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First Soviet Winter Offensive: December 1941-March 1942
During the summer and fall of 1941 the Soviet armies retreated because they had to and not (as was claimed as long as Stalin lived) because of a masterful strategic plan. The nation suffered staggering losses, including two thirds of its prewar coal-producing areas, three fourths of its iron and manganese ore production, and a population of 35,000,000. Nevertheless, the sacrifices bought time, which the Soviet regime exploited with ruthless energy. Even while they were in full retreat, losing, destroying, or tearing down and shipping to the east entire industrial complexes, the Russians managed to recruit and equip fresh armies. As of December 1, Soviet casualties probably totaled between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 men, but at the same time the Germans identified at or near the front 280 rifle and cavalry divisions and 44 tank or mechanized brigades.
The Soviet High Command did not share Hitler's doubts concerning the strategic importance of Moscow. In the summer and fall it sacrificed entire armies and groups of armies in attempts to hold the western approaches to the capital. It would have sacrificed more in the battle for the city itself had not the earliest and coldest winter in a half century almost literally frozen the German armies in their tracks.
The long delays in August, September, and October and the German loss of momentum on the northern and southern flanks in November had given the Russians time to assemble strong reserves around Moscow. Possibly, had the cold not set in, the German armies would have battled their way through that mass of men as they had through others, but victory, as Bock predicted late in November, would have been achieved by the narrowest of margins. As it was, the German offensive ground to a halt on December 5.
On the morning of December 6, the West Front, commanded by Army Gen. (later Marshal) Georgi K. Zhukov, counterattacked. Its offensive in the Moscow sector was joined on the north by the left flank of the Kalinin Front under Col. Gen. (later Marshal) Ivan S. Konev, and on the south by the right flank of the Southwest Front under Marshal Semyon K. Timoshenko. The effect was devastating. Army Group Center had thrown its last reserves into the attempt to take Moscow; it had no prepared positions, and the troops could not dig into the rock-hard ground. The German trucks and tanks were not winterized, and the troops lacked winter clothing, because according to the plan the war should have been over before winter. The generals wanted to retreat, but Hitler refused to do so. There was no place to go, he said, and once a retreat began it would become a rout. The few local withdrawals that he permitted led to such heavy losses of equipment that he became convinced that the only solution was an absolutely rigid defense. On December 18, he issued an order calling for fanatical resistance. Units were to stand firm no matter what the danger.
This order marked a turning point in the German conduct of the war. On December 19, Brauchitsch resigned. His authority had been declining for months, and after December 6 Hitler had pushed him aside. He was not replaced. Influenced by a growing disdain for professional military men and by a desire to give the troops the feeling that they were backed by the furer's will and guided by his genius, Hitler took over as commander in chief of the army. Before the end of the month the three army group commanders followed Brauchitsch into retirement, and several lesser generals were dismissed for having carried out unauthorized withdrawals.
Under the weight of the Soviet offensive the German spearheads north and south of Moscow quickly crumbled in spite of Hitler. Gaining confidence, the Soviet High Command expanded the offensive until the whole Army Group Center front was aflame, and Army Group North was nearly as hard pressed. At the end of December, a breakthrough on the north and a deepening thrust in the southern flank brought the Germans to an astonished realization that the Russians were attempting nothing less than to encircle Army Group Center.
On Jan. 15, 1942, for the first time in the war, Hitler issued an order for a large-scale withdrawal. He authorized Army Group Center to move its front opposite Moscow back to a line running north and south 85 miles west of the capital. The withdrawal was not far enough to escape the threatening encirclement, but it shortened the front and freed troops for the flanks. At the same time winter clothing, much of it donated by German civilians, began to arrive. After mid-January and until well into February, the crisis grew. Although Army Group Center regained some control on its southern flank, for weeks it was nearly helpless against the thrust from the north and barely managed to keep open its lifeline, the road and railroad running eastward from Smolensk. On the boundary between Army Groups North and Center the front was torn open in a 160-mile gap between Rzhev and Lake Ilmen. At Demyansk, south of the lake, two German corps totaling 100,000 men were encircled and had to be supplied by air.
Great as their successes were, however, the Russians lacked the military finesse to turn their opportunities to full account. The grand design, the encirclement of Army Group Center, was not executed. The Demyansk, Kholm, and other smaller pockets came into existence largely because Hitler refused his units permission to maneuver. By mid-February, the Soviet offensive had lost most of its momentum and appeared no longer to have any objective other than to gain additional ground and inflict random damage on the Germans. In the first week of the month, Army Group Center managed to anchor its front on the north around Rzhev, and in the second and third weeks fresh divisions began moving in from the west to narrow the gap to Army Group North. In March, the gradual German recovery continued until the spring mud and floods brought operations to a temporary halt.
Even though the first Soviet winter offensive was militarily inconclusive, it had tremendous effects. Soviet military prestige rose, and the two-year-old myth of German invincibility was shattered. Possibly even more important, the Soviet government acquired a firmer hold on the loyalty of its people on both sides of the front. Paradoxically, Hitler did not lose and perhaps gained stature among his troops. He had again demonstrated his talent for overcoming what appeared to be impossible odds. He had told his men to stand and fight, and they had. His will and the soldiers' spirit had met the test better, the generals were forced to admit, than military science could have done. For the German Army, the most tragic consequences lay in the future, when Hitler tried to make the system of rigid defense work against better-equipped, bettertrained, and better-led Soviet forces.
German Summer Offensive of 1942
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By the spring of 1942, Hitler had assumed direct and complete control of operations on the eastern front. He used the chief of the Army General Staff, General Haider, as his personal chief of staff. During the winter he had reduced the discretionary authority of the army group and army commanders. From his headquarters at Rastenburg (now Ktrzyn) in East Prussia he issued orders to the front by telephone and teletype. Meanwhile, Stalin, aided by members of the Politburo attached to the major commands, kept a similarly tight rein on the Soviet generals.
In a directive issued on April 5, Hitler outlined his plans for the summer. The German armies would regain the initiative along the entire eastern front but, aside from possibly taking Leningrad to link their forces with the Finns, would launch a full-scale offensive only in the south, toward the Don River, Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and the Caucasus oilfields. As preliminaries to the offensive, Army Group South was to complete the conquest of the Crimea, where the Russians still held Sevastopol and had acquired a large beachhead on the Kerch Peninsula during the winter, and eliminate a 60-miledeep bridgehead around Izyum on the Donets River below Kharkov, also a legacy of the winter fighting.
The advance into the Caucasus, when it had first become a subject for concrete German planning in October 1941, had been considered an expedition to be completed in a few weeks. In April 1942, however, Hitler saw it as a decisive stroke. Not only would the Soviet oilproducing regions be cut off, but presumably by the time that had been accomplished, an even more important objective would have been attained-namely, as Hitler stated in the directive, "the final destruction of the Soviet Union's remaining human defensive strength." He assumed that the Soviet Union would sacrifice its last manpower reserves to defend the oil and, losing both, would be brought to its knees.
For Hitler and for most other members of the German High Command, the war in the Soviet Union -had become increasingly a game of numbers. The Germans were waiting for the time when Soviet manpower was exhausted. As long as the Russians continued to expend men at the rate they had during the previous summer, fall, and winter, it seemed not to matter much where the German Army took the offensive. The Caucasus operation, however, appeared to present an opportunity to attain four objectives simultaneously. Before it ended, the human arithmetic could be expected to turn irreversibly against the USSR. If Stalin chose not to draw the proper conclusion and remained in the war, the Soviets would be doubly handicapped by the loss of oil and so could be conquered at leisure. Germany, on the other hand, would solve its greatest economic problem, the lack of adequate oil resources, and would also be in a position to carry the war into the Middle East.
The operation was to be carried out in stages. In the first phase, successive enveloping thrusts, beginning in the north on the Kursk-Voronezh line, would smash the Russian southern flank and carry the German front to the Don River. Then the attack would proceed to Stalingrad and across the Kerch Strait to the Taman Peninsula and strike into the flank of the Soviet Caucasus defenses. After the time and direction of the attack could no longer be concealed, Army Group South would be divided into Army Groups A and B. Army Group B, commanded by Bock ( whose retirement had lasted only about a month), would open the offensive on the north. Latex, Army Group A, under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, would attack along the line of the lower Don and into the Caucasus.
As of April 30, German casualties in the campaign totaled 1,167,835. For a time during the winter, battlefront strengths had been low in some sectors, but as spring wore on, men returning from hospitals and replacements refilled the units. In the regroupment for the summer offensive, Army Group B took command of the Second, Fourth Panzer, and Sixth armies, the first two being transferred from Army Group Center. Army Group A was assigned the First Panzer, Eleventh, and Seventeenth armies. For the first time the German allies Italy, Hungary, and Rumania took the field in earnest, each providing an army. All three of these armies were deficient in equipment and training, and the Rumanians and Hungarians would rather have fought each other than the Russians. The allied armies were expected mainly to lend substance to Hitler's claim that he was conducting a selfless "crusade against bolshevism" and occasionally to provide cover on the German flanks.
Encouraged by the past winter's successes, the Soviet High Command also planned to take the initiative when good weather returned. It intended to keep the Germans off balance by means of local attacks at Leningrad, Demyansk, Orel, Kharkov, in the Donets bend, and in the Crimea, and so to lay the groundwork for another general offensive. In April, Marshal Timoshenko's Southwest Front began preparing the Kharkov operation, which embodied two enveloping thrusts, one across the Donets north of Kharkov and the other from the Izyum bridgehead south of the city. After encircling and destroying the Germans around Kharkov, his troops were to strike southwestward to Dnepropetrovsk.
On May 12, the Southwest Front attacked. While the thrust north of Kharkov gained some ground initially, it was quickly stopped. The attack from the Izyum bridgehead went well the first day and then rapidly lost momentum on the second. Timoshenko apparently realized that he had encountered an overwhelming buildup of German strength. With the support of his member of the Military Council (political commissar), Nikita S. Khrushchev, he appealed to Stalin for permission to stop the offensive. Stalin refused. On May 17, a strong German armored force, which had been assembled and was ready before the Southwest Front entered the trap, struck into the Izyum bridgehead from the south. Two days later, Stalin allowed Timoshenko to turn his units around and try to extricate them, but by then it was too late. On May 25, the ring closed, and in a short time the Germans eliminated the pocket, taking approximately 240,000 prisoners.
The planned Soviet summer offensive disappeared in the Kharkov debacle, and the Soviet government accelerated its diplomatic and propaganda campaigns for a second front in western Europe. The effect of the battle would have been greater if the Germans had been able to begin their own offensive immediately, but they were not ready. The Eleventh Army still had a mission to complete in the Crimea, which required another month. Sevastopol was finally taken by the Germans on July 1, after an eightmonth siege.
Meanwhile, at dawn on June 28, the Second and Fourth Panzer armies opened the German summer offensive. They quickly pushed their way through the inner flanks of the Bryansk and Southwest fronts and advanced eastward toward Voronezh, reaching the outskirts of the city four days later and taking it on July 6. The Fourth Panzer Army then turned southeastward along the Don to meet the Sixth Army, which had moved eastward from Kharkov on June 30. The German armies again held the upper hand, but the first two thrusts, to Voronezh and east of Kharkov, which had been planned as great encirclements on the 1941 pattern, brought in less than 100,000 prisoners. Disappointed, Hitler on July 13 replaced Bock with Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs as commanding general of Army Group B.
The Russians had abandoned the rigid defensive tactics which cost them so many men in 1941. They were still far from having mastered the mobile defense: the Bryansk and Southwest fronts were badly mangled in the retreat, but they did get the bulk of their forces across the Don. In mid-July, the Soviet High Command organized the second phase of its defense. The headquarters of the Voronezh Front took over most of the Southwest Front sector on the Don, and Timoshenko assumed command of the newly created Stalingrad Front, which was composed principally of three fresh armies, two of them established on a line south of Kletskaya across the inside of the Don bend. The South Front, opposite Army Group A, was ordered to wheel back, pivoting on Rostov, to bring its front parallel with the lower Don.
Hitler had originally intended to execute a third encirclement inside the Don bend, which was to clear the entire line of the Don before the offensive was carried toward Stalingrad and into the Caucasus. On July 13, he changed his mind and ordered Army Group A, to which he attached the Fourth Panzer Army, to turn southward, cross the lower Don, and force the Russians back into a pocket around Rostov. In moving to the south, the Fourth Panzer Army passed forward of the line thrown up by the Stalingrad Front, leaving the Sixth Army to meet the two fresh Soviet armies alone.
Rostov fell on July 23 without producing the expected large numbers of prisoners. On the same day, Hitler issued a directive setting forth new objectives. He transferred a panzer corps from the Fourth Panzer Army to the Sixth Army and ordered the latter to clear the Don bend, cross the narrows between the Don and the Volga, and take Stalingrad. He also instructed Army Group A to fan out south of Rostov, clear the Black Sea coast, and capture the oilfields at Maikop and Grozny. At the same time, the army group would have to yield the headquarters, all of the heavy artillery, and about half of the divisions of the Eleventh Army, which were being shifted to the north to take Leningrad and so prepare the way for a joint German-Finnish thrust to Belomorsk to cut the Murmansk Railroad. As he had at the same stage of the 1941 offensive, Hitler was dispersing the German effort.
Army Group A was on the threshold of the Caucasus, but the distances were tremendous: 200 miles to Maikop and nearly 400 miles to Grozny. To reach Baku and Tbilisi (Tiflis), the mountains had to be crossed. On July 29, the army group cut the last Soviet rail line into the Caucasus. Two days later, Hitler issued another directive. The Russians, he reasoned, could do nothing further to defend the Caucasus, but they could be forced to expend their last reserves defending Stalingrad and their lifeline, the Volga River. He ordered the Fourth Panzer Army to make a 180° turn and advance on the city from the south. On the same day, two new Soviet armies joined the Stalingrad defense forces.
The German successes oontinued in August, but without bringing any major objective closer to attainment. East of Leningrad, Army Group North withstood a Soviet attempt to break the siege, but as a consequence had to abandon its own plan to take the city. Army Group A seized Maikop, but found the oilfield completely destroyed. A mountain company planted the swastika flag on Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus, but Soviet troops continued to hold all the passes. Two armored corps headed toward Grozny, but were slowed down and finally stopped for several weeks by gasoline shortages: the trucks making the long trip from Rostov were burning nearly as much gasoline as they could carry. The Sixth and Fourth Panzer armies closed in on Stalingrad from the west and south, but had to spread their forces thinly to cover their flanks and so lost their momentum.
At the end of the month, the eastern branch of German Army intelligence concluded that the Soviet Union had lost less territory and fewer men than it had anticipated on the basis of the 1941 experience and would therefore be able to conduct another strong winter offensive. In September, it reached the dismaying conclusion that Germany, far from winning the game of numbers, was perilously close to losing it. The total German and allied strength on the eastern front, excluding Finland was 3,138,000 men. The Soviet Union had 4,255,000 men either on the front or as readily available reserves. Moreover, the Soviet pool of draftable manpower was about three times greater than that of Germany.
Hitler now apparently realized that victory was slipping away from him and began looking for scapegoats. On September 9, in a minor dispute over tactics, he dismissed Field Marshal List as commanding general of Army Group A, and he also told Haider that he intended to relieve him as chief of the Army General Staff. For a time he also considered removing his most trusted military adviser, General Jodl. In one of the most unusual arrangements of the war, Hitler for two and one-half months took personal command of Army Group A, which he then ran from his forward headquarters near Vinnitsa in the western Ukraine 700 miles behind the army group front. On September 24, Gen. (later Col. Gen.) Kurt Zeitzler replaced Halder.
In August, to cover the lengthening front, Army Group B had placed the Hungarian Second and Italian Eighth armies along the Don below Voronezh. By mid-September, the Sixth Army had pushed the Russians into a bridgehead at Stalingrad 9 miles long and no more than 3 to 4 miles deep, but there for the next two months the Soviet Sixty-second Army under Gen. (later Marshal) Vasili I. Chuikov forced the Germans into a battle of attrition on a scale not seen since World War I. In early October, to gain troops for the fighting in Stalingrad, the Sixth Army turned its flank on the Don over to the Rumanian Third Army. On October 14, Hitler issued an order terminating the summer operations except at Stalingrad and at several points in the Caucasus.
Second Soviet Winter Offensive: November 1942 -March 1943
While Army Groups A and B marched across southern European Russia to the edge of Asia, the Soviet Union raised, equipped, and trained new armies in preparation for the coming winter. During the summer the Soviet Army carried through a reorganization that did not (as Soviet historians have since claimed) place it at the pinnacle of military science, but did give it the ability to operate effectively against weakened and overextended German forces. Beginning in 1941, the Soviet staffs, aided by the military academies and other special groups, had closely studied German tactics and operating methods. They had learned much and had not been purely imitative scholars. The defensive battles of the summer of 1942 already showed a great increase in flexibility and imagination. Armor had been released from its role of infantry support, and tank armies were being created. At the higher levels commanders had emerged-Zhukov was the best example-who had not only mastered the German tactics, but had adapted them to their own forces' capabilities and limitations.
The fall of 1942 also marked the culmination of a successful effort to establish a partisan movement behind the German front. Attempts in 1941 to incite partisan activity had produced only a mediocre response, but in the winter, when the whole northern half of the German front crumbled, the Soviet High Command was able to send recruiters into occupied territory and virtually draft a partisan movement. During the spring and summer the partisan detachments were drawn together into brigades and brought under tight control from the Soviet side of the front. By fall the movement was nearing its approximate maximum strength of 200,000 men, nine tenths of them operating behind Army Groups Center and North.
In August, General Zhukov and Gen. (later Marshal) Aleksandr M. Vasilevski had assumed direction of the coordination of Stalingrad's defense as representatives of the high command. The last of the strategic commands, the Southwest Forces, had been disbanded in the spring of 1942; thereafter, when conditions required broader direction than the fronts could give, temporary higher headquarters were established under representatives of the high command. Most frequently it was Zhukov who performed this function. In the first week of October, he perfected a plan for a counterattack at Stalingrad. A massive buildup during the rest of the month and the first two weeks of November raised Soviet strength around the city to 12 armies, including a tank army, under three front headquarters.
After waiting for freezing weather to create suitable conditions for overland tank movements and the Allied landings in North Africa to occupy the Germans in the west, the Russians opened their offensive at Stalingrad on November 19. The Fifth Tank Army attacked the Rumanian Third Army north of the city and demolished its front in a few hours. The next day another force struck south of Stalingrad, achieving an even more spectacular success against a Rumanian corps on the Fourth Panzer Army front. On November 22, the Soviet spearheads met at Kalach on the Don River, and the Sixth Army and approximately half of the German and Rumanian troops of the Fourth Panzer Army (250,000 to 300,000 men in all) were encircled.
Two days before, Hitler had created a new headquarters, Army Group Don, under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, which he entrusted with the mission of rescuing the Sixth Army. Adhering to his fanatical resistance doctrine of the previous winter, he refused the request of Gen. (later Field Marshal) Friedrich Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army, to evacuate Stalingrad and break out to the west. On December 19, the Fourth Panzer Army under Army Group Don advanced to within 35 miles of the Stalingrad pocket, but Hitler again refused to permit the now badly weakened Sixth Army to break out of the encirclement. In the meantime, after smashing the Italian Eighth Army on the Don on December 16, the Russians had extended their offensive west of Stalingrad. They were clearly intending to move via Millerovo to Rostov and cut off Army Groups Don and A. Army Group A, which Hitler had placed under Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Ewald von Kleist on November 22, was still in the Caucasus, its left flank 350 miles from Rostov. On December 28, Manstein was forced to order the Fourth Panzer Army to withdraw south of Stalingrad. Army Group Don was fighting for its own existence and that of Army Group A.
Early on the morning of Jan. 14, 1943, the Russians moved up the Don for the third time, this time to strike the Hungarian Second Army. The Hungarians collapsed even more quickly than the Italians and Rumanians had, opening a 200-mile gap in the German front between Voronezh and Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk). In another scythelike sweep the Russians turned southward to the Donets, threatening to envelop the German remnants of Army Group B and Army Group Don, which was still endeavoring to hold open Army Group A's lifeline to the west at Rostov.
On January 25, the Russians struck northward once more to hit the German Second Army, which was already withdrawing from Voronezh, and in three days they encircled two of its three corps. Hitler, who for a month had vacillated and discussed counterattacks to relieve Stalingrad, finally had to draw some conclusions. On January 27, he transferred the First Panzer Army to Army Group Don. Since this army was all that could still be removed through Rostov, the rest of Army Group A had to begin withdrawing into a large beachhead on the Taman Peninsula. This maneuver immobilized 400,000 men at a time when the entire southern flank of the eastern front was being shattered.
On January 31, Paulus, refusing to take the hint implicit in his promotion to the rank of field marshal the day before (no German field marshal had even been made prisoner), surrendered the troops that he still controlled in Stalingrad. A pocket around a tractor works in the northern suburbs of the city held out until February 2. On February 6, unwilling to risk another encirclement, Hitler gave Manstein permission to withdraw Army Group Don to the line of the Mius and Donets rivers, from which Army Group A had moved forward in July 1942.
In nine days, Army Group Don executed the retreat to the Mius. Meanwhile, the First Panzer Army moved to the army group's left flank on the Donets. But the Soviet offensive was still moving forward at full speed. The right flank of Army Group B was forced back to Kharkov, which it lost on February 14-16. A 100-mile gap opened between the flanks of Army Groups B and Don, through which Soviet units struck southward and westward across the Donets. Six Soviet tank corps forming the Popov Group, named for its commander, Col. Gen. Markian M. Popov, moved forward to sever Army Group Don's communications lines. On February 13, it cut the Dnepropetrovsk-Stalino (now Donetsk) railroad, and by February 19 it had reached the Sinelnikovo railroad junction 20 miles east-southeast of Dnepropetrovsk and had begun to turn southward toward Zaporozhe.
On February 12, Hitler had removed the headquarters of Army Group B and divided its front between Army Groups Center and Don, simultaneously redesignating the latter Army Group South. At the same time he ordered 7 divisions transferred from France and Belgium to Army Group South. A week later he ordered Army Group A to begin evacuating troops by air from the Taman Peninsula to reinforce Army Group South; 100,000 troops were transferred by the end of the first week in March.
On February 18, without waiting for the arrival of the divisions from the west or the troops from Army Group A, Manstein initiated a series of maneuvers that were to produce the last German victory of the war. He ordered the headquarters of the Fourth Panzer Army to move to Dnepropetrovsk at about the center of the gap between the First Panzer Army and the southern flank of the former Army Group B. There, with at first 4 divisions, he began creating a new Fourth Panzer Army. In eight days after February 20, the Fourth and First Panzer armies joined their flanks, trapping the Popov Group between them, and the Fourth Panzer Army closed up on its left to the front west of Kharkov.
At the end of the month warm weather set in, and the question then was whether to continue the advance toward Kharkov at the risk of its being halted by the approaching thaw. On March 7, the weather turned cold, and Manstein decided to proceed. The Fourth Panzer Army moved rapidly to the north, and despite kneedeep mud on all the roads reached Kharkov on March 11. Seven days later, after mopping up the Soviet divisions trapped west of Kharkov, the army carried its advance 30 miles farther north and took Belgorod. Except for several bridgeheads, in which Soviet troops held on doggedly, Army Group South had regained the line of the Donets to Belgorod. Immediately to the north the Russians held a large salient west of Kursk.
Operation Citadel
For the past three years the coming of spring had heralded new German triumphs. The year 1943 was different. The victory on the Donets that ended the long winter retreat had restored German morale at the front, but not even Hitler deluded himself into believing that the next summer would see the swastika flag replanted on Mount Elbrus or German outposts again looking eastward into Asia from the high bank of the Volga. In the late spring there was an ominous quiet on the eastern front.
Since June 1941, German attention had centered in the east. In the early months of 1943, quite suddenly that, too, changed. Dangers which might have been overcome easily, had the Russian campaign developed according to schedule, threatened on all sides. In January 1943, United States Flying Fortresses staged the first daylight bombing attack on Germany. Thereafter bomb damage, particularly in the Ruhr, mounted alarmingly. A second Stalingrad had been in preparation in North Africa since November 1942. When the British Eighth Army broke through the Mareth Line late in March 1943, it became inevitable. That the British and Americans would follow their victory with an invasion of Italy or the Balkans was certain, and the day of the major test, the landing on the Channel coast, might come within the year.
On the other hand, the failure of Hitler's fanatical resistance doctrine during the winter had produced a substantial bonus. The long retreat from the Don, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus, as well as a voluntary retrograde movement which Army Group Center executed in February and March to shorten its front, had created surplus strength on the eastern front approximately equivalent to two armies. The disastrous winter had also forced Hitler to recall to active duty his tank expert, Guderian, and to appoint him inspector general for armor. By spring Guderian, working with Albert Speer, the minister for armament and munitions, had the new Tiger and Panther tanks coming from production lines by the hundreds. If another offensive in the style of 1941 or 1942 was no longer possible, neither was Germany helpless.
The most profitable strategy seemed to be to consolidate the so-called Fortress Europe and to exploit the Clausewitzian axiom that defense was the stronger form of warfare. Some of the generals proposed building an East Wall, a permanently fortified line across the USSR, but Hitler disapproved. He did, however, instruct Army Group North to plan an operation to take Leningrad and stabilize the northern flank by joining forces with the Finns. He also began reinforcing the Army of Norway to enable it to occupy Sweden if that country attempted to support Allied operations directed against northern Europe. Nevertheless, after nearly three months' hesitation, he decided that he needed one more big victory in Russia, a victory, as he put it, "that will shine like a beacon around the world." On June 12, he announced that he intended to execute Operation Citadel.
Citadel, a two-pronged attack to eliminate the Soviet salient west of Kursk, had been planned in March to be executed as soon as the ground dried and while the Russians were still off balance from their defeat at Kharkov. Bad weather and various mishaps, as well as Hitler's own uncertainty, had caused repeated postponements. By the time he decided to proceed, the German forces for Citadel were at peak strength, and so, as one of the generals pointed out, were the Russians.
Operation Citadel began on July 5. The Ninth Army on the north and the Fourth Panzer Army on the south struck toward Kursk across the base of the Soviet salient. For three days the attack went well, but on July 9 the Ninth Army was stopped before a heavily fortified ridgeline and stayed there four days. On July 12, the Russians, confident that they had taken the measure of the Ninth Army's offensive, launched a strong attack of their own against the front north of Orel behind the Ninth Army. The Fourth Panzer Army was then just beginning to gather momentum.
On the next day, July 13, Hitler called the army group commanders to his headquarters and informed them that he had decided to halt Citadel. The situation north of Orel was precarious, and he was concerned about a Soviet threat to the Donets Basin; but his greatest source of worry was Sicily, where American and British troops had landed on July 10. The Italians, he said, were not fighting, and it was necessary to create new armies to defend Italy and the Balkans. Troops would have to be removed from the eastern front. Partly to gain troops for Italy, and partly because the offensive opened by the West Front, under Gen. (later Marshal) Vasili D. Sokolovski, and the Bryansk Front, under General Popov, had already gone too far, Hitler was forced to yield his own salient around Orel, ending the German threat to Kursk.