Operation Kutuzov, 1943: the Red Army takes the Orel bulge

On the night of 5 August 1943 the guns of Moscow fired twelve salvoes into the night sky. Nothing like it had been heard in the capital during the war. The salute was for the troops who that day had taken Orel and Belgorod, and it marked something larger: for the first time, the Red Army was winning a summer campaign. The northern half of that victory was Operation Kutuzov.²

Background: two bulges

Orel had been in German hands since the autumn of 1941. When the Red Army's winter counteroffensive before Moscow rolled west, the Germans held on to it as one of the strongholds of their winter front, along with Bryansk, Kursk and Kharkov.³

By the summer of 1943 the line near Kursk ran in two great bulges. The Soviet salient around Kursk pushed west into the German front; just north of it, a German salient around Orel pushed east. Hitler chose the Kursk bulge for his summer offensive, Operation Citadel: two attacks, from the Orel side in the north and from Belgorod in the south, were to cut it off and trap the Soviet armies inside.⁴

The Soviet command had its own plans for the same ground. Werth writes that it saw the Kursk salient as a springboard for retaking the Orel and Bryansk country and the Ukraine, and Menning that it meant to let the Germans wear themselves out against its defenses and then strike back at once. Ziemke, the US Army's official historian, points out the weakness of the German position: Citadel would be launched out of the tips of two far from stable salients, whose outer faces invited a Soviet attack as much as the Kursk bulge invited a German one.⁵

Armies and commanders

Three Soviet fronts, as the Red Army called its army groups, took part in Kutuzov: the Western Front under Colonel General Vasily Sokolovsky and the Bryansk Front under Colonel General Markian Popov against the north and east of the bulge, and Konstantin Rokossovsky's Central Front, which had just held the German attack on the north face of the Kursk salient, against its south.⁶

Their great strength was artillery. Ziemke compares the Soviet preparatory fire of 1943 to the great battles of World War I, and a Soviet general who fought at Orel told the British correspondent Alexander Werth that there had never been such a concentration of Russian guns, in places ten times the fire-power of Verdun.⁷

On the German side the bulge belonged to Army Group Center under Field Marshal Günther von Kluge. The Second Panzer Army held most of the bulge, while the Ninth Army under Colonel General Walther Model, a commander known for his energy and force, had massed in its southern tip for the attack on Kursk. For Citadel the Germans gathered some 2,000 tanks around the Kursk salient.⁸

The battle in phases

Citadel stalls, 5 to 11 July. On 5 July Model's Ninth Army attacked south toward Kursk. It ran into defenses dug in depth and before the fighting turned into a battle of attrition gained only a little ground: about 10 miles (16 km) by the count of Britannica and Werth, 10 km by that of the German Historical Museum.⁹

The northern blow, 12 July. On the morning of 12 July, with the German reserves tied down at Kursk, the Bryansk Front and the left wing of the Western Front attacked the Orel bulge, deep in the rear of Model's army. It was the same day that, far to the south, Soviet and German tanks clashed at Prokhorovka.¹⁰

The Second Panzer Army could not hold. By the time Model took over the defense of the bulge its front had been broken in three places, and by 15 July, after three days of heavy fighting, the Soviet troops were through the main German defenses. That day the offensive spread to the south of the bulge, where the Central Front attacked the Ninth Army.¹¹

The long squeeze, late July. For two more weeks the Soviet fronts pressed on the bulge from three sides. Then, in the last week of July, the war in Italy came to a head: Mussolini fell from power, and the US War Department's atlas noted that the Germans in Russia were now yielding before a Soviet counteroffensive aimed at Orel. Ziemke links the decision to give up the bulge to Hitler's need for divisions to hold Italy.¹²

Ziemke dates the start of the German withdrawal to the night of 1 August. As they went, the Germans destroyed what they could not take with them and drove civilians west, while Soviet partisans in the forests around Orel and Bryansk struck at the railways and at the columns behind the front.¹³

Orel, 3 to 5 August. The fight for the city itself began on 3 August, when it was almost surrounded. In the early hours of 5 August Soviet troops broke in, and the Bryansk Front, with the Western and Central Fronts, took Orel that day. On the same day, far to the south, Belgorod fell.¹⁴

Turning point: 13 July

The decisive moment came on the second day of Kutuzov. On 13 July Hitler stopped Citadel. Ziemke names the danger to the Orel bulge as one reason and the Allied landing in Sicily on 10 July as his greatest worry; the German account that Werth quotes likewise sets the decision right after the Soviet blow toward Orel and ties it to Sicily.¹⁵

From that day the Germans were on the defensive and never won back the initiative. The German Historical Museum writes that the Soviet summer offensive followed at once and that the initiative passed to the Red Army for good; the War Department's atlas put it in 1945 that within a month the Germans in the East had been thrown from the offensive to the defensive.¹⁶

Aftermath

Moscow celebrated at once. Stalin's order of the day announced a salute of twelve salvoes from 120 guns for the troops who had taken Orel and Belgorod, and the first units into the two cities were given their names. The journalist Konstantin Kudryashov tells a slightly different story: according to the memoirs of Andrey Yeryomenko, Stalin had asked for a salute of 100 guns.¹⁷

After Orel the Soviet fronts pushed on west toward Bryansk. By 18 August, when Operation Kutuzov ended, the bulge was gone and they stood before the city. In the south its twin, Operation Rumyantsev, ran from 3 to 23 August and took Kharkov.¹⁸ › Smolensk operation, 1943: the Red Army breaks open the road west

Ziemke judges the German withdrawal a major tactical achievement, and Britannica credits Model with helping to save the German position after the defeat at Kursk; Hitler went on sending him from one crisis to the next as his “fireman”. But the larger verdict is the same in all the sources: Citadel had failed, the Orel bulge was gone and the strategic initiative in the East now lay with the Red Army.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

For the Soviet Union, Orel and Belgorod opened the era of victory salutes. Both Werth and Ziemke describe how the victory salutes, with their set announcement and the boom of the guns, soon became a familiar sound in the capital as one city after another was retaken.²⁰

The summer also broke a legend. Stalin's orders declared that the German claim that Soviet troops could not fight a successful summer offensive had been dispelled, and the US War Department's atlas, two years later, agreed that the Soviet drive had disposed of that theory.²¹

Historians have mostly folded Kutuzov into the larger battle. Britannica and Menning both date the Battle of Kursk from 5 July to 23 August 1943, so that it takes in the counteroffensives at Orel and Kharkov. Werth, writing in the 1960s, held that by winning the Battle of Kursk the Soviet Union had in effect won the war. The whole battle is told in our article on the Battle of Kursk.²²

Orel today

Orel, today spelled Oryol, is a regional capital on the upper Oka river. It is a city proud of its writers: Werth found it full of memories of Ivan Turgenev in 1943, and Britannica notes that Turgenev's house is preserved as a museum and that many of the streets are named after writers who lived there.²³ › 12 July in military history: the Battle of Prokhorovka and Operation Kutuzov, 1943