Armor and Blood

by Dennis E. Showalter

  That left a new design, which became the Panther. Its design and preproduction absorbed most of 1942, and delivery projected by May 1943 was only 250. Its 75 mm L/70 was the most ballistically effective tank gun of World War II. But apart from the predictable teething troubles, two fundamental issues emerged. One was protection. Would the Panther’s well-sloped frontal armor suffice against the weapons likely to be introduced as a counter? Its side armor, moreover, was not much better than that of its predecessors. The Panther’s other problem was the engine. The tank weighed forty-five tons. Its Maybach 230 delivered a power-to-weight ratio of 15.5 horsepower per ton: low enough to strain the entire drive system and make uparmoring problematic. “Not perfect, but good enough” was the verdict rendered in the developing crisis of the Eastern Front.

  The Panther’s counterpoint, the Panzer VI, better known as the Tiger I, lent its aura to the whole German armored force. Even experienced British and U.S. troops were likely to see Tigers behind every hedgerow and leading every counterattack. There have been at least a hundred books in English, French, and German devoted to the Tiger’s origins and performance. The first Tiger was a birthday present for the Führer in April 1942. Its initial production runs were set modestly, at fifteen a month by September. The Russians were expected to be defeated by the time the new tanks could take the field.

  “The Tiger was all muscle, a slab-sided beast as sophisticated as a knee in the groin.” Incorporating components from several firms and several design projects, it was always high maintenance. That does not mean unreliable. “Tiger was like a woman,” in the words of one old hand. “If you treated her right, she’d treat you right.” Tiger was also not a cheap date. Range on a full tank was only 125 miles. Speed was on the low side of adequate by previous panzer standards: about twenty miles per hour on roads, half that and less cross-country. But far from being a semimobile “furniture van” (Möbelwagen), Tiger was intended for offensive operations: exploitation as well as breakthrough. Its cross-country mobility was as good as that of most of its contemporaries. And with an 88 mm gun behind more than 100 mm of frontal armor, the Tiger could outshoot anything on any battlefield. Tested in small numbers from Leningrad to Tunisia beginning in August 1942, the Panzer VI seemed ideal for the conditions developing around Kursk, although it could be deployed only in small numbers—128 at the start of Citadel.

  In one sense, that was Hitler’s problem—the tank and the situation fit together too well for comfort. As early as April 18, the Führer inquired whether a preferable alternative might be to do the really unexpected and attack the salient’s relatively vulnerable nose. In 1914, with war only hours away, German emperor Wilhelm II reacted to a vague hint of French neutrality by saying that now the whole army could be sent to the Eastern Front. His chief of staff never recovered from the shock. Kurt Zeitzler had a stronger nervous system. The time lost in shifting forces, he replied, would impose unacceptable delay, sacrifice prospects for surprise, and encourage a Soviet attack as the Germans redeployed.

  Hitler calmed down for a week. Then he received a disconcerting report from the commanding general of the army responsible for Citadel’s northern half. Walther Model is best remembered as a tactician, a defensive specialist shoring up broken fronts in the Reich’s final years. But he had made his bones with the panzers, commanding a division and then a corps before being assigned to Army Group Center’s right-flank Ninth Army in January 1942. He was also a trained staff officer, and the details of his army’s proposed mission were not reassuring. The plan allowed too little time for preparation. It took too little account of the defense system the Soviets were constructing in Model’s zone of attack. It allotted too few men and tanks to underwrite Model’s original estimate of two days to achieve a breakthrough. As corroborating evidence mounted, six days seemed a more reasonable figure.

  Hitler respected this tough, profane battle captain enough to schedule a one-on-one meeting for April 27. He rejected Model’s suggestion that a preferable alternative was to shorten Army Group Center’s line and await a Soviet attack. But he was impressed by the visual aids Model proffered: aerial photos showing a spiderweb of Soviet fortifications and trench lines matching anything in World War I. He responded by postponing the start of the offensive to May 5, then to May 9; and he spoke privately with Zeitzler about dropping it back to mid-June.

  In May, the Führer took his concerns to a conference in Munich. The key meeting was on May 4; the principal participants were Zeitzler, Manstein, Kluge, and Guderian, plus Luftwaffe chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek. Hitler began by explaining in almost an hour’s worth of detail his reasons for postponing the attack—essentially the same ones offered by the absent Model. When called on to reply, Manstein reiterated the necessity for an early success in the East, noting that by June the Red Army’s overall abilities to mount its own offensives would be significantly enhanced. Rather than lose time reinforcing the armor, Manstein asked for more infantry—at least two divisions—to facilitate breaking through the Red Army’s defenses. Hitler responded that none were available; tanks would have to compensate.

  Kluge was next, and he spoke out strongly against postponement. He described Model as exaggerating Russian strength and warned that Citadel’s delay increased the risk of a major Soviet attack elsewhere on his army group’s front. Hitler shut him down by replying that he, not Model, was the pessimist here. Guderian promptly asked permission to speak. He called the Kursk operation pointless. It would cost armor losses the Reich could neither afford nor replace. And if the Panthers were expected to make a difference, they were still suffering from teething troubles and should not be counted on. Guderian concluded by recommending that should Citadel be allowed to proceed, the armor should be massed on one front to achieve total superiority—in other words, to create a decisive point, the Schwerpunkt that had been a feature of German planning for a century. Jeschonnek agreed, along with mentioning that the Luftwaffe had no chance of matching the Red Air Force’s concentration in strength if the delays continued.

  By this time, Hitler had a well-developed approach to dealing with the senior officers he disliked and mistrusted. He structured conferences around his own remarkable memory for detail, bolstered by information provided directly by his staff. If he failed to carry a point by drowning it in statistics, he insisted that decisions were best made spontaneously: instinct processed data more reliably than did calculation. Almost disconcertingly, neither of these behaviors was in particular evidence on May 4. Instead, Hitler seemed to weigh events and balance prospects.

  The Axis position in Tunisia was collapsing with unexpected speed. Formal resistance ended on May 13. For ten days before that, increasing numbers of Germans and Italians were on their way to POW camps. The final tally was nearly a quarter million—worse than Stalingrad, without even the possibility of spinning the catastrophe into a heroic last stand.

  Hitler obsessively saw himself as working against time. In contrast with Marxist-based radicalism, which ultimately understood itself to be on the side of history, Hitler’s clock was always at five minutes to midnight. That in turn reflected Hitler’s increasing sense of his own mortality, combined with the self-fulfilling paradox that Hitler’s self-defined role had no place for a genuine successor. But his reflexive compulsion to action was in this case arguably balanced by Model’s photographs. Hitler’s identity was also shaped by his experiences as a Great War combat veteran, a Frontschwein, “front hog,” who understood battle in ways alien to the grand gentlemen of the general staff. And what he had seen—studied, indeed, with a magnifying glass—was all too reminiscent of a Western Front that had ultimately defied German efforts at a breakthrough.

  Inaction was not an option. Neither was a second failure. In the first half of May, Hitler’s thoughts—and more important, his feelings—turned to the new tanks as he increasingly came to view technical superiority as the key to defeating enemies committed to mass war. Moreover, since 1940 the panzers had been Germany’s a
rm of decision, challenging and overcoming space, time, and numbers in every conceivable situation; this time they would do it again.

  The May 4 meeting did not result in a decision. But on May 5, Citadel’s date was reset to June 12. When Guderian warned again that the Panthers could not be made combat-ready in five or six weeks, Hitler abandoned his own initial sense of urgency, disregarded his field commanders’ emphasis on haste, and postponed the operation until early July.

  While the Führer delayed, the soldiers moved. In Model’s sector, XX Corps, with four infantry divisions, would hold down the Ninth Army’s right flank. Next came XLVI Panzer Corps. It had only a few tanks under command, but its four infantry divisions were as good as any in Russia and expected to fight their way deeply enough into the Russian defenses to draw their reserves away from Model’s Schwerpunkt. That was provided by XLVII Panzer Corps: three panzer divisions and another good infantry division, commanded by Lieutenant General Joachim Lemelsen, who had commanded mobile troops since 1938 and had no illusions about what he was expected to do. Next to Lemelsen was another panzer corps: Josef Harpe’s XLI. With the 18th Panzer Division, two infantry divisions, and several battalions of heavy armored vehicles, Harpe’s corps was Lemelsen’s left shoulder, to cover his advance and develop his success. The XXIII Corps, which concluded Model’s sector to the east, was tasked with mounting a secondary attack toward the town of Maloarkhangelsk. It had two infantry divisions and a one-of-a-kind “assault division,” an experimental formation whose strong component of antitank guns would make it possible for the corps to hold any positions captured. In reserve were three mobile divisions, two panzer and one panzer grenadier (motorized infantry with some armored half-tracks). These were under Kluge’s control, not Model’s, and would be committed only when the breakthrough was secured.

  Model thus commanded in total around 335,000 men, six hundred tanks, and three hundred assault guns. These were tank chassis with guns mounted in the hull. Their heavier caliber made up for limited traverse compared with their turreted counterparts. There were no Panthers, and a single Tiger battalion would join Lemelsen’s corps only at the start of the attack. As compensation, Model received two battalions of Ferdinands: 88 mm assault guns built on the chassis of a Tiger design rejected for production. Often dismissed by critics because of their bulk and because they lacked machine guns for close defense, the Ferdinands drew no criticism from their crews or the infantry, who welcomed their big guns as tank killers and bunker busters.

  The Second Army held the salient’s nose. With seven understrength infantry divisions and fewer than a hundred thousand men, it was assigned no role in Citadel beyond maintaining the link between the Ninth Army and Army Group South—which was configured to do the heavy lifting. Model’s deployment reflected what was expected: a straightforward collision of men and tanks, with the Germans essentially muscling their way through the Russian defenses. Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army had to perform a trifecta: break in, break through, and break out into the rear of the salient.

  To do it, Hoth had almost a quarter million men, including some of the best troops in the German army. Hoth formed his Schwerpunkt by allotting the left half of his sector to LII Corps and its three infantry divisions. In the center, XLVIII Panzer Corps had an infantry division as maid of all work, two panzer divisions, and the elite Grossdeutschland Division (GD). Designated a panzer grenadier, or mechanized infantry, division, Grossdeutschland was configured as a full-fledged panzer division and was at the head of the Wehrmacht’s list for replacements and equipment. The corps also included an independent tank brigade with no fewer than two hundred brand-new Panthers, giving it a total of around six hundred armored fighting vehicles. Next to XLVIII was an arguably even more formidable instrument of war. The SS Panzer Corps had three divisions, 1st Leibstandarte, 2nd Das Reich, and 4th Totenkopf: the pick of the litter in Heinrich Himmler’s already metastasizing Waffen SS. They had fought separately until assembled for Manstein’s counteroffensive in early 1942, and earned reputations as warriors who never expected quarter and gave it only when convenient. Designated panzer grenadier divisions, they were panzer formations in all but name: the corps had around five hundred tanks and assault guns, including forty-two Tigers, and each division had six panzer grenadier battalions—two more than their army counterparts.

  Neither Otto von Knobelsdorff of XLVIII Panzer Corps nor Paul Hausser of SS Panzer Corps—the corps’s official title was changed to II SS Panzer Corps in June, but the original title remained in common use during Citadel—particularly stood out among the senior panzer officers as tacticians. The British phrase “good plain cooks” is not damnation with faint praise here. But both had reputations as soldiers’ generals with the decorations to prove it, and Citadel did not look like the kind of battle that would offer much opportunity for finesse. Should that quality be required, Hoth had an ample supply of it. In the spring of 1943, he was the most experienced, and in many judgments the best, army-level commander of mobile forces in the German army. He had led a corps and a panzer group in 1940–1941, survived Hitler’s purge in the winter of 1941–42, taken over the Fourth Panzer Army in June 1942, and taken it to Stalingrad and beyond in a series of virtuoso performances that impressed even Manstein. And through all that, his men called him “Pop” (Vati). Much depended on him. Hermann Hoth expected to deliver.

  Army Detachment Kempf stood on Hoth’s right. This was an ad hoc formation above a corps but below an army. It had nine divisions by early July, three of them panzers in III Panzer Corps commanded by another “comer,” Hermann Breith. Werner Kempf was the right man to oversee Breith’s debut in high command. He had led a brigade, a division, and a corps well enough to be promoted to the ad hoc force bearing his name in early 1943. Manstein trusted him: as good a recommendation as any tank man might wish. Kempf’s detachment was originally intended as a blocking force, but its role grew as it became apparent that the defenses on its front might be a little less formidable than those facing Model and Hoth. Breith’s corps added an infantry division, then a Tiger battalion, to its original strength of more than three hundred armored fighting vehicles (AFVs)—a formidable strike force in its own right, able to create opportunities as well as exploit them.

  Army Group South had reserves as well: an army panzer division and the 5th SS Panzer Grenadier Division Wiking. But with only around a hundred tanks between them, they were more derringer than belt gun: better able to restore positions or exploit situations than to turn the tide of battle by themselves. They came, moreover, with a string attached. The Army High Command had to approve their commitment—a virtual guarantee of delay and distraction under conditions demanding Manstein’s total concentration.

  By this time, what “wave” a German infantry division belonged to was more or less irrelevant. The ones assigned to spearhead the offensive usually had solid cadres of veterans and as many replacements and as much new equipment as the overstretched rear echelons could provide. As late as mid-May, fewer than four hundred recruits and convalescents had on average reached Model’s divisions. They would go into action as much as 20 percent under strength—a level even higher in the rifle companies. Training was another problem. Attacking the kinds of positions mushrooming in the Kursk salient was a specialized craft, and field commanders were willing enough to trade the offensive’s repeated delays for a chance to improve training and increase firepower, giving their men a better chance in the close-quarters fighting to be expected.

  The mobile troops were no less weary. By the end of the winter fighting, the eighteen panzer divisions in the East were down to around six hundred tanks. “Motorized” battalions were moving on foot and by wagon. Friedrich von Mellenthin, XLVIII Panzer Corps’s chief of staff, widely accepted in postwar years as a final authority on mobile operations, declared that “hardened and experienced” panzer divisions were ready for another battle as soon as the ground dried. But Mellenthin was a staff officer: a bit removed from the sharp end. Hoth
informed Manstein on March 21 that men who had been fighting day and night for months now expected a chance to rest. Even hard-charging regiment and division commanders had to drive instead of lead because of widespread apathy in the ranks.

  Staff officers and line officers alike were openly critical of Citadel’s repeated postponements. But delaying the attack provided the breathing space, the Verschnaufpause, the Germans so badly needed. It gave the newcomers a chance to shake down and the old hands a chance to relax. Gerd Schmückle, who would end a long and checkered military career as deputy commander of NATO in Europe, in 1943 was a junior officer in a panzer division. His memoirs nostalgically recall elaborate alfresco dinner parties, friendly Russian peasants, visits to the Kharkov opera—and one particular ballerina. There was even time to put on a show for a delegation of Turkish officers: clean shaves, clean uniforms, and all medals on display, with a cameraman on hand to record a Tiger put through its paces for the benefit of the Reich’s newsreels.

  The backdrop for all this was a buildup like few had ever experienced. Reactions, even among the cynics and grumblers, oddly resembled those widespread in the British Expeditionary Force in the weeks before the Battle of the Somme in 1916. This time, there was just too much of everything for anything to go seriously wrong!

  II

  Ironically, the Russians were coming to a similar conclusion. The Soviet victories at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus had not been won in isolation. On January 18, the Red Army had opened a corridor to the besieged city of Leningrad. Small-scale actions in the central sector had also favored the Soviets. Evaluating the results, Stalin interpreted the success of Manstein’s post-Stalingrad counterattack as anomalous. He believed Soviet forces could shift directly to the offensive and win decisively. In response, the Soviet high command initially planned a major offensive: a deep battle, initiated by sequential attacks on a front extending from north of Smolensk down to the Black Sea, followed by theater-scale mechanized exploitation.