They could perhaps do work on 30-40 tanks, that doesn't mean they could repair battle damage that quickly for that many tanks depending on the situation and extent of damage or what the average turn around time was (p.26). Of course that assumes that they situation were stable, it was ideal conditions, and the unit was up to strength and in good supply.
In late-July, the situation was indeed stable, the conditions were quite decent, the repair units were indeed up to strength, and the supply of spare actually pretty excellent even through most of August (and made better by the cannibalization of unrepairables). The number of tanks damaged during Citadel was high, but not anything the forward repair shops couldn't handle.
Assuming theoretical optimum perhaps, but nothing was said about average repair times in the document, especially for situations as massive as Zitadelle, especially given that they were on the retreat from the bulges they pushed into the Soviet lines and around Orel were under attack both frontally and against their flanks when the Soviet counter offensive started on July 12th. So these units weren't in one position optimally functioning, they were constantly moving around and having to deal with substantial attacks; in the case of the SS Panzer Corps, 1st SS division was stripped out and left all it's equipment and repairs behind, meaning more work with less men. Plus more and more damage and maintenance was stacking up throughout July-August-September. As Forczyk's 'Dnepr 1941' Osprey book points out, by September operational rates for armor were disastrously low and built up from Kursk.
Since you yourself proceed quoted the section of the document which noted that repair times maxed out at 14 days, so I'll let the bald face incorrectness of the first sentence stand on it's own. And all this would be as true IATL as it was IOTL. Your other assertions in this paragraph do not jive with the actual reality: the SS divisions that were sent to Italy had their vehicles sent to the rear depots, not to the forward repair shops. While panzer formations were indeed dispatched to other fronts, this represented only a minority of available German formations and the vast bulk still were available to do repairs. And of course the September operational rates (I assume the quoted book title is a typo as it would be odd for a discussion on actions along the D'niepr in 1941 to discuss the situation in autumn 1943) for armor were disastrously low: they had just lost a grueling, month long defensive battle against the Soviets in August with many of their repair companies overrun and were immediately thrown into another series of rear actions to protect the retreat to the D'niepr. That would have translated to disastrous operational rates in armor even regardless of what happened in July. On the whole, AGS had a three week grace period between the end of Citadel and the start of Rumianstev: more then enough to put the gross majority of tanks back into service.
As your monograph says:
So that 14 day theoretical situation basically didn't happen and the heavily damaged equipment was cannabilized and lost in movements and retreats due to long deferred repairs. As per usual, the quick repairs got preference and heavier damaged vehicles got constantly pushed to the back of the repair line. So it is very plausible that by September there were still Panzer waiting since July for repairs and not yet returned to deeper depots. Of course those deeper repair depots, say in Kharkov, weren't evacuated totally of equipment and supplies before being overrun, in part due to having some of the rail lines to it cut.
Nothing in your quoted section says what you are claiming. What it essentially says is that tanks that would take more then 14 days to repair would be sent back to depots or cannibalized for spare parts, as I said. Since German regimental repair shops on the Eastern Front were reluctant to send their tanks to the depots, they tended to prefer to cannibalize them. And while the monograph does state there were
some cases of damage taking more then two weeks, it is also clear that was the exception rather then the rule. WWII AFVs were pretty robust and it didn't take that long to repair most combat damage. Nothing in there supports your claim that there were still a lot of panzers damaged in Citadel waiting for repair in September. It is up to you to provide solid evidence that there were still excessive numbers of tanks damaged
from Citadel, and not from defending against the more recent Soviet attacks, in German forward repair depots in September. Until then, your blowing smoke.
Got some? Anecdotes aren't the plural of data, especially when talking about the a-typical situation of Zitadelle and the quick Soviet offensives in the followup, plus then transfers to other fronts (like the quick move from Kursk to Mius in July, which would have disrupted repair ops heavily).
There really wasn't anything about the aftermath of Citadel that was atypical for the Eastern Front. Indeed, the most atypical thing about it was that most of the panzer divisions got an extended rest period before they were transferred to the other areas of the front (or to Italy) as the Soviet offensive didn't occur for several more weeks.
We cannot know because the records don't differentiate. Being on the offensive against the heavily mined and defending northern face of the Kursk Salient was drastically different than defending against a Soviet offensive when in prepared defensive positions. German armor use in Kutuzov could not have been more different than attacking Kursk.
The difference does not change the fact that tank warfare on the eastern front meant it was always easier for the attacker to recover disabled tanks then the defender.
It also does not change the fact that Model withheld the preponderance of his armor from taking part in Citadel as he had doubts about it’s validity and was worried about the threat to his eastern flank, which is why he was able to redeploy them so rapidly to slow the Soviet offensive and prevent the Red Army from achieving a full operational breakthrough. AGC’s armor was much more committed heavily against Kutuzov then it was for Citadel, which necessarily would have meant heavier losses.
Other than the depletion of German infantry attacking Soviet trenches in July?
Given that German infantry had already proved incapable of holding against Soviet massed armored attacks even before Citadel, unless backed up by German panzer divisions, and even proved unable to secure the extremely small flanks of the German penetration at Kursk... no.
Plus, German infantry losses defending against the Soviets were again heavier then attacking them so the sooner the Soviets are able to go on the offensive, the faster German infantry formations lose strength.
It may well not depending on how long it takes the Soviets to replace losses and the quality of the replacements. Certainly the Soviets did push a bunch of bulges into German lines, but the fall of Kharkov was the direct result of running out of ammo. Eventually it would have taken even if there had been enough ammo, but it would have been deferred, been more costly for the Soviets, and given the Germans time to evacuate in a much more efficient and less costly fashion. Endless fighting throughout July-August burned up ammo stocks; during Zitadelle though German-Soviet ammo expenditure was 3:1 according to Zetterlin's Kursk book.
There is nothing to indicate that the ammunition made any difference and in any case, endless fighting IATLs July-August (or, more likely, May-June) will burn up German stocks just as rapidly. Which still leaves the Germans out of ammo and the Soviets with a minimum of seven months, likely more, of offensive capability in them.
Dug in actually did matter in 1943, as loss rates during the 1943 Smolensk offensive demonstrated, exchange rates were far better for the Germans than Zitadelle:
Except at Smolensk the difference wasn't that the Germans were dug-in, they were dug-in at Kutuzov too and it did them no good, but that the Soviets did not deploy any of their tank armies there them with no mechanized forces above the division-equivalent to conduct the sort of breakthrough-exploitation work that you need mechanized corps/armies to be able to do. Even the wikipedia article notes this was what made the decisive difference. Wherever the Soviets did deploy their tank armies though, German infantry proved totally incapable of standing up to them regardless of how dug-in they were... unless they had their own panzer support. But German panzers could not be everywhere and the Soviets had more tank formations then the Germans could ever hope to counter. In short what mattered wasn't how dug-in the German infantry was, it was where the German panzer corps and Soviet tank armies were.
However, even then the Soviets steadily advanced and repeatedly cleaved through the German defensive lines, advancing hundreds of kilometers in the course of two months and their casualties, while heavier, were never unsustainable. The German losses, on the other hand, were never made good.
That was a function of the Smolensk offensive pushing back AG-Center through August-September. Endless shoving backward as part of very costly offensives.
The Bryansk Offensive operation executed in September 1943 was the follow-up to Suvorov and chewed through the Haagen line just as efficiently as the Soviets had gone through the German lines around Belgorod. For some bizarre reason, Wikipedia includes it as a minor section of it's 1943 Smolensk article but the Soviets list it as a independent operation from their Smolensk offensive.
That's assuming the second go works. It may well not depending on how long it takes the Soviets to replace losses and the quality of the replacements. A break gives the Germans time to repair and replace too, plus their losses will be more moderate in defensive positions as Smolensk 1943 demonstrated. Eventually the Soviets will grind the Germans down, the question is how long will that take and how costly will that be...and where do the Soviets eventually run out of steam? Soviet manpower is not endless and they needed the 4 million men they drafted from liberated territory in 1943-45.
It's statements like this that make me think you just don't understand the strategic dynamic of the Eastern Front in mid/late-1943 and starts making me do comparisons with the historical OKH, who showed an equal lack of understanding to the strategic pattern. We have the actual history of OTL to show that the Soviets could and did replace their losses rapidly and resume offensives far faster then the Germans could recover from their own losses, whether suffered defensively or offensively. From July 12th all the way to March of 1944 the Eastern Front, particularly the southern sector in Ukraine, was an endless calvacade of Soviet offensives that, inspite heavy losses, continuously gained ground and inflicted losses upon the Germans they could not sustain. Every time one attack started to lose steam, another one on another section of the front commenced. Armies and fronts which became exhausted were always almost instantly replaced by fresh formations who would proceed to renew the advance. In the end, only the Spring Raputitsa proved able to end the Soviet offensive cycle. And the quality of the Red Army only steadily improved in this time. Look at the aftermath of Rumianstev: the entire Voronezh Front was burnt out after the fighting of both Citadel and Belgorod-Kharkov... so the Soviets simply replaced it with the Steppe Front and continued the advance, seamlessly following Rumianstev that cleaved through the defensive line the Germans had stitched together after Kharkov and forced them to withdraw all the way to the D'niepr. Hell, Citadel
itself demonstrated the capacity of the Soviets to replace losses without sacrificing quality far beyond anything the Germans could handle: the Soviets lost five times as many tanks and had entire Tank Armies wiped out, yet still assembled a crushing offensive edge in late-July and August far faster then the Germans believed was possible.
The long and short of it is that the historical record of Soviet offensive operations for the summer, autumn, and winter of 1943-1944 very much demonstrates that Soviet endurance means they can continuously mount non-stop offensives and give the Germans no break.
And even if the Soviets advance at the pace they did at Smolensk, then they'll still liberate their territory and get their "4 million men" at roughly the same time they did OTL... if not earlier.
Seems unlike Wikipedia to under count Soviet losses.
More like (possibly) over counting German losses. The wikipedia section lists Frieser as saying Army Group South lost 161 tanks and 14 assault guns by 16 July when Citadel ended. So if we use THAT number (assuming it is correct) then its 161 to 1,342, which is a whopping 8:1 in the German's favour for the fighting when they were on the offensive in Citadel as opposed to the 5:1 ratio they suffered in Rumianstev.
I don't know how you can claim anything about Kutuzov as German losses in armor for that operation aren't stated separately from Zitadelle.
I'm having trouble locating my copy of the Battle of Kursk, but I recall Glantz actually states that the 323 figure was what AGC just in Citadel and his estimate for what the Germans lost to Kutuzov numbers around 500 AFVs. I can't recall how he justifies those figures however.
And the reason that they would have had better ratios is that there was a lot less operational armor fighting back in late July-August than there was during Zitadelle.
Not an assertion you have supported. The German losses at Citadel were real enough, but they were hardly debilitating. The idea that Citadel, and not Kutuzov-Rumianstev, did outsized damage to the German
panzerwaffe does not stand up to scrutiny and is pretty much entirely the product of post-war German general memoir apologia. Said memoirs have since been found to be, at best, unreliable and, at worst, deliberately misleading.
Maybe our definitions of penetrated differ, but having bulges punched into a line doesn't mean penetration, it means a break in. Citino's quote says that the bulges compromised German positions, but were NOT an operational breakthrough.
And I said that it was not a full operational breakthrough. That does not mean, however, the defenses were not penetrated. Indeed, to achieve a break-in one still has to penetrate the enemies defenses. A tactical penetration is still a penetration, especially if it operationally means the defense line is overrun (albeit not the enemy forces). Citino makes this perfectly clear a few pages before when he says that the opening offensive of the Bryansk and Western Fronts “penetrated just about everywhere.” (Pg 215).
Squeezing the Germans out of a bulge into a straighter line was not the point of the offensive, nor did it cripple German forces:
The point of the offensive was to retake Orel and eliminate the salient. This it did and did so handily. That some Soviet general complained they did not achieve a greater victory does not change that the Soviets achieved a victory. And while it did not cripple German forces by itself, it did so as part of one of innumerable Soviet offensives up-and-down the line. It also didn’t cripple the Soviet forces involved, as they immediately followed up with a successful offensive against the Haagen line near the end of August.
Results would have been worse had their been no Zitadelle.
Not a assertion you have supported.
It suggests they could have held with artillery support, but they were out of sufficient ammo:
Nothing in there actually suggests that and even the supposition advanced by Wohler is based on assumptions that don't stand up to an objective analysis of the situation. To claim that the 10,000 men holding the city could hold out against the 500,000 coming down on it, backed by their own far more numerous artillery that could counterbattery the German artillery to death, runs screaming straight into Wehraboo territory. Indeed, Kempf was stating that the city would fall, that trying to hold it would produce another Stalingrad, and requested permission to withdraw on August 12th, a week before the ammunition shortage manifested. Manstein, in a rather Hitlerian move (and possibly on Hitler’s orders, to be fair), had him relieved for stating the obvious two days later and replaced him with Wohler. It’s rather obvious in that context that Wohler used the ammunition shortage as an excuse to save the army detachment, not to mention himself, without being fired like Kempf was. But the reality is that the city was lost even before the shortage as the Soviets has crushing superiority across the board. Even if the Germans had all the artillery ammo they could wish for, the final result of trying to hold would indeed have been a Stalingrad and the Germans would have lost both the city and the army instead of just the city. In other words, it would be an even worse defeat for the Germans, not a victory.
It also doesn’t change the fact that the Soviet
breakthrough occurred on August 5th, two weeks before the ammunition shortage developed. So there is no argument to be made that the shortage had any impact on that.