Alternate Eastern Front: The Manstein Strategy

Still anything was better than Hitler's old "hold the line at all costs" which played exactly into the strengths of Soviet deep battle, yet the germans still gave the Ivans incredible fits even through Hitler's irrational and flawed strategy. Imagine the kind of casualties they could inflict on the Red Army if the Wehrmacht had been given full tactical mobility and the freedom Manstein wanted.

Holding "fortresses", as he called them, is a wrong way of looking at it. If you call it "holding rail junctions" you'll begin to appreciate that old Adolph's ideas weren't as bad as his generals would want you to believe. Bad they were, but not that bad.

And without the disastrous Battle of Kursk the panzers and mechanized forces are instead distributed throughout the eastern front.

Do you remember the old saying about why the German Panzerwaffe won over the French tanks? It goes something like: the Germans and the French both had 3,000 tanks. The Germans used theirs in 3 1,000-tank packets, the French used theirs in 1,000 3-tank packets.
Now, things didn't go exactly that way in France, but the saying should teach you what the risk is. And on the long, long, long, long Eastern front, dispersing tanks is a much riskier proposition than on the French front.

At best the Soviets sustain far more casualties and retake less territory...

Once again, and I don't like having to repeat obvious things already stated:
1. a German strategy that trades land for casualties means the Germans are giving up spontaneously more land than they lost forcibly in OTL. So it is impossible that the Soviets retake less territory. By definition.
2. the paradigm you proposed, the vaunted Manstein strategy, can be summarized as: the Soviets took a few hundred kilometers from the gates of Grozny to Kharkov, then the Germans retook a few tens of kilometers with their counteroffensive. Who's the real winner here?

I'll give you that the Soviets take more casualties. But in OTL they had their manpower crunch in 1945, as they were at the gates of Berlin. In this ATL, yes, they'll have the manpower crunch in 1944 - but they'll still be, at that time, at the gates of Berlin. So those two things even out. You see, trading land for casualties wouldn't work on the short distances of say France; it would work on the long distances of the Soviet Union; but only for some time, because even if they are long, they are not infinite.
 
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