Ostkrieg
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On the first day, in fighting of “unimaginable toughness,” Model’s troops ground forward almost five miles, but at high cost. Buoyed by the effect of the dense defenses on the German attacker, the Soviet commander of the Central Front, Rokossovsky, the next day prematurely threw his considerable reserves into a counterattack. This foray ended with a rude shock, as the burning hulks of Soviet T-34s, in their first encounter with the Tiger tank, were left strewn about. Once the kings of the battlefield, T-34 crews watched in amazement as their shells bounced off the thickly armored Tiger, itself largely invulnerable to any but a close shot from the side or rear but able to knock out a T-34 over a mile away. Rokossovsky now ordered his tanks to bury themselves in defensive positions so that only the turrets were visible, an order that he admitted was dictated by their complete inferiority to the Tigers. Amazingly, the Ninth Army had only twenty-six Tigers when the battle began, with eighteen knocked out of action by mines in the first two days. Nevertheless, the Ninth Army made steady, if laborious, progress and, by the seventh, had advanced over ten miles and reached the main Soviet defenses at Ponyri, a key town on the Orel-Kursk railway, as well as the decisive heights of Olkovatka, which commanded the terrain all the way to Kursk.73
Here, however, the enemy had massed such extensive defensives that the Germans later referred to it as a “second Verdun” and the “Stalingrad of the Kursk salient.” In bitter house-to-house fighting on both the seventh and the eighth, German and Soviet forces traded control of Ponyri, with the Germans, their strength exhausted, finally securing most of it by the evening of the eighth. Supported by Ferdinand tank destroyers, German troops that day also stormed the heights at Olkovatka. Dismayed at finding so formidable an obstacle miles behind the front, however, Model was forced to suspend operations for a day while he regrouped his forces. Even these successes, he gloomily predicted, would not open the way to Kursk, terming the offensive a “rolling battle of attrition.” On the tenth, he resumed the attack, supported by air units from Army Group South, but Rokossovsky, who had also regrouped his forces, threw his last reserves into the battle. Once again, Model was forced to suspend the offensive in order to reform his units, but he also took the opportunity to rethink his options. Aware that he was not likely to prevail with the forces available if he clung to his present direction of attack, he resolved to continue the assault on the twelfth with his reserve units, among them the Fifth, Eighth, and Twelfth Panzer Divisions, but with the main effort now planned for the right flank, which was to move south around the fortified heights. Amazingly, this was to be the first time in the operation that his tank units were to be used as a combined force; just as astonishing was the fact that, to date, the Ninth Army had suffered only 63 total losses of tanks, assault guns, and tank destroyers (for all of Citadel, the Ninth Army lost 77 battle tanks, compared with 526 Soviet tanks destroyed).74
At the culmination point of his attack, however, as he was introducing his last reserves, the Soviet Bryansk Front and the left wing of West Front launched, as Model had feared, a powerful offensive aimed at Orel. Although the initial probing assaults on the eleventh had been contained, the next day powerful Soviet forces broke through on a wide front in quick, deep penetrations that the Second Panzer Army was unable to check. If Orel fell, not only would Model’s main supply line be broken, but his army would also be threatened with encirclement. With the Second Panzer Army unable to close the gaps on its own, Kluge at Army Group Center thus had no choice on the twelfth but to order numerous armored and infantry divisions of the Ninth Army to break off the attack and hurry to the aid of the neighboring army. With that, Model realized, any continuation of the attack became pointless; for the Ninth Army, the Battle of Kursk had ended.75
To the south, Manstein’s initial blow achieved considerably better results than Model’s. Not only did his leading units, Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf, possess more tanks overall (1,377 to 988), but they also had far larger numbers of the Tigers (102 to 26) and Panthers (200 to 0). Just as significant, Manstein, in contrast to Model, deployed his tanks at the tip of the spear in the classic blitzkrieg manner. Although slowed by the onerous Soviet minefields, the Germans found their major problem in the first few days to be the mechanical failure of the new tanks. During the march to the assembly areas on the night of 4–5 July, forty-five of the Panthers, almost a quarter of the total force, had broken down, some bursting into flames because of faulty fuel pumps, seeming confirmation of Guderian’s protests against the premature use of a weapon that had not been fully tested. Very quickly, however, the Panther and the Tiger began to assert their superiority over the Soviet T-34s. By the second day, not only had Jakovlevo, an important transportation center fifteen miles from the start line, fallen, but the Soviet leadership had also begun to show signs of great anxiety. Reports of the initial tank battles indicated that, overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness, the Soviet crews were now succumbing to the same panic that had afflicted the Germans when first encountering the T-34s.76
On 6 July, just the second day of the battle, the Soviets made two key decisions. First, at a surprisingly early point, they decided to throw their strategic reserve, originally intended for use as part of the counteroffensive after the Germans had been halted, into action at Kursk. Second, General Vatutin, the commander of the Voronezh Front, ordered his tanks buried to the turret in order to form a compact antitank defense. Although bitterly criticized by Zhukov, who wanted instead to launch an energetic counterattack that, under the circumstances, would have been disastrous for the Soviets, Vatutin’s order, although made out of desperation, was clearly correct. German tanks now had to creep extremely close to the buried enemy tanks in order to destroy them, which negated their great advantage of range. The well-camouflaged Russians typically let the Tigers and Panthers pass by before opening fire from the side or the rear, a tactic that was effective but required enormous courage, for it amounted to a virtual death sentence for the Soviet tank crews. Nonetheless, Vatutin’s order to bury his tanks, along with the transfer on 7 July of considerable portions of Manstein’s air support to the north to support Model, contributed to a noticeable slowing of the tempo of the German advance.77
Still, the superiority of the new German tanks was striking. In one extraordinary incident on 8 July, a single German Tiger tank, in a workshop and not fully repaired, engaged a force of some fifty to sixty Soviet tanks, destroying twenty-two T-34s before the remainder fled in panic. By 11 July, Army Group South had already destroyed some seven hundred tanks and assault guns of the Voronezh Front while suffering only 116 total losses. The Psel River, the last natural obstacle before Kursk, was reached on the ninth, while, on the eleventh, Army Detachment Kempf, on Manstein’s right flank, finally broke through stiff Soviet defenses on the Donets, driving to within ten miles of the southern edge of Prokhorovka, and effectively trapping large parts of the Soviet Sixty-ninth Army. That same day, units of the Second SS Panzer Corps seized Hill 252.2, a key height just one and a half miles southeast of the city. Believing that the last defenses had been breached and the way to Kursk was now open, Manstein’s headquarters radiated a mood of euphoria. The Soviet command, however, planned a surprise of its own for the next day, a battle of annihilation. The stage was set for one of the most famous—and mythical—battles of World War II.78
As part of the preparations for its planned summer offensive, the Soviet High Command had succeeded in creating, and hiding from German intelligence, a large strategic reserve (the Steppe Front) whose strongest element was the Fifth Guards Tank Army under General Pavel Rotmistrov. Sensing that the Germans had passed the culmination point of their offensive, the Soviets now proposed a three-pronged counterattack for 12 July that intended, not merely to stop, but to encircle and destroy German forces. In the north, the Bryansk Front was to strike toward Orel, while, in the south, the Seventh Guards Army was to drive into the flank of Army Detachment Kempf. The Fifth Guards Tank Army, an elite unit with almost on
e thousand tanks and assault guns, was to play the key role. Striking directly at the Second SS Panzer Corps at Prokhorovka, its task was to annihilate the German force as the first step in a grand counteroffensive that, gathering momentum like an avalanche, would sweep away everything in its path. The Battle of Prokhorovka, according to Soviet and Western historians, thus was the turning point in the Kursk offensive, a legendary battle in which over fifteen hundred tanks slugged it out at close range, with some four hundred German tanks destroyed, a decisive defeat that, according to Marshal Konev, marked “the swan song of the German tank troops.”79
The reality, however, was considerably different. The Germans, for example, could not possibly have lost 400 tanks on 12 July because on that day the entire Second SS Panzer Corps had only 211 battle tanks, 58 assault guns, and 43 tank destroyers; the units directly involved in the battle, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich, possessed a total of only 186 armored vehicles (117 tanks, 37 assault guns, and 32 tank destroyers). Nor did all of Rotmistrov’s considerable force go into action on the twelfth; of his roughly 950 armored vehicles, fewer than 700 seem actually to have been engaged at Prokhorovka, with perhaps only 500 in the first attack wave. Finally, despite Konev’s claim of vast German losses, it was, in fact, the Soviets who suffered a catastrophe. Ironically, the immense discrepancy between German and Soviet losses seems to have occasioned the legend in the first place. Confronted by an angry Stalin, who demanded to know what he had done with his “magnificent tank army,” Rotmistrov, in league with Vatutin and his political commissar, Nikita Khrushchev, protected themselves from his wrath by concocting the story of equally massive German losses to balance the Soviet disaster. Since the attack at Prokhorovka had been Stalin’s idea in the first place, the mythical outcome of the battle suited the dictator’s purposes as well. Spread through the memoirs of various Soviet generals, the legend took on a new life when it was adopted uncritically by Western historians.80
In fact, as Karl-Heinz Frieser has shown, what actually transpired at Prokhorovka can be readily reconstructed from German war diaries. Having on the eleventh seized Hill 252.2, along with a hastily constructed antitank ditch in front of the heights to the southwest built as part of the Soviet defenses, the men of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, exhausted from seven days of hard fighting, collapsed into deep sleep. Eager to catch the Germans by surprise, Rotmistrov, under orders from Vasilevsky, rushed to attack without proper reconnaissance, preparation, coordination of combined units, or basic intelligence gathering. Amazingly, the Soviets seemed unaware of the existence of the antitank ditch that they themselves had dug. Under the mistaken impression that the enemy possessed far larger numbers of Tigers than he did in actuality (the silhouette of the new model Pz IVs resembled that of the Tiger, leading to the error), Soviet tank crews, perhaps inspired as well by liberal doses of vodka, launched their attack at 7:30 A.M. on 12 July at high speed in order to close the distance and nullify German advantages as quickly as possible.81
What followed was an inferno of smoke and fire in which both sides lost control and the battle deteriorated into a chaos of close-quarter combat. The battle-weary Germans, taken completely by surprise by this seeming kamikaze-type attack and overwhelmed by the tempo of the Soviet onslaught, were swept off the crest of Hill 252.2 and down the back slope. As the first wave of Soviet T-34s raced down the hill, however, they failed to notice the roughly fourteen-foot-deep antitank ditch and plunged headlong into it. When those following spotted the danger, they veered wildly in all directions, crashing into each other and bursting into flame as German tanks went into action. By the middle of the day, when the Soviet attack was largely spent, the area in front of the antitank ditch resembled a tank graveyard, with perhaps 100 burning Soviet wrecks, while the Germans claimed another 190 abandoned Russian tanks as the spoils of war. Although the reported numbers seemed so high that the commander of the Second SS Panzer Corps, Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser, came to the battlefield to see the scene for himself, the most recent Russian figures indicate that, on the twelfth, the Soviet Twenty-ninth Tank Corps alone lost 172 tanks, 118 as total losses.82
In all, the magnitude of the Soviet debacle at Prokhorovka was breathtaking: one Russian tally, admittedly incomplete, put the total losses at 235, while the chief of staff of the Fifth Guards Tank Army reported the loss between 12 and 16 July of 334 tanks, virtually all on 12–13 July. A preliminary count by the Second SS Panzer Corps on the evening of the twelfth showed 244 enemy tanks put out of action, with another 249 counted the next day, for an astounding total of 493 losses. Rotmistrov himself admitted that 420 tanks had been put out of action, although 112 of those had been reparable. Even if we settle on the smallest figure, 235, it dwarfs the German losses, which were not the 400 of legend but only 3. Far from being decimated, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich actually gained tank strength. On 11 July, the two units reported a total of 186 operational armored vehicles, while, on the thirteenth, after the Battle of Prokhorovka, the number was 190. For all of Citadel, in fact, the Second SS Panzer Corps suffered only 33 total losses of tanks and assault guns, while it lost no Panthers for the simple reason that it had none. Nor did the Russians destroy 70 Tigers; on 12 July, the corps had only 15 operational Tigers, of which only 5 fought at Prokhorovka. The losses of men were equally lopsided, the Soviets suffering fifteen hundred dead and missing to the Germans’ ninety-seven. At the end of the day, the Germans controlled the battlefield, which accounted for their astonishingly low total losses since they were able to tow disabled tanks to repair shops. They had not only repulsed the fanatic Soviet attack but also regained all their lost ground. Despite the immense sacrifice of men and tanks and the fanatic spirit of the Russians that shook even many SS troopers, the Soviet attack at Prokhorovka had been a complete disaster. The mood was clearly triumphant at Army Group South headquarters as Manstein prepared to resume the offensive the next day.83
The climax to Manstein’s efforts, however, never materialized. His victory at Prokhorovka took place against a backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating situation elsewhere. The Soviet breakthrough at Orel threatened not only the encirclement of the Ninth Army but also, if left unchecked, the destruction of Army Group Center. More importantly, Hitler’s worst fear, and the key reason he had delayed the Citadel offensive, had now come true: on 10 July, Anglo-American forces had invaded Sicily, and the two-front war had become a reality. Both Hitler and the OKW had worried from the start about throwing away the valuable German tank reserves for limited gains at Kursk, with the Führer, fearful of a front near the German border, determined to take immediate action in case of a threat in the Mediterranean. By the twelfth, it had become apparent that neither Sicily nor Italy could be held without significant German aid, triggering his reflexive decision to transfer strong panzer forces to Southern Europe. For the first time since the invasion of the Soviet Union, strategic concerns in the west superseded the war in the east. On the thirteenth, Hitler called Manstein and Kluge to his headquarters to inform them of his decision to break off Citadel and transfer the Second SS Panzer Corps to Sicily. Kluge, having already halted his portion of the attack, received the news with relief. Manstein, believing his forces to be on the edge of victory, protested vigorously that to give up the battle at the decisive moment was like “throwing victory away.” The enemy in front of him was defeated, had already lost some 1,800 tanks, and had squandered a great part of its operational reserve, he stressed, yet he still had his trump card: the Twenty-fourth Panzer Corps, with 181 armored vehicles in the SS Panzergrenadier Division Viking and the Seventeenth and Twenty-third Panzer Divisions, had not yet gone into action.84
Hitler not only rejected Manstein’s demand to continue the attack but effectively gutted his forces, not only ordering the transfer of tank units to Italy but also dispatching a further third of his air units to Army Group Center. Manstein, in view of the massive enemy tank losses, believed it still possible to pull a partial success out of
the Kursk operation and, thus, proposed a plan (Operation Roland) that would allow him to destroy some Soviet forces while putting space between him and the enemy. Instead of continuing his attack north, the field marshal now aimed at turning his units abruptly to the west along the Psel River in a one-armed pincer movement in order to encircle Soviet troops in the southwest corner of the Kursk salient. Hitler halfheartedly approved Manstein’s plan, but with the proviso that he use only forces presently engaged and not deploy his reserves. Although the OKH conspired to limit the impact of Hitler’s order, Zeitzler hoping that Manstein could achieve a partial operational victory, the Führer intervened again on the sixteenth, ordering the Fourth Panzer Army to break off the battle the next day and reassemble to the west near Belgorod. Although Manstein, with his eyes firmly glued on his own situation, rightly claimed that he had been forced prematurely to give up yet another victory, Hitler, viewing the overall state of affairs, was also correct in his worries about the Soviet breakthrough at Orel. In addition, an expected enemy offensive on the southern flank of Army Group South threatened the loss of the vital Donets industrial area, while the opening of the Mediterranean front meant that limited German resources would have to be split even further. Ironically, in the event, only the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was actually sent to Italy; the withdrawal of the panzer corps, as Karl-Heinz Frieser has noted, was, thus, too late to be of help in Sicily but too early for any successful conclusion of the Kursk operation.85