Which battle really sealed the deal in the Eastern Front? Or was it ither factors, staryegy, supply limits, the western front that made the difference?
I think in most of the current scholarship it's other factors that determine the Eastern Front. I'm quite partial to David Stahel's thesis on this topic, which is really that it's the deterioration of the Panzer units through a combination of poor logistics, over ambitious strategy and the operational environment that doomed the Nazi's to failure in the east. And this doesn't even bring into account the opposition of the Red Army or the USSR's capacity for force generation that more than replaces losses.
I'll try and keep it relatively brief on each of the main issues, starting with logistics and supply problems. After realising the importance of highly mobile and hard hitting combined arms units in the Panzer and mechanised infantry Hitler ordered a massive expansion in them, creating new divisions in 1940 after the fall of France. The vehicles needed for these new formations couldn't be provided by German industry, which wasn't fully mobilised, and so other avenues were pursued. Captured vehicles from defeated European powers were pressed into German service in their tens of thousands, this included tanks and armoured fighting vehicles but was mostly trucks. Military vehicles were most highly sought after, but civilian trucks were very widely used as well. This still didn't meet the needs of the new divisions and so motor transport was stripped from the mass of infantry divisions, replacing trucks with horse drawn wagons.
This lead to two large problems for the Germans. Firstly the lack of motor transport slowed down and strained the infantry divisions as they were limited to the speed of the slowest wagon. This meant that when the Panzer groups raced ahead in deep penetration of Soviet territory the infantry would quickly be left behind, creating a large gap of territory that was poorly controlled or uncontrolled.
Secondly the inclusion of hundreds of different makes and models of vehicle caused innumerable problems for the German logistical and supply apparatus. By Operation Barbarossa the Germans had to supply over 1 million different individual parts for the upkeep and repair of its tens of thousands of vehicles. As so many of the vehicles came from occupied territories, or were even captured British ones, acquiring the parts often proved impossible, leading to a very high attrition rate for these vehicles. This was made worse by the often poor quality of civilian trucks which weren't suited to military purposes.
The next problem ties in with the first. The large gap between the advancing infantry, which brought along with it things like supply depots and railway tracks, and the Panzer units badly strained the logistical apparatus. The uncontrolled territory was often crawling with Red Army troops, many of whom had been bypassed by the relatively narrow advance of the Panzers. These soldiers preyed on the lightly guarded convoys that ferried the essential supplies of fuel, food and ammunition to the Panzer units, causing often significant losses of materiel, but also diverted fighting troops from the Panzers to guard convoys.
Along with all the attrition caused by logistical issues and the need to guard lines of communication, the Panzer units were called on to do the heaviest fighting, usually unsupported, until the infantry could reach them. These units would fight constantly for days or even weeks without respite and the constant action incurred more losses which would be difficult to replace. One important area of Panzer attrition was the tanks themselves breaking down due to the geography of the Eastern Front. David Stahel breaks the numbers down in his research, but after the opening weeks of Barbarossa the Panzers quickly fall to ¼ to 1/3 of their fighting strength, not through combat losses but by mechanical failures. There simply aren’t the parts, facilities or time to repair the tanks. And this particular problem is frequent throughout the war in the east.
German strategy is really confused here as well. Hitler and his top generals don’t see eye to eye on what they should be doing in the East. They want to defeat the Soviet armies and cause the USSR to collapse. But they don’t agree on how to do so. Initially they plan to defeat the Soviet armies on the western borders and capture a line deep into Soviet territory from Arkhangelsk in the north to Astrakhan in the south before the onset of winter. This would capture all the main cities in the USSR, including Moscow, and cause the collapse of the USSR.
It very quickly became apparent that this was not going to happen. From this point on Hitler and his generals basically fought about what to do instead, with Hitler directing the capture of Ukraine and Leningrad and his generals preferring to capture Moscow. This fight goes on for weeks and stalls the campaign before Moscow is abandoned as an objective. With Hitler winning the fight he takes more or less sole control of the campaign in the east, largely ignoring advice from his generals and the information being passed back from the front.
The last issue of the operational environment really makes all the previous problems worse. The USSR gets bigger the further east you head and distances are enormous. The German armies have to spread out further and further and as such each thrust is weaker than the previous one. What roads the USSR had were usually very poor and the weather compounded the issue. When it was hot and dry the roads kicked up so much dust that it overwhelmed air filters in vehicles and clogged engines with dirt, massively increasing oil consumption for the Panzers and causing high rates of breakdown. Engines seized as their oil became gritty with dust and there weren’t repair shops, replacement engines or even more oil to flush them.
In Autumn and Spring there was the Rasputitsa. They were the wet seasons which turned the roads into a morass as armies used them and all speed was lost. Panzer units that could travel 100 miles a day in good weather were slowed to a crawl at less than a quarter of that. The legend of General Winter, although much overblown, does have some truth to it and the freezing cold of Russia caused its own problems for the Germans.
So on the face of it, it looks like the Germans did very well in Barbarossa. They captured much of the western USSR, killed, wounded or captured around 5 million Soviet soldiers and completely stupid amounts of war materiel. But it had badly failed on its own terms. The USSR had not fallen, the Red Army was larger than it had been in June 41 and the Germans were nowhere near the A-A Line. Worse than that the Germans and their allies had lost around 1 million men, who would be difficult to replace. And with the hope of a quick war gone it was then faced with the unpleasant fact of a long, war of attrition that it was ill equipped to withstand.
When I teach this I find it really instructive to look at the objectives of the German offensives in 1941, 1942 and 1943.
1941: Defeat the Red Army on the border and collapse the USSR
1942: Drive south-east to capture the Don Basin and the Caucuses for resources, particularly oil
1943: Destroy Red Army forces around Kursk and straighten out the salient there.
Those are three very different goals, each one much smaller than the last. Stalingrad coming at the end of 42 and the operational campaign at Kursk already demonstrate that the war in the east was probably lost in 1941 when Barbarossa failed.
Sources:
David Stahel Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009
David Stahel Kiev 1941. Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012
Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, David Stahel Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization Rochester, NY
David Glantz When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, 1995
Ben Shepherd Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016
You will probably not find a single consensus answer on this question, as many professional military historians still debate it today. I am in the camp that turning points are a bit of a wild goose chase in military history, and that it is really an accumulation of factors that cause tides to turn in war. This discussion at Military History (not) Visualized is a good introduction to the different points of view on turning points as a concept, I think. With that in mind, Stalingrad and Kursk are frequent candidates for the title of turning point in the Soviet-German War/Great Patriotic War, as are Moscow and the failure of Operation Edelweiss to seize the Caucasian oil fields. Stalingrad is, in my opinion, a better candidate than Kursk for the military turning point between the Wehrmacht and the RKKA if I had to pick. Soviet historians themselves divided the war into three periods: the first, from the onset of Barbarossa in 1941 until the launch of Operations Uranus and Mars during the Battle of Stalingrad in November 1942; the second, from November 1942 to the end of 1943 (coinciding with the end of the post-Kursk consolidation operations, as far as I am aware); and the third, from the beginning of the Dnepr-Carpathian Offensive in January 1944 to the end of the war. We’re really concerned with the first and second periods for this question. During the first period, the Germans held the strategic initiative, and the RKKA had little ability to contest it via counteroffensives; this period was marked by frequent Soviet routs. In the second period, both sides contested the initiative, with the RKKA growing more proficient, more confident, and increasingly able to claim the initiative, until by the end of 1943 it was firmly in Soviet hands. We can see from this demarcation (which is followed and built upon by Glantz and House in When Titans Clashed) that Stalingrad represents a major strategic shift, but so does Kursk in its own fashion.
The major reason I think Stalingrad is a better candidate than Kursk is because, as Robert Citino argues in Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 and The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943, 1942 is the year when the Wehrmacht lost its ability to really pursue the Nazi state’s war aims. In the Great Patriotic War specifically, the annihilation of Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the parallel Soviet attacks against Rzhev (the admittedly failed Operation Mars), and the follow-on Operation Little Saturn offensives, altogether marked the death of any serious ability for the Wehrmacht to reach the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line (the original goal of Barbarossa), let alone achieve the longer-term Nazi aims of collapsing the Soviet state and implementing Generalplan Ost (the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Slavic lands). Even though the Wehrmacht did indeed still contest the strategic initiative during the second period of the war, what “strategic initiative” meant for them had changed drastically. During the first period of the war, strategic initiative for the Wehrmacht meant the ability to break Soviet lines, encircle Soviet forces, and generally keep driving east to threaten the sovereignty of the Soviet state. During the second period of the war, German strategic initiative consisted of frustrating Soviet attempts to collapse their lines or engaging in backhand counterattacks like Manstein’s devastating victory at Kharkov. None of these counterattacks had any serious chance of restoring the Wehrmacht’s ability to achieve its war aims. In the instance of Kursk, to plagiarize myself from another thread: “Much debate has been made of the tactical side of this battle and various hypotheticals by which the Wehrmacht could have achieved a penetration of the Soviet defensive belts, but even assuming such a breakthrough were made - a breakthrough to where? It strains the imagination to conceive of a tactical victory at Kursk that would produce the desired German operational outcome of encircling Central front, let alone any broader strategic goal; any breakthrough would have culminated just in time for Konev’s Steppe front or the other reserve forces in the Soviet depths to counterattack. Certainly there is no reasonable world in which II SS Panzer Corps achieves breakthrough at Prokhorovka and then drives on to Moscow. A successful Operation Citadel would have bolstered Nazi morale and dealt the Red Army a serious blow, but by 1943 it is hard to conclude that it would have been anything but delaying the inevitable.” This is why I think Stalingrad is a better choice for a military-strategic turning point than Kursk, because at Kursk a German victory could delay the end but not materially alter the outcome of the war.
With all of this said, I do still believe that individual battles are not really turning points. Neither Stalingrad nor Kursk nor any of the other candidates occurred in a vacuum; for instance, the victory at Stalingrad was enabled by American Lend-Lease support and fresh troops from Siberia (as Soviet intelligence no longer believed Japan was likely to invade), as well as diversion of German resources to North Africa. German attrition during the campaigns of 1942, which they had after all never expected to fight, contributed as well; Uranus took great advantage of the fact that manpower shortages forced the Wehrmacht to anchor its flanks with worse-equipped and -trained Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian troops. 1942 as a whole represented the strategic overextension of the Wehrmacht on all fronts, as it bit off more than it could chew and in doing so incurred serious losses through a year of aggressive and admittedly often tactically & operationally successful offensives. Stalingrad was simply the big, visible capstone on the Wehrmacht’s erosion, and as such was a powerful symbolic turning point for the Allies.
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