facebook
twitter
  • Home
  • News
  • Who we are
    • Foundation, Object, Vision & Strategy
    • Membership
    • Activities, Expenses and Advertising
    • Data Protection
    • Constitution
    • Standing Orders for Debate
    • Our Committee
  • What we do
    • Events
    • Reports
      • 2015 – WW1 Centenary
    • New Researchers
    • Grants
    • International
  • Our Journal
  • Members’ Area
  • Events
  • Links

The Battle of Kursk – a who dunnit of the Soviet German War for Covid 19

4 August 2020
by Grainger, Andy
armour, Eastern Front, Historiography, Kursk, Russia, Sources, World War 2
Comments are off

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.

https://www.hgwdavie.com/blog/source-materials-exercise

About the Author
Social Share

    Search


    BCMH Upcoming Events

    1. REGISTER for XLVII International Congress of Military History, 26th August to 2nd September 2022

      26 August @ 8:00 am - 2 September @ 5:00 pm

    View All Events

    Contact Us

    Creative Commons Licence

    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
    All images are Creative Commons or reproduced under appropriate licenses. Should someone identify an image for which they retain copyright then please contact us using the contact form provided.
    © - British Commission for Military History.