastery of mobile warfare and German soldiers’ fighting power has gained credibility with hindsight. But the concept was barely articulated in early 1943. To the extent that it existed, it was Manstein’s brain child, tested over no more than a few months, for practical purposes unfamiliar even in the panzer force. Experience would show that elastic defense was by no means a panacea. Its success depended on an obliging enemy—and the Red Army of 1943 was anything but obliging.

Manstein himself saw elastic defense in the existing strategic contest as essentially a temporary expedient, to wear down Soviet forces and prepare for a grander design. Manstein initially intended a combined general offensive by his Army Group South and Army Group Center against a hundred-mile bulge around the city of Kursk, driven into the German lines during the winter fighting. A double penetration would cut off Soviet forces in this Kursk salient, and draw Soviet reserves in that sector onto the German anvil in the fashion of 1941. With Kursk eliminated and the German front shortened by 150 miles, reserves could more readily be deployed for future operations against the Soviet flanks and rear.

Manstein described this ambitious operation as a “forehand stroke” that must be made quickly, while the Germans could take advantage of the dry season and before Soviet material power grew overwhelming and the Western allies could establish themselves on the continent. It was correspondingly disconcerting when Kluge’s Army Group Center replied that it lacked the resources to participate in the kind of assault he projected. Paradoxically, that refusal made Manstein’s commitment to the Kursk operation even firmer. He considered it a high-risk window of opportunity that must be seized even with limited resources.

Army Chief of Staff Kurt Zeitzler was also attracted by the prospects of eliminating the Kursk salient, albeit for less ambitious reasons than his subordinate. He considered weakening the Russians in the southern sector and shortening the front quite enough to be going on with.

By default the generals’ debate kicked the decision upstairs, to Hitler. On March 9 his Operations Order No. 5 provided for a spring offensive with the purpose of denying the Russians the initiative. After a couple of false starts, it became the basis for Operation Citadel, whose scope was defined in an order of April 15. The opening paragraph of Operations Order No. 6 spoke of “decisive significance . . . a signal to all the world.” In sharp contrast to the far-reaching objectives set in 1941 and 1942, however, the operational geography was so limited it requires a small-scale regional map to follow. That did not make Kursk a limited offensive. Success offered a chance to damage the Red Army sufficiently so as to at least stabilize the Eastern front and perhaps develop a temporary political solution to a militarily unwinnable war.

The operation was militarily promising. Strategically even a limited success would remove a major threat to German flanks in the sector and limit prospects for a Soviet breakout of the Dnieper. The experiences of Operations Barbarossa and Blue indicated that the Germans won their victories at the start of campaigns and ran down as they grew overextended. Citadel’s relatively modest objectives seemed insurance against that risk. This time, forward units would not be ranging far beyond the front in a race to nowhere in particular. There were no economic temptations like in the Ukraine in 1941 or the Caucasus in 1942. Kursk would be a straightforward soldiers’ battle. As for what would come next, sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. It was a line of thinking—perhaps a line of feeling—uncomfortably reminiscent of Ludendorff ’s approach to the great offensive of March 1918: punch a hole and see what happens.

Kursk seemed to be the kind of prepared offensive that had frustrated the Soviets from division to theater levels for eighteen months. Geographically, the sector was small enough to enable concentrating overstretched Luftwaffe assets on scales unseen since 1941. Logistically, the objectives were well within reach. Operationally, the double envelopment of a salient was a textbook exercise. Tactically, from company to corps, the panzer commanders were skilled and confident. For the first time since Barbarossa they would have tanks to match Soviet quality.

But would there be enough of them—indeed, enough armor of any kind? As had been the case throughout the war, the tip of the upside-down pyramid was the panzer arm. By the end of the winter fighting, the eighteen panzer divisions on the Russian Front had a combined strength of only around 600 serviceable tanks. The shortages of trucks and other supporting vehicles were even greater. Refreshing the divisions in situ meant fresh demands on men already bone tired.

Friedrich von Mellenthin, widely accepted as a final authority on panzer operations, declared the “hardened and experienced” panzer divisions to be ready for another battle once the ground dried. But Mellenthin was a staff officer, a bit removed from the sharp end. Some divisions of his own XLVIII Panzer Corps were down to fewer than two dozen tanks apiece. Fourth Panzer Army’s old pro Hermann Hoth informed Manstein on March 21 that men who had been fighting day and night for months now expected a chance to rest. Even hard-charging company and battalion commanders were reporting widespread apathy.

Operations Order No. 6 emphasized speed. But Army Group South reported that its panzers could not be ready for battle until the first half of May. Army Group Center complained that partisan attacks and air strikes were seriously delaying rail movements. Walther Model, whose 9th Army would carry the weight of the northern arm of the proposed pincers, insisted postponement was necessary. Perhaps even that aggressive general had lost faith in the operation’s prospects. Certainly he was well aware of the overall weakness of Army Group Center’s front. Shifting its resources southward invited a repetition of Rzhev, where the Soviets had come far too close to a victory under similar conditions.

Hitler was having his own second thoughts. He postponed the attack until May 9, partly with the intention of bringing as many Panthers and Tigers on line as possible. When the overworked assembly lines failed to deliver, Hitler postponed the attack again, then again, and finally set the date for July 5. The delay was later widely criticized among the soldiers. Some of this was reflex; “ask of me anything but time” was a military axiom long before Napoleon aphorized it. Some was second-guessing, typically expressed by Mellenthin’s assertion that the Russian position at Kursk was vulnerable in May. It might indeed have been—to the kind of attack the Germans delivered in July. The postponements enabled doubling Citadel’s strength, bringing the order of battle to a quarter million men and over 2,500 armored fighting vehicles for a 60-mile front. The postponements enabled refitting the panzer divisions, bringing them to near full strength of 150 or so tanks. Approximately 150 Tigers and 200 Panthers were included in the inventory—most of them concentrated in a few units.

The panzers would be sporting new coats. After over eighteen months, higher headquarters had become officially aware that the dark gray with which the armored force had gone to war was poor camouflage in the greens and browns of rural Russia. The new scheme authorized in January 1943 was a base color of dark yellow, with crews at liberty to apply olive green and red brown mottling to suit specific conditions. As spring broke out, would-be artists employed spray guns and brushes.

Eighteen hundred aircraft, two-thirds of the Luftwaffe strength in Russia, were available to support the operation—a number enhanced by the high quality of the air and ground crews compared to a Red Air Force still learning its craft. The now-legendary Stuka would make its last appearance in a dive-bomber role and its first as a tank-buster with two 37mm cannon mounted below the wings. The Stukas were joined by five ground-attack squadrons equipped with Fw 190s, and by five more squadrons of specialized antitank aircraft: the Henschel Hs 129, whose twin engines, heavy armor, and 30mm cannon made it the ancestor of the US Air Force’s well- known A-10 Thunderbolt, and no less formidable in action.

Delaying the attack also gave the old hands in the panzer divisions the breathing space they so badly needed. It gave them time to welcome returned wounded, to integrate replacements, to learn the individual characteristics of the Panzer IIIs and IVs most of them were still riding. It gave them opportunity to experience a buildup like few had ever seen. Reactions, even among the old hands, oddly resembled those widespread in the BEF in the weeks before the Battle of the Somme in 1916. There was just too much of everything for anything to go seriously wrong.

The catch-22 was that the Red Army had been steadily countering the German buildup with one of its own—one whose scale escaped both German intelligence and German reconnaissance. Its strategic matrix, as mentioned above, was offensive. Its operational intention was to break the Germans and advance to the line of the Dnieper. And tactically it would begin on the defensive—by design. Intelligence sources, including Western-supplied ULTRA information, and common sense alike indicated the Germans would attack rather than wait to be overrun. And this time there was only one sector of the entire front offering anything like a favorable opportunity. The question was not “where” but “whether” the offensive could be stopped.

Preparation began in mid-April to make Kursk a fortress and a killing ground. The salient was configured as a combination of battalion defensive sectors, antitank strong points, barbed wire, and minefields. The forward belt alone included 350 battalion positions, each a network of mutually supporting trenches and bunkers. There were seven more of them, with a depth extending over 100 miles. Minefields averaged over 2,500 mines per mile. These active and passive defenses were structured to steer the panzers against antitank strong points largely built around combinations of antitank rifles and light 45mm guns. Both were long obsolescent and correspondingly expendable. Both were useful only at point-blank ranges. Both were proof of Stavka’s commitment to replicating Stalingrad in the steppe.

Manning the fixed defenses were some of the best infantry of the revitalized Red Army, including a number of Guard divisions who had earned the honorific the hard way. Supporting them was a mass of artillery, heavy mortars, and rocket launchers—close to 20,000 barrels, many organized in complete divisions, working with calibrated ranges. Behind the salient, the sword to the shield was a striking force under Ivan Konev, who would finish the war second to none in the Red Army as a master of operational art. His Steppe Front included over 4,000 tanks commanded by some of the best of a new generation of Soviet armor generals: M. E. Katukov of 1st Tank Army, A. G. Rodin of 2nd, and a dozen others forgotten to history but familiar enough to the Germans.

Overall responsibility in the northern sector rested with Central Front’s Konstantin Rokossovsky. Polish born, he had spent three years in the Gulag during the Great Purge. Released in 1940, his lost teeth replaced by the best Soviet metal, he showed his own mettle from Moscow to Stalingrad. Facing off against Manstein, Voronezh Front’s N. F. Vatutin had demonstrated his capacity for high command since the start of the war. A leader from the front, respected by his subordinates and his soldiers, Vatutin was a risk-taker who appreciated staff work: an uncommon but welcome combination in the Red Army.

No less significant was the synergy between the geographic scale of Kursk and the Red Army’s command and control methods and capacities. Since Barbarossa, those had developed in contexts of top-down battle management, reflecting both the Soviet principle that war is a science and the fact that Soviet commanders at all levels were essentially the product of experience. At this stage of the war, and arguably much later, senior Soviet officers resembled their counterparts in the armies of Napoleon: both lost effectiveness when operating independently. Previous German offensives had found no difficulty in getting inside Soviet decision loops, generating increasingly random responses that frequently collapsed into chaos. Kursk’s small scale enabled timely response to German moves as the defense slowed the German pace. It also enabled a level of management absent in previous major battles, cresting in turn a confidence at all levels of headquarters that a culture of competence had replaced a culture of improvisation from desperation.

Those were significant force multipliers, in a situation arguably not needing them. It is a familiar axiom of modern war, expressed mathematically in something called the Lanchester equations, that an offensive requires three-to-one superiority. Soviet doctrine reduced that to 3:2, assuming superior planning, staff work, and fighting power. By the time the preparations for Kursk were complete, the Soviet defenders outnumbered the attackers in every category of men and equipment, in almost every sector. The average ratio was somewhere between 1:1.5 and 1:2.5. On paper the outcome seemed assured. But wars are won in the field, and the panzers had made a habit of defying odds.

Given the respective rates of buildup, it seems reasonable that an attack mounted by the forces available in April or May would have lacked the combat power to overcome the salient’s defenses even in their early stages. The Germans’ only chance was the steel-headed sledgehammer they eventually swung in July. And that highlights the essential paradox of Kursk. The factors that made the battle zone acceptable in operational terms also made it too small to allow for the application of the force multipliers the panzers had spent a decade cultivating. Geographically Kursk offered no opportunity for operational skill and little for tactical virtuosity. Militarily the strength of the defensive system meant the German offensive had to depend on momentum sustained by mass—which is another way to describe a battle of attrition, the one type of combat the German way of war was structured to avoid.

Hitler’s panzers thus faced a second paradox. Not only were they the tip of an inverted strategic pyramid, operationally and tactically they were required to match the Red Army’s strengths at the expense of their own. And once the fighting started, a third paradox developed. One of the tactical advantages initially considered in planning Kursk was that the limited geography would enable the infantry to remain close to the armor and assume responsibility for mopping up. But the Reich’s systemic and increasing shortages of replacements favored giving priority to the panzers—army and SS alike. The advantage was often marginal: Leibstandarte’s ranks were in part refilled by unceremoniously transferred Luftwaffe ground crews. But infantry divisions already chronically understaffed were in the process of being reduced to six battalions instead of the original nine.

The resulting formations were easier to handle. New weapons like the MG 42 enhanced their firepower. But they lacked staying power when pitted against defenses like those of Kursk. As a consequence the panzers were increasingly constrained to use their own resources—tanks as well as panzer grenadiers—to secure the ground they captured at the expense of sustaining offensive momentum.

On the right half of the German pincer, Army Group South deployed Hoth and 4th Panzer Army on its right. With six army panzer divisions and the SS Panzer Corps², plus an independent regiment including all 200 available Panthers, this was the largest armored force ever previously put under a single commander. Its mission was correspondingly straightforward. Screened on his left by the three panzer divisions of Army Detachment Kempf ’s III Panzer Corps. Hoth was to break through and join forces with Army Group Center’s 9th Army attacking from the north. Model had another six panzer divisions, one of panzer grenadiers, and seven infantry divisions which he proposed to use to open the way for his mobile forces. Sixty miles separated Model and Hoth. It would be the longest distance in the history of Hitler’s panzers.

“It’s time to write the last will and testament!” one SS trooper wrote in his diary while awaiting the order to advance. Across the line Soviet soldiers swapped their own grim jokes—like the one about the tanker who reported almost everyone in his unit had been killed that day. “I’m sorry,” he concluded, “I’ll make sure I burn tomorrow.”

On the evening of July 4 1943, the Germans sent their men the infallible signal: a special ration of schnapps. An Alsatian serving in the SS promptly deserted—and convinced a high-status interrogation team, including a forty-nine-year-old political advisor named Nikita Khrushchev, that the German offensive would be under way before dawn on July 5. Soviet false alarm would be risky. But giving the Germans the advantage of tactical surprise might be fatal. The Red Army acted. In Model’s sector a massive Soviet bombardment preempted the German barrage, which only opened an hour later. It was the start of a very long day for the German infantry, which took heavy losses against a nightmarish maze of trenches and strong points. The panzers made better local progress—up to five miles—thanks in good part to the Tigers. Ninth Army was nevertheless a long way from a breakthrough by nightfall.

Hoth and Kempf led with their tanks but had little better fortune. Hoth’s XLVIII Panzer Corps included the Panther regiment, of which great things were expected. Instead it ran into a minefield, losing almost half the tanks to mines and mud, breakdowns, and inexperienced crews. At day’s end the corps had done about a mile better than Model but remained a long way away from a breakthrough, much less a linkup.

When the Waffen SS crossed their start lines around 4 AM, they advanced in a modified version of the long-standard wedge. This time the Tigers were the point, with the AFVs on each side and the infantry, in half-tracks or on foot, in the middle: trucks were suicidal in these close quarters. The prewar idea of the wedge had been to throw antitank gunners off balance and off target. Here the Russians kept their heads and kept the Tigers under fire. As the mastodons shrugged off hit after hit, the panzer grenadiers, directly supported by tanks and assault guns, closed in under cover of waves of Stukas and ground-attack aircraft. The panzers took out machine-gun and antitank positions; the infantry cleared trenches with grenades and flamethrowers. In the close-quarters fighting, mercy was rarely asked or given. Leibstandarte counted only a little over a hundred prisoners for the day, most of those accidental.

By evening elements of the SS Panzers were as far as 15 miles into the Soviet defenses. They continued their drive the next day as a worried Soviet command shifted sector reserves, including an entire tank army, into their path. Here again the few available Tigers were decisive, picking off opposing T-34s at long range, shifting position to evade return fire, then finding new targets. By noon the panzer grenadiers had fought their way into the defenses sufficiently for tank and half-track battle groups to begin pushing forward against T-34s dug in to their turrets, pillbox fashion. This was Vatutin’s idea, and Zukhov flew into a rage at what he called a senseless waste of armor. But Vatutin understood that his main task was to tie up the Germans until the strategic reserve could intervene. Even a Tiger engaging a dug-in tank from the front was vulnerable to others on its flanks, and the Red Army still had enough mobile tanks to mount counterattack after local counterattack.

Forty-eighth Panzer Corps and Kempf’s divisions slowly closed up on the SS flanks despite having to weaken their spearheads by detaching ever more armored units for flank security; Soviet tank losses correspondingly mounted. By July 13, Army Group South would account for the defeat of over 1,200 tanks at a cost of only a hundred of its own AFVs. The ratio was a tribute to the German tank gunners and to the panzer grenadiers who, especially in the SS sector, accounted for a good share of the kills. No less did it reflect the high quality of German frontline maintenance and the high morale of crews willing to take their field-repaired vehicles back into combat. “We no longer flinched when a steel hand knocked,” recorded one SS tanker. “Instead we wiped away paint flakes, loaded, aimed, fired.” Easily written, and not so easily done, as British and US crews in similar circumstances would later affirm.

Fourth Panzer Army continued its advance through July 8—no spectacular breakthroughs, but relentless and remorseless enough that the Soviets were giving ground steadily. The heavy armor and long-range guns of the Tigers and the constant hammering from the air were taking human toll as well. More and more prisoners were shuffling rearward under token guard. Tank crews were abandoning their vehicles under Tiger guns. An entire tank corps was smashed when caught in the open by a flight of Henschel 129s: fifty T-34s were destroyed in an hour. Stavka responded by summoning reinforcements. Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army was to move his whole force 120 miles and be ready for action by July 9—around the village of Prokhorovka.

The German nickname for an officer like Hermann Hoth is alter Hase—“old hare.” Unlike the English “old fox,” who outwits danger, the hare stays alive by anticipating it. Well aware of the strong Soviet reserves in rear of the salient, Hoth was convinced from the beginning that they posed too great a risk to his right flank to ignore, or to trust to Kempf. He proposed to respond by having the SS swing northeast and draw the Soviets onto their guns on the high ground around the village of Prokhorovka. Once the threat was suppressed, 4th Panzer Army would resume its original axis of advance. A series of map exercises developed the concept; a series of discussions with Manstein convinced the Field Marshal to accept it. On July 9 Hoth pulled the trigger and set the stage for a legendary clash of armor.

His decision reflected in part Model’s failure to match 4th Panzer Army’s progress. The Russians had expected the main German effort in Central Front’s sector. Rokossovsky had a two-to-one superiority over Model in artillery. He could call on an entire air army for support. And he was a battle captain. Part fireman, part chess player, he juggled and shifted his reserves to keep abreast of the attackers. German panzer wedges were blunted by the synergy of sophisticated defenses and T-34s employed in numbers too great for even the Tigers to suppress. On this front as well the Soviets had enough tanks to dig in large numbers of them as pillboxes. Panzers fell prey to everything from Sturmoviks to antitank rifles and Molotov cocktails. A dozen Tigers fell to antitank mines in a single day—repairable to be sure, but nevertheless out of action when badly needed.

Unable to develop a weak spot, Model decided to create one. He tried three times, first at the high ground around the village of Olkhovatka, then at the village of Ponyi on the Orel-Kursk railroad, then again at Olkhovatka. No one ever suggested Walther Model possessed more tactical sophistication than he needed. When a hammer failed, he sent for a bigger hammer. Olkhovatka earned the dubious sobriquets of “second Verdun” and “second Stalingrad.” Ponyi became a “second Douaumont.” As tank losses mounted 9th Army’s war diary spoke of a “rolling battle of material attrition.” Infantry casualties were no less massive. And the Olkhovatka ridge still held out.

On July 10 Model broke off the attack, but he by no means accepted defeat. Most of the armor losses were temporary, with only a total of 63 write-offs by the 11th. Army Group Center was sending him two more panzer divisions. Model now proposed a relatively indirect approach flanking Olkhovatka from the right. The new attack was set for July 11. The same day the Red Army swung its own hammer.

The plans of the Soviet high command balanced the defensive at Kursk with a series of offensives. One was against the Orel salient in Army Group Center’s sector: the other half of the monad formed by Kursk, and just as vulnerable geographically. It was authorized to begin when the German attack was stopped. On July 11 the first probes were launched. On the 12th large-scale attacks struck the salient’s north flank and apex. The Germans had been preparing defenses for months, but the force and timing of the onslaught came as a surprise—a tribute to Soviet deception operations and another failure on the part of the German intelligence service. The blow fell on the by now ironically named 2nd Panzer Army. It consisted of 14 infantry divisions, with a single panzer division in reserve. Within hours Model was ordered to send four of his panzer divisions north, effectively ending any serious prospects of a serious offensive in his sector.

The southern half of Citadel was still functional. What was intended as pincers might become a hammer-and-anvil operation—if 4th Panzer Army could clear its front. That burden rested squarely on the Waffen SS. Its orders established three missions: break the Soviets to their immediate front, draw along with them the army panzers on their left, and open an alternate route to Kursk. Any one was a tall order. Hoth was not likely to admit it, even to himself, but Hausser’s men were arguably better suited than the army formations—in terms of ideology, experience, and leadership—for the kind of head-down head-butting that lay ahead. And in another context they might well be considered expendable: party troops in what was at the sharp end still an army war.

Manstein underwrote Hoth by ordering Kempf’s III Panzer Corps to strike Prokhorovka on the right flank of the SS. He also released two panzer divisions from army reserve to develop any success. Hausser spent a day repairing damaged tanks and moving the Skulls from their assignment of covering the corps right flank to a key assault role on the left. That latter was an overlooked successful exercise in traffic control that said a lot about the high level of the corps’s staff work and administrative efficiency. Totenkopf responded by forcing two bridgeheads over the flooded Psel River on the tenth. By noon the next day the pioneers had finished a bridge strong enough to carry Tigers.

Totenkopf was in position to either swing left and support the army’s panzers or swing right to help its sister divisions. The latter were taking longer than necessary with their advances against opposition that by now included an airborne division. Between them, Leibstandarte and Das Reich, again benefiting from pinpoint support by Luftwaffe Stukas, were able to crack the final defenses in front of Prokhorovka in a series of massive frontal attacks. No less seriously from a Soviet perspective, most of the positions selected for Rotmistrov’s counterattack were lost. Planning had to begin again from scratch, and on-the-fly improvisation was never a Red Army strong point.

Rotmistrov’s attack was only part of a major offensive inside the salient, the whole intended to coordinate with the attack on Army Group Center. On July 12, 1st Tank Army, with another five armored and mechanized corps, was scheduled to envelop and break through XLVIII Panzer Corps into the German rear and join Rotmistrov’s spearheads around Prokhorovka in a Soviet Cannae, an armored version of Stalingrad.

Attacking into these preparations, XLVIII Panzer Corps made no significant progress. Its tank crews were tired enough to make expensive tactical mistakes. The panzer grenadiers had taken heavy casualties, especially among officers and NCOs. It was easier to repair tanks than replace men, and the past week had taught caution to the boldest.

Kempf’s III Panzer Corps, in contrast, finally eroded its opposition and broke out into open country. Lieutenant General Hermann Breith understood his craft, and two of his divisions, 6th and 7th Panzer, counted among the Wehrmacht’s best. By nightfall the corps was well on its way to Prokhorovka. But the distance to be covered and the resistance to be expected were sufficient to make counting on its appearance the next day a risky proposition.

Hausser counted on no one but his own soldiers. Maintenance crews worked through the night to put over 300 tanks and assault guns on line, including 16 Tigers. Hausser’s orders were as sophisticated as a kick to the groin: Leibstandarte straight ahead into Prokhorovka, with Totenkopf and Das Reich running interference on its flanks. Rotmistrov responded by placing three tank corps in his first line and a mechanized corps in reserve: over 800 AFVs, around 500 of them T-34s. By now it was clear at all levels that engaging the Germans at long range was playing with the other man’s deck. “Close in” was the mantra. Get to within 1,500 feet at least, and then try to shorten the range further.

The German attack went in at 6:30 AM, July 12. The Soviets jumped off at about the same time. Rotmistrov left a colorful firsthand account of a close-quarters death grapple: tanks engaging at gun-barrel length, hulls exploding, turrets being flung randomly around the battlefield, and tanks burning like torches. He told of the difficulty of determining who was defending and who was attacking. His description set the tone for the reconstruction of a fight costing the Germans as many as 400 tanks, including dozens of Tigers, epitomizing the coming of age of Soviet armor and marking the beginning of the road to Berlin’s Reichstag. Prokhorovka is commonly described as the greatest armored battle in history, the most important victory of the war, the graveyard of Hitler’s panzers.

Prokhorovka’s reality was a good bit less spectacular. Rotmistrov’s attack went in as he described it, wave after wave at high speed. But initially it faced not a similar mass, but two companies, most of whose crews had been in an exhausted sleep as late as 5:30. It seemed a long-standing panzermann’s nightmare come true: a steel avalanche impossible to stop by courage or skill. The Tigers opened fire at 1,800 yards, their optical sights enhancing the skill of their gunners. As the range closed, the Panzer IVs joined in. A good crew could deliver four or five rounds a minute, and the SS were very good. More and more Soviet tanks slewed aside, burst into flame, and exploded, strewing chunks of armor plate and whole turrets across the killing zone. Then, unexpectedly, the leading T-34s drove headlong into one of their own well- camouflaged antitank ditches. Fifteen feet deep, it upended tanks like they were children’s toys. Across a three-mile sector the charge eroded into a maelstrom of small-scale combats. The Germans gave ground and counterattacked, and by the time the seesaw fighting ended in mutual exhaustion around mid-afternoon, who held the initiative in that sector was a matter of opinion and optimism.

The men who fought there interpreted Prokhorovka in mythic terms. Division Das Reich reported a panzer grenadier lieutenant carrying an incendiary grenade that was touched off by a Russian bullet. Divesting himself of trousers and underwear, the officer led his company on to its objective naked from the waist down and gave a new meaning to the concept of risking all for the Führer. A far more familiar Soviet account has two tankers restarting a disabled and burning T-34 to ram a Tiger and send both vehicles up in flames. The commander of the allegedly demolished Tiger reported that he had in fact dodged away at the last minute. The only Leibstandarte Tiger reported as a total loss for July 12 fell to gunfire. The legend nevertheless survives.

The best comparison of material losses, based on official records, lists well over 300 Soviet armored vehicles as having been destroyed, with most of their crews blown up or incinerated. The tank corps listed more dead and missing than wounded: 3,600 out of a strength of around 7,000. Stalin, famous for describing a million deaths as a statistic, was sufficiently enraged at these figures that he initially proposed to court-martial Rotmistrov. German casualties amounted to 522. Their recorded total loss of tanks in the sector was only three—another reflection of the effectiveness of German maintenance and the survivability of even the older models of tanks.

On the left, Totenkopf fought what amounted to a separate battle, holding its ground and then counterattacking successfully enough to lead Rotmistrov to shift some of his by now scarce reserves to stabilize the line. To Hausser’s right, III Panzer Corps spent the day fighting the sound of the guns—and initially fighting panzer style for the only time in the entire Kursk operation. On his own initiative the CO of the 11th Panzer Regiment pushed a tank battalion and one of panzer grenadiers in half-tracks forward through unsuspecting Soviet positions during the night of July 11. With a captured T-34 in the lead, the Germans reached and crossed the Donets by morning—a little over 10 miles from Prokhorovka.

Two years earlier, perhaps even in the high summer of 1942, this might have been the beginning of something. In 1943 it was a dead end. The Russians had always known how to fight. They had learned how to move. And a series of counterattacks made what might once have become a spearhead into a long salient. Rotmistrov’s reinforcements confirmed the result. Breith’s corps spent the day fighting in three directions simultaneously. Its commander described an advance to Prokhorovka as out of the question.

Things in the Prokhorovka sector might well have been far worse, perhaps disastrous, for the Germans had Grossdeutschland and 3rd Panzer not been able to shift left and move south in time to blunt 1st Tank Army’s thrust. Third Panzer Division was down to fewer than 40 tanks and Grossdeutschland was not much better off when, by evening, mutual exhaustion put an end to the fighting. No real hope remained for immediate coordination with the SS. Two divisions had nevertheless averted what was intended as a major breakthrough, and done so smoothly enough to treat the matter as near-routine in their reports.

On July 10 the British and Americans landed in Sicily. It was a long way from Kursk and a long way from Germany. It was also the “second front” not only Hitler but generations of German generals had feared. Almost by reflex the Führer determined it was necessary to reinforce the west with enough armor to cancel the invasion and underwrite Mus solini’s tottering regime. On July 13 he summoned Manstein and Kluge to his Rastenburg headquarters and informed them of his decision to suspend Operation Citadel. Kluge, with his own sector exploding, insisted he needed 9th Army to restore the situation. Manstein, citing the destruction of as many as 1,800 Soviet tanks, insisted his army group could finish off the Russians in the salient if given Hitler’s authorization to commit its three reserve panzer divisions.

Hitler compromised and temporized. Ninth Army was committed in the north. Model was also given command as well of 2nd Panzer Army; Schmidt’s open and sulfurous criticism of the way the war was being run had recently led to his dismissal and an official recommendation that he be confined to a psychiatric hospital.

Army Group South was given a few days to continue its offensive. Breith’s corps did succeed in establishing contact with the SS, but only on July 15, by which time most of the Russian forces in the sector escaped. Manstein remained convinced he could draw Soviet reserves into the kind of mobile battle which maximized the panzers’ advantages and his own talents. In theory perhaps—but all along Manstein’s front Soviet resistance showed no signs of weakening, much less collapsing. On July 17 Hitler ordered the SS Panzers off the line, effectively shutting down Citadel once and for all.

Manstein insisted that this decision threw away a victory. That case might be made in an operational context. But any gains on that level would almost certainly have been promptly swept away by the long-prepared, comprehensive Soviet counteroffensives that decisively shifted the balance of the Russo-German War. For Hitler’s panzers the shining times were over. The next 18 months would see their role, and their nature, change essentially. But before considering that new order of things, it seems appropriate to cast up Citadel’s accounts.

The balance of losses clearly favored the Germans. Far from the hundreds of armored vehicles described in Soviet sources, the total number of write-offs for Model and Manstein combined was around 250. Red Army losses in contrast were so large that they were released only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even now they remain difficult to calculate. The best low figure is around 1,600; the best maximum somewhere short of 2,000. The Germans suffered around 55,000 casualties, including 9,000 dead. Official Soviet losses are given at 177,000, with strong evidence indicating an actual figure of over 300,000.

The discrepancy between Soviet estimates of German armor losses and the actual figures can be ascribed to varying combinations of propaganda, adrenaline, and inexperience. The Soviet Union needed heroes from its ranks—needed them badly. The stress of combat encouraged tank crews to overestimate the effects of their gunnery, in much the same way American heavy bomber crews consistently exaggerated the number of fighters shot down. Inexperience led as well to underestimating the high survivability of German tanks, and their high reparability even after taking several hits.

On the German side, statistics invite comparison to air war in other contexts. As with fighter pilots, a relatively small number of crews scored a disproportionate number of kills. Promotion, decoration, and recognition increasingly accompanied high scores. Some old-timers have said they could not be bothered to notice their number of kills. But contemporary evidence strongly suggests that successful panzer crews kept as careful track as their fighter-pilot contemporaries—and that official records were kept with corresponding care whenever possible.

The statistics speak strongly against conventional arguments that Kursk broke the back of the German panzers. Instead the battle highlighted a shift in technical effectiveness that enhanced the tactical advantages the panzers still retained. The Tigers proved masters of the field wherever they went—at Prokhorovka alone, 15 of them accounted for eight times their number of T-34s. The crews of the often-denigrated Ferdinand described themselves as on the whole “very satisfied” with their vehicles. And the Panther’s failures were generally understood as a mixture of teething troubles, inexperienced crews and commanders, and the fortunes of war. German soldiers were better trained; German combined-arms offensive tactics coped effectively with one of military history’s most sophisticated defensive systems against superior numerical odds. And at seventh and last, the Germans held the field when the fighting ceased.

Why then can Kursk still be considered decisive? Karl-Heinz Frieser, whose research has done much to strip away the veils of legend, stresses the symbolic value of stopping in its tracks the greatest armored attack the Wehrmacht ever mounted—on level terms, without the advantage of weather or soft spots. Whatever remained of the myth of German invincibility—for both sides—faded into the sun and dust and blood of the Kursk salient.

Kursk, however, was more than a psychological experience. The Red Army not only held its ground; the distinguishing features of its developing excellence were the hallmarks of its success: density, redundancy, management, movement. The Soviets concentrated and massed their forces alike on defense and offense. They planned and deployed in integrated layers, on scales the Germans could not hope to match except locally and under special circumstances. Instead of trying to outdo its enemy in flexibility and initiative, the Red Army was learning to master control—arguably a better practical response to the increasing scale and pace of mobile warfare than the German “mission approach, ” whose emphasis on individual initiative easily led to cross purposes against a competent enemy. Finally Soviet formations from regiments to field armies were learning to move—not to maneuver tactically, German-style, but to get from place to place expeditiously and in order, arriving ready to fight. Rotmistrov’s Guardsmen offer the best examples, but Citadel as a whole provides no significant examples of Red Army units victimized by quicker German reaction time. Rotmistrov’s narrative of events may be part propaganda device, part personal gasconade. But it’s not bragging when it’s backed up. At Kursk the Red Army earned and paid for the right to tell its war stories to anyone willing to listen.

II

DAS DEUTSCHE REICH und der Zweite Weltkrieg trenchantly describes the twelve months from the end of Kursk to the Red Army’ s summer offensive of 1944 as “the forgotten year.” That period featured continuous fighting from Leningrad to the Black Sea, on scales surpassing those of 1941-42 and with losses far larger, especially on the Soviet side. The story of the panzers becomes correspondingly difficult to reconstruct as the divisions bloodied at Kursk were scattered to bolster resistance in a dozen sectors.

The German retreat from Leningrad and the successful, albeit temporary, stabilization of the northern front in the Baltic states owed little yet much to the army’s panzers. They were stretched too thin elsewhere to provide major assistance to the hard-pressed Landser. But the Red Army in the north was still learning its craft. Three Tigers by themselves played a vital role in holding a reestablished defense line around Narva, Estonia. A panzer division that arrived with only three dozen tanks was the spearhead of a counterattack that plugged a critical gap between two German armies. And the buccaneering assault gunners kept appearing where they were most needed, shifting from sector to sector and division to division to shore up infantrymen as outgunned as they were outnumbered. By October one battalion recorded a thousand official kills.

Part of the panzer gap was filled by the Waffen SS. By the end of 1942 the army had essentially decided the small units of foreigners it had managed to raise were more trouble than they were worth. Heinrich Himmler, always on the lookout to enhance the scope of his ramshackle empire within an empire, took them in. In early 1943 he activated III (Germanic) Panzer Corps, to include the Vikings and a new division eventually designated the 11th SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier Division (Northland).

Had Hitler not intervened its honorific might have been “Varan gian,” a reference to the Scandinavian guard troops of the medieval Byzantine empire and a reflection of Himmler’s desire to base the division on Aryan volunteers. In fact Northland absorbed most of the remaining foreign legions—including, for a while, a 50-man British detachment—and made up its strength with “ethnic Germans” from outside the expanded state and “Reich Germans” from territories annexed during the war. Northland saw its first action and made its first bones in the no-quarter partisan fighting in Yugoslavia. In November the division and III SS Panzer Corps were sent to the Leningrad sector. When it proved impossible to withdraw Viking from the fighting in the south, the corps was fleshed out by the ostensibly Dutch SS Volunteer PanzerGrenadier Brigade Nederland. Despite having only a single tank battalion plus some assault guns, it played an important role in the successful defense of Narva over the winter of 1943-44.

The III SS Panzer Corps is best understood in the context of the far more numerous unmechanized Waffen SS formations also thrown into what Reich propagandists described as “the battle of the European SS.” Some were Belgian, with Flemings and Walloons carefully separated. Others were local: Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians. Interpreted by postwar apologists as participants in a crusade against Bolshevism, they wore SS runes but saw themselves fighting against Russia and for their homelands.

In the war’s final months the Waffen SS would incorporate Bos nian Muslims, Croats, Italians, Frenchmen, and plain criminals into grandiosely styled “brigades” and “divisions” whose only German elements, in the words of one contemptuous Landser, were a few German shepherd watchdogs. Another thing these ragtag formations had in common was that they only saw German tanks by accident. The Waffen SS, in short, was subdividing into an elite fighting core, according to many accounts disproportionately favored in personnel and equipment; and a fringe of increasingly desperate men who, as they felt the ropes tighten around their necks, took little account of their behavior to prisoners and civilians.

Army Group Center’s post-Kursk circumstances were arguably even more perilous than those of Army Group North. When the general Russian offensives began in that sector, 3rd Panzer Army on the far left had not a single armored vehicle under command. Its neighbor, 4th Army, began the battle with 66 assault guns against almost 1,500 Soviet AFVs. The Germans nevertheless executed a fighting retreat into White Russia despite the Red Army’s desperate efforts. Companies were commanded by sergeants; local reserves were nonexistent, and replacements were a forlorn hope. As early as September 8, one army commander reported the total combat strength of his infantry was fewer than 7,000 men. A month later Kluge contacted Hitler directly and pulled no punches informing him that no general could command without men, weapons, and reserves. The Russians had all three.

Things might have become far worse had the Red Army in this sector not regressed to tactics making the Somme and Passchendaele appear sophisticated by comparison. Massed infantry, massed armor, and massed artillery hammered at the same points time after time, until nothing and no one remained to send forward or the Germans gave way.

The German plight was compounded by a well- coordinated partisan uprising in their rear. The army group had been preoccupied with holding its front since 1942. Now it faced an exponentially increasing number of strikes against communications systems and railroads. Security forces responded with large-scale, near-random executions and, as the front receded, scorched earth—when anything remained to scorch. This was no mere torching of villages and looting of houses. It involved the systematic destruction of militarily useful installations. In total war that meant anything. What was not burned was blown up. Thousands of civilians were “evacuated,” a euphemism for being driven west with what they could carry, with the alternative of risking execution as partisans or being shot at random. Files named “Protests” and “Refusals” are conspicuously absent from otherwise well- kept German records. What was important to senior officers was that the devastation be carried out in order and under command. German soldiers were not mere brigands.

The fight of Army Group Center was largely a foot soldier’s affair—with the by-now usual and welcome support of the near-ubiquitous assault guns. At the beginning of October the army group’s order of battle included a single panzer division itself reduced to battle group strength, and two panzer grenadier divisions in no better shape. Those figures remained typical. Yet ironically the panzers’ major contribution to the retreat played a large role in setting the scene for future debacle in the sector.

It began in March 1944 when the Red Army enveloped the city of Gomel and its patchwork garrison of 4,000 men. Gomel was a regional road and rail hub, as much as such existed in White Russia. Hitler declared it a fortress; the High Command supplied it from the air and ordered its immediate relief.

Initial efforts were thwarted by soft ground and the spring thaw. But after 10 days a battle group of SS Viking fought its way into the city. It required 18 hours and cost over 50 percent casualties. The lieutenant commanding received the Knight’s Cross. The hundred-odd surviving panzer grenadiers were welcome. The half-dozen Panthers were vital in holding off Soviet armor while LXVI Panzer Corps put together a relief force from an already worn-down 4th Panzer Division and a battle group built around what remained of Viking’s Panthers. The combination broke the siege on April 5, though it was two weeks before the link to the main front was fully reestablished.

The defense of Gomel solidified Hitler’s conviction that he had found a force multiplier. Gomel was on a small scale. But if larger “fortresses” could be established and garrisoned, under orders to hold to the last, the Soviets would be drawn into siege operations that would dissipate their offensive strength while the panzers and the Luftwaffe assembled enough strength to relieve the position. Army Group Center considered the idea good enough to be the best available alternative. The operational consequences of shifting to this fixed-defense approach would be demonstrated within months.

The southern sector of the eastern front saw far more armored action than the other two in the months following Kursk. The Red Army’s performance was also exponentially better. Most of the best Soviet tank generals had been sent to that theater to see off the Kursk offensive and to prepare for the series of strikes expected to—finally—destroy German fighting power in south Russia.

It began on July 17. First Panzer Army and the re-created 6th Army initially held positions along the Mius River. Manstein planned a coun terstrike, using Das Reich and Leibstandarte to stun the Soviets on 1st Panzer Army’s front, then shifting them to 6th Army’s sector to join Totenkopf and 3rd Panzer in a larger concentric attack. When Hitler forbade it, Manstein borrowed the words of General von Seydlitz from two centuries earlier: His head was at the Führer’s disposal, but while he held command he must be allowed to use it.

Eventually, reinforced by a total of five panzer and panzer grenadier divisions, 1st Panzer Army did mount a tactically successful counterattack. But Manstein still faced over two and a half million men, 50,000 guns, 2,400 tanks, almost 3,000 aircraft. Purists sometimes suggest that Stavka should have used this overwhelming superiority to generate battles of encirclement, panzer style. But Stalin remembered all too clearly how Manstein had thwarted a similar approach after Stalingrad. At front and army command levels there also seems to have been a near-visceral desire to smash an enemy that had so often embarrassed them, and to do it with strength the Germans could not hope to match. Even airborne forces were thrown into the operation.

Ninth Army, 4th Panzer Army, and Detachment Kempf, rechristened 8th Army but with the same resources, paid the bill. Model secured Hitler’s permission for a fighting retreat from the Orel salient as part of the general withdrawal of Army Group Center. Fourth Panzer Army was split into three parts by the Soviet onslaught, each fighting its own desperate battle. Useful reinforcements were few—the 8th Panzer Division arrived with no tanks. A staff officer at Army High Command confided—but only to his diary—that the end might come before the new year. Manstein had to fight Hitler almost as fiercely as the Russians to secure permission to do anything but “hold, hold, hold!” Guderian cattily observed that Manstein was inappropriately tentative in the Führer’s presence. In fact Army Group South’s commander not only insisted that disaster awaited were he not allowed to fall back to the line of the Dnieper River, but on September 14 he declared that he would issue the orders the next day on his own responsibility. Hitler conceded defeat.

The success of the retreat depended on the panzers. Materially Manstein was playing a handful of threes. In contrast to Kursk, there were few chances to recover and repair damaged tanks. Casualty evacuation was random. Units constantly on the move meant stragglers were usually lost for good. It took two weeks to reach the Dnieper. By that time Army Group South counted fewer than 300 serviceable tanks and assault guns. The average infantry division’s frontline strength was around a thousand men. Its average front was twelve to thirteen miles.

Even Tigers felt the strain. In the course of the campaign, Army Group South’s single battalion of Panzer VIs was increased to four. But their commanders complained the Tigers were victimized by their reputation: thrown in piecemeal, shuttled from sector to sector, denied time to maintain the complex and sensitive vehicle. Too often they were used as mobile pillboxes. Too often their infantry support was nonexistent or ineffective.

The tankers ascribed that last to poor training and low morale. From the infantry’s perspective, it was often common sense. The Tiger was essentially different from the familiar assault guns, whose low silhouettes and maneuverability enabled them to seek ambush positions and use cover—almost like a Landser on treads. The Tigers were big. They drew fire like magnets and attracted Soviet tanks like flies to manure. Any smart rifleman—and slow thinkers had short life spans in the autumn of 1943—was likely to avoid them rather than take the risk of providing close-in protection.

As they fell back, the Germans scorched the earth. That is a polite military euphemism for a swath of devastation covering hundreds of square miles, sparing nothing and no one except by accident. “They are burning the bread,” Vatutin admonished his men. Few Soviet soldiers did not know what hunger felt like. Small wonder the Russians succeeded in throwing bridgeheads across the river. Small wonder that the Germans’ best chance of holding was to destroy them before they could metastasize. And small wonder that they failed.

On November 3 the 1st Ukrainian Front began crossing the Dnieper in force around Kiev, on Manstein’s northern flank. Fourth Panzer Army’s few remaining AFVs foundered in the Soviet tide. The 25th Panzer Division, sent to restore the situation, had spent most of its existence in the peaceful surroundings of Norway. Botched transportation schedules temporarily made it a panzer division with no tracked vehicles at all. Yet the division managed, somehow, to halt an entire tank army and set the stage for another of Manstein’s signature counterattacks.

This one would be made without Hoth, summarily dismissed by Hitler for his failure to hold the river line. His replacement represented no loss in ability. Erhard Raus had been tempered in the front lines from Leningrad to Kursk. Tactical command of the counterattack was in the arguably even more capable hands of Hermann Balck, now commanding XLVIII Panzer Corps. Even the weather obliged, freezing the mud to stability by the time Balck went in.

Hitler had rejected Manstein and Guderian’s proposals to concentrate every tank in the southern sector for a short, massive blow. Forty-Eighth Panzer Corps counted only 200 tanks and assault guns, but they were manned by some of the Wehrmacht’s best, divisions like 1st Panzer, 7th Panzer, and Leibstandarte. For three weeks they ran rings around the baffled Rotarmisten. Balck’s corps was on the point of executing a 1941-style encirclement when a captured map showed the intended pocket contained no fewer than seven Soviet corps. Even for the intrepid Balck, that was a bit much. And despite virtuoso German performances from corps headquarters to tank crews, the Soviet bridgehead was still intact.

Further south, 1st Panzer Army and Army Group A, whose sector had been relatively quiet since the withdrawal from the Caucasus, came under increasing pressure in mid-August. Initially it was possible to plug gaps and secure flanks by using available AFVs as emergency relief. But when an eagerly awaited panzer division turned out to consist of seven tanks and an under strength panzer grenadier regiment, operational reality had an unpleasant way of unmistakably asserting itself. The situation was worsened in 1st Panzer Army’s sector, where Hitler had ordered an already dangerously deep salient where the Dnieper bent west at Zaporozhye to be expanded to a bridgehead—not for military reasons but to protect a dam producing electricity described as vital for the industry of occupied Ukraine, a dam that was also widely understood to symbolize Soviet achievement.

The extended deployment required to sustain this propaganda illusion drove Manstein to near-wordless fury. It took only four days for the Red Army to overrun the bridgehead in mid-October. The resources it had absorbed were unavailable to resist a far larger attack against 6th Army on 1st Panzer’s right: over a half-million men and 800 tanks against a fifth of the number of armored vehicles, in wide-open country. By the beginning of November the Crimea was isolated and Army Group A cut in half.

The Russians were learning how to keep moving tactically and operationally, and figuring out how to coordinate their movements on a theater level. On October 15 another sledgehammer shattered 1st Panzer Army’s left wing, and in 10 days covered the 100 miles to Krivoi Rog. On October 24 a second front-level offensive broke out of another Dnieper bridgehead a few miles south of the first. Mackensen, anything but an alarmist, reported the gap could not be closed, that his exhausted men had no more left in them. Hitler responded by giving Manstein control of 1st Panzer Army and a temporary free hand.

This time Manstein planned a movement. A panzer corps headquarters rotated from his army group through 1st Panzer Army’s rear zone into position on its left flank. It took command of Totenkopf, of 24th Panzer Division, in Italy since its reformation after Stalingrad, and of 14th Panzer Division, another Stalingrad revival currently shaking down in France. On August 28 this hastily assembled force drove southeast, into the Soviet rear toward Krivoi Rog. Mackensen’s LVII Panzer Corps attacked in the opposite direction two days later. Both operations took the Russians by surprise and succeeded in linking up to cut off the Soviet spearheads and restabilize the sector.

It was another neat local victory, and Mackensen’s last fight in Russia. On November 4 he was transferred to Italy, replaced by a no less capable man. Hans Hube had lost an arm in World War I, led a panzer corps with sufficient distinction to be flown out of Stalingrad, and done well against the British and Americans in Sicily. He had a reputation for willpower and energy. He would need both in the face of still another coordinated Soviet offensive in what again seemed overwhelming force.

The Soviet Union had paid for its successes against Army Group South with over 1.5 million casualties, a quarter of them dead or missing. The German front still held—barely—but its defenders were so tired and apathetic that in the words of one report, they no longer cared whether they were shot by the Russians or their own officers. And this was the elite Grossdeutschland Division, which enjoyed its own personal battalion of Tigers.

On December 24 the Red Army struck again: four fronts, 2.25 million men, 2,600 tanks. Fourth Panzer Army was again hammered into fragments, each making its own way west as best it could. Manstein almost by reflex saw the best response as shortening the front and concentrating his armor for a counterattack, as he had done after Stalingrad. When Hitler refused, Manstein, on his own responsibility, pulled 1st Panzer Army out of the line and redeployed it on 4th Panzer’s right. Hube had his own III Panzer Corps, XLVI Panzer Corps transferred in haste from France, and a provisional heavy tank regiment with a battalion each of Tigers and Panthers, plus some attached infantry and armored artillery. His counterattack cost the Russians a few tens of thousands of men and around 700 tanks. It was a victory—but only in the most limited tactical sense.

The experiences of Mackensen and Hube showed clearly that even in reasonable strength the panzers could do no more than restore local situations. Both counterattacks, moreover, had depended for half their striking power on divisions transferred from the west. How long would it be before Allied initiatives made that impossible?

Any doubts that the balance in armored war had definitively shifted should have been dispelled by the Battle of the Cherkassy Pocket. The Germans still held a 100-mile stretch of the Dnieper north of that city. Hitler projected its use as a springboard for a proposed spring offensive and forbade withdrawal. On January 24, two Soviet fronts hit the sector with a third of a million men, artillery, tanks, and aircraft in proportion. Inside of a week a half dozen divisions, including what was left of Viking, were cut off in the city of Korsun: around 60,000 men. Their armor support totaled two dozen tanks and half as many assault guns.

Hitler, remembering Demyansk, ordered the pocket to hold and promised supply from the air. Those melodies were too familiar. Manstein, well aware of the morale-sapping fear throughout his army group that the pocket would become another Stalingrad, planned a major relief operation using no fewer than nine panzer divisions. Initially every one of the divisions he proposed to use was already engaged elsewhere in Russia, and one was literally stuck fast trying to move through early spring mud. The four divisions finally assembled under 8th Army’s XLVII Panzer Corps had a combined total of 3,800 men in their eight panzer grenadier regiments. Their progress was predictably limited.

That left it up to Hube. His strike force for the unusually domesti cally named Operation Wanda—III Panzer Corps—included 1st, 16th, and 17th Panzer Divisions, Leibstandarte, and the heavy regiment. But the Panzer IV’s Tigers and Panthers bogged tread-deep in mud the wide-tracked T-34s traversed with relative ease. Fuel consumption spiraled; breakdowns multiplied; supply vehicles were immobilized. By February 15 it was clear that the pocket could not be relieved. Instead Manstein ordered a breakout in the direction of the mired III Panzer Corps, code word “Freedom.”

Orders were to leave anyone unable to march. For one of the few times in Wehrmacht history, something like a mutiny took place. Wounded who could be moved were loaded onto every available vehicle. With its seven tanks and three assault guns, Viking took the point and carried the retreat through the first Russian defenses. But III Panzer Corps was unable to fight its way to the designated meeting point and unable to contact the pocket by radio. Command and control were eroding even before the Germans entered a Russian combined-arms killing zone around dawn on February 16. For over four hours Russian tanks and cavalrymen chased fugitives through the ravines and across open ground. This was one of the few verifiable occasions where T-34s systematically ran over fleeing men. And the killing was likely both payback and pleasure.

Around 36,000 men, including 7,500 wounded, eventually reached III Panzer Corps’s lines. Eighty-three hundred of them belonged to Viking and the Walloon SS brigade attached to it. Total casualties in the pocket amounted to around 20,000: no bagatelle, but a long way from Stalingrad. First Panzer Army’s loss of over 150 AFVs reflected its inability to move immobilized tanks and repair breakdowns, rather than any sudden forward leap in the effectiveness of Soviet armor. Nevertheless, though Goebbels’s propaganda machine described a great victory, the battle for the Cherkassy Pocket highlighted the continuing decline of Hitler’s panzers from a strategic and operational force to a tactical instrument.

To maintain and restore even temporarily Army Group South’s sector of the Eastern Front in the months after Kursk had required the commitment of most of the army’s combat-ready armor. That commitment, moreover, was increasingly ad hoc. A “panzer division” in the German order of battle was increasingly likely to be on the ground with as many tanks as could be made operational combined in a single battalion; the mechanized panzer grenadier battalion and the reconnaissance battalion, both brought to something like table of organization strength by transfers from the remaining panzer grenadiers; the half-tracked pioneer company; and a few self-propelled guns. These remnants were repeatedly thrown in against odds of ten to one or higher without time to absorb replacements and work in new officers. They might bear famous names and numbers. They were not what they once were. But then the same could be said about an entire Reich approaching the point of unraveling.

The tipping point on the Eastern Front was even more clearly indicated in March 1944. The Korsun-Cherkassy breakout enraged Stalin, but was not even a speed bump to the continuing Russian offensive. Zukhov had taken over, and his hands drove the spearheads that tore 50-mile gaps in the front, left 1st Panzer Army facing in the wrong direction, and created within days a pocket containing over 200,000 men, fighting soldiers, their rear echelons, and the detritus of an occupation. Twenty-two divisions were represented. One had only 600 men and not a single antitank gun, and that was all too typical. The isolated Germans counted 50 assault guns and 43 tanks, some of them unable to move for lack of fuel.

One veteran spoke of “clean undershirt time,” when one looked for anything white enough to make a surrender flag. Hitler insisted on “holding what there is to hold.” Manstein informed Hitler that he intended to order a breakout on his own responsibility. Hitler temporized to show who was in charge, then agreed.

Manstein’s plan was by now almost conventional: reinforcements from France, this time the refreshed II SS Panzer Corps, to attack from the outside; 1st Panzer Army to drive west toward the SS spearheads. Radio interceptions—midlevel Red Army communications security had not progressed too far since 1914—helped Manstein time the breakout. Hube brought another idea to the table. His experience at Stalingrad and Cherkassy had convinced him of the risks involved in depending on a relief force. If one appeared and made contact, all was well and good. If necessary, however, Hube was prepared to fight his own way through in a “traveling pocket.”

Hube’s plan and its execution are still studied in war colleges. He had four corps headquarters, three of them panzer. He had elements of 10 panzer divisions—all the command elements he needed. The problem was how best to organize the operation. Given overall Russian superiority in the sector, conventional wisdom suggested a strong armored spearhead. The problem was that the tankers might move ahead too fast and too far, leaving the rest of the army to fend for itself—a polite euphemism for being overrun and destroyed. Instead Hube did the opposite. He organized the breakout in two parallel columns. Each had a vanguard of infantry supported by assault guns. The panzers formed the rear guard, in a position to move forward and support the advance forces when necessary.

Hube commanded the breakout in person. He had kept his men active in the days of preparation, sublimating feelings of despair and panic. Straggling and desertion were minimal. Zukhov’s threat to shoot every third prisoner if the pocket did not capitulate by April 2 was not generally known, but would have surprised few. That the Soviet marshal later restricted proposed victims to senior officers was limited comfort to anyone aware of the concession.

Hube originally wanted to break out to the south and head for Romania. Manstein insisted on a western direction despite the longer distance and the numerous river crossings it entailed. He had the senior rank and the final word. On March 27, 1st Panzer Army started west. It had the advantages of surprise; sluggish enemy reaction enabled the rear guard to close up to the main columns relatively unmolested. Hube kept his men closed up and moving. Improvised airstrips enabled the Luftwaffe to bring in fuel and ammunition and evacuate wounded—a major continuing boost to morale and a tribute to “Aunt Ju,” the Ju-52 transports that could land and take off from ground that was unusable by even the American Dakotas. On April 6, 1st Panzer’s spearheads made contact with elements of II SS Panzer Corps. A few days later its divisions were in action on a new defense line that held this time. Hube, awarded the Knight’s Cross with Diamonds, was killed in an air crash on his way to receive it.

His death was at once irony and paradigm. Hans Hube had conducted an epic, indeed heroic operation—but in the wrong direction. First Panzer Army brought out its tanks and its wounded at a cost of 6,000 dead and missing. Its anabasis bought time, but to what purpose? “For slow exhaustion and grim retreat/For a wasted hope and a sure defeat.” The words of an American captured on Bataan in 1942 might well serve as an epigram—or an epitaph—for the saga of Army Group South in the endgame months of the Russo-German War.

III

ALBERT SPEER’S APPOINTMENT as Minister of Armaments in February 1942 brought no immediate, revolutionary change to Germany’s war industry. But Speer had Hitler’s confidence, as much as anyone could ever possess it. He was an optimist at a time when that was a declining quality at high Reich levels. He concentrated on short-term fixes: rationalizing administration, improving use of material, addressing immediate crises. And he faced a major one in tank production.

In September 1942 Hitler called for the manufacture of 800 tanks, 600 assault guns, and 600 self-propelled guns a month by the spring of 1944. In April 1944 the army’s panzer divisions had fewer than 1,700 of their total authorized strength of 4,600 main battle tanks: Panthers and Panzer IVs. That gap could not be bridged by admonitions to take better care of equipment and report losses more accurately. The long obsolete Panzer II was upgraded into a state-of-the-art tracked reconnaissance vehicle. But a glamorous renaming as Luchs, or Lynx, could not camouflage an operational value so limited that production was canceled after the first hundred. Other resources were also diverted to the development of a family of tracked and half-tracked logistics vehicles and increased numbers of armored recovery vehicles, both in their own ways necessary under Russian conditions. The growing effectiveness of the Soviet air force led to the conversion or rebuilding of an increasing number of chassis into antiaircraft tanks with small- caliber armaments. The continued manufacture of early designs—again necessary to maintain even limited frontline strength—further impeded production. Between May and December 1942, tank production actually declined despite constant encouragement and repeated threats from the Reich’s highest quarters.

One positive result of the slowdown was the ability to address the Panther’s shortcomings. The original Model D received improved track and wheel systems. Das Reich received a battalion of them in August, 23rd Panzer Division in October, and 16th Panzer in December. All played crucial roles in Army Group South’s fight for survival. The D’s successor, the Model A, had a new turret with quicker rotation time and a commander’s cupola. Both were important in the target-rich but high-risk environment of the Eastern Front. Engine reliability remained a problem, in part because of quality control difficulties in the homeland, and in part defined by the tank’s low power-to-weight ratio. Improvements to the transmission and gear systems nevertheless reduced the number of engine breakdowns. Modifications to the cooling system cut back on the number of engine fires.

Soft ground, deep mud, and heavy snow continued to put a premium on driving skill. One Panther battalion reported having to blow up 28 tanks it was unable to evacuate. Fifty-six more were in various stages of repair. Eleven remained operational. But during the same period Leibstandarte’s Panther battalion reported only seven combat losses—all from hits to the sides and rear. Of the 54 mechanical breakdowns, almost half could be ready within a week. On the whole the improved Panther was regarded as excellent: consistently able to hit, survive hits, and bring its crews back.

Toward the end of 1943 the High Command began rotating battalions officially equipped with Panzer IIIs—the old workhorse was still pulling its load—back to Germany for retraining on Panther Model As. The reorganized battalions were impressive on paper: 4 companies each of 22 or 17 tanks, plus 8 more in battalion headquarters. First Panzer Division welcomed its new vehicles in November. Others followed, army and SS, the order depending on which division could best spare a battalion cadre. By the end of January 1944 about 900 Panther As had reached the Russian front, in complete battalions or as individual replacements.

As good as they were, the Panthers were a drop in the bucket compared to the mass of Soviet armor facing them. As compensation the High Command began considering a Panther II. Beginning as an up-armored Model D, during 1943 the concept metamorphosed—or better said, metastasized—into a lighter version of the Tiger. Weighing in at over 50 tons, it was originally scheduled to enter service in September 1943, but was put on permanent hold in favor of its less impressive, more reliable forebear.

The same might have been better applied to another armored mammoth. The Panzer VIB, the “King Tiger” or “Royal Tiger,” could trace its conceptual roots all the way to the spring of 1941. Prototypes emerged in 1943; the first production models appeared in January 1944. The VIB was best distinguished by a redesigned turret with a rounded front and a cupola for the commander. Its second characteristic feature was an 88mm L/71 gun (that translates as 19 feet long!) that could take out any allied tank at extreme ranges. Its frontal armor, more than seven inches in places, was never confirmed as having been penetrated by any tank or antitank gun. Its Maybach 700 horsepower engine gave it a reasonable road speed of 24 miles per hour. But if the King was dipped in the River Styx for strength, it was also left with an Achilles heel. Its weight was immobilizing. Only major road bridges could support it. The tonnage increased fuel consumption when fuel supplies were a growing problem, and also overstrained the drive system to a point where breakdowns were the norm.

The point was initially moot, since only five VIBs were in service by March 1944. But the situation was replicated in other end-of-the-war designs. The Jagdtiger was a tank destroyer version of the VIB carrying a 128mm gun—not only the heaviest weapon mounted on a German AFV, but an excellent design in its own right. At over 70 tons, however, and with only 20 degrees traverse for its main armament, the vehicle was only dangerous to anything unfortunate enough to pass directly in front of it.

The Panther’s tank destroyer spin-off was far more promising. Indeed the Jagdpanther is widely and legitimately considered the best vehicle of its kind during World War II. An 88mm L/71 gun, well-sloped armor, and solid cross-country capacity on a 45-ton chassis made the Jagdpanther a dominant chess piece wherever it appeared. Predictably, preproduction difficulties and declining production capacity kept its numbers limited.

For all the print devoted to the Panthers, the Tigers, and their variants, the backbone of the armored force through 1945 remained the Panzer IV. Its final versions had little enough in common with the “cigar butts” of 1940. The Model H officially became the main production version in March 1942. Its armor protection included side panels and grew to a maximum of 3.2 inches in front, at the price of increased weight (25 tons) that cut the road speed to a bit over 20 miles per hour. A later J version incorporated such minor modifications as wider tracks and wire-mesh side skirts just as effective as armor plate in deflecting infantry-fired antitank rockets.

Guderian in particular considered the new version of a well-tried system a practical response to the chronic frontline shortfalls in tank strength in the East. The Panzer IV was relatively easy to maintain -and relatively easy to evacuate when damaged. Over 3,000 of them would be produced in 1943, and standard equipment of the army panzer divisions was set at a battalion each of Panthers and Panzer IVs.

Guderian’s opposition to the assault gun had eroded with experience. Not only was its frontline utility indisputable, it could be manufactured faster and in larger numbers by less experienced enterprises than the more complex turreted tanks. Guderian correspondingly advocated restoring the panzer regiments’ third battalions and giving them assault guns as a working compromise.

The vehicles he intended were significantly different from the original assault guns and their underlying concept. The mission of supporting infantry attacks had become secondary at best. What was now vital was holding off Soviet armor. The self-propelled Marders, with their light armor and open tops, were well into the zone of dangerous obsolescence. In 1943 the Weapons Office ordered the development of a smaller vehicle mounting a scaled-down 75mm gun on the chassis of the old reliable 38(t). The 16-ton Hetzer (Baiter) was useful and economical, and continues to delight armor buffs and modelers. It was, however, intended for the infantry’s antitank battalions, and did not appear in combat until 1944—one more example of diffused effort that characterized the Reich’s war effort.

On the other hand, the Sturmgeschütz IIIG, with its 75mm L/48 gun, seemed highly suited to tank destruction and was readily available—until Allied bombing intervened. The factory manufacturing the bulk of IIIGs was heavily damaged in late 1943. To compensate, Hitler ordered the available hulls to be fitted to Panzer IV chassis. The result proved practical enough to encourage the production of over 1700 Jagdpanzer IVs by November 1944, despite Guderian’s protest at the corresponding fallout of turreted tanks. The new name of “tank destroyer” suited the vehicles’ new purpose, though their predecessors continued in service under the original title, creating confusion during and after the war that remains exacerbated by the vehicles’ close resemblance.

The Jagdpanzer IVs were intended for the panzer divisions and the assault gun battalions, whose number grew to over three dozen during 1943. A slightly heavier version with a 75mm L/70 gun like the Panther’s and the unflattering nickname of “Guderian’s Duck” began entering service in August 1944. It proved first-rate against armor in Russia and the West; almost a thousand were produced during the war. The “Duck’s” long gun made it uncomfortably nose-heavy (the source of its sobriquet), but by then that was among the least of the panzers’ problems.

Apart from a few emergency variations churned out in the war’s final months, the technical lineup of Hitler’s panzers was complete. As a footnote the design staffs, after years of work, finally developed the war’s best armored car. The SdKfz 234/2 Puma had it all: high speed, a low silhouette, and a 50mm L39 still effective against tanks in an emergency. Unfortunately, by the time the Puma and its variants entered production, the panzers’ need for a long-range reconnaissance vehicle was itself long past. Now their enemies all too often found them.

IV

FOR THE FIRST half of 1944, German strategic and operational attention remained focused on Russia—specifically on a southern sector whose vulnerability had been repeatedly tested and too often confirmed. Guderian spoke for the panzers in a report of March 27, 1944. He bluntly informed Hitler that the war in the east could never be won by static defense. Whenever the panzers’ mobility was disregarded, whenever they were engaged piecemeal, catastrophe followed. The situation demanded the formation of a strong operational reserve to be used in a mobile defense, Manstein-style.

Hitler dismissed Guderian’s urging as nonsense. He described it as criminal to give up anything bought with German blood without another bloody fight to hold it. To make his point, on March 30 the Führer removed Kleist from command of Army Group A and dismissed Manstein as well. The time for operations, he declared, was over. Now was the time for stubborn defense. Any doubt of how that should be defined was also removed when Hitler appointed Ferdinand Schörner commander of the renamed Army Group South Ukraine. Schörner during the war had devolved from an unimaginative field leader to a less imaginative thug with a penchant for ordering drumhead executions.

Manstein’s rechristened Army Group North Ukraine went to Model. His perceived status as “Hitler’s favorite general,” combined with an abrasive personality and a no-excuses approach to command, have combined to reduce his stature as a capable general. He also had some of the best of the new generation of panzer officers: Raus at 4th Panzer Army, Josef Harpe succeeding Hube at 1st, and Breith and Balck commanding corps. Even before Model’s arrival, these men were coming to a consensus, based on their post-Barbarossa, post-Stalingrad experiences, that the army could no longer execute sweeping maneuvers in the Manstein style. The discrepancy in armored forces was too overwhelming. Tactical success was all even the best-executed counterstrokes could achieve, and even those were questionable except under strongly favorable conditions.

Manstein’s approach had another weakness. It reduced the infantry to little more than pawns. Soviet attacks were based on mass and planning. Artillery broke down the defenses; infantry overwhelmed them; tanks drove into the rear zones. Failure at any stage meant repeating the sequence; as many as 30 consecutive attacks in the same local sector had been verified. The increasingly frequent result was the overrunning and dislocation of the defending German infantry divisions. That in turn meant the sacrifice of their antitank capacity. Two-thirds of the infantry division’s guns were towed 75mm pieces too heavy to move in a hurry. The remainder were thinly armored, open-topped mounts vulnerable to almost any heavy weapon.

Infantry without antitank guns were like oysters without shells. Personal weapons, an upscale copy of the US bazooka and the fire-and-forget Panzerfaust rocket, were coming into service and would prove highly effective. Their short ranges, however, made them almost suicidal to use in open country or against tanks massed on Soviet scales. The best the foot soldiers could do was get as far out of the way as possible. And by the time the panzer reserves intervened, they found themselves fighting off the back foot, reacting to superior force as best they could.

As Raus dryly noted, the Soviet system was foolproof as long as the Germans did not interfere. Instead Army Group South’s command team favored a “battle-zone defense” that could be as much as 25 miles deep. The infantry manning the front lines would fall back to prepared positions a mile or so in the rear just before the Soviet hammer fell. The artillery would simultaneously switch to prepared alternate firing positions. Extensive minefields covered by antitank guns would channel the Red Army onto killing grounds. Panzer battle groups reinforced by antitank and assault guns would be available for immediate intervention to choke off local breakthroughs and mount local counterattacks, enmeshing the Soviets in a modern version of the Roman arena’s retiarius-secutor gladiatorial combats.

What Model and his principal subordinates had in mind was a long way from Hitler’s primitive concept of defense. Both nevertheless dated to the Great War. The Führer had been imprinted by his experiences in 1914-15, under a doctrine that stressed holding and retaking ground at all costs. By 1917 a more flexible approach had developed, much along the lines of thinking in Army Group South, with armor added to the counterattack punch. It would require excellent communications and careful timing. But a combined-arms zone defense in earlier versions had worked for Model at Rzhev and against him at Kursk. At least it gave the Landser a fighting chance. On the other side of the war zone, Erwin Rommel was simultaneously advocating a similar approach based on similar reasoning to resisting Allied landings whose success would also depend heavily on mass and firepower.

Panzer purists in East and West objected vehemently. Balck in particular held his ground so stubbornly that Model unusually gave up the argument and resolved the issue by transferring all of Balck’s panzer divisions to other commands. The deeper significance of the issue, however, lies in the armored force’s growing institutional acceptance of a strategic, operational, and tactical environment mandating a fundamentally defensive focus.

Armies are not infinitely, or even significantly, malleable institutions. They tend to finish much as they began; learning curves seldom imply paradigm shifts. The German army of World War II was unusually successful in reconfiguring itself in the middle of a conflict. Nevertheless, seen from a bit of distance and with a bit of irony, the zone defense concept amounted to the inversion of the approach that the panzers had so effectively employed in 1940, though restoring the all-arms cooperation significantly disrupted by the exigencies of the last 18 months in Russia.

The new order’s prospects in the East were, however, limited in view of the storm brewing on the Russian side of the battle line. For mid-1944 Stavka planned a series of mutually reinforcing strategic offensives along several axes. The initial operation proposed for 1944 was a drive into Romania: a follow-up of the winter’s successes in the Ukraine intended militarily to open the way to the Balkans, politically to force Romania out of the war, and economically to deprive Germany of Romanian oil. Simultaneously, pressure in the Leningrad sector and Byelorussia would be renewed, eroding German resources and pinning their forces in place. The offensives on the flanks would be followed by Operation Bagration: a massive blow against Army Group Center with the intention of annihilating the forces in that sector and compelling the Germans in the north and south to retreat or risk envelopment. If success reinforced success, as Stavka expected, the entire German front might well dissolve, opening the way to Berlin and Western Europe before the British and Americans did more than gain a foothold on the continent.

This was the broad-front Grand Design Stalin had sought from the beginning. The program was ambitious, but the Red Army of 1944 had the material strength to implement, and the operational sophistication to plan, the largest, most geographically extensive, coordinated strategic offensive in the history of war. Technically, its armored forces in particular had also moved to an advanced stage.

In 1942 and early 1943 the Red Army’s crucial problem had been maintaining inventory. Design innovation had been suspended. Production increases combined with the advent of the Panthers and Tigers to encourage new developments. In April 1944 the T-34/85, armed with an 85mm gun in a three-man turret, began entering service. Arguably a cut below the Panther technically, the T-34/85 was a battlefield match for both the big German cats—and it could be manufactured in far larger numbers. The KV was replaced on Soviet assembly lines by the JS, named for Josef Stalin. Its definitive World War II version, the JS II was armed with a 122mm gun: the largest caliber used in any numbers by any army. Its low velocity compared to the Panther and Tiger was balanced by the 55-pound weight of its shell: enough to crack open any armor at battle ranges. At 46 tons, its 600 horsepower engine gave the JS a road speed of around 23 miles per hour, and its well-sloped turret armor conferred solid protection from glancing hits. It took the field at the same time as the T-34/85, and was an even less pleasant surprise to German tank crews and panzer commanders.

A new generation of assault guns emerged as well, including one of the war’s signature AFVs. In early 1943 the roomy hulls of obsolescent KV tanks had been used to mount a 152mm howitzer adapted from an artillery piece. Any shortcomings in range and muzzle velocity were balanced by a shell weighing almost 100 pounds. First used at Kursk, the SU 152s were promptly nicknamed zvierboi, “animal hunters,” and supported every Soviet offensive in 1943 before being supplanted by the JS 152 and its variant JS 122, mounting the tank’s 122mm gun in a fixed hull mount.

In contrast to the Panthers and Tigers, optimized for armored combat, the new Soviet AFVs were designed for breakthrough and exploitation. Compared to their German counterparts, their guns had better high-explosive capacity, enhancing their use against unarmored targets. Their range was longer; their reliability greater. Generally, for the rest of the war the JS heavies, organized by battalions, were the backbone of break-ins and breakthroughs. The T34s, both 76s and 85s, were deployed by brigades in the tank and mechanized corps for the breakout and exploitation stages.

The Red Army’s summer offensive began when 4th Ukrainian Front isolated the Crimean peninsula in April and overran the garrison a month later. But 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts were not merely checked but defeated in their efforts to break through into Romania in April and May. The Soviets threw several bridgeheads across the Dniester but were unable to develop them. Initial Soviet casualties were heavy. The spring thaw slowed their tanks as impartially as it had German ones in other wet seasons. The Germans again scorched the earth partly in preparing their defenses, partly under orders, and partly from choice, leaving a swath of devastation that impeded already overextended lines of communication. The Red Army nevertheless did not bog down. It was checked by a defensive system that succeeded in neutralizing a discrepancy in men, tanks, guns, and aircraft that was about two-to-one across the board.

Again the panzers played a key role. Three divisions with different provenances: Totenkopf, Grossdeutschland, and 24th Panzer—which still preserved its horse-cavalry panache—illustrated time and again Raus’s metaphor of the fencer who interrupts his opponent’s sequence of moves just when he exposes himself to strike. The 2nd Ukrainian Front described German defensive belts supported by small armored forces operating from ambush, slowing and stopping advances thrown into confusion by their sudden appearance. Recurrent phrases like “poor target identification” and “unobserved artillery fire” suggest that Soviet troops were still on the down side of critical learning curves involving situational awareness and situational response at tactical levels.

The conclusion reached by Hitler and the High Command that the summer’s main assault would be in the Ukraine has been widely criticized and frequently described as a result of Soviet maskirovka or “deception”; a failure of German intelligence and reconnaissance; a willful overlooking of the geographic vulnerability of Army Group Center’s sector. The frequently overlooked late-spring offensive discussed above also contributed to German decision making. The Russians had been hammering at the Ukraine for 10 months and had gained enough to make following up on successes a solid option. The Germans understood very well the political and economic consequences of further losses in that region. They were aware as well that increasing sectors of the front were in the hands of Romanian and Hungarian troops whose morale was even shakier and whose fighting power was even less than in the weeks before Stalingrad.

Despite a year’s worth of evidence both that the USSR possessed the resources to mount simultaneous large-scale offensives and that Stavka did not share the German concept of a Schwerpunkt, High Command planners projected the consequences of a Soviet breakthrough in the south in militarily ethnocentric terms. They forecast either a full-strength drive into Romania and the Balkans or a replay of the panzers’ 1940 left hook, aimed toward the Baltic. Should the latter be the case, Army Group Center had done well and fought well the previous year. Its longtime commander, Gunther von Kluge, had been hospitalized by a traffic accident. But his replacement, Ernst Busch, had a reputation as a steady if unspectacular tactician with a good record in defensive operations of the kind he was expected to face.

That logic indicated the mobile divisions’ deployment. As of May 31, Army Group South Ukraine had Grossdeutschland, seven panzer, and one panzer grenadier divisions. Army Group North Ukraine counted seven panzer and two panzer grenadier divisions, plus no fewer than four full-strength battalions of Tigers. Army Group North, an armored- force stepchild since 1941, possessed one panzer and one panzer grenadier division and a Tiger battalion. Army Group Center had two panzer divisions, a panzer grenadier division, and a lone battalion of Tigers.

Those ratios remained essentially unchanged over the next month. For the first time in its brief history, the Eastern Front was becoming something of a stepchild. Its strategic reserve lay 1,500 miles away, preparing to throw the Allies into the English Channel as invasion loomed in the long-neglected West. Its operational reserve did not exist—not least because too many of the East’s mobile divisions were in no condition to be redeployed casually from sector to sector. Neither replacements nor reinforcements were prominent in their pipelines. As late as May, only five panzer divisions had a Panther battalion. Third Panzer Division listed 12 operational Panzer IVs; 12th Panzer only three. This was thin protection against a looming storm.

The run-up to Operation Bagration also offers an opportunity to address a subject that almost disappears from view after 1941: panzers and partisans. In the proliferating body of literature analyzing German anti-partisan operations in the context of a war of extermination implemented by ordinary soldiers against ordinary victims, panzer units are conspicuous by a marginal presence. That reflects three facts. Neither the Reich nor the Wehrmacht was interested in winning hearts and minds. Once the Eastern front stabilized in 1942, the limited strength of German rear security forces relative to the burgeoning partisan movement encouraged near-random violence as a deterrent. And when additional force was needed to ratchet up the terror, infantry divisions were more likely to be deployed than panzers always in demand at the front and ill-equipped for fighting in swamps and forests.

Those points made, there is no evidence that when panzer formations were employed behind the lines in Russia, they systematically behaved any differently from any other units. In March 1944, Army Group Center’s 9th Army established camps in its rear zone. They were meant to contain all civilians unable to work—whether due to age, gender, or sickness—to keep them from aiding the partisans. The victims, as many as 50,000, were confined in barbed-wire enclosures without shelter, clean water, or sanitary facilities. A few loaves of bread thrown over a fence caused panic and riots. Fires were forbidden at night though the ground froze hard. After a week, hunger, cold, and disease had turned the swamp into a cemetery. As many as 13,000 Russians died.

The units involved in this roundup included 5th and 20th Panzer Divisions—as normal a pair of formations as the Wehrmacht offered. Twentieth Panzer did distinguish itself by bringing in 7,000 more civilians than the trains could accommodate. Otherwise it was a routine exercise. There was nothing spectacular: no mass shootings, no more than occasional brutality—just indifference; just another day’s work on the Russian Front.

V

OPERATION BAGRATION BEGAN on June 22, 1944—three years to the day after the German invasion. The Red Army struck in the initial phase alone with 1.25 million men, more than 4,000 tanks and assault guns, more than 23,000 guns, mortars, and Katyushas, and almost 6,500 aircraft. Army Group Center simply disappeared so completely that it required years and decades to begin piecing together a coherent narrative of events in the first hours and days.

With only a single panzer division immediately available, any notion of a zone defense was illusory. The three panzer divisions transferred in were committed by battalions to stabilize critical situations, if only for a few hours. The army group’s assault guns desperately shifted from sector to sector, fighting by batteries and single vehicles to cover retreats and open escape corridors. Model relieved Busch on June 28. The best he could propose was to construct a new front around Minsk, stabilizing it with new divisions from Germany. But Hitler continued to insist on holding ground, hanging on to “strong points” existing in little more than name, and counterattacking at every opportunity. Some units tried to obey; others dismissed the directives as Soviet deception. At least one division commander committed suicide.

On June 30, Zeitzler, turning at the last like a stepped-on worm, refused to take responsibility for Hitler’s order to hold on in the Baltic despite what was happening to Army Group Center. By his own account at least, Zeitzler concluded by insisting the war was militarily lost and it was time to make an end. In the aftermath of the confrontation he collapsed. Whether from a heart attack or a nervous breakdown, the result was the same: an exacerbation of order-counterorder-disorder. Both the Führer and the High Command believed the “real” Soviet offensive in the Ukraine was yet to come. The fighting in Normandy was absorbing more and more of the Western theater’s mobile forces. Army Group Center was on its own.

Minsk went under on July 3 as the 5th Panzer Division and a Tiger battalion sought vainly to keep open the way west. By July 8, 5th Panzer was down to 18 operational tanks. Vilna’s garrison was authorized to break out only when Adolf Heusinger, who had temporarily replaced Zeitzler, urged Hitler to allow the surrounded men to choose how they wished to die. For two and a half years 3rd Panzer Army had been an armored army virtually without tanks. Now Reinhardt, last of the original panzer chieftains, remembered he had led a division before he became a colonel general. Taking command of elements of 6th Panzer Division, just arrived from reconstitution in Germany, he rode with the leading tanks, cut a 20-mile corridor through the Red Army to Vitebsk and brought out 3,000 survivors.

It was another fine piece of panzer soldiering—in a minor key. The Red Army did even better armored work on a decisive scale. On July 18, 1st Byelorussian Front drove two spearheads deep into Army Group Center’s southern sector, trapped most of 2nd Army, and headed for the Vistula. Driving into a near-vacuum, the Front’s vanguards reached the river on July 25; the first permanent bridgehead was established four days later.

If the frontline emergency was not enough, Heusinger was among those injured in the unsuccessful July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life. His successor as Chief of Staff (officially Acting Chief) was Heinz Guderian. He seems to have been at least aware of the assassination plot, and probably indirectly approved. Certainly Guderian authorized temporarily delaying the movement from Berlin to the Eastern Front of some armored units the conspirators intended to use to take control of the capital after Hitler’s death. On July 20 he took pains to be absolutely elsewhere: hunting by himself on his new estate in East Prussia. Though Guderian was able to sidestep the suspicion that fell on him, there seems to be little doubt that he would have served a new government with the same competence with which he continued to serve Hitler: a combination of ambition, opportunism, and patriotism, marinated in an increasing level of fatalism.

For the record Guderian referred to his appointment as a burden he felt compelled to accept. He briefly underwrote Hitler’s perspective by denouncing proposals for withdrawal as defeatism and pessimism. Whether that behavior reflected opportunistic gratitude for his promotion or lack of information on what was really happening in Russia remains unknown—perhaps even to Guderian himself.

The events of July 20 further complicated responding to a disaster reaching such dimensions that Hitler overlooked Model’s policy of breaking out encircled troops where possible and establishing a new, firm defensive line along the Vistula. Here again the panzers bore the weight of the action. Viking and Totenkopf Divisions were returning from brief stints in the rear after having been taken off the line in the Ukraine. The Skulls were Himmler’s pets because of their concentration camp origins, and he saw to it that the division received a full battalion of Panthers. Viking had no similar patron, but on August 1 it managed to field 64 tanks, two-thirds of them Panthers. Fourth Panzer Division, fresh from a long spell in France and Germany, was one of the only two fully equipped panzer divisions in Russia, with 80 Panzer IVs and the same number of Panthers. The newcomers’ battle groups managed to clear a path for 2nd Army’s more or less orderly retreat. They sustained enough fighting power to play vital roles as well in the second half of Model’s operational plan, a riposte aimed at the Red Army formations drawing up to the Vistula.

Soviet losses had been heavy; Soviet organizations had been disrupted by victory; Soviet logistics had been overextended by distance. These are usually cited as the operational reasons the Red Army slowed and stopped east of Warsaw. On the political side it is frequently asserted—and sometimes held as an article of faith—that Stalin ordered the halt in order to leave the Germans free to destroy the Polish Home Army, which rose on August 1 expecting Soviet support, and thereby facilitate Poland’s “liberation” as a Soviet satellite.

Hitler’s panzers also had a good deal to do with that course of events. Taking a chapter from Manstein’s book in the winter of 1942-43, Model pulled three panzer divisions out of the line, sacrificing ground to concentrate force. He added the newly arrived Parachute Panzer Division “Hermann Göring” to the blend, and hit the 2nd Tank Army from four sides at once in the open ground east of the Vistula with about 300 AFVs against 800. Clogged roads and disrupted rail schedules were almost a relief to staff planners able to turn their attention away from the dismal overall prospects. The result was a reduced version of another classic envelopment executed 60 miles north in 1914: the Battle of Tannenberg which destroyed an entire Russian army. Now SS, army, and Luftwaffe tankers fought side by side in a three-day battle that cost 2nd Tank Army two-thirds of its strength and perhaps threw Stavka and Stalin off at least part of their game.

The tragic events in Warsaw, the Wehrmacht’s savage suppression of the rising and the destruction of the city on Hitler’s orders, have understandably overshadowed this event. Soviet accounts are, equally understandably, silent on the subject. German records were lost or scattered. An outstanding piece of archival investigation, one of many by the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt’s Karl-Heinz Frieser, makes the case against categorizing the event as just another rear-guard fight, another meaningless tactical victory for the panzers. In its aftermath, Soviet planning for the central sector shifted, returning to the proven pattern of coordinated frontal attacks.

This was done against Zukhov’s vehement urging to maintain the strategic/operational initiative by driving past Warsaw, toward the Baltic through East Prussia—not least in order to bring the war home to what Russia had long understood as Germany’s heartland. This bold stroke just might have finished the war in the east six months earlier. As it was, 30 German divisions were gone: 400,000 men—over 250,000 of those simply listed as “missing.” Army Group Center had time to stabilize its front—but that front now lay in Poland. And this comprehensive disaster invited others. Army Group North had been not merely outflanked but virtually isolated. Hitler insisted on holding a “Baltic Fortress” under attack by elements of four Soviet fronts, including numbers of new JS-IIs.

Army Group North had a veteran Tiger battalion, the 502nd. Its 30 tanks wreaked company-scale havoc wherever they appeared. In one fight, the first-ever encounter of Tigers and Stalins, the 2nd Company accounted for fifty JS-IIIs and T-34s without a single loss. On another occasion, three Tigers knocked out 18 Soviet AFVs in one long summer evening. But the 502nd could not be everywhere at once. The army group’s 200 assault guns were needed to shore up the infantry. Demodernization had progressed so far that in some sectors, Landser took the chance of letting tanks roll over them in order to use satchel charges against their sides and decks—“poor man’s war” with a vengeance.

The result was predictable. On July 31, Red Army vanguards reached the Baltic Sea, the first stage of what became a 75-mile gap between Army Groups North and Center. The German response was also predictable: turn to the panzers. Third Panzer Army received an armored transfusion. Reinhardt had taken over the army group on August 16 when Model was transferred to the Western Front. Reinhardt’s replacement was Raus, no less capable a panzer general. Instead of bits and pieces, he had six divisions, including Grossdeutschland, newly arrived from Romania, plus an improvised task force with 60 tanks. Each one would be needed: as at Stalingrad, Army Group North was too overextended to do more than hold its ground as opposed to participating in a breakout.

What Raus did not possess was a viable plan. Hoping to catch the Russians off balance, the High Command sent in the panzers on such a broad front that mutual support was impossible. Raus and his staff officers were unable to drive forward an advance that opened no more than a narrow, fragile corridor to the trapped army group before grinding to a halt. Then instead of using the hard-won passageway as an escape hatch, Hitler funneled reinforcements through it—including a panzer division whose forlorn- hope assignment demonstrated Hitler’s determination to hold the Baltic to the end. And 3rd Panzer Army’s headquarters was eventually established in Willkischken, just on the Prussian side of the 1939 border with Poland. The Reich was steadily and inexorably receding.

Guderian and the High Command insisted Army Group North be authorized to break out and rejoin Army Group Center. The distance was still short enough, and the terrain sufficiently broken, that lack of armor was less of a handicap than had been the case elsewhere in such operations. As further incentive, a high proportion of the Army Group’s units and men came from the Reich’s eastern provinces and would be fighting for their homes and families. Hitler vetoed every proposal. In September, 15 Soviet armies, 1.5 million men and over 3,000 tanks and assault guns, struck Army Group North all along its line. Schörner, transferred in July to the Baltic and initially committed personally to holding on, nevertheless knew a lost hand when dealt one. He flew to Hitler’s headquarters and in an eloquent quarter of an hour convinced Hitler to allow a retreat. Abandoning Estonia, the army group pulled back into Courland.

On October 5, seven Soviet armies rolled over a 3rd Panzer Army again reduced to one of its titular divisions, driving its remnants westward and reaching the Baltic coast four days later. A series of frontal attacks in the next few weeks drove Army Group North inextricably into the Courland peninsula. They also forced using the available armor in detachments, dooming any unauthorized breakthrough before it started. The eventually renamed Army Group Courland had the 12th and 14th Panzer Divisions and enough assault guns and tank destroyers to field initially around 250 AFVs on a good maintenance day. By November 1, 14th Panzer Division was down to 21 runners. Twelfth Panzer reported 19. A half million soldiers and civilians were trapped against the Baltic Sea. They had no real hope of rescue, even should Hitler change his position that where the German soldier planted his boots, there he remained. Alive or dead made no difference.

Of no less consequence, the panzer divisions vainly expended in the north were unavailable to reinforce a southern sector whose long-expected turn finally came on July 13. Harpe had taken over from Model in command of Army Group North Ukraine. Since Army Group Center’s collapse, seven of his panzer divisions had been ordered north. There remained 1st, 8th, 16th, and 17th Panzer, 20th Panzer Grenadier, and SS Viking: three each in reserve of 1st and 4th Panzer Armies as a counterattack force with a total of around 500 deployable AFVs. First Ukrainian Front, the immediate opposition, had 1,000,000 men, over 2,200 tanks and assault guns, and enough artillery to deploy 400 pieces per mile in the sectors chosen for the initial breakthrough.

The massive discrepancies in force and fighting power negated the concept of a zone defense. Harpe’s armored reserves disappeared in days, absorbed before the full Russian strength developed. Over 40,000 Germans were cut off around Brody. This time there were no miracle escapes. The German commanders on the ground reacted slowly; only fragments were able to fight their way through to panzer battle groups barely able to hold the line, much less counterattack with any effect. By July 18, 4th Panzer Army was down to 20 tanks and around 160 assault guns—the latter, as in the northern sector, fully absorbed in keeping the hard-pressed infantry formations from being entirely scattered by what seemed endless numbers of T-34s. The battalions had been renamed brigades, but initially without any increase in strength.³ Batteries and individual crews ran up their scores into three figures. But the front kept moving back.

Even against determined resistance, the Russians moved fast. Lublin fell on July 24 after a breakthrough attempt by 17th Panzer Division failed—though nobody in authority seemed to ask what the prospects for success were in the first place for a worn-down division pitted against an entire army. Against Hitler’s orders, Harpe ordered a general retreat to the Vistula. The key regional transport and communications center of Lvov fell on July 27. On July 29, a Soviet tank army crossed the Vistula in force at Sandomierz. By the end of the month the Army Group’s front was over 120 miles farther west, into Galicia and the Carpathian foothills. Its losses approached 100,000, but its line was intact, the worst of the gaps plugged, and Harpe expressed a hope of hanging on until reinforcements arrived from somewhere—anywhere.

Instead the High Command ordered a full- scale counterattack against the Sandomierz bridgehead. The job was given to Balck, who took over 4th Panzer Army on August 5 for an attack that began on August 10—another example of what had become a pattern of expecting senior panzer officers to substitute energy and willpower for the careful planning required of the weaker party. The III Panzer Corps achieved initial success through surprise, but was stopped within a few days. A second local counterattack by four panzer divisions on August 28 was canceled after three days; a third was called off when Balck and his staff failed to bring the exhausted panzers on line in time.

The Red Army no longer buckled when faced with the unexpected—particularly on the defensive. Flexibility was still not a major characteristic of Soviet armored formations, but solidity is also a military virtue. The Soviet tankers who held their ground around Sandomierz were motivated by more than fear of NKVD firing squads. They knew that support was on hand, and that support would arrive in a force the Germans could no longer match.

At company and batallion levels, Red Army tankers were taking the measure of their German opponents. The 501st Heavy Tank Battalion was the first to take Tiger Bs into action on August 11. In three days, 14 of 30 were lost to an approximately equal number of T-34s and JS-IIs. The Soviets shifted quickly from attack formations to ambush positions, taking full advantage of the Stalins’ cross-country capacity to strike the Tigers’ vulnerable sides and rears. The 122mm guns cracked open the Tiger B like a coconut. And when they evaluated the three undamaged tanks they captured, Red Army experts were unimpressed by its technology.

By the end of August, North Ukraine’s front was relatively quiet—less from anything Harpe and his commanders did than because of the Soviet decision to reinforce a more spectacular victory to the south. Schörner had used the time after the abortive Russian spring offensive and before his transfer to replace equipment and train men. Army Group South Ukraine’s divisions were at full operational strength; its front was stable. The army group’s chief of staff even boasted that troops could be made available to other fronts if necessary.

In the first three weeks of July, South Ukraine paid an initial installment on the bluster with five panzer divisions and two battalions of assault guns. The Romanian government and high command, already badly shaken, was anything but reassured. Nor was Schörner’s replacement a particularly inspired—or inspiring—choice. At best, Johannes Friessner was what Napoleon called “a good ordinary general,” with no experience of the kind of war waged in the open ground of the southeast. The first thing he learned was that his staff considered the available reserves—two panzer and a panzer grenadier division—insufficient to block a Soviet offensive. The second thing he learned was that Hitler would allow no front adjustments. The third was that his staff was right.

Second and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts were commanded by two of the best Russian wartime marshals: Rodion Malinovsky and Fyodor Tolbukhin. Stavka had rebuilt their combined force to over 900,000 men and 1,400 AFVs. Eighteen hundred planes guaranteed near-supremacy in the air. The hammer fell on August 20 in the Pruth valley. The sector was held by a mix of German infantry and Romanians already looking over their shoulders. Successful local counterattacks by panzer battle groups could do nothing to restore a situation that, by August 24, saw Russian spearheads meet near Leovo and cut off the German 6th Army. A Bagration-scale disaster was in sight, and Friessner was not the man to convince the Romanians otherwise. On August 23, Romanian King Michael dismissed Prime Minister Ion Antonescu. Within days the new government took Romania out of the war, then in again—against Hungary and Germany. Bulgaria, which had supported the Axis without declaring war on the USSR, declared war on Germany three days after Tolbukhin’s tankers crossed its border on August 5.

For a while everybody was shooting at everybody else. The Luftwaffe bombed Bucharest. The Romanians took about 50,000 German prisoners. The Russians finished off 6th Army for the second time during the war and drove toward Hungary and the Balkans. Not only did 600,000 men and 26 divisions suddenly find themselves on enemy territory; as Red Army spearheads entered Yugoslavia, the entire German force in the southern Balkans was threatened with envelopment.

The transformation of occupied Yugoslavia from a strategic backwater to the key to the Eastern Front’s right half, the successful evacuation of Greece and Albania, and the stabilization—again temporary—of what remained of the Reich’s Balkan sector, is a story of its own. It has little to do with the panzers. Apart from a few pawn pieces like the self-propelled antitank guns organic to some infantry divisions and a few of the ubiquitous assault guns, a vital sector fought a vital campaign on a technical level little advanced from that of 1918. The 2nd Panzer Army, sent south in August 1943 and commanded eventually by an artilleryman, spent most of its time disarming Italians and fighting partisans with no tanks at all under command. It was a far cry from the days of 1940-41 for those of Guderian’s former staff officers who remained at their posts.

Romania’s change of sides left Army Group South Ukraine no option but to save what could be saved and fall back on the Carpathians. The new line was formed by divisions officially designated as “remnants.” They included 13th and 20th Panzer, who covered the retreat until they had almost nothing left. By August 29, 20th Panzer Division was down to 1,300 men and no tanks: a “panzer battle group” by designation and courtesy. A similar fate overtook most of the assault gun battalions: guns lost, vehicles destroyed, survivors escaping on foot in small groups.

Favorable terrain, Soviet overextension, and increased commitment by a Hungarian army fighting on its doorstep with German guns at its back, enabled the establishment of something like a stable front covering Budapest and the oil fields of Lake Balaton, which were now more vital than ever with their Romanian counterparts gone. Initially it seemed more of a speed bump than a battle line. On October 6, Malinovsky broke through a Hungarian sector on a 60-mile front around Debrecen. That was only 130 miles from Budapest, most of it open ground: the only question apparently was which of the front’s elements would arrive first.

The Germans had stationed large forces in Hungary since March. When Regent Miklós Horthy attempted negotiations with Stalin, he was deposed on October 16 and replaced by a fascist puppet government. In the aftermath of the coup, the German High Command had been moving reserves into Hungary for a counterattack of its own. Operation Gypsy Baron, a nice reference to the Strauss operetta, was ambitiously expected to recover the Carpathian passes. Instead its forces were thrown in to block the Red Army: 227 tanks and assault guns, German and Hungarian, against almost 800. In a near-classic encounter battle, the 1st, 13th, and 23rd Panzer Divisions up and encircled part of the Soviet vanguard. But taking a page from their enemies’ playbook, the Russians managed to break out despite losing over half their armor.

Malinovsky proposed to regroup and rebuild his tired front. Stalin ordered him forward. The offensive resumed on October 29. When it stalled, Stavka authorized heavy reinforcements, including 200 tanks, and ordered Tolbukhin to close up on Malinovsky’s right. Through November and into December, the Russians fought their way forward on both sides of Budapest, cutting the rail line to Vienna on December 23 and beginning the siege of a city neither German nor Hungarian generals believed could be defended.

The panzers’ direct role in this process was limited. They had shot their bolt at Debrecen. Battle groups of a thousand men and a few dozen AFVs were merely drops of water on a hot stove. The men and the tanks that could have made up some of the autumn’s losses had instead been sent west to the Ardennes. In the face of Hitler’s insistence that Budapest be held to a finish, panzer commanders on the spot risked no more than minor movements.

VI

THERE WAS A sidebar to the campaigns of 1944. On September 10 the 1st Byelorussian Front, resupplied and reinforced, mounted a major offensive north of Warsaw, aimed northwest at the Narew River. It was stopped by Viking and Totenkopf, who thereby played a crucial role in the Warsaw Uprising’s defeat; but on October 10 it resumed, extended on the left by the 3rd Byelorussian Front. By October 21, the Red Army had captured an undamaged bridge across the Angerapp River, in the heart of East Prussia. Nothing seemed to stand in the way of the T-34s until Friedrich Hossbach was given most of the armor in the sector and ordered to counterattack.

This was the same Hossbach who, as Hitler’s adjutant in 1937, kept the records that became the Hossbach Memorandum. An infantryman by branch, he had commanded 4th Army since mid-July. Now he had a worn-down 5th Panzer Division, the similarly attenuated Hermann Göring, and the newly organized Führer Grenadier Brigade. Together they amounted to around 100 tanks and assault guns. Not much seems to have been expected, but Hossbach was able to hit both flanks of the breakthrough simultaneously. Fifth Panzer went in from the north on October 21 with 22 tanks. Two days later they made contact with the Führer Grenadiers advancing from the south. The Soviets panicked, abandoning tanks and equipment in a rush to the rear the Germans lacked the strength to stop. Third Byelorussian Front, shut down for the winter. So did the campaign against East Prussia. But the future prospects of Army Group Center, were inescapably grim.

Just how grim was suggested at the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf—the site of the Angerapp crossing of October 21. Elements of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps held the bridgehead against counterattacks for about four hours, then withdrew. When German troops entered two days later, they found a scene that German propaganda described as a massacre, with hundreds of civilians raped, shot, and butchered. The actual events remain subjects of debate, with allegations of photos doctored, corpses brought in from elsewhere, numbers exaggerated. One recent scholarly investigation reports fewer than 30 verifiable murders, with lesser atrocities on the same limited scale.

These numbers have in turn been challenged. What is certain is that Goebbels and East Prussian Gauleiter Eric Koch used Nemmersdorf to inspire a spirit of resistance locally and nationally. What is also certain is that the Landser, foot- marchers or panzermen, had a winter to think about the story—and perhaps to remember other villages at other times, when the situation had been reversed. The victory rings on a Tiger’s gun barrel might move steadily toward the muzzle. An assault gun battalion might note its thousandth confirmed kill. But when Ivan came again, the fight would be to the finish.