Realities were substantially different. Army Group South’s Tigers were assigned by companies to the panzer divisions, which provided an initial maximum strength of fifteen or sixteen. Two or three days of combat would reduce a company to half that, another two or three days to a quarter. Then the numbers stabilized thanks to the maintenance crews.
Nor did all of the disabled vehicles drop out due to battle damage. Some suffered from new-vehicle teething troubles. Others needed routine maintenance—particularly the Tiger. But neither condition was likely to take a vehicle off the line for more than a day. Combat damage as well was often superficial even for the Mark IIIs and IVs. Hits from antitank guns, especially the smaller ones, were by no means always fatal. Barring a fuel or ammunition explosion sufficient to burn out or blow apart a vehicle, damage could be repaired, interiors cleaned of body parts, and casualties replaced, in days or hours.
Crews could often repair track damage themselves, and the risks from exposure were far outweighed by those involved in remaining a large stationary target. Maintenance under fire, while not exactly common, was familiar: some damaged tanks were repaired three times in a day and sent back in for a fourth round. On-site repairs, however, were more often made after dark, accepting the risks of showing light from welding torches and flashlights. As the Russian tankers had warned, armor dug in could not be dug out in a hurry. When the Germans held the ground at day’s end, they kept control of the disabled or abandoned tanks of both armies, making Russian losses permanent.
When the numbers were tallied and cross-checked, the SS Panzer Corps had ten more AFVs at the end of July 7 than at the day’s beginning. Given fuel, water, and ammunition and a few hours of bomb-interrupted and adrenaline-disturbed sleep, the tankers of Leibstandarte and Das Reich might yet fulfill their next day’s mission and in cooperation with XLVII Panzer Corps destroy the Russians to their front.
III
Manstein was increasingly disturbed by III Panzer Corps’s failure to advance. He gently reminded Breith that success depended on coordinating his divisions. But on July 7, the Russians had other ideas. On the corps’s left flank, held by the 19th Panzer Division, the 73rd Panzer Grenadiers captured the railroad station and the village of Kreida, then, closely supported by a tank battalion, took Blishnaya Yigumwenka and the high ground around and beyond it. Meaningless names; barely discernible spots on a map. But the Russian 81st Rifle Division held its ground until literally overrun by the panzers. The 73rd Panzer Grenadiers lost their colonel, leading from the front in approved German fashion. One of the regiment’s companies was down to ten men at day’s end. At the end of the day, the German battle group commander declared there were no reserves and there would be no relief: “All that’s left for you is to dig yourselves in where you are.”
The 6th Panzer Division, in the corps center, moved out at 7:30 A.M. under Stuka cover, its four operational Tigers in the lead. Mines slowed the advance before the division’s armored battle group reached and cleared its first objective, the strongpoint of Sevrukova. But the Rasumnaya River proved a more formidable obstacle. It was a typical steppe watercourse: meandering from here to there, with banks so waterlogged that fords were impassable—and both bridges were blown. Pioneers and pontoniers commenced constructing a bridge capable of taking the Mark IIIs and IVs. They were shot off it by Soviet artillery and rockets. The division’s half-track panzer grenadier battalion, whose lighter vehicles could negotiate the boggy ground, covered the pioneers, crossed the river, and established a bridgehead but was pinned in place by tank-tipped counterattacks. The German panzers remained on the far bank, under heavy artillery fire. Not mate—but check.
The 7th Panzer Division began its day by driving into a killing zone of 76 mm antitank guns. It continued it by clearing the Miassoyedovo strongpoint house by house, taking two hundred prisoners in the process. The division ended it by being drawn into a de facto ambush set up by the Seventh Guards Army. The counterattacks were strong enough for Breith to divert Tigers to the sector and call on the Luftwaffe for another battalion of 88s. By day’s end, it was clear that 7th Panzer was unlikely to be able to do more on July 8 than protect the corps flank. Erhard Raus’s infantry divisions in XI Corps on Army Detachment Kempf’s extreme right, farther south, had their own plate full, overextended and pinned in place by superior Russian forces. That sector too was anything but a rest cure. On July 5, signal intelligence intercepted a Russian phone conversation. A regimental commander reported having taken 150 prisoners and asked what to do with them. The reply was, “Keep a few for interrogation and have the others liquidated.” Later that evening, the junior officer reported the order executed: most killed immediately, the rest after interrogation—whose nature is better left unimagined.
It is difficult to ascertain whether or when Erich von Manstein became nervous. But by the night of July 7–8, Army Group South’s maps presented a disconcerting image. Hoth’s tanks were indeed working through the defenses—the SS had advanced more than twelve miles—but they were still creating salients rather than sectors. The resulting flanks were under growing pressure as they grew longer. The attacking divisions were diverting increasing forces, tanks as well as infantry, to shore them up. Neither the army group nor the Fourth Panzer Army had any effective disposable reserves left. Hoth’s headquarters reported two fresh tank corps moving into the Oboyan road sector and increasing truck activity on the panzer army’s eastern flank. Again Manstein made his case to the high command for committing XXIV Panzer Corps. But that corps represented the hole card of the entire southern sector, even though its two understrength panzer divisions made it more a five-spot than a face card in Citadel’s contexts.
Had Manstein’s recreational reading included Joel Chandler Harris, he might have recalled the image of a tar baby and the experience of Brer Rabbit. Instead he ordered XLVIII Panzer Corps and the SS to advance north on July 8 as rapidly as possible, envelop the Russian armored forces to their front, and destroy them. Simultaneously, the SS were to secure their own right flank against any threat from the northeast. The plan was a necessary departure from Hoth’s proposal to turn the entire SS corps northeast. Fourth Panzer Army’s two salients had to be consolidated in order to secure the army’s flanks. And the best way out was through—or at least forward. With the salients converted to a sector, Knobelsdorff could drive forward toward Kursk and a junction with Model. Hausser would cover the advance and take care of whatever emerged from Steppe Front’s sector on the projected killing ground of Prokhorovka.
Vatutin had originally intended to use the still largely intact Thirty-eighth and Fortieth Armies from his right flank to attack Knobelsdorff’s left in force. Instead, implementing Stalin’s order, he transferred the bulk of their respective mobile forces to confront the German advance directly. That essentially took his counterattack off the board. The reinforcements, however, gave the hard-pressed front line a combination of tank and motorized battalions strong enough to require Grossdeutschland to swing west and support 3rd Panzer more closely than either division commander intended.
In any case, XLVIII Panzer Corps was going nowhere until it took Syrzevo. The 3rd Panzer and Grossdeutschland hit the strongpoint again at dawn. Grossdeutschland’s Tigers and Mark IVs repeatedly broke up tank attacks that amounted to berserker headlong charges, hoping to bring at least some T-34s to killing range. But Syrzevo itself held out, its garrison exhorted by the political officers to fight to the death. They came close. It was well into the afternoon before Grossdeutschland’s panzer grenadiers and elements of 3rd Panzer Division’s tank regiment cleared a village that by then resembled a cross between a wrecking yard and a slaughterhouse. Katukov and Popel witnessed the final scene, Katukov reporting as he looked through his binoculars: “They’re regrouping … advancing … I think we have had it.”
What the First Tank Army saw was Grossdeutschland’s tanks assembling to continue the advance north. They had anything but an easy time of it.
Earli
er in the morning, one of the division’s panzer grenadier battalions reported that it had captured Verkhopenye—a village far enough north of Syrzevo to suggest that Russian defenses were finally beginning to unravel. The division commander committed his immediate reserves, the reconnaissance battalion and the assault gun battalion, to push north, go around Verkhopenye itself, and occupy Hill 260.8, across the Oboyan road.
The half-tracks, armored cars, and assault guns advanced, only to find that the panzer grenadiers had misread their maps. They were on the Oboyan road, right enough—but in another village several miles away from Verkhopenye. XLVIII Panzer Corps chief of staff Friedrich von Mellenthin opined later that such mistakes are in the nature of war. But lofty Clausewitzian aphorisms were no help to troops a long way out on a shaky limb. Advancing up the road was impossible: it was bisected by a tributary of the Pena River, and the bridge was not designed for armored vehicles. Division ordered the battle group to hold its ground while headquarters thought of something. The battle group sent the assault guns across the bridge one by one, set up a perimeter on the far bank, and began passing the recon battalion across the by now very shaky bridge. While that enterprise was under way, the Russians began a sequence of armored counterattacks. Shifting from position to position, the outnumbered German assault guns managed more than fifty kills during an extremely long afternoon. The bridgehead held until relieved by a second Grossdeutschland battle group, accompanied by bridging equipment.
The column reached Verkhopenye by twilight, thanks in good part to the Stukas. SG 2 and 77 flew seven hundred sorties between them on July 8, in formations up to fifty strong, and paid the heaviest price of the fighting to date. The Russian fighter pilots were learning on the job: dividing their forces tactically with one element first engaging the covering Luftwaffe fighters, then a second one going for the suddenly unprotected Stukas. The resulting losses were unsustainable over any length of time—especially when only in the wake of these attacks was Grossdeutschland’s column able to “claw” its way into a town the division’s history calls a “hard nut to crack.”
Verkhopenye, whose buildings straggled along both sides of the Pena River, was critical for its bridge, which could support Mark IVs. Also able to support T-34s, the bridge was too important to the Soviet defense network to be condignly demolished. The result was a bitter fight, with the Germans taking heavy losses from artillery and antitank guns massed on the river’s far side. A single Russian tank brigade sustained no fewer than twelve attacks before withdrawing behind the Pena and digging in as part of what the Germans hoped would be a last stand the next morning.
Their immediate opponents were reeling. The 3rd Mechanized Corps had borne the brunt of the fighting in the Oboyan-Syrzevo sector for three blazing days. The commander of its 1st Mechanized Brigade duly noted that by the evening of July 8, his tank regiment could no longer hold its position. His radio communications were out. His supply of armor-piercing shells was almost exhausted. The wounded were piling up. The neighboring brigade had retreated; 1st Mechanized seemed to be “on an island in the midst of a sea of fire. It was senseless to stay in this sector any longer.”
Grossdeutschland were the army’s glamour boys: first in line for new weapons and trained replacements—with a postwar status in the Federal Republic that enabled the publication of a three-volume divisional history. But the 11th Panzer Division’s warriors for the working day kept pace on Grossdeutschland’s right. It was no easy task. Vatutin’s continuing shift of his reserves to Oboyan created a situation where once a line was penetrated, the attackers faced fresh troops in even greater numbers. Nevertheless, without matching its neighbor’s advance to the Pena, 11th Panzer protected Grossdeutschland’s flank and pushed forward toward the advance units of the SS Corps, which was simultaneously shifting its axis and redeploying its assets.
IV
For July 8, Hausser proposed to send the combined armored strength of Leibstandarte and Das Reich northwest toward the Psel. Das Reich’s panzer grenadiers would continue toward Prokhorovka—whether as spearhead or mobile flank guard was still an open question. Totenkopf was to turn over its flank-security mission to the 167th Infantry Division, currently deployed between Das Reich and 11th Panzer, and move northwest to Leibstandarte’s left flank. This maneuver, if it succeeded, would establish firm contact with 11th Panzer, get the SS across the Psel, and open a clear way north for the SS and XLVIII Panzer Corps in tandem, as opposed to the existing parallel salients.
The “if” was a big one. Totenkopf’s relief began at 2:15 A.M. but took most of the day to complete—at that a remarkable piece of staff work by an SS often described as indifferent to such details. The corps reported a “quiet” night—at least by Citadel standards—but by 8:00 A.M., patrols and troop movements were visible all along the front. The SS tanks and assault guns pushed forward in stops and starts, scoring heavily against the outranged T-34s in the relatively open terrain. Repeated counterattacks by T-34s that seemed to find every gap in the German front gave way during the day to increasingly formidable air-armor-infantry strikes, built around as many as a hundred tanks. Leibstandarte gained about twelve miles at the price of losing contact with the 11th Panzer Division, stopped three miles west of the Oboyan road. Das Reich made about eight miles, cutting westward behind the Soviet defenders and coming within a few miles of Voronezh Front’s third line and ten miles of Prokhorovka itself.
The way into the First Tank Army’s rear seemed open. The 31st Tank Corps reported defenses broken and men fleeing in panic. A shaken Khrushchev contacted Vatutin. The front commander promised an immediate counterattack. He also ordered what was left of 31st Tank and 3rd Mechanized Corps to fall back to new positions north of Verkhopenye, across the Oboyan road, and along the Solotinka River to the Psel. Vatutin hoped that Katukov could hold on until his blow from the northeast had time to develop.
The First Tank Army’s survival already owed much to the increasing pressure on the SS right flank. Das Reich, in particular, beginning around 11:00 A.M., reported having to divert forces to secure the immediate right flank of its armored battle group and to take some pressure off the division’s hard-pressed panzer grenadiers. The reconnaissance battalion, the assault gun battalion, and finally the panzer regiment itself turned to meet armored counterattacks. Toward evening, the Luftwaffe appeared in force. Its Stukas and medium bombers were welcome sights to men left on their own most of the day.
The SS Panzer Corps reported 290 Soviet AFVs destroyed—a third of them by infantrymen using “close combat means.” That meant grenades, explosive charges, Molotov cocktails. It also meant fighting power. One of Das Reich’s panzer grenadier regiments had “organized” an intelligence section of half a dozen Russian “auxiliaries,” prisoners of war who for many reasons chose working for their captors over life as a POW. Part of its job was to monitor radio traffic—often in plain Russian rather than code, for the sake of haste or as a consequence of fatigue. When two higher headquarters began exchanging threats over the nonappearance of reserves, an SS company infiltrated Russian lines, made its way to the command post of a rifle brigade, and returned with the commander, his staff, and the whole headquarters company. The stunt was facilitated by the area’s lack of the built-up defenses characteristic of main combat zones. But call it a “hussar trick,” as in the German idiom, or a “John Wayne,” in Vietnam-era argot—either way it remains the sort of performance the Waffen SS expected of itself. They may have been willing servants of a criminal regime, but the men of SS Panzer Corps were also men of war.
Following his communication with Stalin during the evening of July 7, Vatutin reoriented the focal point of his intended major counterattack. Front orders issued at 11:00 P.M. sent the fresh II SS Panzer Corps southwest down the road from Prokhorovka in the direction of Teterivino. To the left, 5th Tank Corps would attack directly west. The 2nd Guards Tank Corps, deployed on the 5th’s left, would move against the right flank and rear of the SS while covering the f
ront’s counterattack against a III Panzer Corps assumed to be too busy in its own sector to have much impact elsewhere.
The combined strength of the four corps amounted to around four hundred AFVs. The attack would be supported by thirty minutes of artillery preparation, making up in intensity what it lacked in duration, and by a maximum effort from the Second Air Army. Things began going wrong when Leibstandarte and Das Reich crossed their start lines ahead of 10th Tank Corps’s projected dawn attack. The corps, one of the two just assigned to Vatutin by Stavka, was getting its first taste of armored war Citadel-style. Its brigades were caught off balance; its commander reacted by initiating the attacks mentioned above, delaying the Germans without stopping them.
The 2nd Guards Tank Corps, Stavka’s other contribution, provided—unwittingly and unwillingly—the most spectacular initial results of Vatutin’s counterattack. It too had deployed slowly, going in only around noon, and was essentially uncommitted when Vatutin ordered it forward in response to Khrushchev’s report. The somewhat disorganized advance was promptly spotted by a patrolling Hs-129 piloted by the tank busters’ commander.
The Hs-129B was a defining artifact of the later Third Reich. It was a promising, indeed futuristic, design, whose main armament also redefined state of the art. The 30 mm MK-101 automatic cannon was accurate, hard-hitting, and able to fire nine kinds of ammunition, from conventional high explosives to tungsten-cored armor-piercing rounds. But tungsten was in short supply, and the MK-101 had teething troubles. The aircraft itself was powered by two Gnome-Rhône engines looted from France, whose low horsepower further reduced an already limited airworthiness. To date, the Henschels had been held back. Their large size and limited maneuverability rendered them disproportionately vulnerable to fighters and antiaircraft guns, especially when compared with the Stukas. But on July 6 they had shown—against the same 2nd Guards Tank Corps—what even small numbers of them could do in the right conditions. Four squadrons of them came in at carefully timed intervals: one attacking, one on the way, one taking off, and one returning to refuel and rearm. A participant described the formula for success: a low-level run and a carefully timed, well-aimed shot at just the right time. “I would say that it was a real art,” he concluded. Its practice required ignoring the small-arms fire returned by the desperate tankers. It required as well the kind of battle-space control achieved by Luftwaffe fighters vectored in from everywhere in the sector, which gave the Henschels an entirely free hand.
Armor and Blood Page 14