Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 195 - The Battle of Kursk Part 2: And Firebombs!

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Hitler edges the idea of starting one of the most disastrous battles of all time while the Soviets build Fortress Kursk. Correction: Panzer V - Panther Panzer VI - Tiger Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me, as always, is Liam. Hello, Liam. Hi, Joe. We are doing this podcasting thing that we do. Again, we're in part two of the Battle of Kursk series. I'm being held hostage, Joe. I just want to make that clear.

I'm holding him hostage from clear across the United States. It's the implication of a threat that's what matters. Because of the implication. I have mailed you a tiny... No, I can't even make that joke. It'll get me in trouble. A tiny life-size meat buffet. We're in part two of the Battle

of Kursk, and if you're joining us now, I don't know why you'd do that. Go listen to part one, and then come back. I do like the idea of somebody like, ah, fuck it, I know what happens. Shoot me up. I don't need fucking part one. So, last time on Lions Led by Donkeys podcast,

uh, this. And this. so fucking loud uh now hitler insisted on an attack on the kursk salient even though all of his generals kept pointing out that their armies were mostly chewed up sauerkraut and broken tanks so eric von manstein blamed one anyway because you know hitler's his boss and he doesn't feel like getting shot i've got a tough day at work man yeah uh hey at least you don't have to be a nazi anymore self that problem's true now the most important part that of manstein's plan according to manstein was uh they needed to just do it like if we're gonna do this and it's gonna work we need to do it now and then

hitler decided to wait because the fucking moron can never make a tactically sound decision the most tactically sound decision hitler ever made was to kill himself right which i want to be clear good choice good idea good choice good choice there's actually a reason for this and it's pretty well documented and that is hitler distrusted all of his generals. There's something of an internalized infighting that was normalized within the military and civilian governments, though those would eventually become the same thing. And Hitler took part in that,

in that he hated everybody. Even his most loyal Nazi generals, like Manstein, he's like, I can't trust that fucker. So even if this plan was a best case scenario, he didn't want to do it, even though remember it was originally his idea that nobody

else wanted to do. Right. By March 21st, he took the offensive off the table and nobody's entirely sure why. And if you ask the other Nazis like Heinz Guderian, it's because Hitler really didn't like it when a general became too well known like Manstein had become after retaking Kharkov. Christ.

So it's like dick measuring. When you don't need to do it, you're literally Hitler. And this also happens to a lesser extent on the other side of this line as well. And even then, if Hitler wasn't being a whiny baby it wasn't like hitler known piss baby hitler known piss pants baby that didn't matter because manstein had a reoccurring health issue like something to do with his eyes uh and he had to fly back to germany uh to get medical treatment for that problem and so either way this plan is probably going to be postponed, but it was mostly postponed because of Hitler. With Manstein gone, German Chief of Staff Kurt Zeitzler took his subordinates plans and tweaked them somewhat, pretty much changing it and only making a few small changes.

Namely, turn into a pincer movement or two armies would drive towards Kursk rather than the hammer an anvil that manstein had decided on you don't need to know the military tactics just know that he made the city of kursk of the important part okay by april 11th he smithed the plan to hitler and hitler agreed this plan is actually smaller in scale than manstein's but had the same end result of shortening the front killing the k Kursk salient, and trying to kill as many Soviets as they could in the meantime. Now, the only real reason why this was approved and at a much later date than Manstein's

is Hitler actually liked Zeitzler. I thought Hitler didn't like anybody, Joe. Well, Zeitzler wasn't like a seasoned military officer. He was more of a sycophant. Oh, okay. I mean, obviously he was a military officer, but he had spent his... He was really good at sucking ass. He was more of a sycophant. Oh, okay. I mean, obviously he was a military officer, but he'd spent his... He was really good at sucking ass. He spent his entire life

on like staff officer duty. Gotcha. So he was a desk jockey. Okay. And Hitler liked him. And more importantly, Zeisler wasn't more famous than he was. He hadn't won any huge military victories recently because again, he was a desk guy.

Right. All these things are important to Hitler and they're all stupid. He was a career yes-man and a staff officer with absolutely no troop leading experience whatsoever. Sounds promising. I mean, and not to mention, he never once disagreed with Hitler, even when he probably should have. Like, for instance, he was loyal to a fault uh he refused to order a breakout from stalingrad because hitler didn't want it leading to the destruction of the entire sixth army so yeah he's that kind of loyal oh good the bad kind yeah the very bad kind the nazi kind actually

now only four days after the order was given to him, Hitler published Operations Order 6, which set the earliest date of the attack, now known as Operation Citadel, for May 6th. Now, of course, Hitler fucked the plan somewhat, but on paper, they made sense. Remember, at this point, the war was unwittable through military force, and it always was going to be. The idea was to smash the Russians, stabilize the line, and secure the flanks from a possible Russian attack towards the Dnieper River. And because of those targets, it was kind of an open-ended battle, if that makes sense. Yeah, makes sense.

There was no economic target or material target like before. It was specifically a battle between soldiers against soldiers for the purpose of killing soldiers. Right. They were not seizing a militarily important town. They weren't taking any oil fields. They weren't taking Moscow. Just killing people.

And because of that, there was problems. The plan boiled down to throw about 15 divisions at the Russian line and see what happens next. How'd that go? Like I said on paper, this plan looked fine. The Kursk Bald was small enough to bring the overused air force into use. A pincer move

was something every German officer knew how to do regardless of how new they were. And more importantly, German tanks could finally match Russian ones. Since the last episode, I will say, the Soviets had produced a gem of World War II tank warfare up until this point, the T-34,

in large enough numbers to confront the Nazis. But like we said, German armored tactics of the time were to avoid tank-on-tank battles. Tanks were only there to support infantry. Cowards. And tanks were to be killed by, you know, mobile guns or airstrikes or infantry weapons

or, I don't know, falling to a fucking ditch. Like, you weren't supposed to get bogged down and slug it out with enemy armor. That's hard and slow. For instance, the Mark III tank, which is the German tank, the real workhorse of the early war, had been upgraded about as far as it could go.

They couldn't slap as much shit on it anymore. The platform was overused, and it was just not as good as the T-34. So the Germans were left with a few options on how to confront this new idea of the T-34. The most popular amongst the German leaders, not named Adolf Hitler, was

simply, let's copy the T-34. Sound logic. They've already captured a few of them. They've reversed engineered them. Let's just do that. Now this practically wouldn't have worked. They would have had to have made some tweaks in somewhat because they lacked

manufacturing capabilities to pull it off in large numbers. This meant they would have to come up with a new design that could match the T-34 and you know actually be built leading to the creation of the Panther. It came with a new design that could match the T-34 and, you know, actually be built, leading to the creation of the Panther. It came with a fuckload of problems. Oh, yeah. It was a

very, very bad tank. It came with mostly German tank engines of the war as being massively unreliable pieces of shit as well as being hugely underpowered for powering the armor forward. But it did come with a gun that could kill a T-34 and that's what the Germans wanted.

You want something to lose some. One out of three bad folks. Actually, it is. Now, the other was the Panzer V, better known as the Tiger I. Now, this was presented as a birthday gift to Hitler and might be one of the most celebrated but worst tanks

ever built for war now i say that simply because uh celebrated but worse rather than just worse because there are like every other japanese tank of the era exists and they were all much worse or whatever but the the tiger one is celebrated as like this pinnacle of engineering mostly because it looks cool and i will give it credit it does look cool but that's pretty much it but when it did work when its engine worked its power plant functioned correctly its road wheels didn't just randomly fall off from weighing too much it was one of the best tanks on the battlefield, that was almost never the case. I was going to say, that's an awful long list of caveats. Yes.

It's like saying, when the Osprey doesn't simply fall out of the sky, it works fine for the Marine Corps. That is true, but that other one happens an awful lot. It was mechanical and logistical nightmare. Mostly the logistical part. Even in the best of times, even before Nazis have found themselves thousands of miles, balls deep into the Soviet Union,

they probably wouldn't have been able to supply these things effectively. For instance, it could barely go 100 miles without needing gas. Very sick. And it required a lot of fucking gas to get that far. And you know what Germany didn't have? Gas. That's a problem. Despite being designed for offensive operations, as all German tanks were, it could only go about 10 miles per hour.

That's not very offensive. And that was only over very good, perfectly flat roads. Famously things that the Soviet Union did not have. roads famously things that the soviet union did not have but all of this didn't matter because it was built specifically around an 88 millimeter main gun that could out shoot anything on the battlefield assuming the rest of the tank could take that gun to the battlefield it was true if that 88 hit you you were fucked uh your your tank was probably going up in flames and nobody in it was surviving. But again, it has to get there first. Right.

Now, while all of this is going on, the Germans were still planning for the time to begin to tick down on their plan. What Walter Modell pointed out that the Soviets were really digging into the salient. They weren't trying to hide it necessarily. For instance, aerial photos from the Luftwaffe showed a spider web of fortifications and trench lines like something on the western front of World War I going on for miles in every direction. And Walter Model is

a guy known for his defensive abilities. That's the thing that he does. And he's like, this is bad. Things are looking bad, folks. We should not attack into that and hitler said uh nah man it's fine yeah you know exactly what he

said uh now modal's idea was let's hold back shorten our line ourselves and dig in and wait for the soviets to attack them because the soviets aren't good at counteroffensives yet to them. They're wrong, but that's what they believe.

Hitler refused, but kicked the can down the road on the offensive, pushing the date back from May 6th to 9th. This dude just loves delaying shit. And then he began to think about mid-June. If that sounds like he's arbitrarily kicking things down the road, he did it again

just two days before the original start of the battle and he called his top generals together and explained to them for over an hour while he had personally decided that the attack was being postponed this is a big dumb dummy it gets even funnier because he put forward all the reasons put forth

by modal and said they were his ideas while modal was sitting in the room it's like oh he's a nazi it's okay yeah i was like motherfucker now the generals in the room are pretty confused by this and since manstein had returned from his little eye thing he pointed out that the operation should have already been fucking done why are you guys still here hyans guderian said the entire thing was fucking pointless. And the chief of the Air Force of the time, Hans Joshinek pointed out that if they kept waiting, the Soviet Air Force was going to beat them. And that would be bad. And really only Gunther von Kluge thought the operation should go ahead.

What a name. And despite this, the operations kicked back once again to June 12th. The real reason for this is one, Hitler being an indecisive little shit, and two, the new tanks, the Tiger I's and the Panthers weren't ready yet. And Hitler

was under the idea that like, don't worry about the T-34s, these new tanks will simply take them out. That's a problem because Guderian pointed out that the Panthers, the tank that Hitler was head the idea that like, don't worry about the T-34s. These new tanks will simply take them out. That's a problem because Guderian pointed out that the Panthers, the tank that Hitler was head over heels in love with, would not be combat ready for about another six weeks. And this is because they're dealing with a fuckload of problems with the weapons platform, namely being an unreliable piece of shit.

Now ignoring everyone, even himself, Hitler pushed the operation back again to early July. Oh boy. Fuck ass. As the German army prepared to actually begin the operations, they were still badly under strength. Model said he needed another thousand men for his infantry reinforcements. He got 400.

It's almost like a thousand. Every single one of his infantry regiments was at least 20% understrength, though most were worse off. 18 panzer divisions were down to 600 tanks between them, and motorized units were moving by foot or horse-drawn

wagons at this point. Oh, that's tough. Yeah, that shit sucks. It definitely reminds me of a bit from Bandit Brothers, like, you're on horses. What were you thinking? Other units that were promised new Panther tanks got none because they didn't have any. And others got a few Tigers, but not nearly enough. Well, of course, during all of this, everyone was just lying to Hitler.

Like, I don't want to be the guy to fucking tell them we don't have that many Panthers. Now, the Germans made up for this lack of firepower with so-called assault guns. These were tank chassis with big-ass guns mounted on them. And now, these were all created as an afterthought. In the case of the Ferdinand gun, it was literally made out of rejected Tiger parts.

Wasn't this a weapon in Battlefield 1942, Secret Weapons of World War II? I don't know. I in battlefield 1942 secret weapons of world war two uh i don't know i know they probably had one of the more spectacular wonder tanks that they wanted to make i think with like yeah

i think that was technically a tank destroyer because it's turd didn't move because again it had a naval gun in it you can't move that very well uh but this is a ferdinand which is just like an 88 or other gun like it, piece of artillery to fire directly. And it had some shielding, like had some light armor, a turret, but the turret didn't move because they're gigantic fucking assault guns. And they worked pretty well. Actually, they could turn these out pretty fast.

And they use these as like a stopgap. And not to mention, these would be good to take out T-34s because they were specifically built to reduce obstacles and tanks. Right. Now, the buildup of tanks, men and material did a lot for morale. Since so many people had died, very few had been serving in Russia for very long. Right. Seeing such a massive buildup inspired confidence,

which the book I'm using as a source here, hilariously compares to the British attitude right before the Battle of the Somme. Oof. This is what we call foreshadowing. And he did make that comparison

on purpose. Yeah. Now, let's jump to the Soviet side. And it has often been said that the reason why the Soviets were able to defeat the Germans is because of manpower. And that is a gross oversimplification and that is true that at the stage of the war that the soviets did have more manpower but that's not it you can have a ton

of people and still lose as we have talked about the germans have been scraping the bottom of the barrel already while the soviets were able to renew and reinforce its forces seemingly unendingly, as well as resupply them with an open pipeline of Lens-Lease Act guns and ammo. Sure. But the bigger population did not mean the USSR was actually absorbing these losses without feeling them. There's a fair amount of evidence to suggest that Stalin was kind of open to the political way out of this whole mess, and indirect talks between the two sides began in sweden in 1943 and would go on pretty much for the entire year i mean remember these two sides have made a deal before the baltimore and trump act you know and not to mention the same fucking foreign ministers are still there

so like there's a possibility there even if it was only temporary right the soviets would have absolutely taken a temporary ceasefire because it would have given them time to rebuild. And it would have been stupid not to, honestly. Sure. But as that was going on, military planning never stopped. Marshal Georgi Zhukov was brought into the Kursk area where he was fed a continuous supply of reports from air recon patrols and partisans that the Germans had begun a massive buildup in the area. Okay. By early April, Zhukov had already suspected that the Germans meant to collapse the Kursalien, and he was 100%

correct. This is reinforced by a German communist spiring based out of Switzerland, as well as British reports from the cracked Enigma codes. Seemingly at no point of the German plan to attack the Kursalien, were they ever operating in any secrecy.

Thankfully, this time around though the soviets actually listened because if anybody remembers back in 1941 british intelligence had actually figured out the exact date of operation barbarossa and warned stalin about it who did nothing uh so you know there's that there's a bit of evidence that stalin was about to ignore him again if it wasn't for zukov, despite what would have happened after the war, because they would have a falling out. Zhukov was effectively the second most powerful man in the entire Soviet Union during this point and would be throughout the end of the war for the most part. Stalin let him rule like a king wherever he went. So when he told Stalin, look at this shit and curse stalin's like oh yeah okay whoops yep you're right you're right my dog you're right go ahead and handle it after this the two met

in stalin's so-called power room which honestly is one of my favorite things i've ever read about this guy it does sound sweet it is the most pissant power like this i i said this pissant power of shit but like this is the most pissant small business tyrant thing that you could possibly this is some shit a guy that owns a mattress store would do and that is um his desk was huge his chair was artificially jacked up and uh the seats across from the table were way too small so whenever you went into his quote-unquote power room you would have to look up at him from across this cartoonishly oversized desk and like everything he handed you to use was purposefully small like the pencils were small fucking funny people were forced to

smoke like smaller cigarettes asinine it's It's incredible. It's just so stupid. You'd expect like an app developer to do this. They're like the fucking Bay Area or whatever. Like, yeah, I went to interview for a job and he made me sit in the Mattel playset. I don't think I want to go back. It's just so funny to me. And it's been said, I'm not

sure how true it is, that whenever Zhukov went into the room, he wouldn't sit down. He would stay standing. Smart boy. Yeah. So he would invite them in there and they would have their meeting. Now, Stalin favored going on the attack and knowing that the Germans were planning something in the Kursk area, he wanted to preempt them and attack first. Zhukov thought this is way too risky.

He pointed out that they knew the date and time because the British told them, not to mention their partisan network was pretty fucking good at reconning stuff. And not to mention the communist firing in Switzerland. Because, of course, it'd be in Switzerland. The Germans were all over the place there and their bank accounts and shit. Yeah. Give us our money back, please. So Zhukov had the idea, why not spend the next three months reinforcing those positions? So the Germans could then attack us whenever they wanted and grind themselves to death over the Kursk salient.

Zhukov knew the hairy conditions of the German supply lines and their various logistical problems because partisans were also making that worse. That's what one of their jobs were. He wanted to force them into a massive battle of attrition that would bleed the fight out of the German army and they wouldn't be able to go on the offensive again as long as they remained in the Soviet Union.

His goal was to lure them into a battle and kill as many Nazis as possible. That was it. And with that, Kursk was transformed into one of, if not the largest defensive systems in the history of human warfare. And while that is something that we all focus on, and we should, it was actually a diversion.

Really? The Soviets knew they wouldn't be able to hide all this movement. So they did as much of as they could in the open without even attempting to hide their massive construction works going on all across the salient. But they also knew that that's exactly where the Germans would look. It would give them tunnel vision.

Like why, why are they building fucking hundreds of miles of trench lines in front of us instead of focusing their attention where the Soviets didn't want them to look. So the bonus army shit kind of, this would see the creation of the step front which is a full reserve army of

nearly 600,000 men and 1600 tanks that would be stationed to the north of the Kursk sector in Orel prepared for a huge counter attack because his plan was to get the Germans fully committed to Kursk and then counterattack them from the north.

And once they were fully committed, they wouldn't really be able to fucking pull out. Right. Construction of the salient defenses began in mid-April. 300,000 civilians were put to work digging ditches, building roads, airfields, and bridges to prepare the rear supply and logistical networks that the defensive fortifications would need.

At the front, 250 engineer companies, and each one of those is about 160 people apiece, supported by pretty much every free hand they could find, began construction of strong points, bunkers, trenches, tank ditches, minefields, barbed wire, roadblocks, and other positions. Their layout was seemingly at random in places because they figured if they built in a set pattern the germans would be able to figure that pattern out right so if they just started slapping shit down like they're like oh i finally figured it out nope nope that's fucking fine yeah and honestly in the logistical network a nightmare because not everybody actually knew where all of the positions were to include the Soviets.

They wanted it to be completely unable to be figured out by the Germans because they knew some of these places would fall and they didn't want anybody to have a map of the defensive networks. Sounds reasonable. So everybody was kind of left in the dark to include the people constructing them.

Another thing the Soviets did to create more guesswork with a tactic known as maskarova uh now this is simply deception they built huge amounts of fake shit everywhere that's fucking smart dude this included airfields bunkers communication centers hundreds of decoys all over the place were built to confuse german air recon planes so they wouldn't be able to focus and figure out where the neural center of the defensive network is because it would just be everywhere, all directions.

Right. Every defensive line was multiple lines deep. Like something, like I said, the Western front of world war two, it was defense in depth defined in some places, up to six defensive zones were built. All of them with a mix of bunkers, trenches,

and interlocking machine gun positions. Over 500 miles of barbed wire was set up, as well as over half a million land mines. Holy shit, dude. And they plant them in a way they average one mine per square foot of land. And if that wasn't insane enough,

the Soviets also jerry-ricked together fuel bombs out of gasoline tanks and set them up near minefields so they'd blow up and shoot fire everywhere. That's tight. That's rough, dude. Someone just sitting around the shovel like, hey, you know what would make this worse? If this all also caught on fire. This network of layered defenses would extend for 50 miles. Behind that,

the reserves constructed more. Eventually, there'd be over 200 miles of defensive works. Sitting inside those positions would be almost 1 million men, 200,000 guns and mortars, and 300 rocket launchers,

all supported by 3,300 tanks of various different makes and models. Anti-tank positions are built in a set grid pattern. However, about one every half mile, they were equipped with every kind of anti-tank weapon. The Soviets had like the 76 millimeter gun that could turn tank to burning death trap from pretty close.

Like they could just puncture straight to the front armor for most tanks, as as shit that just simply didn't work anymore like anti-tank rifles it didn't matter the soldiers in these positions were given orders to hold their fire until the tanks were nearly point blank before firing to make sure they get a good hit in and they're also told to fight to the death the literal order being being, quote, hold and die. Oh, okay. The reserve fallback positions were not for anti-tank crews. And to underline this, the wheels were taken off their larger guns so they could not be withdrawn. All of this is supported by a mobile reserve to plug holes in the line, should they happen,

to keep and shift this around to the worst area of fighting. We would call that now a quick reaction force, I guess. Sure. To make all this possible, the Soviets laid tons of telephone wire and cables for hardline radios so almost every single position could then talk to the other one in some capacity or another. And if that failed, a small army of itself made up of runners was set up to start delivering messages. And I have to go like, I think what makes this so interesting is they built their defensive backwards.

By that, I mean, they focused on logistics first, which all fed into the defensive works. And that's how it's supposed to be made. Like, I don't know if anybody's ever picked up on like the main hitching point for every hilarious failure we've ever talked about, and it's always logistics.

Right. Every single time. And I say that as someone who was not in logistics. That was not my branch. I didn't give a fuck about that when I was a soldier because nobody ever thinks about it except weird nerdy officers who I now have significantly more respect for. The quartermaster dweeb. Yeah, I have nothing but respect for my quartermaster dweeb friends now. Now, Zhukov's defensive plan worked in three stages.

He had been fighting the Germans since the beginning and knew them pretty well at this point. He noticed their offensive capabilities were significantly less than they had been in 1942. The beaten down armament corps would be used to rely on infantry to lead the way. This would separate the tanks and the infantry and ruin the combined arms cohesion that the German military

depended on in order to function. That being that the tanks would have to go reduce all of these pillboxes. They'd have to go do this. They'd have to do eight different fucking jobs on what they were supposed to be doing. They would be incredibly easy to trap and destroy without that infantry support. All of this was also on top of full-scale partisan operations that had been conducted behind German lines. By 1943, partisan operations had become a huge hinge of the Soviet battle plan.

They were centrally controlled in Moscow and used as scouts and sabotage units to fuck with German supply lines. And by June, the Soviets entered into a full rail war by ordering the partisans destroy as many miles of German track as they could, which is like, I feel like somewhere that has to hurt someone deep down inside that the partisans massacred thousands of miles of train tracks. Yeah, whatever. They're Nazi train tracks. Pour one out for the dead train tracks. They didn't know what they were doing.

The train tracks are just following orders. I fully support the clean train track theory. Now this, of course, would interfere with troop transport to the front, but more importantly, supplies. The Soviets didn't really give a shit about interrupting troop transport. This in turn created traffic jams because railways are fucked up. We have to load everybody into trucks and wagons or their Chevrolet eggs

and march their happy ass to the front. This would create massive groups of trucks and horses and men that could then be targeted by the Soviet Air Force. Now, speaking of the Soviet Air Force, we do need to talk about that a little bit, to be completely fair. They don't get a lot of love.

The IL-2, man. Yeah, yeah, they do have an entire video game series that's right outside of the navy which rightfully so is kind of thought of as being more of a risk to the people serving within it than the people they were fighting the red air force probably gets the least amount of attention from i'll call history hobbyists now at the beginning of the war they got stomped uh they got they got real real stomped they got wrecked now this ended up actually helping them in a very strange way in the way that they were destroyed not the fact they were destroyed obviously having a shitty air force is better than having no air force at all but because the german luftwaffe mostly destroyed the red Air Force on the ground, that meant most of their trained pilots were still alive once replacements were built or furnished or whatever.

Like it wasn't that, oh, we have to train an entire crop full of pilots. We still kind of have one, even if they weren't the best. By the beginning of 1943, Soviet air design was a full generation behind the standard German Me 109 and 190s. This was made worse by a new generation of pilots as they began to be pumped out and set to the front lines with... You want to take a little guess how many hours of flight time they had? Six. Okay, you low-balled it a bit there. That's like kamikaze level of

flight pilot 24 18 okay split the difference whatever i assume that is just enough to like learn how to take off and maybe learn how to land i mean i know planes are easier back then like you don't have to learn how to computers and shit but you still have to pilot a hurtling death machine loaded down with bombs and machine guns at least effective enough to not kill yourself which takes more than 18 hours for comparison the germans have taken a lot of losses uh their lufa is taking a lot of losses so they also cut their hours but when they cut their hours they cut them to 70 even like the worst german pilots are better than the new crop of Soviet pilots.

Now, the Soviets got around this skill gap by doctrine. And that is, let's just not get in dogfights. That was not their goal. Their goal was ground support attacks. They had fighter aircraft, obviously, to ward off German air attacks. But that was not their goal. Their goal was to keep keep the germans away from their air attack platforms just long enough i mean mostly like their stern effects or whatever but

as they keep them away from them just long enough to drop their bombs and get the fuck out of there they weren't going to purposely go out and engage in a dog fight at this point unless they absolutely had to to protect airfields or whatever the germans were more than happy with this because this meant that if the soviets were going to go out and contest them they could bomb at will as well right so they bombed supply lines and rail yards seemingly at will uh during the entire build-up of the battle there to stop um yeah and only then did the soviets really start to send their fighter pilots out uh where they overwhelmed the Germans in swarm tactics. Gotcha.

It works. It works. Whatever. You might fly better than one of us, but do you fly better than 10 of us? If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid. And it did. It actually had a weird side effect. And that is it got a lot of pilots a lot of flight time very quickly. And it got them combat experience very quickly.

Now, this also ended up with a lot of dead Soviet pilots. However, they learned through attrition. Eventually, the Soviet pilots that survived a couple of these missions ended up being pretty fucking good. It just turns out that's not the most economic way to train an air force because they they chewed through a lot of guys yeah it'll happen that way just think of this as all the job training i want to be a pilot all right kid here's the keys wait what there you go get to work. If we see you tomorrow, we'll probably see you the next day. But, you know, until then, good luck. And, you know, that technology gap that I talked about would also close as the Lenslease pipeline opened up.

But as well as, you know, certain not popular engineers were let out of prison, like the gulags and stuff, in order to design new planes. How convenient. Yeah. Okay, so it's mid june of 1943 now and uh both the germans and the soviets had been preparing for this for months once again the germans were talking about delaying it now this uh the ober commando der wehrmacht which is the armed forces high command in charge of everything outside of the eastern front because

remember that's that's hitler territory right begged hitler to call the whole thing off this included the guy who planned it at this point zeitzler modal pointed out that this huge soviet build-up was maybe a distraction because look at all these soviets up in orel i worry about that. And that's the thing is right now, this whole thing could be canceled. Like they could just leave. And like modal seemed to be the only one really worried about that. Everybody else's worries to include the over commando to Vermont was like,

we don't have enough tanks at all. And we're like three weeks away from this shit, man. At this point, it's siphoning supplies off from the rest of the war effort to the point that like other plans are having to be canceled and stuff. Now, Hitler decided to paper over these little details by one being Hitler and just lying to people without evidence. Again, Hitler, not a good leader. I'm starting to think this guy might not be very good at his job. No, he, as it turned out, he simply promised everyone that had problems that their problems would be solved. For instance, he told modal that he would have, you know, as many Panthers as he would need.

Fun fact, he would not. You get eight. You get one, sir. Make it last. You get this one Panther road wheel with on the factory floor when the rest of it caught on fire um and when he actually got the half of the number that he asked for

that rounds up to the whole number and they went to someone else who nobody was like to like modal the main push for the sector got half of what he needed and the other half wasn't all panthers either like they just like good like like before the uh the replacements like you actually get a scout

car a dead horse and this guy named franz turn this into a defensive for me baby now in the beginning of july the german commanders had stopped complaining because one i think at this point they've been doing this job long enough to realize it was pointless. And no matter what they said, Hitler was going to make them. Hitler got a Hitler, yeah. Yeah, Hitler's got a Hitler.

Many people are saying this. Now, at this point, Hitler worked himself up into a frenzy as he actually did often. Yeah, sounds like Hitler. Yeah, he was known for flying off the handle for virtually no reason. Then flying off the handle. I mean, like long, angry speeches as to why everybody in the room is wrong other than him.

And those speeches mostly consisted of, why don't you trust me? He blamed mostly his commanders. So, like, in this situation, obviously, it's been bookended by failures, right? That's how you end up in this position. Even though, again, Hitler is in command of all of this. Never once is he's like, I messed up. My plans were wrong. Maybe I need to reevaluate my plan.

Take a breather or something. Yeah. Everything was everybody else's fault. How he visioned his officers in the command structure was all incompetent, untrustworthy, because they keep making all of his plans fail, which is not a way to... I mean, he's Hitler. He's going to Hitler. But now he's screaming and yelling and insisting to all of these officers that his plan was going to work no matter how many times the generals point out that it wouldn't. So I have to get into the weeds of a little thing called the lancaster equation lancaster

lancaster equation i'm going with lancaster because yeah like it's there's the only one in central pennsylvania yeah i don't care just suck my balls buddy if you want your british words to be pronounced correctly simply don't make them stupid. That's all I ask. This is that equation. Just to underline how dumb Hitler was in case you needed more proof that Hitler was in fact dumb. Now, this equation is for the best chances of an offensive operation to work. And that is you need a three to one numerical advantage over your opponent.

And history has shown that this is pretty accurate and rarely does something outside of these boundaries work. It's not exactly rocket science. You have more stuff than your enemy. You generally win, to boil it down. So of course, Hitler ignored that bullshit. That's dumb officer speak. He doesn't need that. He's the fuhrer. Despite the fact that this equation is so simple, so intuitive that zoologists have discovered that monkeys have followed this before going into battle in the wild it was thought better than it well that's called innovation joe we're disrupting war joe more like uh uh ape evasion uh because monkeys did it low effort the boomy me. I deserve it. Boo me.

You suck, Joe. Yeah. And you eat your own poop, Joe. That's also true. But that's not here nor there. I have a condition. But by the time Operation Citadel would start, you want to guess how much the Soviets outnumbered the Germans?

It certainly wasn't three to one. Jesus, the Germans are down to what? 500,000 or less. What are the Germans at? Give me at least five to one. Okay. I will give you five to one in the other direction. The Soviets outnumbered the Germans five to one.

That's what I was saying. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The Germans were outnumbered five to one. That's what I'm trying to say. Sorry, everybody. The Nazis weren't in the dark about this they just said fuck it they didn't know the extent mind you but they knew they were outnumbered so like every german officer all for all of their

flaws were like no we absolutely shouldn't do this outside of we're fucked. Like someone's like, uh, my inferior, I've done the math and, um, we are fucked. How you say they will stick their hands so far up. Their ass will be a slutty little elbow puppet. Oh, and I need to point out in his very, very flawed memoirs.

Manstein said he's, he probably should have simply told Hitler that the attack was hopeless. People were saying that they shouldn't attack, but it was the way they were saying it. Nobody was simply looking him dead in the eye and like, this is not going to work. We can't win this, right? We are going to die. But Manstein said that he probably had the political capital to get away with that. Maybe not.

I mean, he was Manstein because he survived the war is obviously a self-provisionist at best. And nobody dared to be blunt with Hitler because it would probably be the last time you were blunt with Hitler. Another German general, Friedrich von Melenthin, probably pronounced that wrong,

wrote that, quote, the German Supreme Command could think of nothing better than to fling our magnificent panzer divisions against Kursk, which had now become the strongest fortress in the world. All right. Rousing endorsement. Let's do this. Like a general is saying things

like, yeah, they're just going to fling our fucking people against the goddamn, like the rocks, like the ocean breaking against the wall. Like Sisyphus, you guys. Yeah. Now, the Germans, especially Hitler, had seemingly forgotten why they had done so well

when they invaded the USSR in the first place. Independent command structure, better tactics, the freedom of movement, the Soviet top-down command system allowed the Germans to punch through and cause chaos,

and incapable junior commanders of the Red Army were unable to command their own soldiers without higher guidance and control. But Kursk had gotten rid of all of that. By nature of the battle, much like World War I, it offered no opportunity of operational skill. There was no room for maneuver warfare. That was by the soviets had made sure of that one of the things that they did and we'll talk about this a little bit later on part three is that their patterns were random like their hard points were random but their razor wire and minefields weren't right they were all purposefully designed to lead tanks. They didn't care so much about infantry. Infantry handles

infantry. That's what a machine gun's for. Or also landmines and their jerry-grin firebombs. The Soviets knew, we kill the tanks, we win. Because you cannot win an unsupported infantry attack. This isn't fucking SOM. This isn't

whatever. Supported infantry attacks are the only way forward and same with tanks the only way for tank attacks or if they are supported by infantry so they made sure to design their obstacles in a way to split them up by making you know openings for tanks big enough for tanks while other openings were big enough for tanks but they had anti-infantry mines so the tanks could drive through them, but it would kill the infantry. Or in other cases, they'll have choke points where they can kill the infantry, leaving only the tanks. Right. And then encircle them and destroy them.

Yeah. And they would have all of these areas slowly being funneled into where one of the 76 millimeter guns are. So then they can kill the tank or failing that literal suicide bombers but we'll get there there's also the dog teams everything about their defensive structure was to kill the tanks

and separate them from infantry right and because of the nature of the defense there was no possible way for the germans to maneuver their way out of it because they were remember they're driving in to 200 miles of defensive works right they know about like this it's not a secret they know what they're doing so like the skill is gone okay for skills we need numbers they don't have numbers either this is going poorly the german

officer's like this this is perfectly designed as a suicide like which you know hitler would eventually become an expert on oh god he fucking owned you dead bitch the germans were attempting to blitzkrieg their way into a battle of pure grinding attrition, which the Soviets had planned and prepared for. And worse than that, we're betting on. Right. This is probably the first time, because obviously the Somme would turn into a massacre.

Stalingrad would turn into a massacre. But those were not planned for. Right. It's also about Soviet war planet history. What? The Battle of Kursk from the ground up was designed by the soviet high command like we were going to kill so many people just slap on the top of the kursk sailor you could fit so many dead nazis in there this bad boy almost systematically the German high command, namely Hitler, but he's not acting completely alone, went down a list and checked off every single one of their own advantages to make sure none of them would be a feature of Operation Citadel. around 2 a.m on july 5th as the soviet 13th army reported that that its patrols had captured german pioneers and being like combat engineers trying to clear minefields and like scouts and stuff like

that yeah yeah because they were attempting to clear minefields which of course would be like pissing into an open ocean of piss they have no idea how many landmines are about to walk in also firebombs also surprise firebomb attacks and the attack would begin an hour later that's when georgie jukov ordered the artillery to go to work and this time it was not a drill opening up the red god of war and that is where we'll pick up next time we're now two hours deep give or take into, into Curse. How are you feeling so far? Is it everything that you hoped it would be? Yeah, thanks for sucking all the joy out of it for me. Really appreciate you, dog.

I don't know. I've always been interested in it just because that shit doesn't happen anymore, I want to say. I don't think it could. We talked about it, I think, in the last episode. It was like before this amount of manpower and death machines would be arrayed against one another. Someone's like, wait, wait, wait, what are we doing? Why don't we just nuke somebody? Yeah.

I mean, I think that that's probably true. I don't see a situation where a million people ever square off against one another. Right. I think the closest thing that we could possibly see. think the closest thing that we could possibly see i mean like iran-iraq war happened in the 80s because there was two non-nuclear powers with dictators that could feed their populations into wood chippers for a decade on end right but i i don't think that we'd see it anymore simply because i don't think that there's a state that exists that can deploy and coordinate this many people that also doesn't have the capabilities of drones.

Yeah, okay. I mean, of course, the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan comes to mind where both of them have rather large armies built up of not great armed conscripts, but were decided by unconventional means and being just a swarm of drones that nobody prepared for. Yeah, I can't see a situation

where two near peer enemies, like, of course, like Pakistan and India come to mind because they've had multiple gigantic wars while both of them have had nukes. Many beefs. But also like, I think one of them would have let fly if they were truly at risk.

They weren't going to capture the capitals or anything like that. Someone would have let fly with a nuke to defend themselves. Right. I think we'll see a border war with a huge formation of people. That wouldn't shock me, no. Maybe India and China beating each other to death with like

baths i think this time has passed uh and i i think that's why like the eastern front is so interesting to me because people rightfully mock world war one for egregious brutality but they don't give the same judgment towards the eastern front without uh because it's like oh uh i mean like the western front's where this podcast got its name lines up by donkeys right and even that is kind of not accurate sometimes but uh you don't see people like oh yeah these dumb officers just you know fed a half a million german soldiers into a prepared kill zone for a month. You don't see it judged the same way as you do World War I.

And I'm not entirely sure why. I think it's maybe because we don't focus so much on the Eastern Front being from the West that we are. I don't know. I think the idea is just alien. The idea like for all the criticisms, and there are many, about the United States military, the idea of prepared kill zone as strategy

is so goddamn foreign to us. Yeah, and even then when we talk about it, it's one of those situations where we do use the equation effectively, like Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Tarawa all come to mind for insane kill zones. We knew we were going to be a massacre and then went ahead and did them anyway.

But it's like the Germans went down a checklist and made sure they didn't have a single advantage while it seemed that the United States military did the exact opposite because we weren't wanting for anything. And of course, that's what happens when you're on the winning side of a war, you fucking assholes. I'll give us another one before we head out. Ooh, that one sounded deceased. Anyway, that's Kursk Part 2. Liam, thank you for joining us. Everyone, I didn't do this at the end of the last one.

That's my bad. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. You make everything we do here possible. If you'd like to hear more incredibly long-winded series where I make my guests increasingly more hopeless, please support the show. That's what I'm here for, baby. And we will talk to you on part three.

And that's a podcast. I don't know how to end this. Later. Bye, everybody.