Using the panzers to make the breakthrough on Ninth Army’s front risked not only getting them stuck—even if successful, the mobile formations might well be left able neither to exploit the situation on their front nor to shift sectors if that became necessary. However, using the infantry, the obvious alternative, meant relying on divisions whose strength and effectiveness were so low that only one was rated as capable of all operational missions. Seven more counted as suitable only “for limited attacks,” and German staffs were extremely generous in those evaluations, at least before the shooting started.
Hitler’s response was that Citadel would throw the Russians sufficiently off balance to prevent an independent offensive. He implied that Model would be reinforced by the Panthers that instead went to Hoth. And he finally set a last, unalterable date for the offensive: July 5, 1943. His mood varied. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels noted that as the deadline approached, Hitler seemed increasingly optimistic about Citadel’s prospects. But on July 1, the Führer summoned the senior generals and some of Citadel’s key corps commanders to a final conference at Rastenburg. One participant described the meeting as a monologue, with nothing convincing, let alone inspiring, about the presentation. Hitler explained the repeated delays as necessary to make up troop shortages and increase production of Panthers and Tigers. He described the attack as a gamble, a Wägnis.
By then, that was one point on which “the greatest warlord of all time” and his generals were in near complete agreement. If, as Kempf said after the war, Model believed the attack a poor idea, he was silent when it still might have counted. In his memoirs, Manstein concluded that it might have been a mistake not to have told Hitler bluntly that the attack no longer made sense. Writing more than a decade afterward, Mellenthin contributed a last word: “The German Supreme Command could think of nothing better than to fling our magnificent panzer divisions against Kursk, which had now become the strongest fortress in the world.” Want of civil courage and military integrity? Perhaps. Or perhaps Hitler and his generals had in common the feeling a gambler knows when he has so much in the game: the easy decision is to call the hand.
It is a familiar axiom of modern war, expressed mathematically in something called the Lanchester equations, that an offensive requires a 3-to-1 superiority. Soviet doctrine optimistically reduced that to 3 to 2, assuming the Red Army’s superior planning, staff work, and fighting power. But by the time the preparations for Kursk were complete, the Soviet defenders outnumbered the attackers in every category of men and equipment, in almost every sector. The average ratio was somewhere between 2.5 and 1.5 to 1 in favor of the Russians. Did that make Citadel a suicide run from the beginning? Given the respective rates of buildup, it nevertheless seems reasonable to argue that an early attack, mounted by the forces available in April or May, would have lacked the combat power to overcome the salient’s defenses even in their early stages. The Germans’ only chance was the steel-headed sledgehammer they eventually swung in July. And that highlights the essential paradox of Kursk. The factors that made the battle zone acceptable in operational terms also made it too restrictive to allow for the application of the force multipliers the German army’s panzers had spent a decade cultivating. Kursk offered no opportunity for operational skill and little for tactical virtuosity. Militarily, the strength of the defensive system meant the German offensive had to depend on mass and momentum—which is another way to describe a battle of attrition, the one type of combat the German way of war was structured to avoid.
No less significant was the synergy between Kursk’s geographic scale and the Red Army’s command and control methods and capacities. Since Barbarossa, those had developed in contexts of top-down battle management, reflecting both the Soviet principle that war is a science and the fact that their senior commanders lost effectiveness operating independently. Previous German offensives had found no difficulty in getting inside Soviet decision loops, which generated increasingly random responses that frequently collapsed into chaos. Kursk enabled a timely response to German moves as the defense slowed those moves down. It enabled as well a degree of management absent in previous major battles—creating in turn a confidence at all levels of headquarters that a culture of competence had replaced a culture of desperation.
Those were significant force multipliers, in a situation arguably not needing them. But the panzers had a habit of defying odds, and Stalin took no chances. He dispatched Zhukov as Stavka’s representative to the Central Front and Vasilevsky to the Voronezh Front. The marshals observed training, offered suggestions, and, not least, kept insisting on the importance of waiting for the German offensive instead of rushing the situation. “Time and patience”—Kutuzov’s mantra from 1812—would be applied to another invader.
Chapter III
STRIKE
FOR THE SOVIET Central Front Citadel began in the early hours of July 5. Around 2:00 A.M., the Thirteenth Army reported to front HQ that one of its patrols had picked up a German pioneer, clearing minefields to prepare for an attack he said would come at 3:00 P.M. Zhukov immediately authorized Rokossovsky to turn his artillery loose—only then did he phone Stalin with the news that this was no drill.
I
Central Front’s counterbarrage opened at 2:20 A.M. But Soviet gunners had not succeeded in registering German positions with complete accuracy. Imprecise targeting produced random firing and wasted ammunition—too much of it, given the intensity of the fire plan. Waiting until the German infantry were out of their dugouts and the tanks deployed in starting positions would have inflicted more damage for less ammunition. Mistakes on that scale were accountable to Stalin himself. But if specific results were episodic, the overall weight and intensity of the shelling was nevertheless so great that the German high command agreed to delay the attack for two and a half hours in Model’s sector so that German artillery might reply.
The resulting disruption diminished the coordination so important to Model’s plan. On the other hand, the Germans benefited from the Sixteenth Air Army’s decision not to strike Luftwaffe airfields in coordination with the artillery, but to meet German air strikes as they came. The crewmen of Model’s supporting 1st Air Division received a surprise in their final briefings on July 4. The original plan for a strike against the Soviet airfields had been abandoned as unworkable based on previous experience. Instead, the Luftwaffe was to act as literal flying artillery, concentrating on strongpoints and artillery positions in the forward battle zone. This was the first time in the war that a major offensive would be made without simultaneously attacking headquarters, airfields, and supply routes in the enemy’s rear. It obviated any chance of reducing the odds by catching the Russians on the ground. It manifested as well the respect air and ground generals felt for the Red Army’s defenses.
The first sorties were mounted at 3:25 A.M.. Medium bombers and Stukas repeatedly attacked the network of gun positions around Maloarkhangelsk. Soviet fighters, deployed piecemeal, took heavy losses at the hands of the Fw-190s of Jagdgeschwader (Fighter Wing; JG) 51. Stuka groups were correspondingly able to hammer the Russians until relieved by another group, then return to base, rearm, refuel, and rejoin the fight. After an hour of that, supplemented by an artillery barrage against the same targets, the infantry went forward.
Able to take initial advantage of the pioneers’ night work clearing minefields, the Landser soon found the going heavy. On the far left, XXIII Corps was tasked with capturing Maloarkhangelsk and anchoring the armor’s advance. The left and center divisions got a little over a mile into the defense system, then were driven out by local counterattacks. The main attack was made by the 78th Assault Division, with a battalion of forty-five Ferdinands attached. These began life as a competitor to the Tigers. When the design was rejected, the optimistically constructed prototypes were completed as 88 mm assault guns. Under heavy fire, the Germans successfully cleared a succession of strongpoints and trenches based on villages and low hill lines. But minefields slowed the Fe
rdinands, and the advance stalled in front of Hill 257.7.
Studded with bunkers supported by dug-in tanks, the Russian position was a nightmare version of the kinds of defenses Americans would encounter two years later on Okinawa. It quickly won the nickname “Panzer Hill”—but the Germans believed they had an armored counter. In 1940, German designers had begun work on a remote-controlled wire-guided mine-clearing vehicle carrying a thousand pounds of explosives. It had performed well enough in limited situations that three companies of the developed version had been assigned to the Ninth Army. Put to the test in front of Panzer Hill, they drew so much artillery fire that the resulting sympathetic detonations obscured the lane they cleared.
The Ferdinands went forward anyway. Enough of them reached the defenses, and enough infantry managed to follow, that the hill fell to close assault—a polite euphemism for a series of vicious fights in which bayonets were civilized weapons. But the “tank fright” that so often characterized Russian behavior in the war’s earlier years had disappeared. The Ferdinands, built without machine guns for close defense, proved significantly vulnerable to infantrymen at close range. Grenades, mines—even antitank rifles took their toll. By day’s end, only twelve of the original forty-five Ferdinands were still able to fight. The often-cited lack of hull-mounted machine guns was less a factor in the Ferdinands’ discomfiture than the absence of their own infantry. Tank-infantry contact had been lost at the sharp end almost from the beginning—an unpromising portent. By the standards developing in the salient, Maloarkhangelsk was still a long way away.
Ninth Army’s initial Schwerpunkt was its center: the six-mile front of XLI and XLVII Panzer Corps. Each had two divisions up front. Front left to right, the 292nd, 86th, and 6th Infantry and the 20th Panzer crossed their start lines around 6:30 under a massive air umbrella of He 111s and Stukas. Again the German fighters kept the skies against the best the Sixteenth Air Army could throw at them. Again the German infantry took heavy casualties from mines, small arms, and artillery fire. But the Ferdinands of Tank Destroyer Battalion 654 broke through the minefields, shrugged off armor-piercing rounds at point-blank range, and brought the infantry of the 292nd and 86th Divisions steadily forward. By evening, the 292nd was beginning its assault of the fortified village of Ponyri, albeit at the price of most of 18th Panzer Division’s tanks being committed in support at an earlier stage than had been hoped.
The 6th Infantry Division had been built around one of the Reichswehr’s original regiments. Recruited in Westphalia, it had a solid nucleus of old-timers and two years of hard experience fighting Russians. By 8:00 A.M., it had made enough progress to commit the temporarily attached 505th Tank Battalion, with its two companies of twenty-six Tigers and a company of a dozen mine clearers. Closely supported by Stukas and artillery, the Tigers crossed the Oka River and faced three hours of counterattacks spearheaded by waves of T-34s. Since the T-34’s first appearances, the panzers had countered by maneuver. Now the Tigers halted, engaged their optic sights, and broke charge after charge at long range. Around noon, the big cats led elements of 6th Division’s infantry into the village of Butyrki, leaving over forty burned-out T-34s in their wake. Three hours earlier, the 20th Panzer Division on the Westphalians’ right had overrun a rifle regiment and gained three miles toward the fortified village of Bobrik.
For the 505th, this was the time to double down and commit the reserves, envelop the first lines of defense, and turn a breakthrough into a breakout. The 6th Division’s commander later said that had the tanks been sent in, Kursk itself might have been reached the first day. Perhaps. But the Tigers were less of a surprise to the Russians, having been committed in small numbers on the Eastern Front since the previous August. The Russians had had corresponding opportunities to develop counters. Since Barbarossa, German tank armor had been vulnerable to Russian guns, but Tiger hunting required more refined skills: letting them close the range and then concentrating on the treads. Cool heads and steady aim were decisive. The Russians had both. In XLI Panzer Corps’s sector, once the Ferdinands had passed through, the overrun Russians had emerged from their maze of trenches to tackle the mammoths with Molotov cocktails, satchel charges, and even antitank rifles, useful against thinner side and rear armor. The 20th Panzer Division was stopped around Bobrik by a similar combination of minefields, antitank guns, and close-assault teams. The 258th Infantry Division on Ninth Army’s far right never got past the second defense line of the 280th Rifle Division in what amounted to a straight-up one-on-one fight. Were there enough Tigers anywhere to make a difference?
The Red Air Force was becoming a presence as well. Initially thrown off balance by Luftwaffe numbers and effectiveness, the Sixteenth Air Army found its equilibrium around noon. Shturmoviks challenged the German fighters and made effective use of the new shaped-charge bombs against tanks. One ground-attack group alone reported thirty-one tanks knocked out—an exaggerated figure, like similar claims in any war, but suggestive.
On the ground, Model committed over five hundred armored vehicles on July 5. About half were out of action by the end of the first day. Many of these could be repaired; the effect on crew morale was nevertheless significant. So were the consequences of occupying ground, shuttling back to relieve pinned-down or hung-up infantry, then repeating the entire performance a few hundred yards farther forward. The infantry too had suffered—not only in numerical terms, but because the nature of the fighting took a disproportionate toll on the aggressive and the leaders: those first around a trench traverse or across what seemed dead ground.
The often-cited criticism that Model failed to commit his armor on the first day is to a degree refuted by evidence that well over half of the Ninth Army’s AFVs were in fact engaged on July 5. But the Tigers and the Ferdinands were organized in independent battalions, not as part of the combined-arms teams that were the real strength of the panzers. Their effectiveness most likely would have been maximized by using them to assist the infantry into and through the Soviet defenses. By early afternoon, the Germans had nevertheless gained more than a foothold in the Russian defenses. By the end of the day, the lodgment would be around nine miles broad and five miles deep. But it was a series of nibbles as opposed to a coordinated bite.
Walther Model was anything but a rear-echelon commando. He spent the first hours of the day with the two panzer corps and then returned briefly to his headquarters, where the reports were not all so optimistic. The Ninth Army’s commander spent most of the afternoon visiting headquarters, shifting armor and artillery in response to what seemed crises or opportunities, and coming to the conclusion that the situation warranted committing his immediate reserves, the 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions, the next day to exploit the gains in XLVII Panzer Corps’s sector. That was arguably the consequence of a genuine miscalculation: underestimating the depth of Soviet defenses and the strength of Soviet resistance. But for Citadel to succeed, even if the Soviet threat to Army Group Center proved a chimera, Model had to break through and out, and quickly.
Whatever the fleeting prospects for an early-afternoon German breakthrough, they were insufficient to panic Rokossovsky. From the Soviet perspective, it was clear that the Germans were barely through the first defensive belt. Rokossovsky, freed of an immediate need to improvise, planned to reinforce the Second Tank Army and move it into position for a counterattack early on July 6. The barrage began at 2:50, followed by waves of medium bombers targeting positions and vehicles on the front line.
This was a major departure from the usual Soviet practice of using these planes to strike deeper into the rear. It was also an expedient. The previous evening, Stalin had phoned Rokossovsky. When the general began describing the day’s events, Stalin interrupted: “Have we gained control of the air or not?” Rokossovsky temporized. Stalin repeated the question. When Rokossovsky said the problem would be solved the next day, Stalin asked whether the Sixteenth Air Army’s commander was up to the job. A few minutes later, Zhukov arrived at Rokossovsky’s headquart
ers to report a similar phone call with the same question.
For the Sixteenth Air Army’s commander, Lieutenant General Sergei Rudenko, it was an underwear-changing moment. All too recently, such a question from the Vozhd had been a likely preliminary to dismissal or to a “nine-gram pension”: the weight of a pistol bullet in the back of the neck. Rudenko quickly proposed mass attacks to saturate German air and ground defenses and to encourage the hard-pressed ground troops. Four successive waves of bombers literally caught the Germans napping: the commander of 1st Air Division had authorized his exhausted fighter pilots to rest that morning. But the Russian armor was slow getting into position in an already crowded battle zone. Their attacks were delivered piecemeal, the tanks and infantry poorly coordinated. The 20th Panzer gave ground, then held, then counterattacked successfully toward Bobrik. It seemed a good omen. And the Tigers were waiting.
The 505th Battalion’s Tigers took out forty-six of a fifty-strong Soviet tank brigade, T-34s and light T-70s, the T-60’s also obsolete successor, in a few minutes. The 2nd and 9th Panzer joined the fight by midmorning. With the 18th already on line, that brought the German AFV strength to around three hundred on a front of less than eight miles—as narrow as any major attack sector had been in the Great War and a correspondingly long distance from any concept of mechanized maneuver. The panzers’ objective was a low ridgeline, the Olkhovatka heights, extending from Teploye on the left of the attack to Ponyri on its right and anchored by Hills 272 near Teploye, 274 at the village of Olkhovatka, and 253.5 east of Ponyri. Little more than high knolls, they nevertheless offered not only Tantalus’s view of Kursk, but passage to relatively open terrain: ground favoring the Germans. And the only way out was through.
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