Kursk 1943: The Southern Front: 305 (Campaign) Paperback – 23 March 2017

Given the limitations of the Osprey format, the author does a very good job summarizing the course of the battle in the southern front of Kursk. However, there are errors in the tables and maps that should have been caught during the proofing of the book.Table 3: Soviet armour strength is short 11 KV-1/2 and 20 SUs. This may be due to the lack of a row for the 38th Army (which had the 192nd and 180th Separate Tank Brigades).The map on pages 78-79 does not have a triangle for Event 17, the attack on Vasilevka. In addition, the text for Event 17 misidentifies the 170th Tank Brigade as the 107th.The Final Actions map on page 87 has transposed the circled events 3 and 4.These are somewhat minor errors and they do not detract from the overall narrative, but they should have been caught by the copy editors.

All good!!!

Wow! Great author, superb detail & communicative to the "Everyman".

The “Campaign” series of books from Osprey Publishing is one of the best things to happen in the field of military history book publishing, and, in my opinion, Dr. Robert Forczyk is the best of the many authors contributing to the “Campaign” series. An excellent case in point is Osprey Campaign Series #305, titled _Kursk 1943: The Southern Front_ authored by Dr. Forczyk. This book follows the by now well-established format of the Osprey Campaign Series. The first chapter explains the larger strategic context, in terms of an entire war, of the battle for which any given book in the series is named. The second chapter provides concise biographies of the commanding generals and other key players on either side. The third chapter describes the opposing armies in terms of their doctrine, weaponry, organization, numbers, and style of fighting. The fourth chapter dissects the plans of the opposing sides, in part to validate the truism that no battle plan survives the first shot intact. The fifth chapter is the meat of most books written in the Osprey Campaign format. The fifth chapter is a straightforward play-by-play, blow-by-blow, maneuver-by-maneuver, attack-by-attack narrative of how the battle in question played out. Chapter six provides the author’s subjective, but well-informed, analysis of the battle in terms of its significance in the context of the larger war in which it was fought. The seventh and final chapter provides information on how today’s tourist with a passion for military history may best visit the site of the battle, along with the author’s critique of the efforts of monument builders and museum curators, whether meritorious or not.Dr. Forczyk is a true master of the Osprey Campaign format just described. He provides his reader with exactly what his reader needs to know for each chapter topic described above. Some Osprey series writers have writing styles that are dully dry or confusingly muddy or distractingly wandering. Not Dr. Forczyk. His writing style is engaging and entertaining as well as profoundly informative. He knows the points he wants to make to his reader and he makes those points with admirable clarity and forcefulness of expression. Military historians love to carry on interminable arguments about whether or not the losing side of any given great battle could have won if only some little twist of fate had worked out another way. The German Kursk offensive in the summer of 1943 is a classic case of a battle about which military historians love to play hypothetical what-if games. In actual history, the Germans eventually lost at Kursk, but was it ever possible for them to win? If the battle could be refought in some alternate universe of the hypothetical, with one or two minute changes in general’s decisions or with a change in how muddy the battlefield was, would the Germans emerge victorious? Dr. Forczyk provides his own strongly worded answer to this question in his chapter six, “Aftermath and Analysis.” I won’t spoil anyone’s fun by giving away his answer here. I will tell you that Dr. Forczyk employs his sharp wit in his chapter seven, “The Battlefield Today,” to harshly criticize how the Russian government has chosen to festoon the Kursk battlefield with monuments. After, as always, providing his readers with the evidence, Dr. Forczyk concludes that the cluster of ostentatious monuments which the Russian government has recently erected on the Kursk battlefield are intended to pander to Russian national mythology, with the result that, the sober, objective interpretation of the events commemorated suffers grievously as a result.The Osprey Campaign Series format book is always a standard ninety-six pages long. The Osprey book I’m reviewing here is no exception to this rule. When one considers that many books about the Battle of Kursk—and any other battle you choose to name—have a few hundred pages, it becomes obvious that any Osprey Campaign book has to be a masterpiece of compression in order to succeed as a book. Dr. Forczyk is a master of making this compression a virtue. I have read a few of the multi-hundred page books about Kursk. I will tell you that the sometimes confusing mass of minutia in these “weighty tomes” are an unintentional metaphor for the chaotic, many-stories-happening-at-once confusion that the soldiers experienced during the actual battle. Dr. Forczyk has successfully taken advantage of this enforced compression to bring all the really important events and teaching points about Kursk into high relief while ancillary pieces of information are pushed more deeply into the background. If you have found yourself being a bit confused and overwhelmed by multi-hundred page books about Kursk, your path to clarity starts with opening the front cover of this most recent piece of work from Dr. Forczyk.Like all books from Osprey Publishing, _Kursk 1943: The Southern Front_, is lavishly illustrated with period photographs, colorful maps, and fine artwork commissioned specifically for the book. In this Osprey book in particular, all the illustrations are placed exactly where they should be, are plainly relevant to what the text is saying without being mere eye candy, and are accompanied by long, thoughtful captions that complement perfectly what the main text is saying.My few and minor complaints about the book are the fault of Osprey Publishing more than of Dr. Forczyk. I mourn the fact that proofreading, and making corrections to a text based on proofreading *before* a text is published, is a dead art. Too many books that have been published in the last decade are riddled with irritating typographical errors that the diligent editors of previous generations would have caught and corrected before publication. The book I’m reviewing here suffers from this current phenomenon. For example, there are at least a couple places in the book where what should be called the “Soviet 181st Tank Brigade” is incorrectly called the “Soviet 180th Tank Brigade.” For another example, an important hill that was a key part of the battle was Hill 252.2. But in one of the map captions, this hill is mistakenly identified as “Hill 242.2.” One of the particularly enjoyable features of Osprey Campaign Series books are the obliquely angled, three dimensional, “God’s-eye-view” maps. Each Osprey Campaign book has three such maps in addition to numerous maps in the conventional format. These special maps are a joy to study, but problems creep into them. One characteristic of these maps is the unit tactical symbols that are printed off the edge of the maps on the bare white paper around the maps. Sadly, it often occurs that where these unit symbols are located in the margins of the map makes absolutely no sense in the context of the military actions the maps are depicting. For example, on the map on pages 78-79 of the book I’m reviewing, there are five map symbols for five Soviet corps printed along the right side of the map. But the “right” side is the “wrong” side for these symbols to appear in the context of this map! As this map is now, these five off-edge Soviet unit symbols confusingly make it seem as if five Soviet corps neatly and perfectly lined up on an exposed southern flank of the 2nd Waffen SS Panzergrenadier Division. Nothing even remotely like this situation happened in the actual battle. Eventually, an extremely close study of the map by a diligent reader will yield the truth of what the map is trying to convey. My solution to this flaw in the layout of the marginal information of the map was to take an ordinary pencil and vigorously cross out the five Soviet unit symbols where they are wrongfully printed on the right edge of the map. Next, using an appropriately colored red pencil, I redrew the five map symbols along the top and left edges of the map where they should realistically go. Another problem with these special Osprey maps is that they are always printed as a double spread across two pages. More often than not, the left and right halves of the map do *not* perfectly match up with each other down the seam between the two pages. The result is that certain key markings on the map disappear down into the crack between the pages. The only way to retrieve these lost bits of map information would be to cut the book to pieces in order to lay the two halves of the map perfectly flat on one’s reading table. Military historical map makers habitually, for obvious reasons, like to create their maps such that the most important and most interesting parts of the battle are located at dead center of the map. But what that means, with the Osprey special maps, is that the most important and interesting parts of the map are precisely the parts most likely to vanish down into the crack between the pages. It’s maddening.But the flaws I have just described are minor quibbles relative to the overall excellence of the book _Kursk 1943: The Southern Front_ by Dr. Robert Forczyk.

Reading this book is a very good way of getting closer to what actually happened rather than the mythology of the battle.