Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk. The Turning Point of World War II by

Dennis E. Showalter

Random House

August 27, 2013

316 Pages

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8129-9465-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-6677-3

542 Nonfiction History Military History & Affairs World War II

Publisher Contact: Steven Boriack, sboriack@randomhouse.com

Reviewer: Thomas E. Nutter

Dennis E. Showalter is a scholar and educator who has practiced his craft at Colorado College since 1969. He also has taught at both the United States Air Force Academy and the United States Military Academy, and has served as President of the Society for Military History. He has written the award-winning Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, as well as many other books and professional articles in the field of military history.

Showalter’s most recent work is Armor and Blood, a detailed narrative of the planning, preparation, execution and ultimate failure of Operation Citadel, arguably Adolf Hitler’s greatest military gamble. And gamble it was, as Showalter constantly reminds the reader by liberally sowing his text with references to games of chance and the points in them at which an individual player must make a decision upon which the game’s outcome will be determined.

Citadel was rife with vital points of decision for both sides. The first of these, and the one that set the dominoes in motion, concerned whether the Wehrmacht should undertake offensive operations in the East in 1943. That such an issue should present itself in the first instance, and in less than six months following the greatest debacle in German military history, was due to the uncanny ability of the Wehrmacht to resurrect itself in the face of disaster.

To the casual eye, the successful offensives of the Wehrmacht in Russia during the summer and autumn of 1942 suggested that the German armed forces had recovered from their first defeat and returned to their former selves, masters of the cut and slash of Blitzkrieg. In truth, however, the Red Army had gutted its German counterpart during the summer and autumn of 1941, beginning a decline in the substance and capabilities of Germany’s armed forces that inexorably accelerated during the next four years.

Manpower levels in German units declined by at least a third, causing the Germans to “recruit” men from the occupied territories, many of whom were not at all motivated to fight for the Third Reich. Allied bombing reduced German production of weapons and ammunition, often forcing the German Army to rely upon captured French and Russian equipment, with a resulting decline in German fighting power. The result had been the disastrous defeats at Stalingrad and Alamein.

Nevertheless, the German Army and Air Force were resilient enough to at least partially recover from even these events, and German industry remained sufficiently productive to arm some powerful elite formations. The question on the table in the early spring of 1943 was whether these units should be shepherded and used defensively to take advantage of the large areas of Russia still under German control, or offensively in one more effort to crush the Red Army and bring the country to its knees.

Adolf Hitler, whose opinion carried the greatest weight, believed that an opportunity to achieve the more aggressive purpose lay with the huge salient in southern Russia left by the Red Army’s post-Stalingrad offensive. At the center of that salient lay the city of Kursk, and the Fuehrer became enamored with the idea that German forces on either side of the salient would pierce it, meet at or near Kursk, and destroy enough Soviet forces to cause Russia to leave the war, or at the very least reduce its fighting power sufficiently to allow Germany to defeat the anticipated Allied invasion of western Europe.

Showalter describes the decision-making process that consumed Hitler and the Generals who would have responsibility for conducting the Citadel operation, illustrating the ambivalence among these men that caused a plague of vacillation among them with regard to whether, if undertaken, the offensive would stand a chance of success. There were important German officers, among them Heinz Guderian, who remained opposed to the plan from start to finish. But the Fuehrer, whatever misgivings he may have had, was persuaded to forge ahead, in part because Field Marshal Erich von Manstein threw his considerable professional weight behind the idea.

Professor Showalter contrasts the success of the Soviet intelligence system in divining both the timing and overall German plan for Citadel, with the chronic failure of German military intelligence, in this case its inability to obtain useful information about either Soviet plans for dealing with the operation or the forces that would be available for the purpose. Indeed, understanding that the Russians knew much of the German plans, and were preparing to thwart them, came primarily through photographs taken during Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights.

What those photographs depicted likely would have persuaded any reasonable person to abandon the enterprise with dispatch and preserve the precious German panzer divisions to fight another day. For the Red Army had begun constructing mile upon mile of interlocking defensive belts, each of which included elaborate systems of trenches, gun positions, wire entanglements, bunkers, anti-tank ditches, and forts whose purpose was to funnel both man and machine into extensive minefields and killing grounds where the enemy’s soldiers and armored vehicles would be destroyed wholesale.

Showalter is truly in his element in describing the reality of the fighting in the Kursk salient, which began on July 5, 1943 and lasted roughly two weeks. But the battle was fought literally around the clock, exhausting men and vehicles alike. The final numbers imply a clear German victory; the most reasonable accounting indicates that the Soviets lost eight times the number of German combat vehicles destroyed in Citadel, and six times the men killed and wounded. Yet the German armed forces clearly failed to meet their objectives, and whereas the Russians could replace the men and vehicles destroyed in the battle, the Germans could not. For the remainder of the war, German ground forces would be incapable of meaningful offensive operations. Likewise the Luftwaffe, whose ground support operations dropped quickly to nearly zero, in parallel with its ultimate failure to defend the Reich from the Allied bombing offensive.

With due regard to the several excellent scholars and writers who have written so well on the same subject, it must be said that Showalter’s narrative of the battle is without peer. Professor Showalter did what any good historian would have done----read the secondary sources, met and spoke with survivors, mastered the pertinent original documents, and cogitated upon the whole----and produced a work that is accessible to both the professional and the casual reader alike. ( )