If you read a lot about World War II, you’ll come across not one but several battles mentioned as the “turning point.” Focusing only on Europe, five events surface. Moscow (January 1942). Stalingrad (February 1943). Kursk (August 1943). Operation Bagration (August 1944). And, of course, Normandy (August 1944). The first four, and possibly the fifth, deserve consideration. But the point is academic. It’s unreasonable to look for a single watershed moment in such a titanic global struggle. That said, there can be no question that in the Battle of Kursk, the largest battle in history, the Wehrmacht met its match, and lost. And British military historian Lloyd Clark gives Kursk its due in The Battle of the Tanks. As Winston Churchill commented, “Stalingrad was the end of the beginning; but the Battle of Kursk was the beginning of the end.”
A colossal battle viewed in strategic context
The Battle of the Tanks is the story, brilliantly told, of the largest battle in the history of warfare. However, it’s not a simple blow-by-blow account of a two-month-long event. Clark views the Battle of Kursk in a larger, strategic context. “It was a confrontation characterized by hideous excess and outrageous atrocities,” he writes, “involving the two largest national armies ever amassed, and fought over four years in operations stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea. It concluded with Germany having incurred nearly three million military dead and the Soviet Union a staggering 10 million.”
In other words, the Battle of Kursk was an inflection point in the war on the Eastern Front. It was the prelude to Operation Bagration and the rapid march of the Red Army westward toward Berlin. And, reflecting this perspective, Clark devotes the first third of the book to reviewing the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union from its inception in June 1941 through through the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943.
The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 by Lloyd Clark (2011) 497 pages ★★★★☆
A granular account of the battle
In The Battle of the Tanks, Clark cites the views of soldiers on the ground as well as those of their commanding officers and of the two contending tyrants, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. He masterfully intersperses sometimes lengthy quotes from the front with those in the words of the two supreme commanders and their field marshals. Those quotes appear throughout. They’re mixed within an account of the disposition of forces on both sides at the divisional, corps, army, and army group levels. And, if the book has a weakness for the general reader, it’s that those passages can be deadly dull. Specialists in military history might think differently.
Without detailed maps at hand and lacking the willingness to read at a snail’s pace, that granular account of the fighting didn’t work well for me. However, the book comes to life through the author’s extensive use of quotations. On every page or two the author quotes from memoirs, letters to wives and girlfriends, official unit histories, and written orders from Hitler and Stalin—and those quotes make the book worthwhile. They convey a visceral sense of the day-by-day experience on the ground. And you can appreciate that experience by skipping the long passages that detail the movement of divisions and armies by name and read only the indented quotations. That’s what I did in the book’s final chapters when my impatience got the best of me.
An account reflecting grand strategy
This book’s greatest strength is the strategic perspective it reflects. And that perspective is not limited to the fighting itself. As Lloyd Clark points out, “It was not by tank duels that the Battle of Kursk—or even the Second World War—was won, but by the production battle in the factories . . .” For the Soviet Union, Clark observes, “the route to victory lay in out-producing Germany.” And that’s precisely the Soviets achieved. “In 1942,” for example, the USSR produced “24,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 127,000 guns and mortars and 25,000 aircraft. Over the same period the Germans produced 9,000 tanks, 12,000 guns and mortars and 15,000 aircraft.” And Lend-Lease from the United States, increased the advantage. “By 1943 [the American program] was providing 17 per cent of Soviet aircraft, nearly 16 per cent of guns and ammunition and 14 per cent of vehicles.”
The upshot was that in the Battle of Kursk, Germany found it impossible to continue replacing all the weapons (and men) lost on the field. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union kept bringing increasingly better-equipped and better- trained troops in enormous numbers into the fight. Despite sometimes dramatically lopsided losses by the Soviets, the disparity in manpower and production levels eventually proved decisive.
About the author
Lloyd Clark is cofounder of the Centre for Army Leadership based at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and is a professor at the University of Buckingham, where he teaches Modern War Studies and Contemporary Military History. He was born in 1967 and educated in history and war studies at King’s College, University of London. Clark is the author of at least nine nonfiction books. He is also a regular media commentator and presents frequently on television. He is married with three grown children.
For related reading
You’ll find other eye-opening books about World War II at:
- 10 top nonfiction books about World War II
- Good books about the Holocaust
- 10 true-life accounts of anti-Nazi resistance
- 7 common misconceptions about World War II
- The 10 most consequential events of World War II
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