Armor and Blood

by Dennis E. Showalter

  After two hours, despite missed signals, jammed cannon, and similar examples of fog and friction, more than fifty T-34s were burning or immobile. The rest of the corps was in one of the few disorderly retreats made by either side during Citadel. It was a tour de force the SS Panzer Corps acknowledged wholeheartedly: “good cooperation with the Luftwaffe” had made the day’s “full defensive success” possible. It was also an unpleasant jolt to the tank crews and the armor generals of Voronezh Front. Unlike the bombs dropped by the Stukas, which might do only superficial damage even by a direct hit, a tungsten-cored 30 mm high-velocity round through a T-34’s rear deck was a certain kill and an almost certain flameout. For the first time in history, a large armored force had been destroyed entirely from the air. How many of the cursed planes did the Fritzes have? And where were the vaunted Red Falcons?

  The most obvious direct response was to make no more large-scale moves of armor in the daylight. That in turn slowed the movements of local reserves to block German penetrations—a key to Vatutin’s conduct of the battle. And if that were not enough, the Germans seemed on the point of developing a new, potentially decisive surge in an unexpected sector of the front: that held by III Panzer Corps. The corps’s advance of July 7 had actually extended the gap between it and II SS Panzer Corps to about twenty miles. Breith’s response depended on the infantry division assigned to his corps. The 168th had been holding the Donets line on the left of the corps’s three panzer divisions since Citadel’s beginning. The 19th Panzer Division was ordered to swing hard left, take the Russians in the rear, and clear that sector. In by now predictable fashion, the attack made initial gains, then was halted by minefields and an untouched second line of defense.

  Things were little better in the rest of the 19th’s sector, where the two panzer grenadier regiments were reduced during the morning to the combined strength of a battalion. Breith had to commit the 168th Infantry Division to restore the situation. In III Panzer Corps’s center, the 6th Panzer Division was delayed an hour when the scheduled artillery barrage failed to materialize. The armored battle group went in on 19th Panzer’s flank, was stopped by the same minefield, and was targeted by a massive artillery and Katyusha barrage. The pioneers cleared a path. A few minutes later, the panzers encountered an antitank ditch. It took three hours for the pioneers to blow in the sides. It was 4:00 P.M. by the time 6th Panzer, by now with Tiger support and covered by the division’s artillery and a flak battalion, reached Melikhovo. It took heavy losses from T-34s dug in to their turrets, from Russian infantry who seemed to have to be killed twice, and from antitank guns. One Tiger crewman recalled, “There were so many of them that they gave me permanent diarrhea.” Every thirty minutes “I squatted down at the rear of the tank without the enemy noticing me.”

  Another victory for a regimental war diary; another day that led nowhere in particular, only creating another salient needing protection. The 7th Panzer Division spent its day covering the 6th Panzer’s right when the 106th Infantry Division was unable to fulfill its assignment and take over the screening role. Indeed, the 106th was pushed so hard that 7th Panzer had to send tanks to its support.

  Raus, among the best German armor commanders, was not easily shaken—one reason for giving him the unglamorous but vital job of commanding the army group’s flank guard. But the 106th was sufficiently overextended that on the previous day a Soviet tank reached its command post. Raus himself led the counterattack that restored the line. He also requested reinforcements: the Red Army’s spare change was taking his XI Corps to its limits. At that point, Napoleon’s rejoinder to Ney at Waterloo may have crossed Manstein’s mind: “Troops? Do you think I can make them?” The army group commander consulted Zeitzler, only to be told in effect to do more with less: Germany and its Führer were watching.

  V

  A commander’s best friend is an obliging enemy. An obliging enemy is not one who merely makes mistakes, but one who acts as though his orders had been written by his opponent. In Walther Model, Rokossovsky had found—or rather, his soldiers had created—an obliging enemy. For July 9, Model concentrated five panzer divisions on a ten-mile front: more than three hundred AFVs, the Ninth Army’s last resources. Central to the effort was the fresh 4th Panzer Division, including a hundred tanks, most of them the new models of Mark IV with long-barreled 75 mm guns. It had suffered from a night of unremitting air attacks as it deployed. The weather had broken as well, meaning saturated ground, reduced visibility, and limited air support. But all that seemed needed was one more push.

  Rokossovsky for his part had used the time bought by his forward units to transfer everything that could be spared from quiet sectors to Teploye-Olkhovatka-Ponyri: two rifle divisions, an artillery division, a mixed bag of smaller units. Rokossovsky too was reaching the bottom of Central Front’s barrel. Specifically, morale in the Second Tank Army was also fraying at the edges. Soviet, and now Russian, treatments of World War II state or imply that almost all the comrades were valiant in defense of the motherland, communism, and Stalin. In fact, the T-34 crews were in much the same situation their Sherman-riding U.S. and British counterparts would face in Normandy. For a year, the T-34s had been the technical masters of the armored battlefield. Now they were being picked off at ranges from which they could make no reply. Charging forward only brought them closer to German AFVs that seemed able to adjust their fire automatically against tanks on the move and zero in on them when they halted to use their own guns. Rokossovsky responded by detaching two fresh brigades from the tanks corps he had left covering Kursk as a final defense against a massive German breakthrough. Those tanks were his last hope, he declared in his memoirs. As Wellington said at Waterloo, it was hard pounding. The question was who could pound the longest.

  At 8:00 A.M. on July 8, 2nd Panzer Division went forward against Olkhovatka. The 4th and 20th followed a new axis, on XLVII Panzer Corps’s right toward the village of Samodurovka, seeking to realize a breach that so far had proven a mirage by developing a gap between the Thirteenth and Seventieth Armies. Luftwaffe radio intelligence scored the first points by picking up the Sixteenth Air Army’s order for a major Shturmovik strike at dawn, supporting a counterattack against German positions at Ponyri. A group of 190s was waiting at altitude and scattered the attackers. By the time the ground attack began, the weather had closed in and closed down. For three hours, the 307th Rifle Division grappled with German infantry in mud that matched that of Passchendaele, with fog and rain reducing the fighting to hand-to-hand flounderings in the mire that left the Red Army riflemen in possession of part of Ponyri—how much depends on which report one reads.

  Artillery on both sides was firing nearly blind, but the Soviets had far more guns in action and were more used to area barrages. On the German right, 20th Panzer Division’s grenadiers led the way toward Samodurovka. Companies reduced to platoon strength were being commanded by sergeants in the first hour of a daylong series of attacks that pinned the Russians in place but otherwise made little progress against the 17th Guards Rifle Corps. An observer called El Alamein a modest operation by comparison and declared that even Stalingrad took second place. The 20th Panzer Division had only one tank battalion, and its war diary describes a day of being shuttled from place to place, supporting the infantry, checking Russian counterattacks, dodging close-attack teams, and running into minefields. The battalion had gone into action on July 5 with seventy-five tanks. Thirty-nine remained operational when the unit took up positions for the night.

  The 4th Panzer Division’s prospects might have improved had not XLVII Panzer Corps commander Joachim Lemelsen detached the division’s panzer regiment to form part of a provisional tank brigade, replacing it with an assault gun battalion that left the 4th with just about half its standard number of AFVs. As it was, a battle group of the division fought through to Teploye and moved toward the high ground south of the village. When the panzer grenadiers could go no farther into Russian fire, the armor continued alone. A platoon, well le
d or simply lucky, took out enough of the first-line gun positions to give the infantry a chance to move forward against the high ground south of the village. Tank-supported Russian reserves threw the Germans back repeatedly. Russian antitank guns held their fire to as near as four hundred yards. In a single battalion, one battery was reduced to a single gun and three crewmen. Another gun, its carriage shattered, was propped up on ammunition boxes and aimed by sighting down the barrel. The antitank riflemen evoked German praise for the “courage and coolness” that cost one company 70 percent casualties. But by the end of the day, the panzer grenadier companies too were reduced to fifteen or twenty men. With the division commander and one of the regimental commanders wounded, a breakthrough in the sector seemed impossible.

  Lemelsen had not “borrowed” 4th Panzer’s tanks on a whim. An artilleryman by trade, he was highly rated by Kluge as a corps commander. He had had three days to experience the limits of tank-infantry cooperation following currently accepted German armor doctrine. And it is worth remembering that the Wehrmacht’s original panzer divisions were armor-centric and armor-heavy even though equipped with light tanks. It was not prima facie chimerical to reason that a large, concentrated force of AFVs—around two hundred when the panzer regiments from 2nd and 4th Divisions, the Tigers, and some stray assault guns were added together—could break through what had to be the final Soviet positions. Instead, the 6th Infantry Division—what remained of it—was stopped on the slopes of Hill 274 outside Olkhovatka, the key point of the defense in that sector and manned by the Seventeenth Army. The panzers went forward repeatedly and were repeatedly thrown back. At the end of the day’s fighting, around 5:00 P.M., only three Tigers remained in action. And the high ground remained in Soviet hands.

  Model’s first reaction to another futile day was to consider relieving a number of his subordinate commanders. His second was to order the panzer regiments returned to their proper divisions. His third was to plan for a renewed attack the next morning. Then the Ninth Army’s staff weighed in. Over thirty-two hundred men had been sacrificed for gains at best measured in hundreds of yards. Half the panzer grenadiers in 2nd, 4th, and 9th Divisions were casualties. Hundreds of tanks were undergoing major repairs. Fuel and ammunition reserves were low. The only plentiful commodity was fatigue, with four sleepless days the norm in the infantry divisions. Model responded by using July 9 to rest and reorganize—everywhere except around Ponyri, where elements of the 292nd Division finally took and held Hill 239 east of the village. On a map, the success offered a chance of a breakthrough. On the ground, it presented another fortified hill, 253, on the new German right flank. The 292nd was fought out. And by now it is almost redundant to say that the Russians literally crowded Hill 253 and its environs with every weapon that could find a position, from T-34s to light machine guns.

  Model’s decision to suspend operations led Kluge to call a senior officers’ conference for the morning. He met Model, Harpe, and Lemelsen at XLVII Panzer Corps headquarters and opened the discussion with an implied “What now?” Harpe said he was running out of infantry; Lemelsen said he was running out of tanks. When Kluge offered three more mobile divisions as reinforcements, Model responded that the best to be expected was a rollenden Material-abnutzungsschlacht, a “rolling battle of material attrition.” The World War I subtext of this Teutonic circumlocution was not lost on men who had been junior officers in 1914–18. Were Kluge and Model, recognizing that the northern half of Citadel had failed, seeking to provide a smoke screen against Hitler’s expressed insistence to continue? Certainly both men were concerned with the developing risk of a major attack in the central sector. Certainly as well, Army Group Center’s headquarters, physically isolated and responsible for a static front, had become a focal point for anti-Hitler plotting. But there was no sign of a smoke screen in the attack XLVII Panzer Corps sent in on July 10.

  Once again, the initial objectives were the high ground south and southwest of Olkhovatka and the much-contested village of Teploye. The 1st Air Division, somewhat revitalized by its weather-assisted stand-down on July 9—only about four hundred bomber and attack sorties were flown—mounted almost seven hundred sorties against the gun positions that had scourged the attacks two days earlier. Its fighters took the action to Sixteenth Army’s airfields, effectively controlling the sky most of the morning. On the ground, Model replicated Lemelsen’s action of July 8, combining tanks from 2nd, 4th, and 20th Panzer Divisions into an improvised brigade. It got as far as Teploye, which was finally cleared by 4th Panzer Division’s infantry. Rokossovsky had reinforced the defense with a fresh rifle division from Seventieth Army. On the night of July 7–8, he committed his last immediate armored reserve, the 9th Tank Corps. It proved to be enough, and once again the Germans were held or thrown back along the front of Seventeenth Rifle Army, sacrificing some of their small earlier gains. The previous day’s success at Ponyri had led Model to relieve the 298th with one of Kluge’s fresh divisions and make one more try in that sector as well. The 10th Panzer Grenadier Division came on line slowly, handicapped by high wind and rain, and despite close support from the surviving Ferdinands, its late-afternoon attacks foundered like all the rest on Soviet determination and Soviet firepower.

  The Central Front on July 11 mounted a series of counterattacks all along its sector. Retrospectively, these were local operations—or at least held to local gains by Germans whose resistance was no less determined than their Red Army counterparts. But the gains were serious enough to tired men and tired generals. Initially optimistic notions of wearing down and breaking through were giving way to a nearly visceral sense that the Russian reserves might, after all, well be inexhaustible.

  By the end of the day, Model had nothing left with which to change the situation. The Ninth Army’s immediate rear zones were by this time a combination wasteland, junkyard, and butcher shop. Disabled vehicles, destroyed weapons, and abandoned gear littered an area overrun by stragglers and Versprengten—men literally knocked loose from their units by the intense, uninterrupted combat. Kursk was an early instance of a phenomenon that fully manifested itself two years later on Okinawa. High-end industrial war, with tanks and aircraft added to artillery and machine guns, the whole combined with an extreme environment, could break men in a matter not of weeks or months, but of days. It was not a case of systemic demoralization, as in the German rear echelons when the Russians enveloped Stalingrad. The Russians were not immune. As defenders, Rokossovsky’s men had stable positions whose abandonment often entailed more risks than sticking it out. Perceived shirkers or fugitives were likely to get even shorter shrift from the Soviet military police and the NKVD than from the legitimately feared “chain dogs” of the Wehrmacht. On July 10, the Sixteenth Air Army’s commander responded to reports that his fighters were defensively minded, patrolling at a safe distance behind the front line, by threatening “cowards” with transfer to a penal battalion or execution on the ground.

  The OKW (Armed Forces High Command) reacted to the impasse by noting the necessity of reversing the balance of attrition. Model responded with a revised plan. Kluge had previously promised Model the 12th Panzer and 36th Infantry Divisions. Now he offered as well, once they arrived, the 5th and 8th Panzer Divisions, freshly refitted and assigned to Army Group Center. Model’s intention was to reinforce the as yet unengaged XLVI Panzer Corps and use it to envelop the Olkhovatka heights on their left flank. Its four infantry divisions were the last relatively fresh troops of the Ninth Army’s original order of battle. But only a battle group of 12th Panzer Division reached Ninth Army’s sector, and it was too late in the day to be of any use. A limited night attack in XLVI Panzer Corps’s sector went nowhere; by then, the Red Army owned the night all along Model’s front. The Ninth Army had lost only about seventy-five AFVs. The 1st Air Division held control of the skies as the Soviet Sixteenth Air Army cut back activity to rest its crews, but without some major change in the overall situation, the rational prospects of a renewed attack see
med no more than adding to a casualty list already exceeding twenty-two thousand.

  That major change would soon be provided by the Red Army. Rokossovsky’s Central Front had stopped the Germans almost in their tracks. The Thirteenth Army and Second Tank Army had chewed up half a dozen panzer divisions. Nowhere had the Tigers and the Ferdinands contributed to anything but limited tactical victories. The price had been high—almost half the front’s tanks, and almost half of those were evaluated as write-offs. Human costs remain debatable. The former Soviet archives lists thirty-four thousand casualties between July 5 and 11—almost half killed. But strength figures for the Central Front during the same period show a reduction of almost ninety-three thousand with no major changes to the order of battle. A discrepancy of fifty-nine thousand cannot be overlooked but as yet remains unexplained.