Hitler not only rejected Manstein’s demand to continue the attack but effectively gutted his forces, not only ordering the transfer of tank units to Italy but also dispatching a further third of his air units to Army Group Center. Manstein, in view of the massive enemy tank losses, believed it still possible to pull a partial success out of the Kursk operation and, thus, proposed a plan (Operation Roland) that would allow him to destroy some Soviet forces while putting space between him and the enemy. Instead of continuing his attack north, the field marshal now aimed at turning his units abruptly to the west along the Psel River in a one-armed pincer movement in order to encircle Soviet troops in the southwest corner of the Kursk salient. Hitler halfheartedly approved Manstein’s plan, but with the proviso that he use only forces presently engaged and not deploy his reserves. Although the OKH conspired to limit the impact of Hitler’s order, Zeitzler hoping that Manstein could achieve a partial operational victory, the Führer intervened again on the sixteenth, ordering the Fourth Panzer Army to break off the battle the next day and reassemble to the west near Belgorod. Although Manstein, with his eyes firmly glued on his own situation, rightly claimed that he had been forced prematurely to give up yet another victory, Hitler, viewing the overall state of affairs, was also correct in his worries about the Soviet breakthrough at Orel. In addition, an expected enemy offensive on the southern flank of Army Group South threatened the loss of the vital Donets industrial area, while the opening of the Mediterranean front meant that limited German resources would have to be split even further. Ironically, in the event, only the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was actually sent to Italy; the withdrawal of the panzer corps, as Karl-Heinz Frieser has noted, was, thus, too late to be of help in Sicily but too early for any successful conclusion of the Kursk operation.85
For the first time, a German summer offensive had failed in its tracks and the attacking units been almost immediately forced onto the defensive, a situation, Goebbels noted laconically, to which the Germans “were not accustomed.” Material and manpower deficiencies, the delay in launching the attack, the absence of the element of surprise, the decision to attack the enemy’s strongest positions rather than seek the mobile operations that played to the Germans’ tactical strength, and, not least, the realization of their nightmare of a two-front war all contributed to the result. Still, Citadel can hardly be seen as any sort of turning point. Far from being the swan song of the German tank corps or the graveyard of the German army, as it is sometimes described, it resulted in astonishingly light German losses. For the entire operation, the Wehrmacht lost only 252 armored vehicles, as opposed to 1,956 for the Soviets, an astonishing 8-to-1 kill ratio; of those 252, only 10 were Tigers. Similarly, German aircraft losses totaled 159 to 1,961 for the Red Air Force, a 12-to-1 ratio. For the Luftwaffe, the invasion of Sicily meant the opening of a third front, which, combined with the costly defensive battles over Germany and occupied Western Europe, proved insurmountable. In July and August, for example, it lost 702 aircraft on the eastern front but 3,504 in the west and on the home front. In manpower terms, the Germans lost 54,182 casualties (11,023 dead and missing; 43,159 wounded) to 319,000 for the Red Army, a 6-to-1 ratio, amazing for an inferior force attacking into the heart of well-prepared and formidable defenses. If personnel losses are broadened to include dead, wounded, prisoners, and the sick, the Red Army lost, according to figures from Boris Sokolov, 1.68 million men as against 203,000 for the Wehrmacht, an 8.25-to-1 ratio. Nor were the materiel losses unsustainable. In July, German industry produced 817 new armored vehicles, three times more than lost at Kursk, with an increasing proportion the new Tigers and Panthers that enjoyed a considerable technical superiority over the T-34. While German casualties were costly, especially among the infantry, they were balanced by 89,480 replacements.86
The reasons for these enormous discrepancies in losses are not hard to find. Certainly, the introduction of the Panther and Tiger tanks, as well as the improved Pz IVs, produced a genuine “tank shock,” a devastating qualitative advantage the Germans would enjoy for at least the next year. While the German tanks could penetrate the T-34’s armor at some considerable range, the Soviets were more likely merely to cause temporary damage that could be repaired. For all its undeniable improvement, the Red Army still lagged behind the Wehrmacht in training of tank crews, tactical efficiency, emphasis on Auftragstaktik, coordination of combined arms, and communication. The interaction of these factors could be quite lethal. Since in the Red Army, for example, only company commanders typically had a radio in their tanks, the German tactic of targeting that tank for initial destruction had cascading consequences. Soviet crews, trained only in rigid Befehlstaktik (command tactics) and, thus, lacking flexibility in decisionmaking and action, were left without direction as combat descended into chaos. As masses of Soviet tanks often simply maneuvered in a directionless manner, they became easy targets. In addition, too many Soviet commanders continued to throw their troops into battle with little concern for casualties and with inadequate preparation and planning, expecting the sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm the enemy. This was often the result, but at a horrendous cost borne by average Soviet soldiers. Still, Citadel had only two modest goals—to shorten the front to conserve forces and to weaken the Red Army sufficiently to forestall its summer offensive—yet had failed utterly at both. Even if it had been successful, it would have remained a largely meaningless tactical triumph, for the Germans could no more prevail in a material war now than they could in the war of attrition between 1914 and 1918. As in the Great War, they now also faced the grim reality of a two-front war.87
If further proof were needed of this iron law of attrition, the Soviets supplied it on 12 July 1943. With the German offensive still in progress, the Red Army launched its long-awaited counterstroke against Orel, to be followed by offensives on the Donets-Mius and at Belgorod-Kharkov. More than a million fresh troops surged into battle, supported by 3,200 tanks and 4,000 aircraft, two to three times the number of the Stalingrad counteroffensive. Moreover, the numerical and material superiority of the Red Army was now so great that it could launch simultaneous offensives up and down the front, supported by partisan operations in the German rear. Smashing into the Second Panzer Army, which, until it received reinforcements (the Fifth and Eighth Panzer Divisions, with 234 armored vehicles), had no actual tanks of its own (and barely 100,000 troops), Operation Kutuzov spotlighted the German dilemma. Having pressed all available forces into the attack at Kursk, not only were other sectors thinly held (at the point of attack, the Russians had ten- to fifteen-to-one advantages in men and tanks), but the OKH also had no operational reserve and, thus, was forced to plug the holes opened by the enemy attack by pulling troops from other areas of the front. This, in turn, simply opened new holes, with the result that the panzer divisions found themselves being sent hither and yon as fire brigades to stamp out any conflagration that erupted. In this case, since the majority of units dispatched to aid the beleaguered Second Panzer Army came from the Ninth Army, Model on the thirteenth was given operational control of both. Regarded as a master of defense, the field marshal immediately halted the Kursk offensive and sent a number of units to the north to plug the dangerous gaps blasted open by the Soviets.88