Manstein may have been conveying doubts. He may also have been emphasizing the importance of an early breakthrough. In either case, in the weeks before the attack he honored the established German principle of delegation, allowing subordinates to plan the details and listening to their specific proposals. The panzer divisions rehearsed down to small-unit levels, emphasizing cooperation with the Luftwaffe and the tactics of overcoming antitank defenses in depth. And Hermann Hoth cogitated.
Hoth was what Germans call ein alter Hase—“an old hare.” Unlike the fox—even the Desert Fox—who outwits danger, the hare stays alive by anticipating it. As early as March, Hoth had expressed doubts about Hitler’s projected preliminaries to Kursk. He questioned whether the panzer divisions’ losses would or could be replaced. He was even more concerned about the armored reserves the Red Army could mobilize around the Kursk salient. As preparations for Citadel proper increased, so did Hoth’s worries about the latter point. Well aware of the strong Soviet reserves moving into position just outside the theater of operations, he became convinced they posed too great a risk to his right flank to ignore—especially should the German advance be slower than expected.
And delay in turn, Hoth reasoned, was virtually guaranteed, because as configured, XLVIII Panzer Corps was unlikely to reach its objectives and secure its left flank as well in the same time frame. Hoth addressed part of the problem by convincing Manstein to add the 3rd Panzer Division to the corps’s order of battle, allowing its commitment from Citadel’s beginning. The other, larger element was beyond his control. To rest the tankers and panzer grenadiers, Fourth Panzer Army’s riflemen had been required to hold the front for days and weeks longer than doctrine or common sense recommended. The infantry divisions were rated “satisfactory,” but the evaluation was at best overly generous, at worst recklessly optimistic. Manstein understood the problem. On June 1, he warned Zeitzler that not only could the attack not succeed with the forces currently allotted, but the concentration of strength around Kursk opened wide opportunities for the Red Army to create crises elsewhere.
“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” To that end, Manstein put everything on Front Street, leaving no significant sector reserves. Hoth also reinforced Manstein’s conviction that breaking directly through the Russian defenses would be a long, absolutely expensive process. At Manstein’s May 10–11 visit to the Fourth Panzer Army, Hoth suggested that a straight line was not necessarily the shortest distance between two operational points. The terrain in front of the Psel River, and the course and configuration of the river itself, suggested that an opposed crossing would prove time-consuming. If his corps had to fight for bridgeheads, they would be wide open to a flank attack by Soviet strategic reserves, mounted from the northeast, through the passage between the Psel and the Donets.
Hoth recommended that instead of advancing straight ahead in tandem with XLVIII Panzer Corps, II SS Panzer Corps should swing northeast short of the Psel and draw the Russians onto their guns around the village of Prokhorovka. The III Panzer Corps in turn would shift its axis of advance northeast and strike the right flank of the Soviets attacking the SS. The XLVIII Panzer Corps, with Grossdeutschland doing the heavy lifting, would keep abreast of the SS, changing direction to correspond with its movements, and reinforce the expected decisive engagement as necessary. From there, the Fourth Panzer Army could advance in any appropriate direction: north to a direct junction with Model, northeast into the left rear of the Russians in the Orel salient—perhaps even due east, for another time-buying “forehand stroke.” A series of map exercises held by Kempf, Hoth, and their corps commanders beginning on May 29 developed the concept. On June 3–5, Army Group South conducted a final war game. Later that month, Hoth ran a command post exercise for the Fourth Panzer Army, testing the intended course of Citadel’s first days. By June 2, Fourth Panzer Army’s war diary was presenting the “Hoth variant” as settled.
The decision was minimally reassuring. Shifting the panzers’ axes of advance would still leave the right flank of Army Group South wide open. Addressing that by turning III Panzer Corps north left Army Detachment Kempf’s infantry divisions to secure with their own limited resources sectors that in one case extended ninety miles. This was a substantial risk, especially should the main advance be delayed.
Like many senior German generals, Manstein was horsey in a way only George Patton matched on the Allied side. To relax, he rode an hour or so each day—until Hitler exploded. Manstein’s aide responded to the Führer’s expressed fear of partisans by arranging for a motorized escort. That, however, defeated the purpose of the exercise in both senses of the noun. Manstein condignly and unhappily dismounted. The field marshal embraced high tech, on the other hand, with the train he adopted as his mobile headquarters. Its half-dozen cars supported antiaircraft and ground security, maintained an elaborate communications system, and above all provided stable working and living conditions. Any fool can be uncomfortable, and while Manstein was not decrepit, at fifty-eight he was well past his youth. The train also enabled him to visit subordinate headquarters by day, then travel to the next destination by night and arrive rested and breakfasted.
Army Group South’s attack began in the late afternoon of July 4. In XLVIII Panzer Corps’s sector, the panzer grenadier battalions of Grossdeutschland and 11th Panzer Division went forward in a drivi ng rain against the Soviet outpost zone and its network of fortified villages. Grossdeutschland had begun the war as an elite infantry regiment, and it prided itself on maintaining traditional infantry skills. But mines, small arms, and artillery turned what was expected to be a shock attack into a stop-and-go operation extending into the late evening. The fighting was hard enough and the casualties high enough that division and corps assumed the defenses had been breached and ordered the main armored force to move into attack positions.
Dawn broke around 3:00 A.M., with the promise of clear, hot weather. During the night, there had been more heavy thunderstorms in Manstein’s sector, and much of the ground would remain frustratingly soft for most of the day. A more immediate concern was the Soviet bombardment that delayed the initial attack until around 4:10 A.M., when artillery and rocket fire pounded Voronezh Front’s forward positions for fifty minutes. The Stukas and the medium bombers of VIII Air Corps appeared as the barrage ended, hammering Kursk’s railway station and Russian gun positions in the rear zones, then shifting to the visible strongpoints of the forward defenses.
Luftwaffe airfields in this sector were closely concentrated. For two months, the Red Air Force had left them relatively undisturbed, hoping to take them out in a surprise attack. As the Russian barrage began, the Second and Seventeenth Air Armies sent 150 Shturmoviks, plus fighters and level bombers, across the front line to the German airfields, where 800 German planes sat waiting to take off, wingtip to wingtip. It might have been the Red Air Force’s chance to collect payback for the first day of Barbarossa, when it was caught by surprise on the ground and suffered catastrophic losses.
But German signal intelligence noted the sudden surge in communications among the Russian air units, and German radar picked up the incoming aircraft. The Germans were launching their own attack earlier than expected, to deal with the Soviet guns. Even so, the next few minutes were chaotic as bombers, scheduled to take off first, scrambled to clear the runways for the fighters, then sought to take off themselves. By now, the Luftwaffe specialized in emergencies. By the time the Soviet aircraft appeared, not only were the targeted airfields empty, but the German fighters had the advantage of height.
Their Me-109Gs technically were no more than an even match for the Red Air Force Yaks and LaGGs. But the pilots of JG 3 and 52 were among the Luftwaffe’s best. A number of the Shturmovik crews by contrast were flying their first missions with the Il-2. The Soviet fighter groups, also largely inexperienced, flew close escort, matching the Shturmoviks in speed and altitude. When they did break off to engage the German fighters, they to
o often lost contact. Russian attack routes were marked by shot-down Shturmoviks. The targeted airfields escaped significant damage. And VIII Air Corps had a free hand in its initial attack.
The impact was multiplied by the Germans’ highly effective air-ground liaison system. Luftwaffe radio teams accompanied corps and division headquarters into action, reporting the situation regularly to their headquarters, contacting formations, and vectoring strikes onto targets as they emerged. In the first hour, over four hundred aircraft appeared in a sector only twenty miles wide. One rifle division reported formations of eighty at a time. Another was hit by five Stuka groups in succession—on a front two miles wide and less than five yards deep! These demonstrations of precision bombing were more necessary than XLVIII Panzer Corps expected or wanted. It advanced three divisions abreast: 3rd Panzer, Grossdeutschland, and 11th Panzer, over 450 tanks and assault guns. More than 350 of those were in Grossdeutschland’s two-mile sector of the front. Two hundred were Panthers, combined with Grossdeutschland’s two tank battalions into a provisional 10th Panzer Brigade that seemed formidable enough to break through defenses weakened the day before in raids made by GD’s panzer grenadiers.
Hoth’s decision to attack without any reserve has been questioned cogently. A two-division front, with the 3rd or 11th Panzer held ready to exploit any tactical success, was one alternative. Another was to use the Panthers as the nucleus of a reserve force in a sector where arguably too many tanks were committed on too narrow a front. Hoth and his chief of staff, Major General Friedrich Fangohr, discussed both options and rejected them on the grounds that Grossdeutschland would need strong armored support on both flanks in order to force an immediate breakthrough. Hoth was nevertheless confident enough to set XLVIII Corps’s objective for July 6 as the Psel River—thirty miles away. But that meant cracking the nut of Cherkassoye, a village three miles behind the panzers’ start line, whose elaborately camouflaged defenses were manned by an entire Guards rifle division, the 67th, the one hit by five Stuka attacks just before the Germans appeared.
A year or two earlier, that might have been enough. This time the 67th’s positions and their supporting echelons responded with the heaviest fire GD had experienced. The Panthers had reached Army Group South on July 1: too late for field-testing the tanks, much less attempts at training. Even their radio equipment remained untested for the sake of communications security. Tension between the commanders of the Panthers and GD’s tanks further complicated planning.
The improvised panzer brigade went in around 9:00 A.M. The Panthers were slowed by wet ground, then drove into a minefield. Some lost treads. Others spun tread-deep in muck trying to extricate themselves. The battalion of GD infantrymen the Panthers were supposed to be escorting and supporting pushed forward but was pinned down and shot to pieces. It took ten hours for Grossdeutschland’s pioneers to clear paths through the minefield and for the maintenance crews to replace damaged tracks.
That was only one sector. Grossdeutschland’s tank commander, who rejoiced in the name of Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz von Gross-Zauche und Camminetz—his men called him “Panzer Count” and “Panzer Lion”—was a member (apparently nominal) of the Allgemeine (General) SS, courtesy of Heinrich Himmler. He had also won the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross during Barbarossa for taking his tank across a bridge and single-handedly annihilating a Soviet convoy. When he saw the Panthers halted, he shifted his own tanks, including GD’s organic Tiger company, to support 11th Panzer.
The Russian defenses were the usual maze of entrenchments, minefields, and strongpoints, strengthened further by wet ground that slowed the armor. The ideal result for a German attack was a more or less simultaneous penetration of a defense sector, then a swing right and left, attacking bunkers and strongpoints from the flank. Like Japanese positions in the Pacific theater, Red Army defenses depended on an interlocking chain of enfilade fire. The more bunkers taken out, the more gaps opened in the firewall, the more vulnerable became the entire system to coordinated attack from front and flank.
That was the theory. In practice, the heavily built bunkers often resisted anything but armor-piercing rounds. For two years, the panzers had usually been able to generate “tank fright” as they came to close quarters. Around Cherkassoye, Guardsmen took on the Mark IVs hand to hand with near suicidal determination, jumping onto the vehicles to blow off turrets with mines. Tankers responded by rediscovering the Great War tactic of straddling a trench, then turning to collapse it and bury the defenders alive. In contrast with events in Model’s sector, the panzer grenadiers were able to maintain contact and supplement the mutual covering fire of the tanks’ machine guns.
But Cherkassoye held even after the surviving Panthers and their panzer grenadiers finally escaped their personal bog and came up in support of GD. The 11th Panzer was able to bring up in its sector a number of Mark IIIs converted to flamethrowers and burn out defenders who at times served their guns until roasted alive. Even then the Soviet survivors of the 67th and the antitank regiments that stood with them maintained a foothold in the village outskirts, falling back to the second line only with the end of daylight, and only under orders.
The 3rd Panzer Division, on GD’s left, had easier going. With its left effectively covered by the 332nd Infantry Division, the 3rd’s panzer grenadiers took the strongpoint of Korovino by day’s end, and a tank battalion took advantage of the transfer there of local reserves to break through the 71st Rifle Division’s forward defenses and drive a narrow salient three miles into the Soviet rear.
IV
Hoth’s final attack orders to the SS panzers, replicated in the corps order of July 1, were to break through the first two Russian defense lines, then advance in force to the Psel River in the area of Prokhorovka. The II SS Panzer Corps thus had the most demanding assignment on Manstein’s sector—and expected it. The identity of the Waffen SS was constructed around its panzer divisions. From unpromising military beginnings, they established a deserved reputation as some of the most formidable combat formations in the brief history of armored war. The Waffen SS began life in 1925 as a security force to protect Nazi meetings and officials. From its beginnings, the force was a party instrument. Its personal loyalty to Hitler was manifested in the regiment-sized Leibstandarte (Bodyguard) established in 1933. The Totenkopf (Death’s-Head) units were created the same year as concentration camp guards. In 1935, a number of local “Emergency Readiness Formations” were grouped into three regiments of Special Service Troops (Verfügungstruppen). All three were expanded to motorized divisions; Leibstandarte was the last to be reconfigured in May 1941.
Ideologically, the SS was projected as a new human type, able to serve as a model and an instrument for revitalizing the Nordic race. Militarily, the SS way was headlong energy and ruthless, never-say-die aggressiveness, emphasizing speed and ferocity. SS training stressed physical toughness and incorporated risk to an extent far surpassing the army’s training. Operationally, the results were initially mixed. Not until Barbarossa did the Waffen SS come into its own. Not until after Stalingrad did it join the first team. Only at Kursk did it begin defining combat on the Eastern Front.
From the Leibstandarte, the Waffen SS drew an identity as the Führer’s personal elite. The Verfügungstruppe, which had become the Das Reich Division, contributed a willingness to learn soldiering from the professionals. Totenkopf emphasized ferocity as a norm. All three qualities attracted attention. An army report singles out the SS riflemen of Das Reich for “fearlessness and bravery” during the drive for Moscow; on one occasion they swarmed over heavy tanks to set them afire with gasoline when antitank guns proved useless. A Leibstandarte rifle company set up the victory at Rostov by seizing a vital railway bridge before it could be blown. Totenkopf was the heart and soul of the defense of the Demyansk Pocket, created by the Soviet Northwest Front’s massive offensive of February 1942. The SS men held nothing back; their spirit of “no quarter, no surrender” left four-fifths of the division as casualties
by the time the pocket was relieved in April 1942.
The chosen three of the Waffen SS spent most of 1942 in France, being rebuilt, reconfigured, and upgraded to panzer grenadier status. In fact, all three had two-battalion tank regiments, at least one of their six panzer grenadier battalions in armored half-tracks, generous allowances of supporting weapons, and by Citadel, a company of Tigers. Authorized strength was more than twenty thousand. The newly created SS Panzer Corps was supremely confident that it was the instrument needed to restore the situation and turn the tide in the East. Redeployed in January 1943, the SS panzers played a crucial role in Manstein’s offensive, paying for Kharkov’s recapture with more than twelve thousand casualties. Leibstandarte’s fighting strength was reduced by almost half, the city square was renamed in its honor, and its men were accused postwar of clearing a hospital by the simple expedient of shooting its seven hundred patients. When Manstein received the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, he owed a good deal of the award to the men in SS black.
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