Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 196 - The Battle of Kursk Part 3: Lunch in Kursk!

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

SS units arrive at the battle of Kursk cheering "Lunch in Kursk!" They would not, in fact, have lunch in Kursk. 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. Oh man, I accidentally put my NPR voice on like I was recording History of Armenia. I'm Joe and with me today is Liam. What's up, Liam? Hi, Joe. Hello, Liam. It's better when I just sound as grim as possible.

It's like that meme of like your emo friend and your friend on ecstasy or whatever. And they're in black. One's in all black. One's dressed in rainbow. Except the difference is I am recording at 6 a.m. in Armenia in an apartment with very thin walls and trying to keep my voice low. I mean, you do sound sexy as all hell, Joe. I am tearing through my shorts. Thank you.

I'm taking the Republic by storm with my husky radio voice. A lot has happened since we recorded the last two episodes i've moved across the world for the next several months this is our first recording since i've moved here which is probably gonna fuck a lot of people up because i've recorded bonus episodes for february um that will come out and not be in chronological order because i recorded those in the united states podcast game baby time isn't uh it isn't real fuck it imagine having a lead on podcasts as opposed to just recording on monday and releasing on wednesday uh i think that that's pretty much how our first um dozen dozen or so episodes were

actually probably more than that with this system it's all fun and games. Somebody takes a vacation. You guys just give to give yourself time off. What's that like? Yeah, we just, we just decide that we're just not going to record that week.

And then people DM us and just like, is everything okay? When it's the next episode coming out, it's like what it's done. I have not missed an episode. It'll be out when it's done. It's, it's the Duke Nukem forever of vodka. Oh wait, no, that actually came out. I can't use that joke anymore. It'll be out when it's done. It's the Duke Nukem Forever of vodka.

Oh, wait, no, that actually came out. I can't use that joke anymore. It did come out. It was terrible. Yeah, it was just better when it was a meme. Now, Liam, we're in part three of Kursk. We are solidly in the middle of getting Kursk pilled. I don't know if I like that.

We're getting Kursk pilled. Just grilling on the front of a disabled panzer. Now, what had left you last time, the central front of the citadel had finally kicked off, and the so-called Red God of Death, that being the baller-ass name that Stalin gave Soviet artillery, got the green light from Zhukov to make it rain. I don't often give Stalin praise for anything but the man could name things occasionally. Very well.

The Red God of Death. Sick fucking band name. Speaking of band names, someone reached out and asked if they could use the name Corpse Road for their metal band that I have never agreed to anything so quickly before in my life there's someone who wants to start a punk band called uh actionable threats

hell yes they can tour together yeah the day bethea extended universe team up tour hell yeah i'd pile into a half air-conditioned uh to watch that. I hope they tour in like a really shitty 80s slam van. That's your band and you do that. Let me know. And in one of the greatest examples of quantity as a quality all of its own, the Soviet artillery totally botched its attempt in taking out the German guns.

They lacked the precision and reconnaissance to effectively counter-battery the opposing German artillery. I use the precision and reconnaissance to effectively counter battery the opposing German artillery. I use the term counter battery a lot. And honestly, I'm not sure if I've ever explained it before. I know you're aware of what that means. But in case we have people who don't have military brain listening, counter battery... Yeah, normal people. In fact, actually, welcome to the show. You've probably ever listened to it before. Why are you listening to part three? Go back and listen to part one.

Sorry you're here. They got lost on their way to like, I don't know. 99% invisible. They got lost on the way to their local true crime podcast. Say the Germans opened fire. Counter battery is what happens if say the soviets attempted to immediately knock out the german guns it's pretty hard to do it requires a really good training um decent like gun management and a lot of mathematics which is why i

was not in artillery yeah so i guess we found liam's job of being the counter battery guy since you're good at math oh buddy oh don't don't give me too much credit here i i i i could do math but i'm not being shelled i don't know how well i'll be doing under fire just do your timetables as uh whatever burst shells are going off all around me airburst that was the word i wanted someone's like do pie to the eighth decimal as like the guy next to you gets churned into jelly they're like oh can i just do an approximation please they tried to do this uh and since they they kind of knew that like they i've talked i think mostly at length in the last episode about soviet limitations

during this time period. But these weren't a secret to the Soviets. It's not like they're like, oh, it turns out we don't know how to counter battery or we can't do it well enough yet. They knew that and they planned for it. Hence all the guns. And so instead of counter battering effectively, they just saturated it with artillery. And it worked, kind of. The Germans decided to delay their attack once again for two hours just a question how many guns are we talking

do we have numbers thousands i know thousands joseph i meant how like how many thousands um i i think the the soviets have i want to say because this is like one of the bigger bombardments of the entire war outside of like uh i believe the one that they opened the assault on berlin with which was famously gigantic i want to say they have like over 2000 something like that it's quite it's quite a lot it's quite a lot um and the germ Germans don't have nearly that much. Remember, we talked about the ratio that you want during the last episode, and the Germans didn't have any capacity to include artillery. During the day, it was decided to call off using the Luftwaffe to bomb Soviet airfields and to instead try to use them to take out some Soviet guns because there were

just so goddamn many of them. The German artillery, which at the time was much better trained and experienced, like we said before, that would eventually stop being the case. But they attempted to reroute the Air Force to bomb some of the Soviet guns because there was one thing they absolutely did have advantage of. Now, the Soviets had deployed a huge amount of fighter aircraft to defend the salients, but due to their tactics, they were set up only like a piecemeal fashion. So, there's like a couple here, a couple there. They attempted to be like proximate defense

fighter aircraft, which really didn't work great when the Germans had just so many Stuka dive bombers. A really big problem is there would be a response from the Soviet fighter aircraft, but as the Stukas attacked Soviet artillery, there wouldn't be nearly enough of them in any immediate vicinity to fight off the attacks. Do anything about it, right? Sure. Yeah. And that kind of worked. And the Stuka attack went on for about two hours before the Germans finally sent in the infantry. Now, a lot of these infantry attacks, like we talked about in the last episode, were totally unsupported due to the previous mentioned lack of everything else other than human bodies that the Germans were currently. Human wave attacks are famous for working well, though, right? That's what I've always heard.

Of course. No notes. This is actually the final episode uh and i'm now coming to you from i don't know i'm not i'm not gonna say the german reich of armenia that sounds rough no we're not doing that um uh and also um they also had a lack of of human bodies as well so like these could only go on for so long like we're not talking about the Somme here, where they had millions and millions of men in reserve. Remember, the reserves were pretty much their frontline now. So they were sending in their infantry virtually unsupported. Now, these guys barely made it a mile into the lines before not only getting chewed to shit by thousands and thousands of rifles and machine guns and what have you. But they got lost.

They got lost in a sea of landmines and pillboxes. Normally, defensive networks have some kind of rhyme or reason or pattern that you can navigate and learn and reconnaissance, so you can slowly carve a path through. Not these, dickhead. That wasn't the case. They had built a funhouse of doom, which is incredible. Remember the firebites? That incredible that's right honestly i did forget

about the firebites yeah like occasionally like uh franz i think we're close oh god everybody's on fire and exploding uh my leg is currently wrapped in razor wire what is happening he's a shit 17 year old german conscript who's's now also the lieutenant. Just watching your friends get turned into marinara sauce. That's also on fire. Oh, we're not allowed to laugh at dead kids. Sorry. My bad.

Even if they're war criminals. Famously when the, I think of the best pictures that come out of the Eastern front. I believe it was the Eastern front. Someone's going to correct me on this, which is fine. If I'm wrong, since it's actually has to do with this episode,

there was like not a Hitler Youth member because they weren't quite being pressed into service quite yet. Granted, you could be 16, but they weren't technically Hitler Youth. So, ha-ha, technically incorrect. But there's a very, very young German soldier crying, just sitting in a trench and crying because he's a little child. He can't handle this, right? But that was one of the more famous pictures to be taken. I think it was taken by the Soviets, which like RIP kid. But yeah, so these infantry attacks were just straight up getting lost.

And in other cases, support attacks went much better, though the term much better here is very, very relative. The 78th Assault Division, backed by ferdinand assault guns managed to punch through a few miles of positions before stalling out due to the sheer amount of everything that was in front of them and being fired at them they stopped in a place labeled a hill two.7. Catchy names. A lot of the smaller battles of Kursk are a lot like the battles of Vietnam where they're just named after a hill. Because again, there was nothing in the salient other than Soviet defensive works. And because

the defensive works didn't make any sense, they had to simply label things based on how tall a hill was on their map, which is never a good sign. Battle of Funhouse Jungle. The Germans affectionately nicknamed this hill Panzer Hill. Now, the 78th assaulted the hill multiple times, assuming like in the early stages of the war, the Soviets would break at the set of an armored supported assault.

This is something that the Germans called tank fright. Now, this is kind of a title that they gave what I would consider a basic human response. And that is... Run for it. Yeah. Yeah. A tank charging at you means like time to get the fuck out of here, bro. And this time it didn't actually work. there was areas where tank fright still occurred but the soviets were over it at this point like even their conscripts that had never seen anything before occurs like the concept of like a wall of panzers coming at you was like just considered normal far for the course sure yeah like morale had caught up to the point where they're not going to run away also not to mention where the fuck are they going to run away to or is it going to get shot if they do that uh probably

are we doing not one step backwards at this point um well that order had certainly been published um the the the usage of nkvd barrier troops is certainly overblown i know i've talked about this before i believe it was in the bonus episode for enemy at the Gate. So maybe the non-patriots haven't heard it. But the concept of barrier troops did exist. So the people shooting people as they ran. But mostly what happened is most people didn't get shot as they ran away. That certainly looks good in a film. And it does. Or Call of Duty 1, if anybody remembers that. Oh, what a great mission dude that was fantastic but generally what happened is you got arrested uh for desertion and then executed later yeah that makes sense after a quick but uh no frills show trial yeah budget show trial

tovarish we only have like 15 minutes dude come got one minute, dude. Come on, guys. We can't really afford a jury on this one, but like, come on, guys. This doesn't really matter. Get in the ditch. Now, instead of being inflicted by tank fright, the Soviet units just took that shit on the chin. The fighting devolved into hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, axes, and more than one boulder to the face. Oof. and more than one boulder to the face.

Oof. The Furnands, built with no supporting machine guns, found themselves overwhelmed by charging Soviet soldiers, climbing onto them and armed with grenades and homemade bombs, while others were shot at point-blank range with anti-tank rifles, which is how those worked pretty effectively, it turns out. Since we did the Pavlov's House episode years ago, I've had multiple people say, actually, anti-tank rifles could still be used.

And that's true. You're technically correct, which is not the best kind of correct when there's a tank charging at you. Generally, you couldn't shoot them at the front of a tank and expect to get damaged. You had to shoot them at a weak point or failing that point-blank range, which the Soviets also knew and did. Now, at the end of the day, at the fighting in Panzer Hell, the Soviets held, and of the

45 Ferdinands in the 78th, only 12 made it out alive. Oh. Not to mention all of the dead infantry. Now, in other pushes, the Germans broke through the first lines, got confused as they got further and further inside the salient, and only found more and more fortifications filled by angrier and angrier Soviets. Fire mines!

And the occasional air-bursting propane tank. In order to do even this, they were required to commit the reserves. In order to do even this, they were required to commit the reserves. In the case of the 6th Infantry Division, they had to send in all of the new Tiger tanks way before they wanted to, and more importantly, before the new crews had been fully trained in how to use them. Now, these guys were like tankers, obviously, and they may have been seasoned Panzer IV tankers or whatever, but I can tell you from experience, knowing how to use one tank, does that mean you know how to use every tank? Oh, no.

In fact, you kind of become a liability. In one case, 26 Tigers were confronted by three hours of Soviet tank wave counterattacks made up of T-34s. Now, the T-34s were not quite sure how to counter the Tiger's superior armor and guns yet. You know how we talked about in the last episode that they were going to do the most bloody version of on-the-job training humanly imaginable? That's what

we're talking here. At this point, the Soviet tankers are figuring out how to counter these things. And they do that by killing themselves. Yeah, it's the same thing we did with Z and uh i forget what aircraft we had in 41 sorry uh until we realized we just had to like attack them from above or whatever or we can outmaneuver them i forget if u.s aircraft were faster or i think they were slower but more maneuverable i can't remember someone's gonna get mad at me in the comments i'm not a planes guy leave me alone the the planes guys are getting big mad as right now as they listen to this but yeah i mean it's it's it's kind of a tale as old as war but generally

not as bloody it's like oh i did this and it worked i'm gonna tell other people about it soldiers never change i say as i pissed out the gun barrel of a panzer as i spray peanut penis on gun barrel of a panzer. As I spray peanut penis on the side of a burning tiger. These first T-34s got pretty solidly destroyed. They left 40 destroyed tanks outside of the Oka River where they launched their counterattack, which is a bad day at the office. However, other German tanks were mauled. All of this just to advance three miles. Remember, they have like hundreds of miles to get through. Right.

By the time the Germans got to the fortified village of Bobrik, the Soviets had finally figured out the best way to use their tanks to counter the Tigers. Now, this is something of a common thread of the Soviet army during Kursk, but also during the entire war. They learned through a combination of on-the-job training and brutal attrition how to counter advantage the Germans still held until they no longer held any. And that is one way to do it. I love your use of the phrase on-the-job training.

On-the- job training, baby. That is what it is, technically. Now, anti-tank teams simply hid in their trenches for German infantry and Ferdinands to drive by, knowing that those are not the targets that we want. And then the Tigers began to inch closer because they're slower. They're harder to maneuver. They're always the last one in any armor column. I mean, they maneuvered like shit.

So as they got closer to the trenches, having bad vision, no infantry support, the men in the trenches would simply pop out of their hiding spots with homemade bombs and Molotov cocktails. Yes, I am aware of the irony of the Soviets using the Molotov cocktail only a few years removed from the time that they invented it by invading Finland, they would target the tiger's tracks to make them immobile and then climb up on top and throw firebombs into open hatches or vision slots to set the tank on fire. What a hell of a way to die. Yeah. If the suicide fire teams didn't work, anti-tank guns would just hammer them from all sides at point-blank range

once the tracks were knocked out, slowly wearing them down through layers and layers of defenses. Or sometimes, which wasn't uncommon, like once the tanks' tracks were knocked out, they became immobile, they started getting pounded with shit. The crews would just get out and run, and then you could just shoot the crews. Despite the tank-on-tank superiority, it didn't amount to anything for the Germans. tank superiority, it didn't amount to anything for the Germans. After smashing the T-34s at the river and at Bobrick, they were still forced to stop due to the non-stop

attacks by anti-tank teams. They would simply keep coming and keep coming. It didn't matter if they knocked out the T-34s that came at them. It didn't matter if they fought off a couple of waves. Like, alright, send in the next death team. Soviets love to wage a war of attrition, man. It's their favorite thing to do.

Yeah, especially like during the Soviet times, betting on manpower when fighting the Soviet Union isn't the best way to go about things. Yeah, and not to mention, say they get through, they get hit by more guns, run to more minefields, whatever. Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, once the tanks were pinned down, unable to withdraw, the Red Air Force would be called in.

And that's when the Sturmovik aircraft armed with new shape charge bombs would bomb them to fucking hell and nothing could survive that. Not to mention is it an airborne shape charge, but also generally it's landing on top of the tank, which is the least armored. So nothing is surviving these

if it gets hit. Now, General Modal committed 500 different armored vehicles, tanks, and assault guns just on the first day. Half had been knocked out by the end of day one. Now, these weren't necessarily catastrophically killed. By catastrophically

killed, I mean like cannot be repaired, crews were killed, whatever. Many of these would be able to be repaired, but that still meant they were not supporting the infantry during the downtime it took them to be fixed, who were still out there fighting and getting absolutely mangled walloped yeah that's toasty that's that's tasty i mean that's just day one oh god i love when nazis return to the pasta sauce by the end of the first day of fighting the germans had punched a nine mile long five deep foothold into the Kursk line.

And that meant, in case anybody's not keeping track of the defensive lines, which like, why would you? That meant they were barely, just barely, the first defensive belt. And they had to get through the entire funhouse of fire mines, labyrinths, and angry Soviets who had been surviving off bread and vodka for three years that's right it's not an offensive i would feel real good about i'm not gonna lie what's funny is this punch was more than stalin had assumed would happen but not more than zhukov zhukov was like fine let them get lost we don't care um because like we'll talk about this later, but these aren't coordinated strikes inward. Like, you know, modal makes it nine miles in.

This other guy makes it two miles in. This other guy makes it five miles in. They're effectively creating salience within the salience. That seems like a real good way to get it circled and killed. Ooh, we call that foreshadowing. Now, this is when Stalin got involved. Remember, he pretty much only trusted Georgy Zhukov. Everybody else he second-guessed. And this is what made him kind of get worried. He phoned General Roskoshevsky asking him why he did not control the skies yet. being the head of the area's Red Air Force, asking repeatedly if the 6th Air Army's commander, General Sergei Rudenko, was capable of doing so. Now, as Rostkiewski told Rudenko this, Rudenko began to panic, thinking it was almost time

for him to collect what had been nicknamed the, quote, nine-gram pension. Oh, wow. Nine-gram pension being the nickname for being executed for perceived failures as nine grams was the weight of a pistol bullet. I thought you said nine grand. Oh, dear. Now, not wanting to collect that particular pension, he ordered waves of bombers to attack the Germans to support the Soviet counterattack

to retake the area around Bobrik. Now, once again, the Soviet armor had been eaten alive by Tigers, losing an entire brigade in a matter of hours and not gaining much of anything. By the end of day two, the battlefield had gotten so hot that tank crews weren't even bothering to close their hatches anymore. German tank units stopped caring about geographical locations to fight over, knowing that nothing mattered other than driving forward the miles and miles of fortifications. The traditional terrain dominating fighting that everyone knew and had trained on was rendered pointless when everything was a reinforced hard point made to fight over and to kill you. With fire mines.

Can't forget the fire mines. I can't like explain enough how everybody was dying. This is how the Germans were looking at it, but also this is how the Soviets were looking at it. It's just miles and miles of things that will kill you. It's like being in Australia, man. If Kursk was in Australia, it'd be called Kurskodong or something weird like that.

Now, Modal used every kind of artillery he had available to him to try to blast away through the wire, the mines, the tank ditches, whatever, while the Soviets did the same thing right back at him. Massive clouds of planes, layers and layers and layers, hundreds and hundreds deep bombed one another, neither side caring much about losses and refusing to back down. Now, at this point of the battle, German air superiority was evident and Soviet fighter aircraft were not able to knock them from the skies, but that wouldn't last for long. And it's not because of the eventual re-upping of Soviet quality here on pilots. It's that the Germans were keeping all of those planes in the air by simply running their pilots

into the ground while the soviets were just like we have a lot of pilots and aircraft the much much less numerous german pilots were being taxed to their last nerve and remember they started this on meth like they that's how they were functioning and like even the meth that they were running on wasn't enough to keep them going. Now, these are simply people. Maybe you can rotate pilots out, but their planes flying around the clock like that badly need maintenance and fuel, which was growing scarce. The same problem that their planes were having as their tanks were having is like, hey, we need a new this or that. That'll be like a three-day wait. It doesn't exist because the factory got bombed. Yeah, exactly.

Now, the German advance still crept forward, but their excess was measured in individual meters. This only brought them further and further into the Soviet fortification framework. Yeah, like getting SOM pilled on Maine. Oh, God, these pills all suck. Why am I covered in French blood? Now, this only brought them further and further into new layers

of the Soviet fortification network. Every new inch of ground causing horrific casualties to the infantry that could not be replaced. An entire infantry division was hemorrhaged in a day as every kind of new forward movement turned into suicide good good

i think yeah suck it you know the best way not to kill yourself if you're the nazi army don't fucking invade people or also don't be a nazi yeah this and every other war could simply be solved by don't invade people we talked a little bit in the last episode just how high german casualties have been during the eastern front just to give a little bit more the last episode, just how high German casualties have been during the Eastern Front. Just to give a little bit more on that, 40% casualties across German units were not uncommon already. And while this sounds insane saying this, it wasn't actually outside the realm of human imagination at this point on the Eastern Front. The problem was when you do that for so long, when you just keep feeding 40%

of every unit into a woodchipper with a hammer and sickle on it, you eventually run out of people to replace those 40% as they build up over time. Now by July 6th, that being day two of the battle, the 9th Army Division's replacement pool only had 200 people per

unit left. They're already hammering through their strategic reserves on day two uh in case anybody's like googling us to see how long this lasts you realizing that like oh how does this continue oh boy because does it just guys vibing just just vibes at some point it's just vibes not a cell phone in sight. Just dudes living their life, strangling each other to death and beating each other with rocks. Now, this had a trickle-down effect

because trickle-down only works in bad ways. Tanks cannot work without infantry support, especially now when every goddamn tranche and pillbox has a dedicated suicide squad of anti-tank bros ready to run out and punch explosives strapped to their own bodies, which yes, they did do that. Also, vision inside tanks is very, very bad. It's hard just to drive and there's actually more to it than that. The reliance on these forward infantry teams to find

minefields, to find obstacles and warn them ahead of time like, hey, don't go over there. Your shit will get churned to paste by a minefield. you have less and less infantrymen to warn the tank crews of this you have more casualties on the armor itself and this feeds right back into the infantry yeah yeah a feedback loop that just fills body bags pasta sauce feedback loop yes it's like a the bag of soup but it also has chunks of bone in it. Bone broth, man. That's high in protein. There you go.

Tanks kept getting ambushed and vehicles got lost in minefields, and anti-tank teams easily surprised and surrounded tanks, picking them off one by one as they slowly made their way around each obstacle. All this while getting blasted with artillery so hard that it was described as worse than anything the Germans had ever experienced up until this point. And remember, there's veterans of Stalingrad in these ranks. Fuck. I mean, good, but fuck.

Right, yeah. By the end of the second day, the Germans had done little other than capture another hill, this being 253.5. Congratulations, boys. Congratulations, the well-known 253.5 hill will have forever live in infamy.5. Congratulations, boys. Congratulations, the well-known 253.5. He'll forever live in infamy. Yeah.

And they found themselves stuck in the second layer of defenses. Now, at this point, one German general, Rudolf Schmidt, flew off the handle, losing his shit about the battle, cursing Hitler and the Nazi party itself for this stupid fucking plan until he was

fired and committed to a mental institution uh well at least he survived i assume he was gruesomely executed later but here's an interesting undercurrent to this whole series this command like a lot of the german commanders of kursk a lot of them would directly lead to the plot to kill hitler well the valkyrie plot yes a lot of them are connected to it you guys ever do valkyrie for a bonus episode yes we did eventually we'll talk about the actual plan because it's kind of interesting i would like to evaluate some of the people involved it's interesting that this seemed to be the breaking point for many of them, not all of them. But like, I think for the first time, a lot of them saw that like, oh, this truly is hopeless. Like even because his 9th Army had chewed through its entire infantry reserve. And most of the tanks had already been hastily repaired at least once. Now, the partisan attacks on German supply lines that we talked about during Episode 2, I believe, really began to hurt.

At this point, there was so little fuel and replacement parts that Luftwaffe finally had to cut their tax nearly in half because they simply didn't have the fuel left. When the Germans began their next push towards the town of Ponry on the 7th, they found that in the night, the Soviets had been hard at work laying more wire and more landmines in front of them.

They simply never slept. Who's on meth now? Everybody, everybody said. I think the US also exported their meth to the Soviets. I don't remember, though. Now, the Germans unleashed the largest artillery bombardment of the war up until that time in support of the attack on Ponry, but it just didn't matter. The tanks were so penned in by Soviet landmines, traps, and wire, they had to follow little trails that had been left open on purpose.

This is seemingly something nobody ever thought of while they were being led down them. Like, weird, why does this one track not have any obstacles on it? I'm sure it's perfectly harmless. This porridge is too warm. This porridge is full of landmines. This bear has a knife. They just got funneled into pre-prepared kill zones for Soviet gun crews, of which there were over 100 gun crews per mile.

Oh, Jesus. Now, each of these gun crews, these anti-tank gun crews, are supported by ground assault teams. These are made up of the anti-tank squads as well as anti-infantry shock squads. At this point, the Germans had walked into a 15-mile deep kill zone with nowhere to go, which is the best place to put your Nazis, in my opinion. The ground. That's where they belong. The Germans attacked the town five different times. And on the 7th, they gained nothing more but dead soldiers. Whenever they broke through in other places, they discovered that every open area they thought they could drive through was another minefield surrounded by hidden positions. And fire.

And occasionally, yeah, air-bursting firebombs. The Germans were already losing. They had lost the Battle of Kursk. Operation Citadel was completely and totally pointless. They were just not aware or too dumb to notice. They had already suffered tens of thousands of casualties, and enough tanks had been damaged that emergency repair parts were being ordered from Berlin, as well as hundreds of thousands of more rounds for tank cannons.

They managed to prepare for this advance for weeks and already run out of ammo. Not to mention, not dying or getting your leg blown off didn't make things any easier for a German soldier, as the attackers had not slept for three days. Oh. Your accuracy, I imagine, is going to suffer at that point.

Yeah, everything's going to suffer at that point. I mean, and I don't know if anybody who's listening has ever done meth. I have not. I've done meth. I can't imagine after just ripping meth, like I think it was called Pervitin, if I remember correctly, ripping on meth for three days might keep you awake, but doesn't necessarily make you the most capable human being on earth. Yeah, I wouldn't say I was the most stable person after day three or so no liam i'm gonna need you to do meth for three solid days okay step two joe i'm clean now i'm retired man do it for the pod okay do a whole bunch of meth i don't want to do that anymore i'm gonna give you a gun um and then okay yeah give me a gun you're gonna do

a whole bunch of meth i'm gonna give you a gun and then i'm going yeah, give me a gun. You're going to do a whole bunch of math. I'm going to give you a gun, and then I'm going to make you sprint through a minefield while listening to... I'm going to liberate Berlin. And then I'm going to give you intricate commands via screaming across machine gun fire. I'm going to see how well you can do. Probably not so good. We'll consider it an experiment that can only be done

once. You either die or we both get arrested by the cops. That's fine. I've been arrested before. I don't care. Yeah, same. I don't's fine I've been arrested for it, I don't care Yeah, same I don't think I've ever been arrested for setting up a mini-bed all of a curse in my yard, though I think that's generally frowned upon What were you arrested for? Mostly vandalism and stuff when I was younger

Okay, I got arrested for drunken disorderly Nice, yeah All of intoxication and disorderly conduct Then I paid $200 to the city of Philadelphia to run away Universities shouldn't have cops. Yeah, that's definitely true. I got arrested by Detroit Police Department for vandalism a couple of times. One of them was they could have got me for arson, but they downgraded it.

Thank God. I didn't need that felony on my record. I'm proud of you. Yeah. I had to pay restitution of like thousands of dollars to hundreds of hours of community service of which i did like a 10 and then a friend filled in the blanks that's fun now seems like you probably shouldn't admit to that on the air bitch it was 15 years ago wait no it was more than 15 years ago i think i was 15 but uh anyway swiftly moving on yeah

yada yada y Admitting to crimes. Listen to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. The only podcast where you listen to history and also occasionally us admit to crimes. Now, the Germans weren't alone here when it came to insane losses. I mean, the Soviets, for all of their digging in, had been just hemorrhaging men as well. It's thought by the end of the first three days, the Soviets had lost at least 50,000 people that are wounded. Jesus. But remember, they had more than enough people to replace those losses virtually immediately. There was no, like, all right, throw out all the dead bodies, fill it with new people.

There was no- It's not in it, basically. Remember, Zhukov's entire plan plan was we can do this all day they can't we can we can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent thank you for editing that quote now in the south of the battle general manstein was doing a little better but again like i've said this is all relative better in comparison to modal is not that good in charge of army group south they were on the other side of the giant pincer movement that had been that would have been what the battle was

meant to be should it have worked um at this point this is more of just a guy slamming his head against the wall than an actual pincer maneuver. Hoping it works out. Sure. Yeah. One of his commanders, Herman Hoth had been, uh, which is solid name. I generally don't give the Nazis props for anything. However, the name of Herman Hoth sounds like a sci-fi character.

It does. It's actually what the battle of Hoth is named after. That's not true. Uh, that's not true at all. Uh, but he had been sure that this entire thing was going to fail from the beginning i mean now he was present in salangrad so he knew what failure felt like

in the face of all of his higher command saying no bro this will totally work source trust me bro i figured his best chances of pulling this off would be that if the plan that involved driving in towards the town of Pokorova, his idea was, okay, they have a lot more people than we do. There's no getting around that. So we need to drive the reserves into an open battle where we can fight them out of their fortifications, out of their firebomb littered minefields, what have you. Now, of course, this plan came with a drawback, that being that they left their entire right flank open. Uh-oh.

But don't worry, their plan would be a straight advance. They would be moving way too fast to be worried about their flank, said the guy who had yet to get lost in the defensive works of Kursk. And, of course, that is not what happened. Manstein's army ran through the same problems as Modal's. Then it began to rain, which is a new little kink to this whole thing. Remember the dry season is what they wanted to fight in.

Tanks get stuck in mud. Tanks get stuck in mud, people get stuck in mud, and more specifically the summer months, which are considered incredibly dusty in Russia, to the point that dust clouds get kicked up for hundreds and hundreds of feet. And when it rains, it gets turned into this really thick, disgusting slurry that is virtually impossible to get through. And not only are tanks hard to use in mud, they actively break tanks down by breaking tracks, slips off the road wheels.

You have to stop and try to fix it over and over and over again. I'm having flashbacks just thinking about it, honestly. The mud in Kentucky would eat tank tracks alive. And I've heard that the Russian mud is even worse. Now, everything at this point is a mud and dead body filled nightmare which slowed their already slow moving panthers and tigers even more because remember they're trying to use these fun doomsday weapon tanks that people like to believe them to be in the worst possible way uh the panthers began breaking down immediately yeah uh this is mostly because uh i mean, well, bad engineering, but...

Incomplete, basically, right? Pretty much. I mean, the... Not QA tested. Yes. Technically, it was a whole tank. However, there was no field testing. And because there's no field testing, there's no field training, which meant these tanks were rapidly breaking down and the tank crews didn't actually know how to fix them.

And then the ones that didn't break down simply got stuck in the mud. Even one of the greatest tankers to ever live. This is a big name guy. His name's Heisentgraf Schwalwitz. Strashwitz? I'm not fucking sure. He was nicknamed the

Panzer Count and the holder of the highest award Germany can give the Knight's Cross the Golden Oak Leaves Swords and Diamonds Jesus yeah it's too many words man well I'm sure it was a giant compound word in German now he was a guy that was so famous

yes he was a Nazi anyway moving on he was a guy that was so famous that just his very presence kind of lifted people's morale. Like a great general on Civ V. The situation in the South was such an absolute clusterfuck going on around him that even he couldn't lift them out of their situation. And he was known for being like this flamboyant, over-the-top pretty boy. He talked real pretty for being a tanker, shit like that.

Everybody looked up to him, and even he was like, this fucking sucks. My breeches are covered in mud. How can I work like this? I can only imagine how disgusting the inside of a tank got. Now, the entire 67th Guards Rifle Division

was facing this unit, dug into the same kind of maze of fortifications that Modell's army had run into. As the Germans slowly pulled themselves 7th Guards Rifle Division was facing this unit, dug into the same kind of maze of fortifications that Modal's army had run into. As the Germans slowly pulled themselves forward, they were confronted with what were effectively suicide bombers. Guardsmen

of the unit were holding anti-tank mines to their chests and strapped to their bodies, climbed up on top of the tanks, set the mines down face down, so like the explosive side down and then slammed on the back of them with a hammer until they exploded jesus fucking christ i often compare things to warhammer 40k but this is some straight up orc shit right like if it works and it's stupid it's not stupid i don't even know what to say to that just wailing

on this shit with hammers until like like imagine you're the guy right like oh you've drawn the the lot you have to go like be the landmine hammer guy yeah and yeah you have to go be comrade hammer you assume okay one hit bright flash then i'm gone and then you hear like tink does it go off like shit i have to do this again i don't want to do this and failure isn't really an option because if you fail, you still just get shot by one of the Germans who notices the guy on top of their tank going fucking like world's strongest man with a hammer. And the top of the tank's armor is very, very thin. So like one landmine would do it. Right.

And to this, the Germans adopted one of the simplest and most horrifying strategies ever. Now, remember how I point out that these anti-tank teams were hiding in trenches, right? The Germans learned that this is where they're hiding and they're very, very dug in. You could hit them with a high explosive shell. It simply didn't matter. They would be deep enough to survive the blast. So, when the tanks ran into a trench, they would simply steer to the left or right and drive alongside it. Tanks were so heavy that this displacement of weight would cause them to collapse and bury the men alive.

Oh, no, thanks. Yeah. Yikes. Like, can I just get shot with a machine gun, please? You just killed me, man. It's fine. Now, this is where I get to talk about everybody's favorite people to dunk on, the SS Corps, because they were there. Specifically, SS Das Reich, SS Totenkopf, and SS Leibniz Adolf Hitler.

Now, we don't need to go into the detail of why the reputation for being highly skilled elite troops is largely just the result of German propaganda being taken as face value. Not going to go into that one again, because they weren't any better trained or better led. Now, what is true is that they may have not been better trained than anyone else, but they made up for it in hyper-aggressiveness and fanatical zeal. You know, kind of like ISIS. When you're propelled by blind belief, training doesn't really matter all that much. For instance, morale is more important than people give it credit for.

If you believe that you're fighting for God or you're fighting for the master race to extinguish what people you truly believe to be destroying the world, and you believe that you're smarter, you're faster, you're the master

race, that will influence how you fight. And yeah, it made them zealots which is certainly a quality to have i suppose but it makes you a nazi so i don't know maybe reevaluate that that part's not so good not so good yeah it's very very bad in fact no um very very bad um at this point of the war because because the SS would eventually be diluted by people who are not true believers, who did not believe in. So, the zealotry would eventually leave, kind of. But at this point, the ranks are still full of the real true believing Nazis. They're hardcore standard bearers of the Aryan race, effectively. Aryan race, effectively.

Now, eventually, obviously, when a lot of people that the SS would have rather murdered got drafted into the ranks, that began to slip a little bit, but not entirely. Even until the Battle of Berlin, when the last fighting was an SS unit. Granted, it was a French SS unit, the SS Charlemagne, and they knew what happened to them should they be captured. So, that's certainly a motivating factor. Now, armed with submachine guns and flamethrowers, these SS infantry, they were Panzer Grenadiers, I believe, assaulted into the Soviet line, setting people on fire and getting into hand-to-hand combat within just a few hours.

And the Germans had driven about three miles into the line. By this point, the SS had taken the strong point of Baikova, and the defending guards had lost about a third of Baikova, and the defending guards had lost about a third of its men after days and days of fighting. When the Germans stormed across a series of pontoon bridges across the Donetsk River in order to capture a

strongpoint, Soviet artillery began bombing the bridges. Another bridge got caught in a traffic jam, blocking it until it too got blown up. You know, that thing that we all think about every time we're caught in traffic. What if a bomb just took us all out? Fuck this. Fuck it, I don't mind this for it.

By 4pm on July 5th, enough panzers had been shoved across the river to capture the strongpoint. On the 6th, the Panzer Division commander noted, quote, considering the sacrifices, you cannot call this a victory. I love that the victory is so costly that even the ss is like you know we can't spend this we this sucks i don't want to fucking be here man in another area of the southern core advance

the bridges had simply collapsed under the weight of the tigers which nobody seemed to kind of do the math for before they tried it like well it's a tank bridge it holds tanks it'll be fine it's like i fucking the bridge as it sags into the river um now when they attempted just for the river which they were told the tiger could do with like a snorkel kit they got stuck in the soft river bottom because nobody had warned them ahead of time that like you need to test to make sure the river bottom's hard and they just get stuck when the tigers finally got through it all the soviets let them pass and then chose to target the infantry because you know you take out the infantry makes it easier to take out the tanks by now the army group had suffered 6 000 casualties jesus christ by the next day when the the SS units moved out again, they were cheering, quote, lunch in Kursk.

They were just so like, you know, big over by Christmas vibes. So, you know where this goes. They were once again pinned in by marshallings and minefields. They found themselves under attack by something new. Dog suicide bombers. Oh, no. There's something awful about the story. I think we've talked about vaguely before in passing.

But the Soviets trained dog teams that had an anti-tank explosive on its back that was triggered when the dog ducked under a tank and had like a lever on top that when it hit something, it'd explode. Now, unfortunately, the Soviets trained these poor dogs with their own tanks. And they would train that there was a treat under the tank and they would just simply run under the tank to get the treat. And then, of course, eventually training would be over, and the dog would explode. Problem was, the dogs quickly recognized like, hey, that tank is friendly. That's the kind of tank that I trained under. I'm going to go dive under that tank. Oh, no.

The dog suicide bombers were actually incredibly ineffective. They blew up a lot of friendly tanks as well. Now, the Germans managed to advance anyway, using close air support and curtains of artillery, but only managed, once again, into the second line of defense. At this point, the armor commander in the area,

a guy named General Vatutin, was getting screamed at because his armor counter-attacks just kept failing over and over and over again. There's a reason for this. If you notice, I'm like, yeah, they were attacked by waves of Soviet tanks, but they're like small groups. These small groups were far too small to make up for the German Tiger and Panther superiority as long as the Tiger and Panther were still running. That little caveat when it came to tank-out-tank combat. So he ordered in two full reinforcing tank cores. The SS units

barely advancing, grinding themselves to death against the Soviet line, had their entire right flank exposed. So, like, hmm, this is where we should throw those tank cores. And that's exactly where they went. The two tank cores crashed into the flank of the SS.

The unit's panzers tried to maneuver to face them, but it had begun to rain, making the ground not friendly for their giant stupid asses and monuments to fucking, I don't know, bad German engineering that will last time immoral. And when they tried to get out of the mud, they got lost in a minefield. The attack began at 5 a.m., and by the afternoon, only 40 of the original 184 panthers were still operational. Those are good numbers.

Finally, some numbers on the other side. The Soviets had figured out we know how to fight the tigers. We have to take away their advantages. They have advantages in armor. They have advantages in firepower. They have literally every advantage other than maneuverability. So let's use their maneuverability against them. They rushed in close to the tigers to take those away.

They no longer had range or power. And at such a close range, their armor didn't matter. You could speed around them in what one person called swarms. Yeah, that sounds about right. Once you got in close, their gigantic gun couldn't touch you, and the turret was very slow, so was the tank. And the faster T-34

could circle around behind them and pound them into the rear armor, which was much, much weaker. And that is how they finally defeated them in face-to-face battles by out-crazying them, effectively. Like, you don't want to punch the crazy guy in the face. Yeah.

Now, doing this, eventually the German advance was stalled. And the Soviets did this again near the Obion Road, where wherever the Germans thought they have been broken through, they were hit by another counterattack until things stabilized again. Like, at no point was the Soviets

planning to ever let them rest. Though eventually they did break through through going towards Pokorova, where they face an endless counterattack by tanks and groups of 30 and 60 out of time, seemingly erupting out of the nearby woods at random. And like nobody could figure out where they were coming from. The Germans like, oh, God damn, another wave of tanks. Oh, shit, another wave of tanks. I hate this.

I want to go home. How many times do I have to teach you this lesson until you leave our gigantic minefield? Now, in a hilarious individual story, an SS company was pinned down in front of a railway embankment they're using for cover when their platoon leader, like taking a knee and trying to guide his unit around, was shot. The bullet didn't hit him. It hit a smoke grenade that was hidden in his cargo pocket and his pants. Now, even though it's a smoke grenade, it still burns incredibly hot. So,

it began burning his legs. So, he tore off his pants like an NBA warm-up suit and then chucked them aside. And like many soldiers having to live out in the woods for weeks or months at time, he didn't have anybody doing laundry, so he'd already burned through his stock of underwear, right? So he's going commando. So he threw away his pants and then began leading his soldiers forward like a, I don't know, Nazi Donald Duck.

Completely naked from the waist down. Which is incredible to think about. Imagine seeing a naked screaming Nazi. I think it was sierra leone civil war with like general butt naked everybody ran the battle naked yeah by the night of july 8th manstein realized something his units were advancing shit the ss had gone 12 miles in which is a lot but like we talked about before they were not advancing on a unified front.

The rather they were creating other smaller salience with each unit pushed forward independently, as far as they could, or as far as the Soviets would allow them. Nobody had any reserves left. And as they advanced, their flanks grew more and more exposed as the salience grew deeper and deeper.

And they didn't have the manpower to actually guard these exposed flanks grew more and more exposed as the salience grew deeper and deeper. And they didn't have the manpower to actually guard these exposed flanks. Instead of fixing it, he decided the only answer was to keep driving for Pokorova and hoped that they could simply outrun the Soviets' advance. When other Germans attempted to advance down the Obian Road, they discovered they were completely lost and their maps were wrong. So that's kind of fun. Most of these maps were old or at best drawn from aerial reconnaissance.

Just kind of eye-fucking it, but that didn't matter. The Soviet Union holding that sector, the 3rd Mechanized Corps, had been beaten to shit over three days of constant fighting. Their neighboring units had been pulled back and their command described as quote, on an island in the midst of a sea of fire.

But it didn't help that the Luftwaffe was getting better at using tungsten cord 30mm cannon fire so that meant that they effectively created I don't know yield A10s to dive bomb Soviet tanks as they moved in the daylight it's a problem like before they had to worry about Luftwaffe attacks but

generally their tanks were safe, barring some kind of Jesus shot with a well-aimed bomb. Now, not so much. Now, whenever Soviet tank comms moved around the daylight to try to reinforce or throw those random waves out of the woods or whatever, they just get chewed up by the Luftwaffe. So, tank crews decided to do something interesting. Simply bury their tanks. They buried their T-34s down to the turrets, making them into

armored pillboxes that were incredibly hard to knock out. In one of the weirdest quotes I found, a Tiger crewman said, quote, there were so many of them, they gave me permanent diarrhea. Every 30 minutes, i had to jump out and squat over the rear of the tank without the enemy noticing fair enough i'd also probably have permanent diarrhea fellas have you ever fought so hard you start shitting yourself the tanks were really hard to knock out and see uh because they were camouflaged into the ground so it made it like it made them very hard to knock out via ground fire.

But it made them incredibly hard to locate and knock out by the air. Now, this works defensively, but it also effectively takes those tanks out of the ability to counterattack. And one person was very unhappy with this idea. And that was Joseph Stalin, which is not a person you want mad at you the general that ordered the the bearing of the tanks heard about stalin being very very mad and began to worry about collecting that old pension right now the only thing that saved the man's life even more than this plan actually working was zhukov who's like no no i said it was okay it's fine and then stalin it was like fine okay but i don't like it and zhukov's like, noted. Go back to your fucking office.

Fucking dislike it all you want. I have noted your displeasure. I don't care. Just play me a goddamn baseline. Go back to your office with all the weirdly shaped furniture, you fucking psycho. By the 9th, Model had temporarily suspended operations. His army had been fighting for four days without rest. Over 3,200 soldiers were dead for virtually no gain and hundreds of tanks were being repaired. The reserves were depleted to the point that veterinarians and truck drivers were being given over to infantry units. this point everyone was low on fuel and ammo and i can't imagine how much it must suck like dearest frowline i have gotten the appointment of my dreams i'll be a veterinarian far away

from the fighting oh what's that i have to go to a place called kursk oh shit my darling frowline have you ever heard of permanent diarrhea i have seen so many many Russians. I simply cannot stop shitting. Also, I have to say, this is not the last time I'm going to cite permanent diarrhea during this series. I have no idea why, but German soldiers constantly run about pooping, which unfortunately I can understand. I get it. I've seen me do it. Now, it was becoming

pretty obvious that the northern half of Operation Citadel was failing, but they weren't allowed to stop. This might have something to do with why Army Group Center, like we talked about, became a hotbed for anti-Hitler plots, and more than a little planning down

the line. While Model was never part of the plan to kill Hitler, in fact, most people consider him a pretty goddamn committed Nazi, a lot of his immediate subordinates were, and he knew about it. And even he was like, yeah, I'm not going to say shit. I get it. He refused to turn them into the Gestapo.

And a few of the people, like, Model may have been one of them, but a lot of other people in the inner circle here, they people were openly talking about like you know hitler needs to go and a lot of them like were like yeah i understand i just won't take part and like one of the excuses like a prussian officer doesn't mutiny is like that old like prussian discipline yeah it's like fart noises this entire thing the reason why i bring this up other than like it being like a cool little fun fact about the battle of kursk is that this speaks way more to military practicalism than any true anti-nazi beliefs of the anti-hitler plotters like all of them benefited from it closely even klaus von stauffenberg was a committed nazi oh yeah they just they wanted in i think what we know about their like proposed peace settlement with the united states they would have kept all of germany's annexed territories yeah yeah he was a fucking nazi yeah all of the annexed

territories just none of russia um none of their military quote-unquote military conquest he was just mad they were losing the war. Yeah. Klaus von Stauffenberg was even okay with anti-Semitism until forced... The only thing that he ethically turned against him was forced deportations. That was his red line. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, really?

Where do you think this is going? Right. And I mean, the same goes for every important german military leader at the time directly benefited from being a nazi even if they weren't nazi party members like erwin rommel was pretty enamored with hitler um and he directly benefited from being you know a loyalist so the idea that they were, I consider them anti-Hitler plots, not anti-Nazi plots. Yeah, absolutely. Which is much more realistic, right?

Now, it was on the 9th that Zhukov knew it was time. The Germans no longer had the ability to break through the center, which means it was time for him to get ready to swing down his hammer. The reserve stationed up in the Orel this whole time to storm through and end this shit. This would eventually be called Operation Kutuzov, which, if you remember back during the French invasion of Russia, Kutuzov was the general who beat Napoleon. Right.

I mean, using that term loosely, Napoleon really beat the shit out of himself there pretty good. He beat himself, yeah. He didn't want to start too early, though. He wouldn't start until July 12th. And until then, all Soviet forces were ordered to hold the Germans exactly where they were. There would be no more allowing them to move into traps. Like, you will hold everything until then.

With the main goal of stabilizing the lines so they knew where to hit. If everything was still fluid, it'd be really hard to launch a counterattack. So, pin them down, do not let them move. While this was happening, the Germans were making their push towards the Sel River, which in order to do so, they'd have to leave their right flank open once again. Instead of doing that, probably learning their lesson from last time, the SS units were sent in to secure it, which required them to capture the town of Pokorova. The Soviets knew this. They were doing the capturing stuff so far. I mean, so far, the SS units were the most effective offensively, which is a low bar, very low bar.

They were ordered to capture the town of Pokorova. And the Soviets kind of looked at this town on their map like, we probably need to hold this, right? Now, they knew that's where the Germans were probably going to go. Because if I was attacking this area, that's where I would go. Which is how you're supposed to think in a defensive framework. Not wanting to commit anything without confirmation, however soviets held off any uncertainty was dispelled when general romitsyrov the a soviet uh army officer got lost while driving down the road and stumbled across ss tank comms driving in the direction of pokorova nearly getting captured in the process and that

dispelled all questions about this shit's going down in pokorova we need to react this lay the groundwork for what would become the largest tank battle in human history and that is where we'll pick up next time and our conclusion part four of the battle of kursk oh i love when nazis get turned into pasta sauce man it's truly amazing that is part three liam thank you for joining me for this the series of your choosing. I was a little bit worried about recording while I'm here. The internet's a bit spotty.

I'm traveling with my podcast travel kit, which is lacking a mic stand, a second monitor, which makes this very weird. DIY as fuck. Yeah, I'm recording in a very small office overlooking the Comitas area of Yerevan, and the walls are very thin. So I was a little bit worried, but traffic noise to stay low. Hopefully nothing in my mic picked up. But everyone, I hope you enjoyed part three, and thank you for joining us so far.

Thank you for supporting the show. If you like what we do here, maybe consider donating to it and getting free stuff and bonus. Well, I guess it's not free if you give us money but you get bonus stuff um and the bonus stuff is is in my opinion it's good it's worth it liam plug your shows uh 10 000 losses and well there's your problem listen to them they're good i've been on both of them buy my books the Hooligans of Kandahar and the sci-fi stuff

I'm very tired Liberty of Death series you can get it anywhere where books are sold and maybe even for free if you have Amazon and you don't care which I don't and until next time don't get lost in a field of

barbed wire and fire bombs later