The Soviet Fortress: Minefields, Strongpoints and the Waiting Armies

For three months in the spring of 1943 the Red Army did something it had never done before on such a scale: it waited. Having concluded by mid-April that the Germans would strike at the Kursk salient, the Soviet high command chose to absorb the blow in a prepared defense and only then to counterattack. The Central and Voronezh Fronts, with the Steppe Military District behind them, turned the bulge west of Kursk into the deepest field fortification of the war: belt behind belt of trenches, nearly a million mines, anti-tank strongpoints sited to cover one another, and armies of tanks held back to strike. This chapter describes how that fortress was built, who built it, what it was meant to do, what the Germans were preparing against it, and how the Soviets fired the first shots of the battle on the night of 4–5 July.

Why it mattered

Every great German summer offensive in the East had so far broken the Red Army’s front. In June 1941 the panzer groups had destroyed whole Soviet fronts in a matter of weeks, and in the summer of 1942 Army Group South had driven to the Volga and the Caucasus. In the spring of 1943, after Stalingrad and after Manstein’s counterstroke had retaken Kharkov and Belgorod in March (Chapter 1), the question in Moscow was whether the pattern would repeat a third time. The answer the Soviet command gave was to build, in the path of the expected attack, a defense so deep, so dense with guns and mines and so well backed with reserves that the German armor would wear itself out before it could break into open country.

That decision, and the three months of work that followed, are the hidden half of the Battle of Kursk. The famous scenes of July, the Ferdinands burning near Ponyri, the SS panzer divisions grinding toward Oboyan and the tank battle at Prokhorovka, all took place inside a fortified zone that had been designed for them. The German plan, Operation Citadel, was a pincer attack by two armies on the base of the salient. It assumed, as German plans in the East had always assumed, that once the crust of the defense was broken, the armor could maneuver freely behind it. At Kursk there was no open country behind the crust, only more crust: a second belt, a third, three more front lines, a whole military district held in reserve and a state defense line along the Don.

The preparations also show the Red Army of mid-1943 as it really was: not the faceless mass of Cold War-era German memoirs, but an army that had learned, at a terrible price, how to organize anti-tank defense, engineering, deception, intelligence and logistics on a continental scale. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them women and teenagers from villages only recently freed from German occupation, did much of the digging. Partisans behind the German lines attacked the railways that fed the German build-up, and German anti-partisan sweeps behind the Orel bulge tied down divisions that might otherwise have been resting for Citadel. American Lend-Lease trucks, food and rail equipment were beginning to arrive in quantity, although much less of it had arrived by July 1943 than is often supposed. This chapter takes each of those elements in turn and ends with the night of 4–5 July, when the Soviet artillery, acting on the word of prisoners, opened fire on the German assembly areas before the German offensive began.

The basic modern source for the Soviet defense is the work of David M. Glantz, a retired U.S. Army colonel: his study Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk, July 1943, written for the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth in 1986; his translation, with Harold Orenstein, of the Soviet General Staff’s own study of the battle; and The Battle of Kursk (1999), written with Jonathan House. Where other writers, among them Lloyd Clark, Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson, and Karl-Heinz Frieser in the German official history, give different figures, the differences are noted. Soviet figures for the work done in the spring of 1943 come mostly from Soviet staff studies and postwar histories; they are the best numbers available but are not independently checked, and they are given here as Soviet figures.

The decision to wait

The Kursk salient was a product of the winter. When the Soviet offensives that followed Stalingrad ran out of strength in March 1943, and Manstein’s counterstroke retook Kharkov and Belgorod, the front settled into a great westward bulge around the city of Kursk, about 200 km across at its base and pushing up to 150 km into the German line. North of it the Germans held a bulge of their own around Orel; south of it they held Belgorod and Kharkov. On a map the Kursk salient invited a pincer attack from both sides, and both high commands could see it.

Soviet intelligence began to report German preparations against the salient within weeks. On 8 April Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Deputy Supreme Commander, sent Stalin an assessment from the Voronezh Front. He predicted that the Germans would attack the salient from the Orel and Belgorod areas with strong armored forces, perhaps 13 to 15 tank divisions, and he recommended against a Soviet spoiling offensive. It would be better, he argued, to wear the enemy down on a prepared defense, destroy his tanks, and then go over to a general offensive with fresh reserves (Glantz and House; Glantz and Orenstein). The Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, agreed. After consultations with the front commanders, Stalin and the Stavka, the Soviet supreme headquarters, settled on this course at meetings between 12 and 15 April 1943 (Glantz and Orenstein; Clark). On 15 April, by coincidence, Hitler signed Operations Order No. 6 for Citadel.

The decision to defend first was not easy and was not universally liked. Stalin’s instinct, and that of some front commanders, was to strike first. Nikolai Vatutin, who took over the Voronezh Front at the end of March, pressed repeatedly in May and June for a pre-emptive attack toward Kharkov, and Nikita Khrushchev, the front’s political member, supported him (Glantz and House). The pressure grew as the Germans failed to come. The Stavka issued warnings of an imminent German attack in early May and again later in the month, and each time nothing happened; Citadel was being postponed in Germany while the new Panther tanks were readied. Zhukov, Vasilevsky and the deputy chief of staff, Aleksei Antonov, held to the plan, and Stalin, against his own temperament, accepted it. The waiting itself was a test of nerves, and the Soviet command passed it.

Soviet confidence rested on unusually good intelligence. The Red Army’s own reconnaissance, prisoner interrogations, radio intercepts and air photography tracked the German concentrations around Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov through May and June. Partisan detachments behind the lines reported troop trains and depots. And there were sources abroad. The “Lucy” ring in Switzerland, run by the German émigré Rudolf Roessler, passed reports of German intentions toward Kursk to Moscow; the origins of Roessler’s information have never been established and remain disputed. John Cairncross, a Soviet agent working at the British code-breaking center at Bletchley Park, later said that he had passed raw decrypts of German signals, including material on Luftwaffe airfields, to his Soviet handlers (Clark; Beevor). The British government also passed warnings through official channels, in sanitized form. None of these sources gave Moscow the date of the attack; it was the Soviets’ own front-line reconnaissance that did that on 4 and 5 July.

Three fronts and a reserve

The salient was held by two fronts, the Soviet equivalent of an army group. The northern half, facing the Orel bulge, belonged to the Central Front under General Konstantin Rokossovsky, formed in February 1943 from the headquarters of the Don Front that had destroyed the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. It had five combined-arms armies: from north to south the 48th, 13th, 70th, 65th and 60th, with the 2nd Tank Army and two separate tank corps in reserve and the 16th Air Army in support. The southern half, facing Belgorod and Kharkov, belonged to the Voronezh Front under General Nikolai Vatutin: the 38th, 40th, 6th Guards and 7th Guards Armies in the first echelon, the 69th Army and the 35th Guards Rifle Corps behind them, the 1st Tank Army and two guards tank corps in reserve, and the 2nd Air Army (Glantz and House).

By Glantz and House’s tables, the Central Front had 711,575 men on the eve of the battle and the Voronezh Front 625,591. Between them they had about 3,600 tanks, of which 1,061 were light T-60s and T-70s, and the bulk of some 20,000 guns and mortars in the salient (Glantz and House; Clark). The figures include rear services; the combat strength of the two fronts was about 511,000 and 446,000 men. Behind them stood a third force, the reserve that made the whole design possible. In April the Stavka gathered its strategic reserves east of the salient into what became the Steppe Military District, commanded from late June by Colonel-General Ivan Konev, and on 9 July redesignated the Steppe Front. It had 573,195 men, among them the 5th Guards Army, the 27th, 47th and 53rd Armies, the 5th Guards Tank Army and several separate tank, mechanized and cavalry corps, with the 5th Air Army (Glantz and House). All told, the three fronts counted 1,910,361 men, with 4,869 tanks and 259 self-propelled guns. Taylor and Kulish calculated that the forces committed to the defense represented about a quarter of the Red Army’s manpower and artillery, more than a third of its aircraft and nearly half of its tanks.

The tank armies were the mobile reserve. It is worth being precise about them, because later accounts sometimes give them their postwar titles. In July 1943 the Central Front’s reserve was the 2nd Tank Army under Lt. Gen. Aleksei Rodin, which did not become the 2nd Guards Tank Army until November 1944. The Voronezh Front held the 1st Tank Army under Lt. Gen. Mikhail Katukov behind its center, on the Oboyan axis. The Steppe Military District held the 5th Guards Tank Army under Lt. Gen. Pavel Rotmistrov, formed on 25 February 1943 under a Stavka order of 10 February, with about 850 tanks at Kursk; in the spring it was concentrated around Ostrogozhsk, east of the salient. Its march of 6–11 July to Prokhorovka, and what happened when it arrived, are the subject of Chapter 6.

Over the fronts stood the Stavka’s representatives: Zhukov with the Central Front, and later with the Bryansk and Western Fronts that were to attack the Orel bulge; Vasilevsky with the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts. The Kursk defense was always meant to be the first act of a two-act plan. North of the salient, the Western, Bryansk and Central Fronts were preparing Operation Kutuzov against Orel; south of it, the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts were preparing Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev against Belgorod and Kharkov (Chapter 7). The reserves held back during the defense were the reserves for the counteroffensive.

Eight belts deep

The shape of the defense followed from a simple calculation. The Germans would attack with their armor concentrated on narrow sectors and would break through any single line. The Soviets therefore built many lines, one behind another, so that each penetration would lead only to another fight, each costing the attacker tanks, time and infantry, until the reserves could counterattack an enemy who had lost his momentum. The vocabulary of the defense comes from Soviet doctrine: a defensive belt (polosa) was a fortified zone several kilometers deep, made up of several positions, each of two or three lines of trenches, with strongpoints, obstacles and gun positions, and the belts were grouped into the tactical zone held by an army and the operational depth held by a front.

Each first-echelon army of the Central and Voronezh Fronts built three belts. The first, or main, belt was the strongest. In Glantz’s description it was about 5 to 6 km deep and held three positions: the first, at the forward edge, two or three trench lines with the second and third 150 to 250 m and 1 to 1.5 km behind the first; the second position 2 to 3 km behind the forward edge; the third 4 to 6 km behind it. The second belt lay 10 to 15 km behind the first, and was manned by the armies’ second-echelon rifle corps; a rifle corps defending on a main axis was thus organized to a depth of 15 to 20 km, three or four times the depth of a division’s defense at Stalingrad (Glantz, Soviet Defensive Tactics). The third, the army rear belt, completed a tactical zone that, with all three army belts, was about 40 km deep (Glantz and House; Glantz and Orenstein). In front of the first belt lay a forward security zone, held by outposts and forward detachments to deceive the enemy about where the main defense began and to make him deploy too early.

Behind the armies, each of the two fronts built three more belts of its own. The first of these was partly occupied by front reserves; the last two were fortified but largely unoccupied, except around Kursk itself. With them, the six belts on either side of Kursk reached back some 130 to 150 km (Glantz and Orenstein; Glantz and House). Behind the salient, the Steppe Military District built a seventh line along its own front, east of Kursk, and an eighth, the State Defense Line, ran along the east bank of the Don. The total depth of the defense, from the forward edge of the Central and Voronezh Fronts to the Don, was in the order of 250 to 300 km. Glantz and House give eight defensive belts and lines in all.

Depth on paper does not mean equal strength in depth. Most of the troops, guns and mines were concentrated in the first two belts of the threatened armies, and above all on the sectors where the Soviet command expected the main blows: the 13th Army’s front around Ponyri and Olkhovatka in the north, and the 6th and 7th Guards Armies’ fronts astride the Belgorod–Oboyan road and along the Donets in the south. The rear belts were insurance. On the southern face, where the German attack went deepest, the II SS Panzer Corps and the 48th Panzer Corps broke through the first two army belts by 9–11 July and fought into the third around Prokhorovka and on the Psel; nowhere did the Germans get beyond the tactical zone into the front belts (Chapter 4).

Spades: trenches, wire and the civilians who dug

The belts were dug by hand. Between April and early July the Central Front dug about 5,000 km of trenches and communication trenches, many laid out in a criss-cross pattern so that troops could move under cover between positions, and the Voronezh Front about 4,200 km (Clark; Soviet Storm). To put the figure in an American frame, the trenches of the two fronts together were longer than a round trip by road from Charlotte to Los Angeles. Behind the trenches went dugouts, command posts, ammunition shelters, gun pits, tank and vehicle pits, anti-tank ditches and escarpments cut into the banks of streams and gullies. In the 25th Guards Rifle Corps of the 7th Guards Army, an average of 1.6 km of barbed wire was strung around each battalion defensive region (Glantz, Soviet Defensive Tactics).

The troops did not do this alone. Soviet figures repeated in Western histories put the number of civilians employed on the fortifications of the salient and its rear at more than 300,000. They came mostly from the Kursk, Orel, Voronezh and Belgorod regions, much of which had been under German occupation until February 1943, and the men of military age among them had been called up as the Red Army returned. Those who dug were therefore mostly women, older men and teenagers, mobilized by local party and soviet authorities, working with spades and wheelbarrows and fed on rations. They built rear belts, anti-tank ditches and roads, and they repaired railways. Their work was compulsory, as almost all labor in the wartime Soviet Union was; it was also, for many, work done to keep the Germans from coming back to villages they had just left. Little of their own testimony has been published in English, and the numbers in Soviet sources cannot be independently checked.

The pressure of time shaped the work. A defense of this size could not be finished in a few weeks, and the Germans’ repeated postponement of Citadel, from early May to mid-June to early July, was a gift to the Soviet engineers. Each week of delay put more kilometers of trench into the ground and more mines into the fields. When the German generals argued in May about whether to attack at all (Chapter 1), one of the arguments against waiting for the Panthers was precisely that the Soviet defenses were growing faster than the German strength. By German accounts, Model brought air photographs of the Soviet positions to the Munich conference of 3–4 May to make the point. The postponement went ahead anyway.

Nearly a million mines

Mines were the heart of the engineer effort. Soviet records show the two forward fronts laying 503,993 anti-tank and 439,348 anti-personnel mines in the salient before and during the defensive battle, about 943,000 in all, with the heaviest concentration in the first belt (Zetterling and Frankson; Clark). In Glantz’s 1986 study the average density was 1,700 anti-personnel and 1,500 anti-tank mines per kilometer of front, which he calculated was four times the density at Moscow in 1941 and two to five times that at Stalingrad; Glantz and House give the same figures per mile as 2,700 and 2,400. Some secondary accounts give 2,500 and 2,200 per kilometer, apparently by treating the per-mile figures as per-kilometer ones; the lower figures are used here.

Averages hide the pattern. The mines went where the tanks were expected to go. In the 6th Guards Army, which held about 64 km of front astride the Belgorod–Oboyan road, the engineers laid 69,688 anti-tank and 64,430 anti-personnel mines in the first belt and 20,200 anti-tank and 9,097 anti-personnel mines in the second (Glantz and Orenstein; Glantz and House; Clark). That works out, on average across the army’s whole front, to about 1,090 anti-tank mines per kilometer in the first belt, and the actual density on the tank-passable sectors was much higher. In the 7th Guards Army’s 25th Guards Rifle Corps, there were about 1,000 anti-tank mines per kilometer of battalion frontage (Glantz, Soviet Defensive Tactics). The minefields were laid in front of the forward edge, between strongpoints, in the depths of the positions and in the gaps between belts, and they were recorded so that Soviet tanks could use the lanes left through them for counterattacks.

Not all the mines were laid in advance. One of the Soviet innovations at Kursk was the systematic use of mobile obstacle detachments, sapper teams held in reserve with mines on their trucks, ready to lay new fields in the path of a German breakthrough once its direction was clear. Each rifle regiment had a sapper squad with mines for the purpose, each division two sapper platoons and each rifle corps a sapper company with 500 to 700 anti-tank mines (Glantz, Soviet Defensive Tactics). The 13th Army alone had eight such detachments, plus the 1st Guards Special-Purpose Engineer Brigade. According to the Soviet figures Glantz gives, the 13th Army’s sappers laid about 6,000 mines on 5 July, 9,000 on 6 July and 8,000 on 7 July, and in the whole battle some 35,000 anti-tank and 4,000 anti-personnel mines, to which they credited 420 German tanks and assault guns destroyed or disabled. On the southern face, Soviet figures credited mines with 355 tanks and 30 assault guns of the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf. These are claims, and “disabled” covered many vehicles that German workshops later repaired; but German records leave no doubt that mines were among the main causes of German armored losses at Kursk.

By the numbers

Mine densities on the Kursk salient

Mines per kilometer of front; Soviet anti-tank mines in gold, anti-personnel mines in gray

Kursk average, anti-personnel (Glantz 1986)1,700

Kursk average, anti-tank (Glantz 1986)1,500

6th Guards Army, first belt, anti-tank (69,688 mines over about 64 km)c. 1,090

6th Guards Army, first belt, anti-personnel (64,430 mines)c. 1,010

25th Guards Rifle Corps, anti-tank, per km of battalion frontagec. 1,000

6th Guards Army, second belt, anti-tank (20,200 mines)c. 320

6th Guards Army, second belt, anti-personnel (9,097 mines)c. 140

The men who laid the mines were the engineer troops of the two fronts. Each rifle division had its own sapper battalion; each army had engineer battalions and brigades; and the Stavka reserve sent separate engineer brigades, among them the special-purpose engineer brigades trained for mine warfare and demolition. The Central Front’s chief of engineers was Aleksei Proshlyakov, who was made a Marshal of Engineer Troops in 1961. On the Central Front’s most threatened sector, the 1st Guards Special-Purpose Engineer Brigade worked with the 13th Army.

The anti-tank strongpoint

If the mine was the heart of the engineer effort, the anti-tank strongpoint was the heart of the defense. The Soviets called it the protivotankovyi opornyi punkt, or PTOP, and Glantz translates it as ATSP. It grew out of the hard lessons of 1941 and 1942, when Soviet anti-tank guns spread evenly along the front had been overwhelmed one by one by German tank concentrations. At Kursk the guns were grouped instead. An anti-tank strongpoint normally had four to six anti-tank guns, six to nine anti-tank rifles, two or three heavy and three or four light machine guns, with an infantry platoon or company to protect it and sappers with mines to close the approaches. In the 78th Guards Rifle Division of the 7th Guards Army, strongpoints had five to seven guns each and a full infantry company (Glantz, Soviet Defensive Tactics).

The strongpoints were laid out in depth across the tank-passable ground, three or four in each first-echelon regiment on the main axes and nine to twelve in each division, sited so that they could support each other with fire. Where the ground allowed, two or three of them were combined under a single commander into an anti-tank region (protivotankovyi raion), a larger and more durable position covering an entire tank approach. Behind them stood the anti-tank reserves of divisions, corps and armies, regiments of guns that could be moved to a threatened sector, and the anti-tank brigades of the Stavka reserve. Almost all artillery, not only anti-tank guns but field guns, howitzers and even anti-aircraft guns, was given anti-tank tasks, and many tanks of the separate tank brigades and regiments were dug in as armored pillboxes (Glantz, Soviet Defensive Tactics; Clark).

In their words

“Where feasible, Soviet commanders combined the forces of two to three ATSPs into a larger and more durable ATR.”

The result was a density of guns that German officers had not met before. In 1942 a Soviet division had averaged two to five anti-tank guns per kilometer of front. At Kursk, first-echelon divisions on the main axes had 18 to 30 guns and mortars per kilometer, besides 0.7 to 1.3 rifle battalions and 2 to 4 tanks (Glantz, Soviet Defensive Tactics). Around Ponyri, during the battle, some 380 guns supported a single rifle division, the 307th, which Glantz calls the largest such concentration in support of one Soviet rifle division in the war in the East (Chapter 3).

By the numbers

Guns per kilometer of front

Soviet guns and mortars per kilometer on the main axes at Kursk, compared with the anti-tank density of 1942

Kursk, first-echelon division on a main axis, guns and mortars (upper figure)30

Kursk, first-echelon division, guns and mortars (lower figure)18

1942 average, anti-tank guns per km (upper figure)5

1942 average, anti-tank guns per km (lower figure)2

Kursk, tanks per km in first-echelon divisions (upper figure)4

The guns themselves were not new. The workhorse of the anti-tank regiments was still the 45 mm anti-tank gun, the 1937 model and the longer-barreled 1942 model, light enough for its crew to manhandle into a pit and conceal, and effective against the side armor of most German tanks at close range but not against the front of a Tiger or a Panther. Beside it stood the 76 mm divisional gun, especially the ZiS-3, which served both as field artillery and as an anti-tank gun, and the anti-tank rifles, the long single-shot PTRD and semi-automatic PTRS, by 1943 useful mainly against the tracks, vision slits and lighter vehicles. Production of the 57 mm ZiS-2, a much better anti-tank gun that had been dropped in 1941, was restarted in 1943 as news of the Tiger spread, but few reached the front before the battle. The SU-152 heavy assault gun, rushed into service in May 1943, was present in small numbers. Sub-caliber armor-piercing ammunition for the 45 mm and 76 mm guns was beginning to reach the troops. The Red Army’s answer to the new German armor at Kursk was not a new gun but more guns, better sited and more closely coordinated with mines.

Roads, rails and the rear

An army of nearly two million men, with thousands of guns and tanks, eats and fires its supplies at a rate that the roads and railways of the Kursk region had never been built to carry. The region had been fought over twice in eighteen months, and the Germans had destroyed bridges, stations and track as they withdrew in February 1943. The main line from Kursk south to Belgorod was in the front line; the line from Kastornoye to Kursk was the salient’s principal link to the east. Restoring and extending the network was one of the largest single tasks of the spring. By one Soviet count, the engineers and railway troops in the salient built or repaired 686 bridges and some 2,000 km of roads (Soviet Storm).

The best-known single project was a new railway. To give the Voronezh Front a second line of supply that did not depend on Kursk, Soviet railway troops and local laborers built a line of about 95 km from Stary Oskol, on the railway from Valuyki and Kastornoye, west to Rzhava on the Kursk–Belgorod main line north of Prokhorovka. Russian regional histories, which call it the “Road of Courage,” say that it was built in a matter of weeks in the spring of 1943, much of it by women from the surrounding villages, and that the first trains ran over it before the battle began; the figure of 32 days for the construction is often repeated. The sources available for this chapter do not allow the dates and numbers to be checked against the railway troops’ records, and they are given here as the Russian accounts give them. The line’s purpose, at least, is clear from the map: it fed the southern face of the salient from the east, behind the Voronezh Front’s rear belts, and it carried supplies for the Steppe Front’s armies and the counteroffensive toward Belgorod and Kharkov that followed.

Behind the railways stood the depots. Ammunition was stockpiled by the trainload in the spring, much of it moved at night and stored in camouflaged dumps, along with fuel and food. The Central and Voronezh Fronts also had to supply their partisans and their deception measures, to build hospitals and to bring forward the bridging equipment and engineer stores for the counteroffensive that was planned to follow. The scale of this effort is one reason why the defense could not have been improvised in a few weeks, and why the long German postponement of Citadel worked so much in the Soviets’ favor.

Maskirovka: hiding an army in plain sight

Soviet military doctrine had a single word, maskirovka, for everything from camouflage nets to strategic deception, and the Kursk salient saw all of it. The aim was not to hide the fact that the Soviets would defend the salient, which the Germans could see from the air, but to hide how strong the defense was, where its strength lay and, above all, how large the reserves behind it were. Troops and supplies moved at night. Radio traffic was restricted and false traffic was generated elsewhere. Guns, command posts and ammunition dumps were camouflaged, cooking fires forbidden near the front, and dummy positions, airfields and depots built to draw German reconnaissance and bombs (Clark; Healy; Glantz and Orenstein). Rumors were spread in the occupied areas.

The Soviet General Staff later claimed that 29 of the 35 major Luftwaffe raids in June 1943 struck dummy airfields (Glantz and Orenstein). The claim cannot be checked against German records in the sources used here, but the broader result is clear. German intelligence correctly identified the Central and Voronezh Fronts and many of their armies, and German commanders knew that the defenses were deep. What they consistently underestimated was the Soviet armor. In mid-June, German intelligence put the Soviet tank strength in and behind the salient at about 1,500 tanks (Clark; Healy), less than half the number in the two forward fronts alone, and the scale of the Steppe Military District’s reserve was not grasped until it was committed. Whether the Germans would have called off Citadel had they known the full picture is a question no one can answer; several of their senior commanders had doubts enough as it was.

Learning to fight the Tiger

The Red Army knew what was coming. The first Tiger had been captured by Soviet troops on the Volkhov Front near Leningrad in January 1943, and captured Tigers were tested by firing on them with Soviet guns from different angles and ranges. The results were sobering: the 76 mm guns of the T-34 and the ZiS-3 could penetrate a Tiger’s frontal armor only at very short range or not at all, and even the 85 mm anti-aircraft gun could not reliably defeat it beyond the range of the Tiger’s own 88 mm gun (Wikipedia, “Tiger I”). The tests led to the restarting of 57 mm ZiS-2 production and, later in 1943, to the 85 mm tank and self-propelled guns; for the summer, they led to instructions. Leaflets and booklets showing the Tiger’s weak points, its sides and rear, its tracks and running gear, its vision ports and the joint between hull and turret, were issued to the troops, and the anti-tank gunners were taught to hold their fire for flank shots at close range.

The infantry were trained too. One of the great dangers of 1941 and 1942 had been “tank fright,” the panic of infantry who saw tanks breaking into their positions. Before Kursk, units in the salient practiced letting tanks roll over their trenches, crouching in the narrow slit trenches as the tanks passed and then rising to attack them from behind with grenades and bottles of incendiary liquid, and to cut off the German infantry following the tanks (Clark; Healy; Glantz and House). A bounty of 1,000 rubles was offered for each enemy tank destroyed (Healy; Clark). The training was done in the rear areas with Soviet tanks, behind the belts that the same troops had dug. Its value showed in July, when in many places the Soviet infantry did not run when the tanks broke in, but stayed in their trenches and fought the German infantry that came after them.

The war behind the lines

Behind the German armies facing the salient lay some of the most important partisan country in the Soviet Union. The great forests around Bryansk, behind the German Second Panzer Army in the Orel bulge, had sheltered partisan brigades since 1941; in the summer of 1942 they controlled more than 14,000 square kilometers there. The movement was directed from Moscow by the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement, formed on 30 May 1942 under Panteleimon Ponomarenko, and it was supplied by air: in June 1943 the Soviet air forces flew more than 800 night sorties to the partisans (Newton). By Soviet figures, partisan strength across the occupied territories rose to more than 550,000 in 1943, a number the movement’s own historians admit was inflated by local reporting.

Before Kursk the partisans’ main tasks were intelligence and the railways. Their intelligence was mostly local, from observation, patrols and the questioning of villagers, and the German security services kept them away from headquarters and bases; but they reported troop trains, depots and movements that helped Soviet staffs build up their picture of the German concentration. Their attacks on the railways were more visible. In June 1943, by figures repeated by Zetterling and Frankson and Clark, partisans destroyed 298 locomotives, 1,222 railway wagons and 44 bridges behind Army Group Center, and made 1,092 attacks on railways in the Kursk sector. The figures are Soviet; the German historian Sebastian Stopper, comparing partisan reports with German records, found that partisans reported 5,886 rails destroyed by the end of July 1943 where the Wehrmacht recorded fewer than 500 demolition sites (Stopper, cited in the German Wikipedia article on Operation Zigeunerbaron). The partisans hurt German supply, but much less than Soviet histories later claimed. Their great railway offensive, the “Rail War,” came only after Citadel had failed, from 3 August 1943 (Chapter 7).

The partisans’ indirect effect on Citadel may have been as important as their direct one. In May and June 1943 the German command mounted a series of large anti-partisan sweeps in the forests behind the Orel bulge. The largest, Operation Zigeunerbaron (“Gypsy Baron”), ran from 15 May to 6 June 1943 in the forests south of Bryansk, with the Desna as its blocking line. It was conducted by the XLVII Panzer Corps with the 4th and 18th Panzer Divisions, the 7th and 292nd Infantry Divisions and the 10th Motorized Infantry Division, with Hungarian troops, a battalion of the Brandenburg special forces, eastern volunteer units, part of the French volunteer legion and the collaborationist militia of Bronislav Kaminski. Against them were six partisan brigades of about 6,000 men. The OKW war diary claimed 3,152 partisans killed, 569 deserters, 207 camps and 2,930 bunkers destroyed, and 15,801 civilians “evacuated,” which in practice meant deported from their homes (German Wikipedia, citing the OKW war diary, Klink and Hesse). The brigades were scattered but not destroyed, and the threat to the supply roads was never removed. Two panzer divisions and three infantry divisions that might have been resting and training for Citadel spent three weeks of the spring in the forests instead.

These operations were also a part of the German war against the civilian population of the occupied East. The anti-partisan sweeps of 1942–43 behind Army Group Center burned villages, deported their inhabitants for forced labor and killed many civilians as suspected partisans or “partisan helpers,” under orders that treated anti-partisan warfare as front-line combat without restraint. Kaminski’s militia, which took part in Zigeunerbaron, became notorious for its brutality and later took part in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. The record of the occupation, and of the German units that carried it out, is the subject of Chapter 8.

Farther west, in Ukraine, the partisan formations of Aleksei Fedorov, Aleksandr Saburov and Sidor Kovpak were ordered in 1943 to move out of their bases in the northern forests into central and western Ukraine, to carry the war to the railways and installations of the German rear. The best known of these marches, Kovpak’s raid to the Carpathians, began in June 1943, in the last weeks before Citadel.

Lend-Lease: what had arrived by July 1943

American readers often ask how much of the Kursk fortress was built with American help. The honest answer is: some, and in particular kinds of help, but much less than would arrive later. Lend-Lease deliveries to the Soviet Union had begun in the autumn of 1941 and grew year by year. Of the 17.5 million tons that the United States shipped to the Soviet Union in the whole war, 2.1 percent went in 1941, 14 percent in 1942 and 27.4 percent, about 4.8 million tons, in 1943; the peak, 35.5 percent, came in 1944 (Wikipedia, “Lend-Lease,” from U.S. shipping figures). Much of the 1943 tonnage arrived after Kursk. The Arctic convoys, the shortest route, were suspended in the spring and summer of 1943 because of the demands of the Atlantic and the danger from German surface ships in Norway (the story of the Battle of the Atlantic on this site), and supplies came the long way, through the Persian Corridor from the Gulf and across the Pacific to Vladivostok in Soviet ships.

Over the whole war, the Soviet Union received 427,284 trucks and jeeps, 1,911 steam and 66 diesel locomotives and 11,225 railway cars from the United States (Weeks), as well as large quantities of rails, field telephone cable, explosives, aviation fuel, machine tools, steel and food. In some categories American supply dwarfed Soviet production: the Soviet Union built only 92 locomotives of its own in 1942–45. Most of the locomotives and railway cars, however, arrived in 1944 and 1945. The truck figures follow the same curve. The famous Studebaker US6, which became the Red Army’s standard heavy truck and the chassis for the Katyusha rocket launcher, had been tested by the Red Army from July 1942 to May 1943, and by the summer of 1943 Studebakers, Fords and Dodges were a familiar sight on Soviet roads; but by most estimates only a minority of the Red Army’s trucks in mid-1943 were American, and the proportion rose to nearly a third only by 1945.

Food is the clearest case of popular exaggeration in both directions. Soviet soldiers came to know American canned pork, which they called “second front,” and the Lend-Lease total for foodstuffs over the war is given as about 4.5 million tons (Weeks). A recent study based on Soviet archives argues that Lend-Lease food amounted to less than 1 percent of the food available in the Soviet Union and that most of it arrived after the Battle of Kursk (Suadicani, as cited in Wikipedia, “Lend-Lease”). Tanks were a small part of the picture as well. Some Soviet tank brigades and regiments at Kursk had American M3 Lees and M3 Stuarts or British Churchills, Matildas and Valentines, but they were a small minority of the armor in the salient; over the war Lend-Lease tanks came to about 8 percent of Soviet production.

Historians still argue about what it all meant. Khrushchev recalled Stalin saying privately that without American help the Soviet Union would not have won, and Zhukov, in a conversation recorded by the KGB in 1963, said that the Americans had helped above all with explosives and gunpowder. Soviet official histories, during the Cold War, put Lend-Lease at about 4 percent of Soviet war production and minimized it. Western scholars such as Hubert van Tuyll and Albert Weeks, writing from American and Soviet records, have argued that the aid mattered most in exactly the categories that made the Red Army’s offensives possible: motor transport, railway equipment, communications, fuel and explosives. Glantz’s judgment is that Lend-Lease did not decide the outcome of 1941–42, which was settled before most of it arrived, but that without it the Red Army would have taken perhaps 12 to 18 months longer to defeat the Wehrmacht (Glantz, When Titans Clashed). For the defense of Kursk itself, which was dug with Soviet spades and fought mostly with Soviet guns and tanks, the American contribution was real but modest; for the offensives that followed it in August 1943, carried forward by trucks and supplied over rebuilt railways, it was considerably greater.

The other side of the hill: German preparations and new weapons

The German preparations for Citadel are described in Chapter 1; what matters here is what the Soviet fortress was built to meet. The plan was for Model’s Ninth Army to attack south from the Orel bulge toward Kursk and Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, with Army Detachment Kempf covering its eastern flank, to attack north from the Belgorod area, the two meeting east of Kursk and cutting off the Soviet armies in the salient. Hitler had first wanted the attack in early May. At the conference in Munich on 3–4 May he postponed it, chiefly to bring forward more of the new tanks, and further delays followed until, at a conference with his commanders at his headquarters at Rastenburg on 1 July, he fixed the date as 5 July. By then the Germans had concentrated about 2,400 to 2,700 tanks and assault guns, some 70 percent of their armor in the East, and more than 7,400 guns and mortars against the salient (Clark; Zetterling and Frankson).

The new weapons were the reason for the delay and the hope of the offensive. The most important was the Panther, the Panzer V, with a long 75 mm gun and sloped frontal armor 80 mm thick, designed in 1942 as the German answer to the T-34. About 200 rebuilt Panthers of the 51st and 52nd Panzer Battalions were issued to Panzer Regiment von Lauchert with the 48th Panzer Corps of the Fourth Panzer Army between 23 and 29 June 1943; they arrived only days before the battle, with little time for training or reconnaissance, two burned out from engine fires after unloading, and many broke down on the way to the start line, so that 184 were operational on 5 July (Wikipedia, “Panther tank,” citing Jentz). The heavy Tiger I, already used in small numbers since 1942, was present in two heavy battalions, the 503rd with Army Detachment Kempf and the 505th with Model’s Ninth Army, which had 45 Tigers on 5 July by Clark’s count (others give fewer), and in companies of the Großdeutschland division and the three SS panzer grenadier divisions.

With Model’s army came the heaviest German vehicles of all. The Ferdinand, later called the Elefant, was a heavy tank destroyer built on 91 chassis left over from Porsche’s unsuccessful design for the Tiger: 65 tons, with 200 mm of frontal armor and the long 88 mm Pak 43/2 gun, but no machine gun for close defense. Eighty-nine of them were committed at Kursk, in the 653rd and 654th Heavy Panzerjäger Battalions (Wikipedia, “Elefant,” citing Jentz). With them, as the third battalion of Heavy Panzerjäger Regiment 656, came the 216th Sturmpanzer Battalion with 45 Sturmpanzer IV assault guns armed with a short 150 mm howitzer, the vehicles Allied intelligence later called “Brummbär”; and companies of remote-controlled demolition vehicles intended to clear minefields. In the air, the Luftwaffe brought the Henschel Hs 129, an armored ground-attack aircraft armed with a 30 mm cannon; five Luftwaffe units were flying it by July 1943 (Smith and Kay). The Ju 87 G, the Stuka with two 37 mm cannon, made its first large-scale appearance over Kursk (Chapter 5).

Several of the new weapons were what an engineer would call immature systems. The Panther’s transmission and engine had not been made reliable; half of the Panthers were out of action before they reached the first assembly area, and only 16 percent of them were operational at the end of July (Wikipedia, “Panther tank,” citing Jentz). The Ferdinands were nearly invulnerable from the front but slow, heavy for the bridges and, once immobilized by a mine, easy prey for Soviet infantry and sappers. Above all, there were not enough of them. The Panthers made up less than 7 percent of the German armor at Kursk; most German tanks were still Panzer IIIs and IVs and assault guns, facing a defense built to stop exactly such tanks. The two months spent waiting for the new weapons gave the Soviets time to lay hundreds of thousands of additional mines.

The night of 4–5 July: the counter-preparation

The last Soviet warning came on 2 July, when the Stavka told the fronts that the German attack could be expected between 3 and 6 July. On the southern face, the Germans made the first move in the afternoon of 4 July, attacking the Voronezh Front’s forward outposts on the heights in front of the 6th Guards Army to win observation points for their artillery (Chapter 4). Prisoners taken that day told their Soviet interrogators that the main offensive would begin early the next morning. Vatutin acted at once. At about 22:30 on 4 July some 600 guns, mortars and Katyusha rocket launchers of the Voronezh Front fired on the German forward positions and assembly areas, especially those of the II SS Panzer Corps (Clark).

On the northern face the decisive intelligence came a few hours later. During the night a German soldier, a combat engineer of the 6th Infantry Division clearing lanes through the minefields in front of the 13th Army, was captured and told his interrogators that the attack would begin at about 03:00 on 5 July. Zhukov was with Rokossovsky at the Central Front’s headquarters that night, and in his account he told Rokossovsky to give the order himself rather than wait for Stalin; the counter-preparation began at 02:20 Moscow time, and Zhukov then informed Stalin by telephone. The artillery of the 13th and 48th Armies and the front’s artillery corps fired on the German batteries, assembly areas and observation posts opposite (Zhukov’s memoirs; Glantz and House; Clark). The Soviet air forces followed at first light with a large raid on the German airfields, which miscarried and cost them heavily (Chapter 5).

Times on the night of 4–5 July are a trap for the careful reader. Soviet sources use Moscow time and German sources German time, which ran an hour behind, and some writers convert and others do not. Glantz’s 1986 study gives the opening of the German attack as 03:30, despite a massive Soviet counter-preparation fired hours before, but also, for the 13th Army, a German artillery preparation of about 100 batteries from 04:30 for 60 minutes, followed five minutes later by a Soviet counter-fire. Others put the German bombardment at about 05:00, lasting 80 minutes on the northern face and 50 on the southern (Clark; Glantz and House). The differences are of the order of an hour and reflect time zones and different moments in different sectors; the sequence is not in doubt.

Nor is the result. The counter-preparation did not wreck the German offensive. On the northern face it delayed the start of the attack by an hour or two and caused some confusion and loss; on the southern face the II SS Panzer Corps attacked on schedule. Much of the fire fell on areas where the German assault troops had not yet assembled, or on batteries that had not yet occupied their firing positions, and the Germans reported their losses as light (Glantz and House; Newton). German commanders nevertheless drew from it one firm conclusion: the Soviets had known when they were coming. The battle that followed was fought on Soviet terms, inside the fortress the Red Army had spent three months building.

Timeline

Building the fortress, April–July 1943

1. Feb 1943The Central Front is formed under Rokossovsky from the headquarters of the Don Front and moves to the northern face of the future salient.
2. Mar 1943Manstein’s counterstroke retakes Kharkov and Belgorod; the front settles into the Kursk salient. Vatutin takes over the Voronezh Front on 28 March.
3. 8 Apr 1943Zhukov reports to Stalin that the Germans will attack the salient from Orel and Belgorod and recommends a deliberate defense followed by a counteroffensive.
4. 12–15 Apr 1943Stalin and the Stavka decide to defend first. On 15 April Hitler signs Operations Order No. 6 for Citadel; the Stavka’s reserves are gathered into the Steppe Military District in April.
5. Apr–Jun 1943The Central and Voronezh Fronts dig some 9,200 km of trenches, build the army and front belts and lay most of about 943,000 mines; more than 300,000 civilians are put to work.
6. 3–4 May 1943At the Munich conference Hitler postpones Citadel to bring forward more Panthers and Tigers. Soviet alerts in May prove false.
7. 15 May–6 Jun 1943Operation Zigeunerbaron: the German XLVII Panzer Corps sweeps the forests south of Bryansk against six partisan brigades.
8. Jun 1943Partisans make 1,092 attacks on railways in the Kursk sector by Soviet figures. The Soviet General Staff later claims 29 of 35 major Luftwaffe raids hit dummy airfields.
9. 12 Jun 1943Kovpak’s partisan formation sets out on its raid toward the Carpathians.
10. Late Jun 1943Konev takes command of the Steppe Military District.
11. 23–29 Jun 1943About 200 Panthers are issued to Panzer Regiment von Lauchert with the 48th Panzer Corps.
12. 1 Jul 1943Hitler tells his commanders at Rastenburg that Citadel will begin on 5 July.
13. 2 Jul 1943The Stavka warns the fronts to expect the German attack between 3 and 6 July.
14. 4 Jul, afternoonGerman attacks seize outpost heights in front of the 6th Guards Army on the southern face; prisoners say the offensive begins the next morning.
15. 4 Jul, about 22:30About 600 Voronezh Front guns, mortars and rocket launchers fire on German forward positions, especially the II SS Panzer Corps.
16. 5 Jul, about 02:20 (Moscow)On the word of a captured German sapper, Rokossovsky, with Zhukov’s consent, opens the Central Front’s counter-preparation.
17. 5 Jul, dawnThe German offensive opens on both faces after artillery preparations of about 50 to 80 minutes; the Soviet air raid on German airfields fails.

How Americans came to know the Kursk defenses

For a generation after the war, most Americans who read about Kursk read about it from the German side. The memoirs of German generals published in English in the 1950s, Friedrich von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles (1956) and Manstein’s Lost Victories (1958) among them, and the studies German officers wrote for the U.S. Army’s historical division after the war, described an offensive that had come close to success and had been called off by Hitler at the critical moment, against an enemy described mainly by his numbers. In that telling the Soviet defense was a mass of men and guns, and German failure the result of Hitler’s interference and the Allied landing in Sicily. The engineering, the planning and the deliberate choice to fight a defensive battle hardly appeared.

The American view changed largely through the U.S. Army’s own interest in the Soviet defense. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the Army prepared to fight a Soviet attack in Central Europe, its schools studied how the Red Army itself had defended against massed armor. David Glantz’s Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk, July 1943, published by the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth in September 1986, was one of the results: a careful reconstruction, from Soviet sources, of the belts, strongpoints, minefields and obstacle detachments described in this chapter, written for American officers. It was followed after the opening of the Soviet archives by Glantz and Orenstein’s translation of the Soviet General Staff study and by Glantz and House’s The Battle of Kursk, which remain the basis of most English-language accounts, including this one.

Questions readers ask

How deep was the Soviet defense at Kursk?

The two fronts in the salient each built three army belts, together about 40 km deep, and three front belts behind them, so that the six belts on either side of Kursk reached back about 130 to 150 km. The Steppe Military District added a seventh line behind the salient and the State Defense Line along the Don an eighth, for a total depth of some 250 to 300 km. Most of the troops, guns and mines were in the first two belts.

How many mines did the Soviets lay?

By Soviet records, 503,993 anti-tank and 439,348 anti-personnel mines, about 943,000 in all, in the Central and Voronezh Fronts’ sectors. Glantz gives an average density of 1,500 anti-tank and 1,700 anti-personnel mines per kilometer of front, much higher on the expected tank routes. Some books give 2,200 and 2,500 per kilometer; those figures appear to be the per-mile figures mislabeled.

Were there two “Guards Tank Armies” waiting at Kursk?

No. Only one of the tank armies at Kursk was a guards army in July 1943: Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army in the Steppe Military District. The Central Front’s reserve was the 2nd Tank Army (Rodin), which received the guards title only in November 1944, and the Voronezh Front’s was the 1st Tank Army (Katukov), which became the 1st Guards Tank Army in 1944. Later accounts sometimes use the later titles.

Did American Lend-Lease build the Kursk defenses?

Not in any large sense. The trenches were dug with Soviet labor and the battle was fought mostly with Soviet guns and tanks. American trucks, food, telephone cable, explosives and rail equipment were arriving by mid-1943, and some Soviet tank units had American and British tanks, but the bulk of Lend-Lease deliveries came later, in 1944 and 1945. Their effect was greater on the Soviet offensives that followed Kursk than on the defensive battle itself.

How it connects

The fortress described here was the Soviet answer to the strategic situation left by the winter battles and Manstein’s counterstroke (Chapter 1). Its northern half was tested by Model’s Ninth Army around Ponyri and Olkhovatka (Chapter 3), its southern half by Hoth’s panzer corps on the road to Oboyan and toward Prokhorovka (Chapter 4), and the sky above it by both air forces (Chapter 5). The reserves held behind it met the SS panzer corps at Prokhorovka on 12 July (Chapter 6) and carried the counteroffensives that liberated Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov (Chapter 7). The occupation behind the German lines, including the anti-partisan war touched on here, is the subject of Chapter 8, and the memorials to the sappers and the dead of the salient of Chapter 9.

Sources

• David M. Glantz, Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk, July 1943, CSI Report No. 11 (Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, September 1986): defensive belts and depths, anti-tank strongpoints and regions, mine densities, mobile obstacle detachments, gun densities, the 13th Army’s mine-laying figures.
• David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), especially chapters 3 and 4 and the order-of-battle and strength tables; and Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (1995).
• David M. Glantz and Harold S. Orenstein, trans. and eds., The Battle for Kursk 1943: The Soviet General Staff Study (London: Frank Cass, 1999).
• Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011); Mark Healy, Zitadelle: The German Offensive Against the Kursk Salient, 4–17 July 1943 (2010); Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson, Kursk 1943: A Statistical Analysis (2000); Steven H. Newton, Kursk: The German View (2002); A. J. P. Taylor and V. M. Kulish, eds., A History of World War Two (1974); Antony Beevor, The Second World War (2012), as cited in Wikipedia, “Battle of Kursk”, which also cites Soviet Storm: World War II in the East (2011) and Karlheinz Münch, The Combat History of German Heavy Anti-Tank Unit 653 (1997).
• Karl-Heinz Frieser et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. 8, The Eastern Front 1943–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2017), part II; Roman Töppel, Kursk 1943: The Greatest Battle of the Second World War (2018); Valeriy Zamulin, Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943 (2011), for the German forces and the 5th Guards Tank Army.
• G. K. Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections (English ed., Moscow: Progress, 1985), for the decision of 8 April and the counter-preparation of 5 July (recollection); Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories (1958); F. W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles (1956).
• German Wikipedia, “Unternehmen Zigeunerbaron”, citing Percy Ernst Schramm, ed., Kriegstagebuch des OKW, vol. 3; Ernst Klink, Das Gesetz des Handelns (1966); Erich Hesse, Der sowjetrussische Partisanenkrieg 1941 bis 1944 (1993); and Sebastian Stopper, “Die Straße ist deutsch,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 59 (2011); English Wikipedia, “Soviet partisans”; John A. Armstrong, ed., Soviet Partisans in World War II (1964).
• Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (2004); Hubert P. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (1989); Wikipedia, “Lend-Lease” (U.S. shipment figures by year; Suadicani on food) and “Studebaker US6”.
• Wikipedia: “Konstantin Rokossovsky”, “Nikolai Vatutin”, “Sidor Kovpak”, “5th Guards Tank Army”, “2nd Guards Tank Army”, “Panther tank” (citing Thomas Jentz, Germany’s Panther Tank), “Tiger I”, “Elefant” (citing Jentz, Panzer Tracts No. 9), “Sturmpanzer IV” and “Henschel Hs 129” (citing Smith and Kay, German Aircraft of the Second World War).
• Further reading: Christer Bergström, Kursk: The Air Battle, July 1943 (2007); Dennis Showalter, Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk (2013); George M. Nipe, Blood, Steel, and Myth: The II SS-Panzer-Korps and the Road to Prokhorovka (2011); Steven J. Zaloga, Kursk 1943 and related Osprey titles; G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (1997).

Photographs: Soviet wartime photographs from the Russian state film and photo archive (RGAKFD) via waralbum.ru, the Russian Ministry of Defence and the Moscow Main Archive (mos.ru), some public domain and some CC BY 4.0; a German propaganda company photograph in the Bundesarchiv (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE); a U.S. Office of War Information photograph in the Library of Congress (public domain); all via Wikimedia Commons. Soviet and German wartime photographs reflect the purposes of their makers; some Soviet photographs were posed, and units and dates that the archives do not record are noted as uncertain. Insignia drawn for this collection are illustrations in the period style, not official emblems.