Instead, she pulled the bandanna out of her hair and threw it away. She tugged the reins of Nikolai’s mount to bring the horse closer alongside Lana. When the two horses were shoulder to shoulder, she pulled her boots from her stirrups, coiled her knees, and leaped to stand, one foot each on the two rocking saddles.
Like this Katya rode past Ivan, Josef, and Leonid. She rode with her bloody arms widespread into the vast and open day.
* * * *
DEATH RIDE
The armored clashes around Prokhorovka have attained almost legendary status as the greatest armored combat of World War II, and perhaps the greatest of all time.
David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House
The Battle of Kursk
The 5th Guards Tank Army delivered a frontal attack against crack German panzer divisions which, without an essential superiority in forces, could at best result in driving the enemy back. Since the Germans in turn were also assembling forces and were preparing to continue their ongoing offensive, a large tank battle was in prospect, which indeed, broke out during the day on 12 July.
Soviet General Staff Study
The Battle for Kursk, 1943
… Citadel was to be a veritable death ride.
Major General F. W. von Mellenthin
Panzer Battles
* * * *
CHAPTER 22
July 10
1030hours
Hill 256.6
near Teterevino,
alongside the Prokhorovka road
Luis drummed his fingers on the warm metal of the turret. His tapping made no sound he could hear above the thrum of the Tiger’s idling engine.
For minutes he’d been watching the motorcycle courier course from the west across the steppe. On the western approaches to Prokhorovka, Leibstandarte’s tanks and grenadiers were finally outside the deep defense works of the Soviets. These fields were untrammeled, a fresh, undulating table without the gargantuan grazes of tank ditches, bunkers, and trenches that marred the lanes to Oboyan.
Luis watched the motorcycle. He grew bored waiting. From his vantage on this hill, he noted how the land fell away to the north, sloping into shallow valleys that shaped the basin of the Psel River. In the eastern distance, close to Prokhorovka, he glimpsed patches of yellow, swaths of sunflowers, vibrant and misfit on this cloudy day.
The motorcycle skidded closer. Luis climbed out of the turret to receive the message standing high on the Tiger. He would not hop down into the mud. He looked at his watch. Damn Totenkopf, he thought. They should have taken their objective hours ago. He turned away from the sputtering motorcycle to face north, where Totenkopf struggled to cross a bend in the Psel River and overrun a key hill. The Reds were putting up a tough defense in the many small settlements along the riverbank. The sounds of the fighting crackled up from the river basin under a smoky shroud in the hazy late morning. Totenkopf was held up on the left flank: This delayed the start of the assault by the other two divisions south of the river, Das Reich and Leibstandarte. Luis again traveled in his mind back to the dark map room, imagining the long poles waiting to push the three SS blocks eastward. He stood on his tank, idling with the Tiger under his boots and the long poles in his head. The motorcycle rider slid closer in the muck until he rode beneath the fat barrel of the main gun.
Luis leaned down for the message, a yellow sheet folded and taped over. The courier was spattered with mud. The soldier did not wait for Luis to read the note but gunned his throttle and puttered off, spraying the Tiger.
Luis read the two lines of the message. The attack was to resume at 1045 hours. The objectives for his division were to clean out Komsomolets state farm on the Prokhorovka road, then capture Hill 241.6, just east of the town. Totenkopf couldn’t be waited on any longer.
He stayed on the shuddering deck alone for another minute, surveying the battlefield. Far to his left flowed the Psel. On the right ran the Prokhorovka road and a parallel railway mound. In between was this long stretch of steppe, an alley about five kilometers wide.
This attack had three prongs: Totenkopf to the north across the river, Das Reich in the south below the road and rail tracks, and Leibstandarte in the middle. The other two divisions had more tanks: Das Reich possessed almost seventy tanks, Totenkopf over eighty. But theirs were mostly the impotent Mark IIIs. Das Reich was left with a dozen and a half Mark IVs and only one Tiger; Totenkopf had two dozen Mark IVs and just two Tigers. Leibstandarte operated sixty-seven tanks, forty-one of them Mark IVs, and four Tigers. Even though Leibstandarte had not fully regrouped after its pivot away from Oboyan, it was still the most potent of the three SS divisions. So it was the force chosen to go up the gut in the onslaught on Prokhorovka.
The mission for Leibstandarte was a simple one: Lead the charge to Prokhorovka, and crush everything in the way. Totenkopf was already encountering running battles in and out of the small farm villages and river lowlands. In another fifteen minutes when the full attack started, Das Reich would have to charge ahead on the other side of the road and rail line, through scattered forests and rolling knolls where the Reds could duck and counter-punch. Leibstandarte in the middle stared across a mostly level plain where visibility would be exceptional, where enemies would face little but each other. Luis thought of a bullring, where nothing separated the combatants but their wills to kill and survive. He fingered the hilt of the SS knife at his belt. He searched again for the partisan’s pulse in his hand and found it. He turned to the turret, to the raised hatch cover for the mark of Erich Thoma and found it, too, brown and flaking, no longer blood but like the partisan, a memory of blood.
The fourteen tanks of his company began to jerk forward, firming into their wedges and positions around him, dustless over the damp earth. His own driver waited for his command. The long poles in the faraway map room waited, too. The sunflowers in the gray distance beyond Komsomolets farm called to him. Luis had always liked sunflowers, a very Spanish bloom, evoking long hot days and idleness.
‘He llegado,’ he spoke to the Red fighters, the angry host standing hard between him and the sunflowers’ gold. I have come. I have come for the honor of the Blue Division. I have come for my father and for Spain. I have come for the lost parts of me. Soy la Daga.
* * * *
July 10
1125 hours
The first seconds of the assault stunned him. Cropland and grasses as far as Luis could see, which had been swaying in the dreary wind moments before, now rose together and advanced. Twenty thousand men and weapons, three hundred revving tanks and assault guns, all stirred at once, as though the plates of the earth had shifted; the ground itself seemed to slide forward. The gray-clad grenadier regiments of the three SS divisions put their guns in their hands and their boots into the soil and river and stomped east, over the tracks, across the florid flat steppe. Then came the first flights of air cover. The Luftwaffe’s Henschel 129s droned in slow and wicked, searching for targets in the fields and villages ahead, and above them the sirens of the diving Stukas began to whine in powered dives. There was inconceivable German power concentrated here. The world tilted east at the Russians and Luis urged his Tiger to join the rolling crest. He wondered what the Reds could do to stop them. He unwrapped a packet of crackers and chewed, almost too excited to swallow; he had to guzzle from his canteen to get the crackers down.
The first answering cannonade whistled in from across the Psel. Damn Totenkopf, Luis thought again, they can’t even keep the Reds busy enough in their own sector to stop them from firing at us south of the river. The rounds landed wildly among his panzers, striking nothing but damp ground and flinging muddy clumps. Luis did not batten down his hatch. He kept his eyes on the dark ten thousands walking and riding around him into the Russian defenders of Komsomolets. He was not impatient or jealous that these others came along, too. He was not afraid he would die today. He laid his hands on the quivering, creeping Tiger. Men and machines kept pace around the tank, believing in this machine as a salvation. Ba
lthasar and the hidden crew waited for his order, and then whoever he chose would die instead of him.
In the next second a hundred reasons for doubting the magic of his life tore through the sky from the north. Like locusts came a screeching mass of rockets, Katyushas, the feared Stalin organs. The missiles rode on comet tails against the charcoal daylight and ripped into the Leibstandarte lines. The explosions pounded on the earth in fantastic rhythm, one boom scarcely separated from the next. The rockets pelted with the speed of a wild heartbeat, and the panzergrenadiers could leap neither left nor right under them but only fall to their bellies where they were and cover their ears. Luis ordered the driver to stop under the hail, soldiers were sprawled in the Tiger’s path. He ducked in the hatch, listening to the Valkyrie screams of the rockets. A few eruptions came close to his Tiger. The Katyushas were not precision weapons. They were designed to sow havoc and fear, but they could kill what they hit. He stayed low in the fuselage until the last rocket fell. His loader cast him a bemused grin across the giant breech.
‘Raining, Captain?’
Luis felt no friendship for these men in his crew. They were his tools. But he’d never been one to let his banderillas grow dull or rusty, the spikes were sharpened before every corrida. He smiled for the loader although he did not try to remember the boy’s name.
‘I don’t think they make umbrellas for this kind of rain.’
The loader chuckled, making a show of approval for the remark. That was witty, Luis thought, I made a funny comment. He was pleased with his show of humor, something he used to have in his command of men when he was the Spaniard.
He stood. The Soviet rockets had shot their bolt and the grenadiers were on their feet and moving again. Luis ordered the driver forward. The plain was not cratered much by the Katyushas, the missiles were more frightening than effective. Only one soldier did not rise to join the advance. Luis rode past the body and felt nothing. This wasn’t the time to take stock of his remaining humanity. The Tiger lumbered forward, men walking beside him and standing in other turrets looked up at him; the last thing they wanted from this Tiger tank’s commander right now was introspection.
A Henschel ground-attack plane drove low across his regiment’s line. The pilot tossed out a purple smoke grenade. The canister hit the ground and raised an oily, pastel stink. Luis curled his nostrils and focused on where he was. The signal meant one thing. Tanks.
He hoisted his field glasses toward Komsomolets, five kilometers ahead now. The clot of structures was a state farm; several grain silos and claret-painted outbuildings were clustered beside the Prokhorovka road and rail mound. A swarm of T-34s raced out from behind cover. He estimated a hundred Soviet tanks burst across the fields, fanning to the left in a flanking action. Sturmovik fighters scorched out behind them. The Luftwaffe planes powered into this Red air cover and they struck up their customary tangled dances overhead. The SS tanks halted. Luis picked his first dashing targets through the binoculars while the Russians were still at the disadvantage of distance. By the time the Reds came close enough to become worrisome, he was certain Balthasar would have a half dozen of them in bits.
Balthasar spoke in the intercom, he had a target. Luis gave him permission to fire. The tank bucked around Luis when the cannon let go. The other three Tigers in the panzer regiment bayed at almost the same moment. In the following seconds, two dozen assault guns and self-propelled tank destroyers joined in. Two kilometers away, the first towers of smoke and steppe drifted into the air among the charging Red tanks. Luis stood in the turret, bracing himself against every blast from Balthasar’s long barrel, wiping his goggles after each of the gunner’s shots. Balthasar and his loader worked as fast as Luis could give them instructions. Their readiness with another shell and firing solution flowed in tempo with the battle beginning to swirl in the fields. Luis held on tight and between rounds ordered the Tiger forward in careful steps, to keep up with the running grenadiers but not to shorten the distance to the rushing T-34s any quicker than he had to. When Balthasar had a target acquired, Luis stopped to let him fire, put his hands over his helmeted ears, then crept ahead in pace with the infantry. The radio operator transmitted Luis’s commands to the rest of the company, for his platoon to stay in wedge formation around his Tiger, and for the other three platoons of Mark IVs to swing into an echelon left position to protect the flank from T-34s coming in wide from the north. More artillery cascaded in from across the Psel, and another barrage of Katyushas stymied the advance for a minute, driving Luis back inside the Tiger, drawing more mirth from his sweaty crew.
Nothing about the Soviet counterstroke impressed Luis, not even their numbers and the will to squander them. Without their network of trenches and solid defenseworks, the Red infantry were routed swiftly out of foxholes. Anti-tank guns were abandoned, damaged T-34s were left with their motors running, prisoners came out of the haze with empty hands high. Leibstandarte was outnumbered and outgunned in the grainfields in front of Komsomolets, as they had been on every battlefield since Citadel began. Even so, the Soviet resistance moved aside from Luis’s tanks like geese in the road. By noon, the first grenadiers had entered Komsomolets. Twenty T-34s stood ruined on the steppe behind them, most killed by German tanks, a few blown up by grenadiers in close fighting. The rest of the Soviet force retreated east of the state farm to regroup behind Hill 241.6, to come in another wave later. Leibstandarte captured the farm and spent none of its own precious tanks, perhaps fifteen soldiers dead and fifty wounded. In the lull before grinding up Hill 241.6, while the grenadiers consolidated their hold on the farm buildings, Luis slipped his panzer company into the small forest next to the riddled silos. He crashed his Tiger and his Mark IVs into tree trunks, knocking them down with a careless pride, to make a place for his men and weapons to rest a little while. The green calm of the trees belied the havoc beside the Prokhorovka road. He ordered up ammunition and fuel, food and cigarettes for his tankers. He accepted a mound of mashed potatoes on a plate topped with a warm brown gruel and ate only a quarter of it. Strolling to the edge of the copse, he looked two kilometers east, up the gradual incline of Hill 241.6, the next objective on the road to Prokhorovka.
This is the soldier’s discipline, he thought. Do the job at hand, nothing more, then wait for orders to do another. But he believed he was here in this battle for a reason beyond the others, the grimy tankers and dirty plodding infantrymen, half-deaf artillerymen, crazy pilots, even the fat generals and their pretty staffs. Luis, alone of them all across every horizon today, knew there was no battle for Kursk, there was no Citadel. Those were only labels that would live in history books. No man lives on a page, he lives in his minutes and his skin. Whatever kingdom Germany or Russia carved out of this bloodied land would not survive, none ever has and none ever will, power is transitory, dominion becomes printer’s ink and dust. Nothing outlives a man, not a crown, not a conquest, nothing but a name and honor. It is better to be honored than to be a king. Luis crossed himself there on the edge of the woods, it felt like he was praying, and he thought of Jesus, who was not a king, he thought of his own father, who had outlived many bulls and recalled all the best of them. He thought of Thoma who’d died so stupidly, all his honor trickled out. He smiled at the Russians on Hill 241.6, because he was sent here out of the many thousands to become great.
He turned and looked down the line of his fourteen tanks, at all the pushed-down trees and bared roots. Men sat on the prone trunks eating rations, fuel trucks delivered drums of gasoline, more shells were loaded by bare-chested soldiers. He stood before them and they were oblivious to his gaze, as they should be. They were invisible to history. Anything these men and tanks did belonged to him, their names would make a stack to lift his own.
Luis was in a fine mood. He chuckled at the sight and sound of the little motorcycle coming again to bring him a message. The bike with its toy spitting engine seemed funny beside Luis’s goliaths, the motorcycle dodged the trees his company had knocked over. The
courier again found Luis and pip-pip-ed to him, holding out a yellow note. Luis gazed after the rider sliding away, and wondered if that rider would tell his grandchildren one day that at Kursk he was a delivery boy to la Daga.
Luis read the note. The attack on Hill 241.6 was to start at 1300 hours. Totenkopf had not yet crossed the Psel. South of the rail mound, Das Reich was barely keeping up with Leibstandarte’s forward units. Nonetheless, Leibstandarte was ordered to plunge ahead and take the hill. Again, Luis thought, I am at the knife’s point of the battle. He folded the note into his pocket and walked to stand near his massive Tiger, to be seen with it, linked to it always by those who would tell later of these fiery days.
At the assigned moment, his company roared out of the forest beside Komsomolets farm. Luis ordered all tank commanders to exit the copse with hatches down and secured. Within seconds of leaving cover, the Soviet artillery opened up on them. He shouted a command into the radio for his company to scatter by platoon and provide support for the advancing grenadiers. ‘Come left!’ he called to his driver. There was no way to motor straight up the slope, the defense was too withering. He stared into his optics, straining to find a target but so much earth was suspended in the air from the artillery lavished down on them he couldn’t pick out anything that resembled a Russian tank. Balthasar had his hand poised on his flywheel to respond the moment Luis called him into a shot. The loader squatted on his stool with a shell across his lap, ever faithful to the always-hungry breech.
Last Citadel Page 41