Armor and Blood

by Dennis E. Showalter

  Corps maintenance crews worked through the night to put more than three hundred tanks and assault guns on line. But in both corps and army higher headquarters, the question loomed ever larger: Where was III Panzer Corps? On the Eastern Front, willingness to shovel manure was a necessary mind-set. But when work just kept piling up and there were no more shovels…?

  I

  Three panzer divisions’ worth of shovels had been held almost in place since Citadel’s inception. Even in best-case circumstances, any success the SS gained at Prokhorovka was going to be limited, when not ephemeral, if III Panzer Corps failed to appear in force from the south. On the morning of July 9, its circumstances had not appeared especially promising.

  Against the freshly reinforced 35th Guards Rifle Corps, the Germans ran into another day of hard fighting for limited results. Just before noon, four Tigers, the last operational ones in III Panzer Corps, led a panzer grenadier company onto Hill 211.1 in 19th Panzer’s sector. But Russian tank counterattacks grew so heavy that 19th Panzer’s attached infantry regiment gave ground, then reported it could no longer hold. The division commander managed to restore the line, but by day’s end, 19th Panzer had only a dozen of its own tanks operational. Kempf reported that III Panzer Corps could make no further headway. Manstein responded by paying Kempf a presumably inspiring visit and ordering the attack to continue.

  The 7th Panzer’s experience was similar. Not until around 4:00 P.M. did its tanks manage to push forward—thanks in good part to a Luftwaffe handicapped all day by low-hanging clouds that took advantage of a break in the weather to mount an incendiary strike on the forest facing the 7th’s front line. But that attack too produced no more than an almost indefensible salient. All this sound and fury was a long way from a breakthrough and drive north to support the SS that was III Panzer Corps’s new primary mission.

  A junior staff officer of 6th Panzer Division, sent to Hoth’s headquarters as liaison on the evening of July 10, described a mixture of energy and resignation against an overall background of fatigue. The atmosphere at Kempf’s HQ was about the same. Manstein, a believer in the restorative qualities of a night’s sleep, waited to take action until the next day, when he met with Hoth and Kempf to discuss the situation. Citadel, he said, was fragmenting. Given that the Ninth Army was stuck fast, given the rapid increase of Soviet forces in the southern sector, was it time to suspend Army Group South’s attack as well?

  Hoth initially recommended continuing the attack, but he picked up Manstein’s subtext that Kursk was now out of reach. He responded by suggesting the more limited objective of destroying the Soviet forces south of the Psel. Kempf was less sanguine. Hoth’s plan depended heavily on the rapid intervention of III Panzer Corps. And although aerial reconnaissance reported that only one prepared defensive line remained, behind that line waited at least a tank corps and a dozen rifle divisions—enough to make the few map miles between III Panzer Corps and Prokhorovka a very long distance indeed on the ground.

  Erhard Raus, the clearest military thinker in Kempf’s command, summarized the dilemma in postwar retrospect. Given a successful breakthrough, a drive north needed the full armored strength of III Panzer Corps. That in turn would be possible only if the Russian forces remaining in the Donets Basin could be destroyed or thrown back. Both operations must be executed simultaneously. Since Citadel’s beginning, however, Kempf had been shifting inadequate resources from place to place for at best limited successes. The Fourth Panzer Army had no help to offer. Even if the chimeric reinforcement of XXIV Panzer Corps arrived, Kempf argued it would be too little and too late.

  Hoth called Kempf a pessimist. Manstein decided to see for himself and went to Breith’s headquarters. The discussion’s exact balance between arm-twisting and consensus is unclear. Its outcome had Manstein ordering Breith to concentrate two of his panzer divisions, break through the Russian defenses at all costs, and give the SS Panzer Corps maneuvering room by driving the Sixty-ninth Army eastward. And Breith reciprocated with something like good news. The day before, Kempf and Breith had returned 7th Panzer Division’s battle group to its parent division. The 7th Panzer then took over part of 6th Panzer’s sector, enabling the latter division to concentrate its resources for a breakthrough effort. The 6th Panzer’s commander, Brigadier General Walther von Hünersdorff, was openly anti-Nazi, but he was skilled and promising enough to have been promoted in spite of that. His division had forty tanks left on the morning of July 11. The 503rd Panzer Battalion, attached to his division, was operating as a unit for the first time in Citadel. Its indefatigable mechanics added nineteen Tigers—a number affirming the design’s fundamental survivability.

  The potential effect of what might seem a small force was enhanced because the Sixty-ninth Army had no armor at all and limited reserves. Its mission was unchanged: Keep the Germans from crossing the Donets and breaking out to the north. Breith’s orders were for the 6th Panzer Division, in the center of his line, to attack north toward Miasoedovo. The 19th Panzer, on the left, and the 7th, on its right, would support the 6th—with the 19th having the secondary mission of forcing its own bridgeheads across the Donets.

  Covering the panzers’ flanks in turn were two of Citadel’s forgotten divisions: 168th Infantry on the far left, 198th on the far right. Both had been indispensable since July 5. Their horse-drawn artillery pieces and locally acquired supply wagons looked Napoleonic among Breith’s tanks and half-tracks. But in blocking counterattacks, supporting the panzers, and frequently taking the main role in the local attacks that had brought Army Detachment Kempf as far as it had come, the Landser had fought themselves to near exhaustion: immer bereit, still zu verbluten im feldgrauen Kleid, “always ready to bleed out quietly in field gray.”

  The strophe is evocative and accurate despite its right-wing provenance. It applies no less to the Russian riflemen across the battle line—specifically to the men of the 35th Guards Rifle Corps on the morning of July 11. The panzer corps artillery began its barrage around 2:00 A.M., followed by massed attacks from VIII Air Corps’s Heinkel 111s. Three hours later, the ground attack began. The 19th Panzer, operating with all of its combat battalions for the first time in days, ran onto a hill so well fortified that the trenches were invisible at five yards. The German report also took pains to note that most of the defenders were “Asians,” whose primitive level of development was said to have made them psychologically immune to the shock of Stukas and panzers. Attempts to bypass this strongpoint were frustrated by marshy terrain and minefields. Not until around 3:30 P.M. did elements of the 19th break through. Their tanks and panzer grenadiers, with Stuka support, reached the villages of Kisilevo and Kholokovo and beyond.

  The 19th Panzer Division’s daylong grapple attracted enough Soviet attention for the 6th Panzer’s armored battle group to shoulder its way forward and through the defenses in its sector. Again the Tigers made the difference. They led the way and they got the jump, breaking through the remaining antitank positions, gaining ground steadily. The Tigers continued north, toward the first objective of Olkhovatka, supported by whatever the neighboring 7th Panzer Division could provide on the fly.

  Both halves of the maneuver succeed. The 35th Guards Rifle Corps cracked, then gave ground. The 6th Panzer’s tanks were able to spot and bypass a minefield, then keep going. The 7th Panzer could muster only eleven tanks, but they covered a mile and a half before encountering serious resistance. The Tigers of the 503rd rolled into Olkhovatka virtually unopposed, and the advance continued for another mile and a half before encountering another series of strongpoints. With Russian antitank guns on the flanks and Russian infantrymen flinging Molotov cocktails to the front, a Tiger commander saw only one solution: “Stand on it!” This particular tank made it through at top speed. The battle group, however, was checked by nightfall, and by resistance that defied the fighting power of the panzer grenadiers who managed to remain with or catch up to the armor. But the 6th Panzer had reached the village of Kazache, the center of
the Sixty-ninth Army’s second defensive line and a total gain of seven and a half miles. A Soviet division commander decided to “relocate” his headquarters to the rear, leaving subordinates to their own devices on a (literally) dark and stormy night.

  It was a good day’s work: the best for III Panzer Corps since Citadel’s inception. It was not a breakthrough in the style of 1940 and 1941. But it was a break-in, and even a short July night to rearm, repair, and rest boded well tactically for July 12. The commanding general of Army Group South concurred. As noted earlier, Erich von Manstein preferred scientific games as recreation. Neither blackjack nor roulette was likely to have been high on his list of ways to lose money. But as he evaluated the day’s reports, Manstein saw not exactly a gamble, but an opportunity that hinged on Breith.

  For July 12, III Panzer Corps was to continue its main axis of advance north. As the range closed, Breith was to swing his left wing west and cooperate with the southern, or right, wing of II SS Panzer Corps in finishing off the Sixty-ninth Army. With Hoth’s unequivocal approval, Manstein also ordered XLVIII and II SS Panzer Corps to, respectively, establish bridgeheads across the Psel and capture Prokhorovka. The next step would be to reverse fronts and deal with the enemy remaining between Kempf and Hausser, like a large boil in the right armpit. According to Hoth’s chief of staff, Manstein originally proposed detaching a panzer division and an infantry division for the purpose. Hoth argued that this was insufficient—if Citadel had proven anything, it was that no serious operation could succeed if mounted on a shoestring. He made a powerful case for using the entire SS Panzer Corps.

  With or without Hoth’s proposed addenda, Manstein’s plan invited careful consideration as being unacceptably risky. German air and ground intelligence had provided a reasonable sense of what Stavka was concentrating around the salient the Fourth Panzer Army had created. Mounting a major offensive into the teeth of an even more massive Soviet attack was something approaching a dice roll. But the panzers’ strengths were mobility and flexibility. The best chance of defeating the Red Army was to confuse it, to turn it back on itself. An encounter battle promised far more in that context than holding in place.

  That again brought the focus back to III Panzer Corps. If Breith broke through to the north in force on July 12, even if Prokhorovka remained out of reach, it might begin the process of throwing the Reds off balance for the first time in this misbegotten operation. Across the front, the Sixty-ninth Army had managed to put together a defense line that still held the panzer spearheads fifteen to twenty miles away from Prokhorovka. But its reserves were nearly exhausted. For practical purposes, it had no AFVs at all. The Sixty-ninth’s commanding general was sufficiently dubious about his prospects that late on July 11 he appealed to Vatutin for help.

  Stalin was looking over the shoulders of both generals, demanding action. The III Panzer Corps proposed to give Lieutenant General Vasily Kriuchenkin even more to worry about on July 12. The action began when Breith ordered 6th Panzer Division, on the corps’s left and the closest to Prokhorovka, to reach the Donets at Rshavets and establish a bridgehead, enabling 19th and 7th Panzer to cross and mount a full-strength drive toward the Waffen SS. The initial plan was for a full-scale daylight attack. The commander of the 11th Panzer Regiment and the CO of its panzer battalion developed an alternate: a high-risk, high-gain nighttime operation that might have an even more decisive morale effect than another direct attack.

  Shortly before midnight, the battle group moved out: two weak tank companies, a panzer grenadier battalion, truck-mounted so as—hopefully—to be less conspicuous, and the Tigers, bringing up the rear in a situation where speed and surprise were essential. On point were two captured T-34s, manned by German crews and clearly marked with the German Balkenkreuz, the Greek cross, replacing the Red star. In passing, given the Wehrmacht’s nearly systematic abuse of deception tactics, this one was an accepted ruse de guerre, legitimated since eighteenth-century navies incorporated one another’s captured ships and captains had to pay attention to colors flown rather than hull and rigging designs.

  Assisted by a moonless night, the German column advanced for three hours, encountering only a Russian truck convoy, which it allowed to proceed on its way. Then the T-34 leading the main body broke down in the middle of the road! Still no Soviet reaction, even from bystanders. One can almost hear tired men muttering, “Let the damn tankisty do their own work!” as German crewmen climbed out and reboarded the remaining vehicles. Around 4:00 A.M., the vanguard, a platoon’s worth of Panzer IVs led by the remaining T-34, entered Rshavets and passed through the town unchallenged. Whispering, the commander reported around two dozen T-34s in his immediate vicinity. The officer in charge of the strike force, the tank battalion’s commander, was a reservist: Major Dr. Franz Bäke. Most Wehrmacht officers with doctorates held them in some branch of the humanities. Bäke was a practicing dentist in peacetime. In war, he had built a reputation as aggressive, successful, and lucky. He took a tank company forward, setting a fast enough pace that no Soviet straggler sought to hitch a ride. Then the Germans met a column of T-34s going in the opposite direction. The Russians were tired and felt safe in their own rear zone. When a voice from the lead German tank said in Russian, “Keep right,” the Soviet column obligingly made place, until someone noticed that they were making way for tanks with German markings. The resulting melee featured grenades, submachine guns, and hand-delivered explosive charges as well as point-blank gunfire. When the fighting died down, about a dozen Russian tanks had been knocked out, several of them by Bäke and one of his crewmen running from tank to tank and placing hollow-charge bombs by hand.

  The French colonial army had a word, baraka. Its original meaning was religious and referred to spiritual force. Its militarized version meant “fighting man’s luck,” and surely the baraka had been with 6th Panzer’s pencil thrust into the Soviet rear. But Bellona, the goddess of war, is no one’s trull. Bäke’s lead tanks were within three hundred yards of the bridge when a series of explosions announced its destruction. The Germans had driven past the turn leading to it. Check—but not yet mate. At around 6:00 A.M., 6th Panzer Division’s battle group was twelve miles from Prokhorovka, with a good road ahead. The column’s panzer grenadiers threw a footbridge across the Donets, then expanded it to a bridgehead. Taken by surprise, Russian tanks and infantry fell back in small groups instead of counterattacking. A division staff reported being encircled by three hundred tanks. A division commander declared himself so chivied about by other German tanks that he had lost control of his formation for fourteen hours. And Sixty-ninth Army HQ repeated its call to Voronezh Front for help.

  Still, the situation was not all that promising for the Germans. But more had been made from less since Barbarossa’s first days. Leading from the front, Hünersdorff and his command group set up shop on the Donets’s north bank to expedite and coordinate the bridgehead’s expansion. About the same time, the Luftwaffe began softening-up raids on the Soviet positions ahead. A group of Heinkel 111s coming in at low altitude spotted a number of tanks and vehicles in the open: the kind of target increasingly difficult to find as Citadel progressed. They mistook the Germans for Russians and took out 6th Panzer’s forward headquarters. Fifty men were killed or wounded, including Hünersdorff himself and two regimental commanders. The Heinkels had guided in on a clearly visible T-34 in the midst of the massed vehicles! Friendly fire and combat karma with a vengeance. The subsequent investigation declared that all precautions had been taken and no one should be held responsible.

  Though local counterattacks rendered control of Rshavezh uncertain until around 9:30 A.M., by 10:00 A.M. the village was in German hands and they were reinforcing the bridgehead. The Tigers’ weight still kept them on the river’s far side, but by 11:15 the Germans were making clear progress. Had those hundred tanks seen by Vatutin’s airmen actually been available, the Russian situation would have been grim. The crucial question now became, “Where was everybody else?” The 19t
h Panzer Division had been expected to advance up the river’s bank, through Kiritsevo, and link up with 6th Panzer sometime after nightfall. That proved easier ordered than accomplished. Not until 2:15 P.M. did 19th Panzer’s advance guards reach the 6th’s positions. Other elements of the division closed on the village of Shchplokovo with the intention of forcing another crossing of the Donets. But the Sixty-ninth Army’s riflemen, eventually reinforced by 5th Guards Mechanized Corps, held, counterattacked, and counterattacked again. Around 11:00 P.M., a panzer grenadier element finally crossed the Donets in boats. Shortly afterward, pioneers completed a bridge heavy enough to carry Mark IVs to the far bank.

  Bäke, now in command of the 11th Panzer Regiment, was nevertheless ordered to attack with everything the Germans could bring across the Donets. The set time was 6:00 P.M.: the forces were far too little to make headway; the hour was far too late to do the SS any immediate good. In the end, Bäke’s attack was canceled. His battle group was ordered to reinforce its parent division while 19th Panzer took over the bridgehead on which so much hope had been placed. For III Panzer Corps, tomorrow would have to be another day. That declarative sentence reflects the fact that 1943 was not 1941. What the Germans had done in the morning would have been enough to create an exploitable breakthrough in 1941. What Vatutin and Rotmistrov did during the rest of the day showed that the tactical game was now even.