II
The day was so hot, in the high eighties, that some crews went into action with their hatches open. The fighting grew even hotter when what was intended as a breakthrough also became an encounter battle as the Second Tank Army entered the fight. The geographic objectives of the panzer divisions became unimportant; what mattered was getting forward. Model concentrated every available gun, rocket, and plane to blast the way for the panzers. The Russians responded in kind. Accounts from both sides describe a steadily intensifying kaleidoscope of shell bursts, screaming rockets, and exploding bombs, tanks bursting into flame or slewing to a stop, crews desperately seeking to escape and being machine-gunned when anyone on the other side had time to notice.
Model had tasked the Sixth Air Fleet with providing maximum support, and the Luftwaffe threw in every flyable plane. Elements of JG 51, scrambled in a hurry, caught a group of Shturmoviks and their fighter escort coming in at low altitude. The result: fifteen Il-2s downed in minutes. But when the next wave arrived, the fighters had returned to their bases to refuel. That made it the Shturmoviks’ turn. With a temporarily clear attack zone, the “flying tanks” reported fourteen flamers and forty more put out of action in minutes. The Luftwaffe responded with formations of level bombers and Stukas as large as a hundred at a time—or so it seemed to the Soviet troops under the bombs. Sixteenth Air Army had several veteran fighter regiments, flying not only La-5s but some of the best of a new generation of fighters: La-7s and Yak-9s, which would serve the Red Air Force well even after 1945. But the Germans took their measure and kept the ring as the panzers advanced.
That advance was by meters rather than kilometers and led the Germans only deeper into a defense system of dominating terrain devoid of natural cover, swept by some of the heaviest fire of the war. Infantry movement of any kind became near suicidal. It was not so much that the Landser immolated themselves trying vainly to advance. Langemarck was three decades past, and there were no innocents on the Russian front. Ordinary riflemen or panzer grenadiers constrained to fight that day on foot—it made no difference. Veterans and replacements alike went to ground and stayed there. The 6th Infantry Division had seven combat battalions. Their total combat strength was around 3,100 on July 4. By July 10, it was down to 1,600.
Forty percent frontline casualties in a week is no bagatelle, but neither was it uncommon under similar conditions in Russia or the West. The problem involved absolute numbers. A battalion of two hundred men was as much a group of survivors as a fighting force; its fighting power was likely to be even less than its reduced strength suggested. And as early as July 6, the Ninth Army divisions’ replacement pools held no more than two hundred or three hundred men apiece.
It took at least a squad, preferably a platoon, but in any case a dozen or two foot soldiers to screen a tank effectively. In their absence, as on July 5, AFVs drove unwittingly into minefields, and were ambushed by antitank strongpoints and T-34s dug in to their turrets and enveloped by close-assault teams. At ranges of a hundred yards and less, even Tigers were vulnerable. Rokossovsky handled his reserves effectively, committing them as needed to hold the line or restore it, always with another rifle regiment or tank brigade as a hole card. A long afternoon of desperate fighting for the fortified village of Olkhovatka and the Olkhovatka heights ended with the Russians still in control of both.
The story was the same across the front. Model’s 78th, 86th, and 292nd Infantry Divisions went into Ponyri at dawn, their surviving Ferdinands and mine-clearing vehicles reinforced by the 9th Panzer Division and what remained of the 18th Panzer. Ponyri was a railway station and a collection/distribution center for the region’s collective farms. Its main buildings—the factory station, the school, the railroad station, the water tower—were solidly constructed: natural, heavily defended strongpoints that Rokossovsky initially supported with Katyushas and artillery as opposed to committing reinforcements directly. Germans described an intensity of shelling never before experienced and compared the seesaw fighting for buildings and houses with the worst Stalingrad had offered. The Germans captured and held Hill 253.5 but made no further progress when they tried to swing west and take the Olkhovatka heights in the flank and rear.
The XXIII Corps, lacking the kind of armor and air support concentrated in the center of Ninth Army’s front, had even less success against Maloarkhangelsk. The day ended with the Germans everywhere still stuck—one might say trapped—in the second line of Russian defenses. Model had taken a chance. He believed that the 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions would spearhead a breakthrough of the Soviet defenses but now accepted that they would be left too battered to develop the success. That left him a single division, the 4th Panzer, to lead the Ninth Army into Kursk.
Model’s real gamble was not the attack itself. It was the belief he could use it to force Kluge’s hand. At 5:40 in the morning, well before his own tanks were committed, Model phoned Army Group Center and asked for the 10th Panzer Grenadier and 12th Panzer Divisions. Kluge temporized. That would leave him with no strategic mobile reserve and increasing evidence of a Red Army buildup on his front. Kluge had another problem as well. Second Panzer Army’s commander, General Rudolf Schmidt, had grown so openly acidic about the Führer and the party that he had been relieved on April 10, with the recommendation he be committed to a mental hospital. Kluge apparently offered a deal: The divisions now, with the condition that if the Russians did attack, Model would assume command of both armies.
Model’s acceptance suggested that whatever his previous reservations, Citadel’s success was the best counter to a massive strike at Army Group Center. Or perhaps he just had the bit between his teeth. Fortiter in re, not suaviter in modo, was Walther Model’s trademark. He spent the day trying to drive the Ninth Army forward by willpower, dodging Shturmoviks in the morning as he moved among subordinate headquarters, then settling with 2nd Panzer Division for most of the afternoon. He might as well have been at a battalion command post. A division’s communications facilities were insufficient to control an army-level battle—particularly when the division itself was heavily engaged.
Second-guessing and hindsight are staples of military history. Nevertheless, it should have been clear after the first day that Kursk in 1943 was not France in 1940 or Russia in 1941. This situation needed a battle manager rather than a battle captain. To develop a victory it was first necessary to win one, and that called for oversight rather than intervention. As the commander toured his front, fleeting opportunities went undeveloped; local gains went unsupported.
Not until 9:30 P.M. did Model finally return to his headquarters, to plan what became the next day’s mistake. It amounted to using 9th and 18th Panzer plus what remained of the 86th and 292nd Infantry to take Ponyri and start south toward Olkhovatka. The 2nd and 20th Panzer and 6th Infantry, plus a dozen or so hastily repaired Tigers, and supported by 4th Panzer, would hit the Olkhovatka ridgeline and Hill 274, then break through to Teploye. By this time, Model was leading with tanks because the Ninth Army was running out of infantry. Nor was that the only problem. The Luftwaffe was running short of fuel. Domestic slowdowns in production had been exacerbated by partisan attacks on fuel trains—vulnerable targets that provided spectacularly gratifying results.
Calculating his resources, 1st Air Division’s commander, Brigadier General Paul Deichmann, arguably more than Model, staked the game on a July 7 breakthrough. Beginning at 5:00 A.M., the 190s of JG 51 and 54 cleared Shturmoviks from the panzers’ lines of advance. The level bombers went in behind them, then the Stukas. The Soviets had spent the night repairing wire entanglements, laying new minefields, deploying more guns and rockets, and bringing up tanks to reinforce the hard-pressed rifle formations. The air strikes were the signal for a massive barrage, heavier than anything unleashed anywhere to date during the entire war. The attack zones were so narrow that for the panzers, maneuver was virtually impossible. Tank after tank went up as heavy artillery shells fired at long range penetrated their thin rear deck an
d turret roof armor. The survivors emerged from the smoke and dust to find themselves in a fifteen-mile high-velocity killing zone of antitank guns supported by dug-in T-34s. Anything looking like dead ground was in fact a minefield, usually covered by close-attack teams.
The Russians saw Ponyri as the key to Central Front’s position and believed the Germans were determined to capture it at all costs. The defenses were correspondingly reinforced as the fighting developed. The 307th Rifle Division was directly supported by three tank brigades and two more independent regiments, by enough antitank guns to provide a ratio of over 100 per mile, and by no fewer than 380 guns—a density never matched on the Russian front or anywhere else. The Germans hit Ponyri five times in the early morning of July 7. Each time, the 307th held its ground and counterattacked. Not until around noon did the Germans gain a permanent foothold in the town’s outskirts, against ever-stiffening resistance reinforced from the air by medium bombers and Shturmoviks, which dropped over seventy-five hundred shaped-charge bombs across the fighting line that day.
At 3:30 P.M., the Germans came again, taking even heavier losses for almost no purpose. The town could be neither stormed nor enveloped. On what by now seemed to both sides a day that would never end, enough light remained at 7:00 P.M. for XLI Panzer Corps to make a final try. Its commander, Lieutenant General Josef Harpe, was an avowed Nazi sympathizer and as hard-boiled a tanker as any in the German army. He committed his last reserves. The 307th Rifle Division—what remained of it—finally abandoned its forward positions. For a few minutes around 7:30, a way into the Russian flank and rear appeared open. Then the antitank guns shut it once more, and the sorely tried Germans retreated to their blood-bought start lines, about halfway into Ponyri.
Model’s intended Schwerpunkt for July 7 was, however, the sector of XLVII Panzer Corps’s attack. The 2nd Panzer Division had almost two hundred tanks and assault guns under command, plus the 505th’s two dozen Tigers. They went in using a new formation. The Panzerkeil, or armored wedge, replicated a tactic from the Middle Ages. At the tip of the wedge were the tanks with the heaviest frontal armor, the Tigers. The lighter tanks and assault guns extended outward on each flank; the soft vehicles, trucks and half-tracks, were in the middle. In contrast with German tactics in the war’s early years, the wedge depended on depth and shock rather than breadth and mobility. Its assumptions were that antitank crews would be less effective because of having to adjust ranges constantly and that the guns would focus on the most heavily armored tanks. With a company of mine clearers to open paths through the minefields, Major General Vollrath Lübbe was reasonably confident as his tanks crossed the start line. But the supporting air strikes were limited in strength and time; after 7:00 A.M., the weight of available airpower shifted to Harpe’s sector. Rokossovsky had committed two of Second Tank Army’s corps in this sector, and they counterattacked constantly in formations of up to thirty at a time. The combination of superior numbers, the T-34’s relatively high speed, and the cumulative effect of constant shelling was expected to throw off German aim long enough for the Russians to come to close quarters.
The Germans’ optimal reply was to halt and take advantage of their quicker training guns and their superior sighting apparatus. But the achieved kills were bought at the price of momentum. An initial steady pace became a series of stops and starts that gave the Russians time to breathe and recover. Soviet accounts have the 140th Rifle Division, which was in the thick of the fighting, repulsing no fewer than thirteen attacks before finally giving ground. It was noon before the panzers broke through in the center. Teploye was less than three miles away, Olkhovatka a mile farther, and the ground seemed open and rolling all the way. But again the Soviet rifle divisions on the flanks held and counterattacked, cutting off tank and infantry spearheads caught in unseen minefields and halted by camouflaged strongpoints on the right. Shturmoviks, supported by modified Yak-9s with fuselage-mounted 37 mm cannon, saturated a German defense whose fighters were heavily outnumbered. The 1st Air Division managed only 307 sorties against 731 for the Russians, flown by men whose skills had improved through experience in the learn-or-die battles of the previous days. By July 7, in the Olkhovatka sector, the Shturmovik groups claimed thirty-four kills for no losses. The German frontline flak could be reinforced only at the expense of leaving the Ninth Army’s rear areas uncovered to Soviet attacks that grew in numbers and effectiveness each day.
Lack of numbers was critical in another area as well. A panzer division had only four infantry battalions, one mounted on armored half-tracks and three in ordinary trucks. These “panzer grenadiers,” as they had been retitled in 1942, were intended to work with the tanks, attacking alongside or ahead of them against fortified positions or minefields. To facilitate taking out strongpoints quickly, the battalions included a formidable array of supporting weapons: mortars, light infantry guns, half-track-mounted short 75 mm cannon. The trucks and half-tracks enabled the infantry to move deeper into the battle zone before dismounting and catch up quickly with the tanks once the defensive lines had been breached and the remaining pockets of resistance eliminated or contained. On the Ninth Army’s front, however, the strength of the defenses forced the panzer grenadiers onto their feet almost from the beginning of any advance. From then on, their additional firepower became a literal burden: carry it forward or resort to bayonets, grenades, and sharpened entrenching tools against the omnipresent strongpoints. Tanks that stayed to help the infantry became easy targets. So did tanks that moved forward independently. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the panzers’ tactics. It was rather that the forces applying them were too weak for the specific situation. The combination of the rifle divisions’ defense and the massive air and armored counterattacks brought the panzers to a halt before nightfall.
In most cases, the tanks and infantry set up perimeter defenses on the ground they had gained—a reflection not only of a determination to hang on, but of a recognition that they would have to fight their way back, as they had fought forward. Better to scratch foxholes and slit trenches, keep alert for the ubiquitous Red Army patrols, and curse the no less ubiquitous “sewing machines” with their flares and bombs.
In principle, the Germans’ significantly superior tactical skill outweighed the advantages inherent to the defense. In practice, the Ninth Army had taken more than thirteen thousand casualties in two days, an overwhelming number of them in the infantry and correspondingly irreplaceable even by warm-body cannon fodder. Actual tank losses at this stage are difficult to determine accurately. On the German side, no one was counting; across the fighting line, so many weapons engaged each target that the Soviets were counting triple. Since the start of the offensive, German mechanics were repairing tanks and replenishing ammunition supplies depleted enough that Model had phoned Berlin for an emergency shipment of a hundred thousand rounds. Total write-offs in tanks—around fifty—were strikingly modest. But how long the field repair jobs would last was anyone’s guess. The crews were suffering not merely from combat stress but from sheer fatigue. Three days without sleep was not unusual among the tankers. The Luftwaffe’s shortfalls in fuel and general overexertion had also grown worse.
Attrition on the wrong side of the balance sheet? Perhaps. But German intelligence calculated that the Russians had lost more than sixty thousand men, three hundred tanks, and even more aircraft. Model, who had again spent the day traveling among his headquarters, was not stupid, but neither was he reflective. It would have been against his character to take a detached, critical approach to the intelligence reports—or, indeed, to the events of the past seventy-two hours. The Ninth Army’s hard fighting had to have eroded the Soviet reserves in front of it. And if the Russians were planning something massive on Army Group Center’s front, the best way to deter that was to divert it. Manstein was making solid progress in the south. Apart from any sense of competition with a colleague so different in background and temperament, continuing the attack in Ninth Army’s sector clearly seem
ed to Model the most promising and least worst option available.
III
Manstein and Model had little in common as commanders, but their initial orders were almost exact duplicates: two strong corps going down the center, covered on each flank by weaker elements. Army Group South was to attack with concentrated force from the line Belgorod–Tomarovka, break through the Soviet defenses, and meet Model somewhere east of Kursk.
Nikolai Popel, chief political officer of the opposing First Tank Army, later compared the Fourth Panzer Army’s attack to a knight’s move in chess. The metaphor was mistaken. Army commander Hermann Hoth’s plan had nothing in common with the freewheeling spontaneity associated with chessboard knights. It was a straight force-on-force exercise. Hoth’s main attack, toward Oboyan, was assigned a sector only fifteen miles across, and his geographic objective, the town of Oboyan, was thirty miles away—a long distance for a narrow front.
Should a hammer blow fail, one option was to send for a bigger hammer. But the Fourth Panzer Army already had the heaviest hammer Germany could provide. The XLVIII Panzer Corps and the Waffen SS had almost eleven hundred tanks and assault guns between them. The Fourth Air Fleet counted almost 1,100 aircraft, and 966 of those were concentrated in VIII Air Corps, which specialized in direct ground support. Almost 250 were Stukas; 75 more were tank-busting He-129s—and Manstein expected to need every one of them from the beginning.
On May 10, Manstein met with Hoth and the senior commanders of XLVIII Panzer Corps. Manstein had by then decided that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points. Given his sector’s geography, the best option was a massive frontal armored attack, using the limited infantry forces to provide flank protection. The initial objective was to cross the Psel River, then to capture the road-junction town of Oboyan. Kursk would be the next stop. In the course of a freewheeling discussion on how best to make that work, Manstein reinforced that it was going to be not only a hard fight but a long one. The main battle would begin only once the first defense lines had been penetrated. That alone would require detailed, precise planning based on the combined-arms tactics that were the essence of panzer doctrine. Lead with heavy tanks. Use artillery to take out antitank positions. Expect major Soviet air attacks from the beginning. The next day, Manstein communicated the same urgency to the SS at corps headquarters: Take nothing for granted. Assume strong defenses continually developed. Prepare thoroughly—this was no time for heroic improvisation.
Armor and Blood Page 10