The Battle of Kursk- Operation Citadel - Extra History - Part 3

Days, weeks passed. The men on the front line waited. Waited for the inevitable. For the unthinkable. For the cataclysmic conflict that had to come around the salient at Kursk. Then, it happened. One night, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were given a special ration of schnapps. A sign every man knew. Liquor to steal the soul. A last drink before you die. One man deserts. He heads to the Soviet line, and he's interrogated for hours. At last, he convinces a political officer on the scene, a man named Nikita Khrushchev, that he's telling the truth. That the attack will begin on July the 5th, the next day. Khrushchev calls Moscow in the middle of the night. Joseph Stalin has woken up. He asks Khrushchev for his assessment. To which Khrushchev replies, We will make the enemy pay in blood. Then the Soviet guns begin to sing. All along the front, in the pre-dawn hours of July 5th, 1943, Soviet artillery attempts to disrupt German units forming up for the upcoming assault. The effect is limited. The Wehrmacht have been planning for this day for too long. But Stalin and his greatest general, Zhukov, had not been idle either. They had turned the Kursk salient into a fortress. Observations along the frontier, and intelligence supplied by the British, made it all too clear that this is exactly where a German attack would come. At first, Stalin wanted to pre-empt the attack by an offensive of his own, but Zhukov eventually convinced him instead to build the greatest defensive works of the Eastern Front, and let the Germans wade through their own dead to try to make it through. Once they'd been bloodied here, there'd be time enough for an offensive. And as the cannons roared, and dawn broke, the great test finally came. The Luftwaffe took to the air. Not for once as a force meant to cripple the enemy's air capacity, but rather simply as support for the massive assault. Bombs fell on artillery and bunkers rather than airfields. The Germans knew the air war couldn't be sustained. Still, the Soviet Air Force managed at first a haphazard response, and in the opening waves, large numbers of Yakolev and Lavochkin fighters fell from the sky. On the northeast, the German advance rolled forward, slowed by the vast minefields of the salient. New technology was tried. They deployed an innovation, a remote-controlled minesweeping vehicle. It was instantly met with fire from the Soviet artillery. Bursting shells and mines exploding under fire turned the battlefield into a haze of smoke and suspended earth. But the path was clear, at least at first, and the forces on the left pushed on. The far left, armed with the rare Ferdinand, an 88 mounted on a rejected version of the Tiger chassis, found itself struggling as the fighting devolved into fierce close-quarters combat. Their Ferdinand, their armed support, didn't have any close-quarters weapons. It was devoid of even the machine gun that was standard on most tanks. Losses began to mount, and yet still, they pushed on. In the center of the northern push, the new Tiger tanks started to show their mettle against the Soviet T-34, the tank that had been causing German armor so much trouble for years, and they began to push through. Gains were made, but everywhere they were stopped short of a true breakthrough. Luftwaffe and Red Air Force fighters traded turns strafing the ground, and the massive concentration of artillery from both sides continued non-stop. By late afternoon, it was clear that this was going to be no rush across France. All along the north, the Germans were slowly carving their way into the enemy lines, but behind every minefield they crossed, and every pillbox they shattered, there was just another minefield, another pillbox awaiting them, in Zhukov's fortress Kursk. And casualties were beginning to mount. Even though much of the remaining German resources had been devoted for months to the offensive around Kursk, German reserves were at an all-time low. Partisan activity behind the lines further hampered men and material from reaching the front, and the variety of vehicles and the introduction of new and radical tank designs strained repair crews to their limits. Meanwhile, in the south, Manstein's force began to execute a similar plan, brutal in its simplicity. Push forward. He had concentrated his forces in the center of his front, and planned to simply exert force at a point until the Soviets broke. He had some of the strongest panzer divisions left to the German army, and they would act like a spearhead to thrust through the Soviet line. His initial target was the small town of Oboyan, a mere 30 miles from the front. But this attack began in stinging rain, which softened the ground and slowed operations. Even the following day, when the weather cleared, the muddy terrain hampered the advance. But with the clear weather came the war in the air. The Red Air Force thought that here they might surprise the Germans and catch their planes still on the ground. But the Luftwaffe scrambled just in time, and what initially appeared to be a turkey shoot for the Soviets turned into a massive battle in the sky. Over 400 planes whirled and chased along the 20 miles of the front. Underneath, hundreds of Panthers and Panzer IIIs and IVs and self-propelled guns rolled along a two-mile stretch of open front. But even that wasn't enough. Slowed by weather and entangled in the Soviet defenses, the presence of so many tanks just didn't scatter the Soviet units like they would have two years before. Instead, they were met with the near suicidal resistance of the Soviet Guard. Men would leap on tanks to take out their turrets with satchel charges, or face down Panzers moving at full speed with anti-tank rifles. But the Germans did still have the practiced killers of the SS Panzer Corps to throw at the South. The powerful Tigers destroyed bunkers from half a mile away, only to be met with the withering hail of Katyusha rockets. Flamethrower teams burnt their way forward, cooking men alive at their guns. It was a scene from hell. Rapidly, the Germans smashed through the front line. But this was resistance on a scale totally unlike what they'd expected. By the early morning hours of the next day, the Germans had barely reached the second line of Soviet defenses. Of the three major groups in the South, only one made it to its nominal first-day objective, and one was woefully behind. Soviet artillery took out bridge after bridge on the Donets, further hampering the advance. On both fronts, north and south, the Germans were making gains. Nowhere had they simply been repulsed or forced to reverse or retreat, and yet nowhere had they made a breakthrough either. Almost every contingent of the German forces was behind schedule, off the timetable of the initial planning. And yet the cost had been immense, for both sides. As the first few days of Operation Citadel wound down, the fate of the contest stood on a knife's edge. Neither side was winning, but neither side could be said to have started to lose. And on that knife's edge hung the fate of nations, if not the world. Hitler knew full well that a victory here wouldn't win him the war, but if he could win here and inflict major losses on the Soviet forces, it was possible that he might be able to sit down with the Soviet ambassadors and bargain for peace from a position of strength. A successful conclusion here might, at least temporarily, allow a cessation of the war in the East, so that German forces could be concentrated on the imminent war in the West. With Great Britain and the United States looking to finally truly push into Europe, a victory here might be able to cut them off from their ferocious Eastern ally. And in turn, a loss here would mean disaster. It would encourage the democracies in the West to hasten their invasion of Europe, if for no other reason than to prevent Stalin from capturing more European territory than they'd ever want him to have. It would mean the loss of some of the best remaining units in the Reich, and destabilize a front that they could barely hold as it is. Join us next time as we watch which way the knife edge falls in this pivotal battle for the Eastern Front.