The Battle of Kursk

Col. Glantz and Mr. House have finally defined the Battle of Kursk in a thoughtful, engaging and methodical approach. More accessible than George Nipe's very good work on Kursk, this is probably the best book on the definitive battle of the Russian Front. A serious, well-researched study.

This book, like almost all of Col. Glantz's terrific books, is far better at covering the Soviet/Russian side than the German side. Yet this, like all others of his, is meticulously-researched, clear as crystal and highly-readable. He makes a good case that the Soviets did remarkably well, and were highly-effective, AND that the Nazi Germans lost the battle because of huge mistakes that any strategist worth his pay simply shouldn't have made. But of course when you are talking about Hitler, you are not talking about an experienced, well-schooled strategist, but an amateur! (Not that Stalin was any better). This is a gripping, fascinating book of unbeatable quality.

This is the definitive book on the battle of Kursk. It is by far the most complete assessment of the battle that has yet been offered. The authors do an excellent and thorough job of establishing the context of the battle (battlefield events up to the summer of 1943, as well as the situations that both armies were in, and what their leadership was trying to accomplish). Glantz and House offer a very detailed description of the fighting, often identifying regimental or battalion-level units. The description of combat is not particularly vivid or exciting, but if the reader is looking to find out where a particular regiment was and what enemy unit it was fighting on, say, July 12, the book is likely to have the answer. In this sense, the sheer volume of detail and factual material is enough to allow me to judge the book a success; it contains information that could otherwise be gained only by consulting many different sources.That said, the real value of the book is in its assessment of several important analytical questions. Due to Glantz's unprecedented (at least on this topic) access to Soviet archives, the book is the first real assessment of Soviet troops, tactics, and plans. While Dunn's book on Kursk was able to offer some of this, Glantz and House are able to go much further. They are able to show how the Soviets used their knowledge of German plans to set their own plans. Glantz and House are also able to convincingly demonstrate, with Soviet archival sources, that the German delays did not change the result. Had they attacked earlier (May 1943), they still would have lost. Furthermore, they convincingly show that the initial period of defense against the German attack was but one step in an overarching operational plan to launch an offensive in the late summer of 1943. This defense was cleverly laid out, with deep lines to be defended flexibly, and with powerful reserves located in the rear/center to blunt breakthroughs quickly. It was the classic elastic or mobile defense; the Soviets were good at making war by this time and the authors make this clear. This is juxtaposed against Glantz and House's analysis of German leadership. They demonstrate that Citadel was proposed not by Hitler, but by his generals. The battle was fought and lost by the generals, not by Hitler, although he got the blame after the war. These are important assessments, because the implication is that the Soviets by this time were simply better at making war than the Germans. Finally, Glantz and House go much further than Cross in putting the clash at Prokhorovka in perspective. Through their battle descriptions, it becomes obvious that the "clash" was instead a series of very disjointed, independent, small-unit battles. Caidin's story (and the popular myth) of the epic charge of tanks across the plains resulting in the swirling melee of combat vehicles at point-blank range never appears. Through detailed examination of orders of battle, tables o

David Glantz writing the definitive assessment of the Battle for Kursk? Sounded like a dream come true. After all, colonel Glantz is the leading authority (along with the now much less active John Erickson) on the Eastern Front topic. After all, he wrote such amazing in-depth analysis on several EF campaign (from a much needed Soviet perspective) like "From Don To Donets" or "When Titans Clashed" - this one probably the best one-volume general history of the Russia's war. After all, Glantz did a wonderful job on demolishing (hard numbers at hand) a lot of Cold War fabricated myths on how good (and unlucky) were Nazi Generals, and how dumb (and lucky and faceless) where the Soviets. So, when "The Battle of Kursk" landed in my hands, I felt a comprehensible shiver of anticipation. The first thing I must say consider is that - probably following many complaints for the very dry style (someone called it a "syntactical slog") of his previous work - col. Glantz finally decided to team with someone providing him with a much needed editing work. Not to say that Mr. House's collaboration solved all the problems: we're treated here and there with repetitions and convoluted passages, and, yes, the style is still a bit on the dry side. For instance, nearly every quote from a primary source describing the actual firefight is preceded by the same "A quote for a (German/Soviet) account vividly depict the intensity of the battle", or a variation of the same. And the maps - ok, a bit more time spent on polishing and editing them would have helped immensely. But these are really minor issues. As far as the content goes, "The Battle Of Kursk" is (nearly) the definitive thing. Glantz manages to put order in the former chaos, and gives us a perspective that, if not new as the dust jacket's notes would make us believe, is possibily the current state-of-art on the subject. Ten years ago, the battle for the Kursk salient (fought between July 5th and 16th 1943) was, thank to the then mandatory uncritical reading of German literature on the subject and a complete disregard for Soviet sources, alternatively known as a footnote at the Stalingrad campaign, as the last significant German offensive effort in the East, as the largest tank battle ever fought, as another evidence of Hitler's strategical ineptitude, the demonstration that if Germany's military brains had free hands they could have won., an Herculean effort almost doomed from the beginning by Soviet espionage, bad timing and many other things. So, Kursk became another lost opportunity for the ubermenshen to revert the Stalingrad disaster and win the war. Also, the whole battle ended up focused on the Prokorovkha maelstrom, giving to that single episode a bigger importance of what was in reality. Not really a battle, but rather a confused collation of events that historians seemed uneasy to define as the turning point of WWII or just another "big" battle.. "The Battle Of Kursk" convincingly demonstrates that Kursk

It is perhaps a considerable understatement to argue that history has not been kind in interpreting the German conduct of the war against the Russians along the Eastern front. Nowhere was their conduct more self-defeating or more disastrous than at Kursk, in one of the most epochal battles in the war. In this book, authors David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, noted authors of other such singular tomes about Operation Barbarossa and the later Russian campaigns into Germany as "When Titans Clashed", concentrate provocatively on the particulars of the epic exchanges at Kursk that changed the calculus of the Second World War, not only for the Russian front of the war, but for the entire Allied war effort in Europe. In this regard, if Stalingrad was the point at which the fortunes of the Wehrmacht were first so fatefully reversed, then Kursk was the point of no return, where the unavoidable destiny of the eventual defeat and horrific destruction of the Nazi regime was all that lay ahead. The Battle of Kursk was one of the most pivotal and epochal struggles in the Allied war against the Germans. It was one of the largest tank engagements in military history, and through its devastating destruction in terms of the number of functional and operating armored vehicles left for the Wehrmacht to continue their prosecution of the war, it was the turning point in the war, the catastrophic defeat the Nazis could no longer afford to absorb. In this regard, considerable controversy has revolved around the extent to which Hitler himself was to blame, given his fabled micromanagement of the Eastern campaign in general and the battle at Kursk in particular. In this book the authors meet this controversy head on, and while many readers may not agree with the interpretations and conclusions of the authors, they will certainly appreciate the verve, scope, and details contained in their overview of the events at Kursk, and their import for subsequent events all along the Eastern front as well. Too many Americans familiar only with the Cold War aspects of Russian history tend to be ignorant of the critical contribution the Soviets made in winning a war so essential to the survival of democracy. It is an uneasy truth that without the Russian contribution in battling up to 200 divisions of German Wehrmacht troops for over four years, our entry onto the continent in France would not have been possible in 1944. Indeed, risking such a large sea borne assault would have been problematic against a force of the numbers of troops who would have been available had they not been otherwise preoccupied and engaged in an epic effort attempting to stem the terrible onslaught they were receiving at the hands of a resurgent Soviet Army. This isn't to claim the Russians could (or would) have won the war themselves, although there are serious and scholarly arguments forwarding such propositions. Rather, my point is that the Russians single-handedl