Grossdeutschland at Kursk:
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
September 2023

The July 1943 Battle of Kursk featured ten days to two weeks (depending on how you want to measure things) of intense armored combat. Our Kursk: Burning Tigers is a Panzer Grenadier game (which means units are platoons) based on the German regular army’s part in the offensive. It has forty scenarios, which seems like a lot, but given the scale of the battle it still leaves a lot of action uncovered.

Grossdeutschland at Kursk is a Campaign Study, a small book of scenarios and history, that looks at just one slice of the battle: the actions of the Grossdeutschland Panzer Grenadier Division over just four days. The Grossdeutschland Division is well-known among wargamers, with a reputation as an elite fighting unit. And while that’s probably exaggerated, the outfit had plenty of combat experience among its officers and NCOs (less so among the rank-and-file, who at Kursk included a great many freshly-arrived replacements) and went into action extremely well-equipped with tanks, assault guns and support weapons.

Kursk: Burning Tigers already has a chapter devoted to the Grossdeutschland Division. It’s got eight scenarios, and runs from the preliminary attacks on the night of 4 July through 10 July, when the Grossdeutschland Division had been diverted to the west in an ill-advised attempt to wipe out the Soviet 6th Tank Corps rather than press forward toward their original objectives.

I considered writing additional scenarios from that period to flesh out the story more; like I said, there was a lot of fighting going on and an oversized division like Grossdeutschland experienced even more action than the regular army panzer divisions, just because of the sheer number of troops involved under its command. Not only was Grossdeutschland the largest German division involved in Operation Citadel, the Kursk offensive, it had an additional tank regiment with 100 brand-new Panther tanks under its command.

But instead, I decided to move forward. On 13 July, Germany’s Supreme Leader ordered his generals to bring Operation Citadel to a close; those instructions went out on the next day. So there were four days of the offensive not covered by the Grossdeutschland chapter in Kursk: Burning Tigers. Plus, four more days of combat that followed the formal end of Operation Citadel, since no one forwarded the memo to the Red Army and they kept on fighting.

Grossdeutschland at Kursk is focused on those four days between the conclusion of the Grossdeutschland chapter in Kursk Burning Tigers. It’s broken into two chapters: one focused on the division’s battles on the 11th and 12th, and the other on the 13th and 14th. This is, I think anyway, the most interesting part of the Grossdeutschland experience at Kursk, as the Germans are continuing their attack (or at least trying to do so), while the Soviets have held them and now gone over to the offensive themselves. Both sides are attacking, defending, and counter-attacking.

In Chapter Nine (we pick up the scenario and chapter numbering from the conclusion of Kursk: Burning Tigers), the German offensive is still trying to grind forward. The Grossdeutschland Division is attacking on a broad front toward the west and north-west, as the higher commands have lost sight of the primary lessons of the operational art (concentration of force, and always remembering your objectives).

By Chapter Ten, the Soviets are attacking, yet the Germans still believed these to be counter-attacks in reaction to their own offensive. The German offensive tried to continue, yet the Soviets kept overrunning their forward lines and their mobile formations, like Grossdeutschland, had to restore them instead of pushing forward toward their own objectives. In game terms, that means that both players have to defend and attack.

This is the sort of thing I like to do with Panzer Grenadier, and the reason I keep designing for the series: to focus very tightly on a single set of operations, to study them in detail and use the scenarios to tell that story. Grossdeutschland at Kursk satisfies that objective, for me at least. It’s not going to be for everyone; if you’d rather have a shotgun selection of “typical actions on the Eastern Front” with little connection to the actual events, this is not for you.

Grossdeutschland at Kursk also comes with a download – Grossdeutschland 1943, which give you 165 pieces in a special Grossdeutschland color scheme. You’ll have to assemble the pieces yourself (there’s a handy guide for that right here), but you get it at no extra charge, which is pretty sweet.

It's our intention to give Kursk: Burning Tigers plenty of additional support. The Battle of Kursk is famous, assuring attention, it’s interesting, assuring good material, and it’s huge, assuring hundreds of Panzer Grenadier scenario opportunities if not more (no, we won’t cover all of them).

Golden Journal No. 49: Storm Division is all about the German 78th Storm Division, an infantry division shattered in combat and rebuilt with a huge allotment of machine guns and anti-tank guns, among other support weapons. It wasn’t all that good at storming, but it did have awesome firepower, and in Storm Division we’ve got 24 new die-cut and silky-smooth playing pieces plus a half-dozen new scenarios (drawn from the 78th Storm Division’s actions at Kursk, north-east of Ponyri Station) so you can play with them (plus three scenarios from Kursk: Burning Tigers revised to use the new pieces). And two battle games that tie the scenarios together.

Golden Journal No. 54: Stalin’s Tanks, in contrast, goes a little alternative. We give the Red Army four alternative tanks that you can try out in place of the standard, multi-role, mass-produced tanks they had in the actual battle. Medium tanks specialized for infantry support and tank combat, and heavy tanks built to hunt and destroy enemy heavy tanks. And scenarios, of course, because you need to play with them.

Grossdeutschland at Kursk is just a little book, but it adds a lot to Kursk: Burning Tigers. Kursk: Burning Tigers is a great game, and Grossdeutschland at Kursk gives you even more reasons to keep it on your table.

You can order Grossdeutschland at Kursk right here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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