(Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from the book, The Tigers Are Burning, by Martin Caidin © 1974.)

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In its simplest form, the Battle of Kursk, which began on July 4,1943, ended one reign and began another. Before Kursk, it was the Wehrmacht that called the shots for major confrontation with the Russians.

There had been defeats, notable among them were Moscow and Stalingrad, where the German strength blunted and bled itself white against hysterically determined Soviet defenses. But even in those defeats the Germans had taken a terrible toll of the Russians. And even in their defeat the Germans withdrew with the power, speed, and mobility to dictate future struggles to the battered but stolid Russians.

Kursk changed all that. If the Germans had succeeded in their Operation Citadel as the attack plan was finally approved by Hitler himself, the stage would have been set to apply vast new pressures against the Russians. Far more was at stake than the city of Kursk. What would never show on the charts and maps would be the savaging of the Russians, and THAT was the heart and soul of the German plan: to punish, maul, disperse, kill, capture.

There was no real or specific geographic or political goal. Not immediately. Later was a different matter. Later, if Citadel had gone as Hitler anticipated, there would be a great new assault on Moscow. And then, he would have implemented his very top secret plan, Polar Fox, and German forces in a lightning stroke would have invaded and occupied Sweden.

But ... the glorious victories that followed the invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, had tarnished. The horrors of Stalingrad, the mauling of the vast German armies by the Russians was a grim portent of the future. Winter, and the Russians, had grown huge bristling teeth and sunk them deep into the German jugular. 

As defeat and catastrophe took hold on the eastern front, Hitler demanded and received an new "total mobilization" of German manpower. Yet it was not enough. Shortages were acute. Replacements for forward combat divisions lacked toughness and experience.

Even time was an enemy. Germany could replace only half the men already chewed up by the Russians. While Germany's flow of replacements to the front ebbed, the Russians gained astonishingly in their new strength.  

During the early winter and spring of 1943 the members of the Soviet high command never lost sight of the stakes involved in the Kursk salient. With the Kursk area as the arena, the armored clash that had been accepted by both sides could literally decide the advantageous position in the war.

With the sound of the ticking clock growing louder and louder, and fully aware that they must take advantage of every minute, the Russians continued their frenetic efforts of reinforcing their position. Meanwhile, for reasons unknown to the Russians, the German delay continued.

It was an unexpected, extraordinary advantage to the Soviet forces. By the time the first long-range artillery guns would rip the air with shells heading for Russian positions, Zhukov would have assembled the most concentrated and powerful military force ever known.

Twenty percent of the entire Russian army would mass in the Kursk salient and reinforcement positions immediately to the east. The unparalleled concentration of armor would be composed of more than one third of all the available first-line tanks in the country. One out of every four first-line combat aircraft would be concentrated in the area.

The scale of the armaments involved, the numbers of men, the intricate and complex movement of the opposing forces, the critical moments of the struggle — all these defy the mental grasp of the observer. The very magnitude and concurrency of events of a battle that raged fifty days over a front that was 350 miles long and often reached a depth of 175 miles defy even the wildest attempts to paint the proper word canvas.

Kursk was not simply a battle. It was a series of interconnected struggles, fought by men whose daring and courage and panic and dying — all the elements that make up so epic a clash — were obscured by the savage fury and enormous scale of the conflict. 

In any such struggle as the Battle of Kursk, it is necessary to appreciate that many battles were going on at one and the same time in an interwoven shuttle of events. Many actions immediately affected other actions, bringing on a falling-domino pattern of events. Other actions took hours or even weeks to produce a noticeable effect upon the situation.

Through all the chaotic happenings before, during, and after the Battle of Kursk, men play their significant part. Some, like the generals and well-known combat leaders, inevitably play a role in the structure of re-creating the key segments of the conflict. Others remain unknown, unseen, playing roles critical to everything else, but without identification, let alone credit or blame — the effect of men, of a man, in the right place, at the right time. Courage, cowardice, stoicism, panic — emotions in battle are the prodding finger of fate, and much of that story we may only surmise, for the sound and fury have long ago disappeared forever into the chronicles that now constitute our means of looking back into history.

There is a strange parallel in the Battle of Kursk to an earlier, much different, but equally critical conflict of arms — the Battle of Britain, when a comparative handful of men in lithe winged craft held off the German air force until attrition wore down the ranks of the black-crossed machines and the Luftwaffe retired from daylight skies to attack at night. The German fighter aircraft of that period, when England stood alone against the Reich, was the Messerschmitt Me-109E. One may question why a particular designation of such a machine is important, why this airplane is singled out from all the others. The answer is that the Me-109E, used for bomber escort and attacking the British fighters, although it was one of the finest aircraft ever built, possessed a single flaw that, had it been remedied, might have enabled the Germans to win their air struggle over the British Isles. The invasion that never happened might well have become reality.

It was simple enough. The Germans needed their fighters to protect the bombers all the way to target. With a screen of the fast, deadly Me-109E fighters, the bombers could penetrate to any point in England. They could go after the most distant fighter fields used by the Royal Air Force. What the Germans could not do in the air they could do against British fighters on the ground. They could destroy hangars, maintenance shops, supply depots, fuel farms — all the critical support paraphernalia so necessary to keeping aircraft where they belong: in the sky.

But the Me-109E, through an incredible oversight in design, lacked a simple, easy-to-manufacture device called an auxiliary fuel tank carried beneath the airplane, to be jettisoned when the pilot willed, which added an additional hundred- or two-hundred-miles flying range to the machine.

With this external tank the Me-109E fighters could have gone all the way in their escort of the German bombers. Without it the fighters were forced to turn back before reaching target, leaving the bombers on their own — and they were promptly and efficiently slaughtered by Spitfires and Hurricanes.

All this took place at a time when the Royal Air Force was nearly shattered. The line between continued fighting and almost complete ineffectiveness was alarmingly slender. If the German fighters had been able to go all the way to the bomber targets, England would have been denied the ability to stay in the same sky with German aircraft. Without this protecting umbrella of firepower in the heavens, there would have been little to prevent the Germans from launching, and carrying out successfully, the planned invasion of England.

To a lesser extent, perhaps (and certainly the exact consequences will never be known), the Germans repeated this same kind of error in the Battle of Kursk. That a simple mistake with disastrous consequences happened so late in the war is astonishing. That it happened in an area in which the Germans prided themselves on absolute superiority — the quality of their armored vehicles — is to beggar credulity.

Into the Kursk struggle, the Germans poured their best Tigers and other weapons. For the moment let us consider only the Mark VI Tiger tank, considered by the contemporary authorities to be the finest weapon of its type in the world. A rolling fortress, a huge chunk of armor racing forward against the enemy, it was a weapon nigh unto itself in all those characteristics that breed reliability and lethality.

But there was a flaw in the Tigers produced by the Porsche company. No flaw in engine, in cannon, in treads, in operating systems. Porsche built their Tigers with efficiency, with skill, with proud reliability. The flaw was in a decision, which was all the more extraordinary when one considers that the men who knew the fine points of tank warfare ever permitted such a decision to be made and, second, that they compounded the error by repeating it with armored vehicles other than the Porsche Tiger.

There were no machine guns. What is called secondary armament. There was a long-snouted cannon, a deadly piece of supreme efficiency that characterized the heavy German tank. There was the thick armor plating that made the Tiger so wicked an opponent. But with all its attributes in battle, a tank is not a weapon to fight and survive unto itself. Like all other major weapons, it must be utilized as part of a system.

Soon after the battle started along the edges of the Kursk salient, with the Germans hammering against the massive Soviet defenses, a number of Russian soldiers noted a curious thing. They had run into the Porsche Tigers (and other weapons with the same defect). More to the point, they had run into the Porsche Tigers under unusual circumstances.

First, the Tigers broke through Russian lines. The great 88-mm. cannon rifled shells into Russian armor and defensive positions, and the defenders gave way. The Tigers roared ahead, clanking and snarling like compact dinosaurs.

They broke through the Russian lines without benefit of German infantry accompanying them. That in itself may beg of disaster, for flanking attacks gnaw at the more vulnerable sides of the armored beasts. But a tank defends itself, or attacks, in different ways. One of them is to assail the infantry it attacks with its machine guns, its secondary armament.

But because there were no machine guns on the Tigers, the deadly German tanks that had shattered the Soviet armor and defensive positions were revealed to be utterly naked to attack by Russian foot soldiers. Once the Russians were fully aware of this weakness, the battlefields resounded to their curious cry in combat of Hurrah! as they swarmed against the Tigers, clambering onto the steel backs, hurling bottles of explosive fuel into exhausts and ventilation slits and other vulnerable points.

Where the Porsche Tigers had been feared, now they were sought out as the dumb, mechanical brutes they truly were. And whatever hopes the German combat leaders had placed in these weapons to crack the Russian line evaporated in the exultant battle cries of the Russian soldiers and the gutting boom of flames disemboweling the tanks, consuming them in the white heat of burning fuel and exploding ammunition.

A small point. Over England, no more than the lack of an auxiliary fuel tank.

Enough, to whatever extent history may tell us or choose to keep hidden within the fury, smoke, and complications of a vast struggle, to have, perhaps, changed the course and the outcome of that struggle.

The term “battle,” as we understand it, cannot be applied to the huge conflict at Kursk. What happened in and about the salient, its repercussions extending outward for hundreds, and then for thousands of miles, can in no way be embraced by this restrictive term. The word “battle” in this sense, then, as it is used in these pages, is more acceptance of the common expletive than it is to contain the events of the Kursk salient as a single, easily focused combat.

What happened at Kursk salient transcended by far the geographic-physical aspects of the event. Kursk rose from a multiplicity of factors, not the least of which was thorough, painful, risk-ridden decision making long before plans were implemented by hot steel. Some battles arise from circumstance, as the unexpected and sometimes unwanted bastard product of a conflict or set of conditions elsewhere. This was by no means the case with the Battle of Kursk, which involved extraordinary commitment by both sides long before the event. In addition, each side, in a war so often dramatized by the term “blitzkrieg" and all that it brings to mind, was provided with months in which to prepare.

Kursk represented a German attack, and it arose from the decision in Berlin to attack first — and from the decision in Moscow to permit the Germans to initiate hostilities.

So Kursk began with a violent thrusting of German armored forces into the Soviet defensive positions, accompanied by a wild and continuing melee in the skies, then a gradual stiffening of Russian resistance, a grinding down of German momentum, an explosive counterattack by the Russians, followed by a huge forward drive that sent the Germans (and the Russians as well) into a monstrous grinding machine that pulped the men and the armor of both combatants. Through all this frenzied large-scale action there were countless lesser struggles — lesser in number but not in bloodletting and savagery. It was all part of the greater picture.

It is apparent to the discerning analyst of warfare that despite the planning and tactics of the German general staff, no hard-cut operational goal had been formulated. True, there was the contemplated annihilation of Russian military strength. True, Hitler and his generals sought to cripple their enemy, but at what point would this be accomplished? What was the German plan beyond this decimation of Russian military strength? At what point would they commit to an advance against a particular city or other goal? Did they expect to chew up the Russian army and then spread out in all directions?

Studying the documents of Operation Citadel, one fails to grasp this clearly defined goal. One seeks the typical expression of specifics, and it is curiously always beyond grasp. To the Russians, the battle shaping up in the Kursk salient was not simply to wait for the German assault, but even to invite it, to draw in the Wehrmacht so that it must fight on Russian terms, in the midst of massive Russian defenses, under the guns of the elaborately prepared Soviet army. That was the basic plan, the basic goal. Let the Germans come. And when they come, decimate their ranks. Counterattack when the moment is ripe, and then judge the situation and make plans accordingly. The Zhukov meat grinder had worked before, and the marshal had no doubt it would work again.

There was another intangible presence on the battlefield, one that had never appeared before and that had an inescapable effect on the battle. This was the Russian soldier. The Russians who fought in the Kursk salient were not the same type of men who had been encountered previously by the enemy. Ivan had long been held in contempt by the Nazi soldiers. He was little more than an animal, a beast of the lowest order. That attitude, officially, had been altered prior to the opening cannonade of Kursk. The Germans acknowledged the Russian troops were of uncommonly high morale and, in a startling judgment, officially graded Ivan as “tolerably trained” — a long way from those men the Germans had considered subhuman and incapable of any technical or soldierly proficiency.

Obviously, if the Russians had managed the events of Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and other areas of their country where the Germans had found victory beyond their grasp, and had done so with subhuman troops for whom technical competency was a hopeless task, to face the “new” Russian soldier of high morale and some degree of training (i.e., competency and discipline), Ivan would now constitute a compelling new force on the field of combat. This must, and did, affect the final outcome.

Meanwhile, it must be understood that the world of the soldier — even for the man in the front lines — is not all military, not constant vigilance, not unending confrontation with the enemy. Men who dig in for any period of time seek at once to improve their miserable lot in life, and the longer the period a force remains in one location, the more elaborate and unmilitary their daily life. The German troops, their own diaries show, at the first opportunity would use ingenious methods to transform utterly Spartan conditions into some semblance of comfort. When one does not know how long it may be before combat will be joined, there is a turning to gardens, to creature comforts, to “settling in.” Much of the German front became an area where home-making was of even greater interest than long-term preparations for the next military engagement.

The countryside of central Russia where the Battle of Kursk would be fought demands an appreciation of its nature. Here the broad mixture of terrain was subject to almost instant change. With no more than a crack of thunder and an ensuing cloudburst, land that was passable became an instant quagmire. Thick mud sucked fiercely at men and their machines, Tanks, trucks, half-tracks, self-propelled vehicles, just as quickly became immobilized. This factor, as much as the others, must be assessed for its influence upon the struggle.

Kursk is accepted as the single greatest armored clash of all history. No other single battle or campaign approached the numbers of armor that were involved at Kursk. And yet it would be a grave error to envision the struggle as one of strictly these thick-slabbed monsters. There were other fighting elements to be considered, beyond the tanks and the machines and the men.

Chief among these were the Russian horses, carrying cavalry that struck fast and hard in terrain considered almost impossible for the swift movement of large phalanxes of men. And not merely behind the lines, but in the thick of battle. Horses by the thousands, the mounted cavalry who learned how to use their sturdy animals to take advantage of their swift maneuverability and their skill at striking without warning. They, too, played a significant role at Kursk.

This is another instance of how difficult it is to look at Kursk, at that slaughterhouse of a battle, from a distance, while trying to comprehend the nature of that conflict. One tends to count numbers without following through to details, and that can lead to misconceptions. In judging the effect on horses of the Russian winter, for example, one must understand that at a temperature of -4° F. a German horse will freeze to death.

Why a German horse? The specification is important. When protected from the wind, a Russian horse, as used by the cavalry, will survive temperatures down to -58° F.

Were horses truly such a factor in Europe during World War II? And especially on the Russian front with all its armored and mechanized weaponry?

On the Russian front alone, German forces counted from their ranks one and a half million horses dead from combat and related actions.

Not by any stretch of imagination can the Battle of Kursk be judged by anything other than what it was — the elimination of the ability of the German army to dictate when, where, and how future engagements would be fought on the Russian front. It is really no more complicated than that. In describing Kursk as “one of the most decisive events of World War II,” Marshal Zhukov added that what Kursk accomplished, beyond anything else, was to force the “Fascist Command . . . to go over to a strategic defense once and for all.”

No one would dare suggest that the Germans had lost their ability to wage war on a massive and devastating scale. But they could no longer, after the fifty days of Kursk, choose the time and place. That privilege was now reserved by the Russians. And this would be the situation right to the end of the war until the Russians massed before Berlin, along a front that averaged out to three hundred heavy guns and thirty tanks (along with all other weapons such as aircraft, rockets, and infantry) for every mile of front.

There were high-ranking Germans, to be sure, who recognized Kursk for what it was — an attempt to shatter the Russian army that failed. They accepted Kursk and its ramifications with unjaundiced vision, and they called Kursk by what it was: a debacle, a disaster of unspeakable proportion because of the manner in which it dictated the conduct of the rest of the war.

Most German officials, however, chose to avert their gaze from the battlefield and all that it revealed. They will tell you that no German army was encircled by the Russians, and this is true. They will tell you there was no panic among the soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Again, for the most part, this is true. They will describe the brilliant rearguard actions of their troops, but they find it difficult to admit that this was brilliance in defeat and not in victory. They will say that the Russians, were the truth to be known, suffered even more casualties than did the Germans. Whether this calls for a readjustment of final numbers (if the German premise is true, and it is rather in doubt) is a moot point. The important end result of Kursk is this: When the last shots had echoed off into the hills, it was the Russian army that bad gathered to itself the impetus of the war, and it was the Russian army that dictated when and where that war would be fought.

To be continued in Part Two . . .              

The Tigers Are Burning

            (in 5 Parts)

1. Kursk: The Fatal Tiger Flaw

2. Kursk: The Incredible T-34

3. Kursk: The Central Front

4. Kursk: The Voronezh Front

5. Kursk: Burning Tigers