Excellent posting and thread, Crazy.
I
think Piekalkiewicz is OK...he is very throrough with his sources, and being a native German-speaker lists a comprehensive bibliography of works, archives, documents and memoirs which in many cases have never been translated. His book is easy to read, breaking the battle down into daily segments.
I find this important as ( forgive my non-academic status ) I find Kursk
extremely confusing to read about !
As mentioned before, the book also contains a really fascinating collection of photographs selected from a number of German archives.
Such a shame that it was published by a small publishing house and isn't easy to find - it wasn't until the mid-90s that general interest in the Eastern Front developed in the UK. I'm all too aware that there have been some recent, scholarly works on the offensive which I have not read.
One final thought about ULTRA. There's now no doubt that British intelligence provided Stalin with extremely detailed intel about 'Barbarossa' ( even down to such detail as German units, numbers of tanks and aircraft, etc ). For whatever reason, Stalin chose to ignore or disbelieve it. By the time of Kursk, perhaps he was more able to (grudgingly) accept and act on the supplied intelligence. ( I must add that this is just me theorizing - no particular source ).
[ 10 August 2002, 05:26 AM: Message edited by: Martin Bull ]