The reality, however, was considerably different, for, in truth, the Germans had no chance of launching an attack in late March or April, even if the other operations had not been considered. In order to triumph at Kursk, they needed to act quickly and to achieve surprise, neither of which was within their power. After the difficult winter battles, German forces were exhausted and desperately needed to be replenished and reinforced. Colonel-General Hoth, the commander of the Fourth Panzer Army within Army Group South, which would spearhead the southern pincer, was under no illusions. “The troops,” he warned on 21 March, “having been in battle day and night without rest for months, are used up…. Some are apathetic and have reached their goal—the Donets—only under strongest pressure from their officers. The truck situation was bad even at the beginning of the counteroffensive, while the equipment levels have sunken noticeably.” Without a significant pause for rest, resupply, rebuilding of stocks, and distribution of heavy weapons, any attack had little chance of success. Furthermore, any German prospect for a quick strike was dependent on the notoriously unpredictable rasputitsa; without a drying up of the roads, virtually all movement was impossible. The Soviet General Staff, in fact, assumed that any German offensive would be impossible until the second half of May. More optimistically, the OKW, in Operational Order No. 6, issued on 15 April, set 3 May as the earliest possible date for an attack at Kursk.62
Even this proved impossibly early, given the dreadful transportation situation in the area of Army Group Center. Model’s Ninth Army needed some 300,000 soldiers and roughly 1,000 tanks brought in as quickly as possible and under the greatest secrecy, conditions that the Ostbahn could not possibly meet. Not only were rail transport and offloading facilities in the Orel area insufficient to meet the needs of a rapid buildup of troops and equipment, but also Soviet partisans had so disrupted the rail network that the Ninth Army was compelled to launch a series of large antipartisan operations to clear the area. For the biggest of these, “Gypsy Baron,” a panzer corps had even been dispatched to vanquish the partisans, with the consequence that additional time would be needed to collect and refit the relevant units for the Kursk operation. Moreover, German intelligence had detected large Soviet troop movements into the area, with the result that, even in mid-April, the enemy enjoyed a nearly two-to-one advantage in troop strength.63
Clearly troubled by the growing problems confronting Citadel, Hitler on 18 April proposed an alternative. Instead of a pincer attack that looked likely to need a long preparatory period, he now suggested a frontal assault into the Kursk salient with the aim of splitting the assembled Soviet forces. Manstein, concerned by the uninspired nature of the proposed pincer attack, had developed a similar plan, one that sought to achieve surprise by striking at the Soviets’ positions in the center, where their fortifications were weakest, then, after a relatively easy breakthrough, wheeling to the left and right to drive Soviet troops into their own minefields. Although Zeitzler later claimed that he dissuaded Hitler from this “odd variant,” in reality it seemed to have been dropped out of concern that there was too little time to redeploy the units. A further proposal by Manstein to launch a deep envelopment movement that would include a strike at Soviet reserve forces was also rejected, for reasons that remain unclear. With his top generals riven by doubts and personal animosities as well as a growing lack of confidence in him, the Führer on 3 May convened a conference in Munich with Zeitzler, Kluge, Manstein, Jeschonnek, and Guderian at which he decided to postpone the offensive until early June. While Zeitzler and Kluge argued vehemently against any delay and Manstein waffled, Guderian expressed his utter skepticism about the entire operation, dependent as it was on new tank models that had not yet been battle tested, preferring instead to stand on the defensive in 1943 and build German tank strength.64
Ironically, in part because of Guderian’s promise of stepped-up tank production, Hitler postponed the attack on numerous occasions in June as technical and production problems delayed the arrival of the much-anticipated new Panther and Tiger models. Still, it would be a mistake to make too much of the Führer’s alleged “technology mania” as the primary reason for putting off the operation. Hitler certainly had high hopes for these new weapons, but more important, in addition to tactical and logistic problems, were strategic considerations. Above all, developments in the Mediterranean area—the final defeat of German and Italian forces in North Africa, the fear that Italy might leave the war, and anxiety over a possible Allied landing in the Balkans—shook Hitler and convinced him of the need to keep sizable reserves available for any contingency. In early May, in fact, he had already speculated with Goebbels that it might be better “under the circumstances to wait to see whether the Bolsheviks want to beat us to it [an attack]. That might give us an even more favorable opportunity than if we seized the initiative.” Only when he was convinced that Italy would continue in the war and that sufficient defensive forces were available in the Mediterranean, according to Warlimont, did Hitler finally order that Citadel proceed. Significantly, however, as early as 15 May he had decided to transfer strong forces from the eastern front in the event of any danger in Italy, an action that would bring an immediate stop to Citadel. Strategic concerns and not an obsession with tank numbers played the key role in delaying the Kursk operation; more time to deliver additional Panther tanks to the front likely only influenced the last postponement, from the end of June to early July.65
In any case, the largely enforced delay had little bearing on the other major difficulty—catching the enemy by surprise was out of the question since the Kursk salient offered such obvious rewards for an attack. Already in mid-April, the Soviet leadership knew the direction of the German offensive, and, moreover, the Germans knew that the Soviets knew. Not only had the Russians obtained information from their own spy rings and from British intelligence, which was decoding German radio transmissions, but more conventional intelligence methods (aerial reconnaissance, interrogation of prisoners, and agents in the occupied areas) had given the Red Army leadership a rather exact picture of German intentions. The Germans, in fact, seemingly made little effort to keep the target of the attack a secret, evidently hoping to entice the Soviets to concentrate more troops into the salient, where they could then be destroyed. Such a tactic was highly risky, however, for it invited disaster if the enemy became too strong to defeat. This, in fact, was precisely what the Soviets intended, for they had decided on their own version of a backhand stroke: they would allow the enemy to strike first in order to destroy his exhausted and depleted forces in a savage counter-offensive. This was precisely what Gehlen feared since Foreign Armies East had established by mid-June that the Soviets had shoved so many troops, tanks, and artillery into the salient that the operation was rendered unfeasible. “The Russians have anticipated our attack,” he wrote in a memo the day before the assault began. “[The enemy] has built many positions… and has done everything he can to absorb our blow early on. It is therefore hardly likely that the German attack will break through. Given the sum total of ready reserves at the disposal of the Russians it is not to be expected that Citadel will lead to such a high level of losses for him that his intention to choose the proper moment [for an attack] will be unrealizable because of insufficient strength…. I hold the intended operation to be a totally decisive mistake.”66