Member Hugh Davie's interests particularly lie in the realm of logistics. See his blog https://www.hgwdavie.com/
One this occasion however, he has offered those of us encircled in the Covid Kessel an opportunity to examine an operation at the Battle of Kursk with particlar reference to the sources. Having started it myself, it is certainly a challenge and can keep you occupied for hours!
Introduction
One of the major issues with the historiography of the Soviet-German War is that German accounts of the war had an almost unchallenged run for over forty years between 1945 and 1991. Former German generals found a willing audience in American soldiers and historians who were struggling to counter the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the prospect of a Third World War. The post war Foreign Military Studies Project of 1945-54 collected materials from captured German generals to work up into studies of the war and when combined with publication of numerous memoirs from FM. Erich v.Manstein downwards and popular histories from the likes of journalist Paul Carrel, the result of this activity was a tendency to skew Western views of the Soviet-German War towards a Germanocentric one. In the process, difficult subjects were ignored and disappeared and entire military operations sunk without trace. Since 1991 the release of Soviet documents, the activities of Russian and Russian speaking Western scholars has begun to swing the pendulum back towards the centre, however there continues to be a steady stream of one-sided German histories written and published by Western scholars.
The aim of this exercise is to demonstrate some of the problems with one-sided Germanicentric scholarship by examining one of those rare occurances, a divisional sized battle which has primary and secondary sources from both sides.
