EVERYTHING SEEMED TO TILT IN THE LUFTWAFFE’S FAVOR ON JULY 5, 1943, THE OPENING DAY OF WORLD WAR II’S BATTLE OF KURSK.
The German pilots in their Messerschmitt Me-109s and Focke-Wulf Fw-190s had a field day against their Soviet adversaries and their inferior Yakovlev fighters. The Germans reported 367 victories that day. In terms of numbers, that made it the Luftwaffe’s greatest day of air combat in the entire war. Yet despite this initial success, the seeds for a German defeat at Kursk had already been sown, in the air and on the ground.
The Kursk battle is most often remembered as a gigantic tank clash, when German Tigers, Panthers and Ferdinands crashed into Soviet defensive lines that bulged westward around the Russian city. This is how Adolf Hitler viewed it. Even in February 1943, five months before the battle began, Hitler spoke of his new tanks as a “gigantic concentration of the newest offensive weapons” that would restore German superiority on the Eastern Front. Tanks alone weren’t enough, though. Without air power, the Germans lacked a vital ingredient for their projected Blitzkrieg.
The Luftwaffe had proven essential during the Third Battle of Kharkov in March 1943, a German counteroffensive that made the July attack on Kursk possible. “The enemy is again attacking us heavily with his air force,” said one Soviet report that emphasized the importance of German air power. Another noted that “the movementof enemy tank stakes place under the cover of his aircraft.” This close cooperation between the Germany Army and Luftwaffe was the linchpin of Germany’s entire war machine, and thus the key to any possibility of victory in the planned attack on the Kursk bulge, called Operation Citadel.
The problem for the Germans was that the Luftwaffe was not what it had been in the early days of the war. German
