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Exactly 50 years after the beginning of the Battle of Kursk, "Operation Citadel" (as the German plan for surrounding and destroying the Soviet forces in the Kursk area was known), has been resurrected again. And although this time they want to play it out on a computer, the scale of the preparations is no less than the real thing.
Extremely detailed data for every day, form July 4 through the 18th, on 110 German and Soviet formations and units - from Fronts and Armies, to Divisions and Brigades, is being gathered, coded and fed into a computer base: Command Post and Observation Post co-ordinates, the mission, unit strength, losses, reinforcements, distance of movement from one line to another, width of th front, left and right flank co-ordinates, eight front-line co-ordinates, the time of entry into battle, time of exiting battle, fortifications, obstacles, vehicle movement characteristics, weather conditions, weapon weight, weight of a single amoo complement, maximum fire range, percentage of misses per salvo, travel speed over roads and broken country, explosion kill area, flight range, necessary runway distance, the crew's rest needs, etc.
I have not enunerated even a tenth of the multipage list of information necessary for creating a computer model of the Battle of Kursk, which can then be endlessly replayed, analysing the virtues and shortcomings of the two sides, achievements, miscalculations, mistakes of the commanders, their creative style, and the soldiers' combat qualities.
The client is the US Army's Concept Analysis Agency. The contractor is the American Dupuy Institute. The subcontractors are the Russian consultative-service company RANTEK; the Military History Institute of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff; the department of the history and tactics and operational art of the Frunze Military Academy (chairman, Col. R. Portugal'skii); the Association of Russian Military Historians, under the same Portugal'skii, and; the Russian Military Archives at Podol'sk.
Just what is the US Army Concepts Analysis Agency looking for in the history of a figty-year old battle? After all, it's known the Americans don't spend money for nothing. It's obvious that something's eating at the American military. Namely what?
I will lay out my own deeply personal point of view. For me the Battle of Kursk was and remains the most mysterious event of the Great Patriotic War. Mysterious in the sense that in its difficulties, as it seems to me, one should search for the key to understanding the reasons and the essence of the catastrophe which took place exactly two years earlier, in June-July 1941.
The events on the eve of the war and the eve of the Battle of Kursk are really surprisingly similar. A three-month period of relative quiet on the front precededed the battle - a strategic pause quite comparable in significance with the worrisome and tense situation before the war. Both sides have no doubt as to the coming collision, gather their forces, trying to discern the enemy's operational-strategic designs and to anticipate them. In both cases, the Germans, observing the strictest secrecy and resorting to disinformation, prepare for a blitzkrieg - a surprise attack with tank wedges, in order to surround the enemy's large-scale forces. As in the spring of 1941, the Soviet command repeatedly received intelligence on the date of the enemy attack; in May 1943, our troops were twice brought into full readiness, both times they were false alarms.
In other words, on July 5, 1943 began that which, according to our prewar conceptions, was supposed to have happened on June 22, 1941; the Wehrmacht strike with all its might, but only drives a few small wedges into the depth of the Red Army's defense, where its offensive impetus dries up, after which Soviet troops launch a decisive counteroffensive and throw back the enemy, pushing him further and further to the west. In September 1943 our troops reached the line of the Dnieper River, while in September 1941 they should have reached the Vistula.
The summer of 1943, however ideal and polished, alas, was late by two years and was the model for 1941, which cost us such enormous losses. This is the torturous riddle: why didn't it work the first time and why was it late by two years?
There have been many hypotheses. According to some accounts, Stalin tried with all his might to delay the war and not give Hitler the slightest excuse for a war, and supposedly did not prepare for war. According to others, quite the opposite; the Red Arm was preparing a preventitive attack against the German forces (V.M. Molotovy's testimony, according to the writer Ivan Standiuk).
Military leaders' memoirs testify that on the eve of the Battle of Kursk certain commanders were in favour of launching an offensive without waiting for the enemy's attack. And now we read Marshal Zhukov's report to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of April 8 (three months before the start of decisive events!): "Evidently, the enemy, having gathered in the first phase, his maximum forces, including 13-15 tank divisions, supported by powerful aviation forces, will launch an attack by his Orel-Kromy force to outflank Kursk from the northeast, and by his Belgorod-Kharkov force to outflank Kursk from the southeast. I consider as inexpedient the launching of a preemptive attack by our forces in the near future. It will be better, if we exhaust the enemy on our defense, knock out his tanks, and then, having committed fresh reserves, by launching a general offensive, to completely rout the main enemy force."
The memoirists of 1941 either say nothing about preparing a defensive zone, or describe its most serious shortcomings and miscalculations in the location of Soviet troops along the border. In 1943 at Kursk we prepared eight (!) defensive lines with an overall depth of 250-300 kilometres. Against the enemy's tank forces were concentrated three no less powerful tank armies. If in 1941 the forward movement of five combined-arms armies from the interior as a second strategic echelon had only begun, then in 1943 behind the bulge was deployed an entire reserve Steppe Front. It was namely the front's Fifth Guard's Tank Army which on July 12 stopped the breakthrough by the SS "Reich", "Death's Head" and "Adolph Hitler" tank divisions, and the Wehrmacht's III Tank Corps at Prokhorovka.
The significance of the Battle of Kursk lies in the fact that for the first time in the Second World War's practise the German's blitzkrieg strategy was repulsed. Before this, in both 1941 and 1942, the German-Fascist troops' tank and air blows invariably broke through and bogged down only in Russia's endless spaces, exhausting themselves first at Moscow, then at Stalingrad. Here took place what did not happen in June 1941.
Thus its doesn't require much to understand why the Americans have such a burning interest in the Battle of Kursk. For them it is not a question of history, but one of modern tactics. After all, in repulsing the blitzkrieg, the Red Army in the same way defeats "Desert Storm", which was also founded entirely on air and tank blows. Now they're going to program the Battle of Kursk, and the strategists from the US Army's Concepts Analysis Agency will be playing the program bacwards and forwards in order to discover where the Hitlerites make their mistake, and how to win the battle, if only in theory. For they undestand fully that any attempt to repeat 1941 against our country will inevitably lead to a repetition of 1943 for the aggressor. It's not for nothing that only the battle's first two weeks have been selected for analysis, during which the Germans endeavoured to continue the offensive. It follows that only the offensive phase will be played out on the computers.
Do the Russian specialists, who have undertaken to help the Americans, understand what they're doing? No, this is not academic research, but turning over to the enemy that which the Americans themselves call military-strategic "know-how", and which undermines the country's security. What the Americans have undertaken is called a war game, the materials and results of which are practically never declassified, such as the materials of the January 1941 war game, in which G.K. Zhukov played the "western" side.
The capabilities of modern computer technology immeasurably exceed the capabilities of wartime staffs to generalise and analyse information. Thus the program to study the Battle of Kursk may reveal such secrets as perhaps we oursleves still don't understand fully., and which all the more so should not be known abroad.
"Citadel"-93 is only beginning and can still be halted. This matter must be taken up by parliamentarians and the appropriate, as they say, competent organs.
Aleksandr Frolov
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