From Vatutin’s perspective, Voronezh Front had to deal not only with the German bridgehead at Rshavezh, but with the unexpectedly successful advance of the 168th Infantry Division. Disregarded by the Russians as Kempf’s left-flank security force, it fought its way to the Donets, took more than two hundred prisoners, and was working to force a river crossing with its own resources. Germans across rivers, in whatever strength, was a bad omen. Specifically, Breith’s panzer battle groups had shown a high standard of mobility, repeatedly turning up unexpectedly where they had no business being. And as the Sixty-ninth Army began shuffling its forces one more time to cope with the morning’s developments, the continuous line of defense in their sector facing Army Detachment Kempf grew even more ragged.
At 1:15 A.M. on July 12, Stalin, increasingly concerned about what seemed an unstoppable German advance, issued orders to Steppe Front to concentrate a rifle army and two mechanized corps for dispatch to the threatened southeast sector of the Kursk salient. The deadline, however, was the end of July 13. That left Vatutin to restore the immediate situation with his own resources. The Sixty-ninth Army had taken a predictable initiative by ordering its counterintelligence department—a uniformed branch of SMERSH (the Russian acronym for “Death to Spies”)—to prevent further abandonment of the battlefield. By 4:00 P.M. on July 13, the responsible senior officer reported 2,842 officers and men “detained” and the mass retreat stopped. Otherwise, the front commander was playing with an empty pocket. Every available formation of any useful size was committed to the defense or the counterattack. Russian air intelligence tended to count armored half-tracks in with the panzers—a logical action given the absence of such vehicles in the Red Army at the time. As a result, reports indicated about two hundred tanks in the break-in zone. Rotmistrov calculated twice as many.
Perhaps that was why he cooperated so thoroughly with Vatutin’s completely unexpected order at 5:00 A.M. on July 12 to dispatch a strong force to the Rshavezh area. Rotmistrov instructed his deputy, Major General K. G. Trufanov, to assemble the 2nd Guards Tank Corps, two mechanized brigades from 5th Guards Mechanized Corps, and supporting units, turn south, and destroy the enemy in the area of Rshavezh. Trufanov was also to report his progress every two hours. It was a substantial downsizing of the Fifth Guards Tank Army’s main assault force. But having three panzer divisions emerge on an open flank while frontally engaged with the Waffen SS was an even bleaker prospect.
Trufanov’s fire brigade arrived in increments, reaching its concentration areas by 2:15 P.M.: 160 tanks, each of them a welcome sight to the men of Sixty-ninth Army and their commander. Trufanov did not have a headquarters; the two subordinate formations, 5th Guards Mechanized and 2nd Guards Tank, took charge of whatever units they found in their geographic zones—a quasi–battle group system that diffused effort and transformed an intended large-scale counterattack into hole-plugging and sector-level ripostes.
That is the hindsight version, formed by consulting orders, reports, and maps, with as many hours to evaluate decisions as commanders had minutes to make them. The 11th Mechanized Brigade went in around noon against 19th Panzer. Its chief political officer later reported the brigade was thrown in without intelligence information, without artillery preparation, and on an untenable defense line. The results included failure of air-ground cooperation, poor liaison with neighboring units, and haphazard exercise of command.
Fighting in this sector was fierce from the beginning, and the defenders were left largely to their own devices. Companies and battalions—what remained of them—abandoned positions without orders even in the absence of German pressure. One battalion commander led his unit away from the front until the rout was stopped by the division chief of staff, around Alexandrovka. Russian tanks opened fire on one another while Shturmoviks shot up the positions of the rifle division the tanks were supposed to be supporting. In the same sector, a tank regiment’s ordered withdrawal (ordered at least according to the official report) drew groups of infantry with it. Antitank guns mistook the result for a German breakthrough and were barely prevented from opening fire on the whole mass. The commander of the 81st Guards Rifle Division ordered his regimental commanders to “introduce the strictest discipline” and “implement Order No. 227.”
Order No. 227, mentioned earlier in the text, was Stalin’s “not a step back” directive of July 28, 1942, forbidding any commander to retreat without orders and allowing the summary execution of “panic-mongers and cowards” by specially organized “blocking detachments.” That aspect of the order had been unofficially dropped a few months later. But on July 12, the Sixty-ninth Army’s SMERSH detachment improvised seven of them. But if the Soviet defenses were shaken, the front never cracked. The 19th Panzer Division was still fighting its way through its immediate opponents at day’s end.
Voronezh Front was staging no celebrations. On the night of July 12, Vasilevsky informed Stalin that the threat of a breakthrough from the south was real and that he was doing everything possible to reinforce the sector with the rest of 5th Guards Mechanized Corps and four additional antitank regiments. Nevertheless, the Soviets had stabilized their positions without resorting to large-scale summary courts and ad hoc executions. The Germans were unable to convert their advance into a breakthrough.
One might call this an and/or/both proposition. The fighting in this sector on July 12 has been relatively neglected, even in detailed accounts of the battle. Usually the Germans are given credit for their gains, with a deduction of varying size for falling short of the objective. In fact, the experience of Breith’s corps reflects the intersection of two performance curves. The Russians, both the original defenders and Rotmistrov’s reinforcements, were learning how to respond to emergencies on the spot and not resort to the large-scale retreats and advances that had highlighted their tactics as late as the aftermath of Stalingrad. For their part, the Germans were showing the effects of wear, tear, and grit in the machinery. Here, as elsewhere in Manstein’s sector, it was not just a matter of too few tanks at the sharp end. Too many veteran crewmen, too many experienced company officers, were gone. Too many of the replacements were learning the nuances of their crafts on the job, against an enemy whose tuition rates were increasing. And although records, memoirs, and memories combine to deny it, the strain of combat seems to have begun eroding not so much courage as judgment: the fingertip feel, the situational awareness, central to the German approach to war. Opportunities, discovered or created, were not being developed with the speed and flair of earlier months, to say nothing of years. That required an obliging enemy—and the Red Army was not all that obliging.
II
Turning to the opposite flank, Voronezh Front had spent most of July 11 providing the muscle for the straight right-hand punch of its intended counterattack. The orders were delivered at various times during the afternoon and evening of July 11. According to First Tank Army commander Mikhail Katukov, Vatutin on July 10 said he was not expecting much: a kilometer or two of ground, and keeping the Germans in the sector from reinforcing Prokhorovka. But Katukov’s orders were more optimistic—or so it seemed. He told his corps commanders that the objective was a deeper penetration. After all, men with limited objectives could not be expected to fight with the determination of those set to break through the full depth of the enemy defenses. Motivational psychology Red Army–style, circa 1943.
The revised plan assigned 3rd Mechanized and 31st Tank Corps, reinforced by two rifle divisions, to hold their positions east of the Oboyan road, taking the offensive only when the Germans gave way to the main attack of 5th Guards Tank and 10th Tank Corps against Grossdeutschland and 3rd Panzer at 8:30 A.M. Katukov was not acting entirely on his own initiative. Intelligence reports had revealed both XLVIII Panzer Corps’s tactical reshuffling and the movement of two infantry divisions from LII Corps to cover the flank positions now occupied by 3rd Panzer Division. From a Russian perspective, the developing German deployment looked like a smaller version of the SS salient at Prokhorovka. A
break-in there was worth a try, especially given the expectations placed on Rotmistrov’s attack. And the best opportunity was while the Germans were regrouping, settling into new positions, and reconnoitering potential routes of advance.
Grossdeutschland’s sideways shuffle went as according to plan as anything ever did on the Russian front: artillery and antitank units moving out first, with the reconnaissance battalion and a panzer grenadier regiment waiting for 3rd Panzer to shift into place. But the German tankers had taken heavy casualties the day before, and the route of advance was thick with mines, German and Russian, many of them randomly sown. By 5:00 P.M., the Russians had advanced nearly ten miles in 3rd Panzer’s sector and come close to throwing 332nd Infantry Division into the Psel River. A panzer grenadier battalion and the division’s antitank gunners did blunt the Soviet drive, and 3rd Panzer was even able to mount a counterattack as the day ended; but when losses were tallied, 3rd Panzer’s operating tank strength had been reduced by the evening of July 12 to around twenty. Not only could the division offer Grossdeutschland no help, it would require support against what seemed a Soviet attack with the potential power to split XLVIII Panzer Corps in half.
That the German front held owed a fair amount to the delay of 19th Tank Corps, on 5th Guards’s left, in going forward. With more than 120 AFVs, it had the muscle to give First Tank Army the initiative. But by Katukov’s account, the corps commander failed both to deploy his units appropriately and to clarify orders that had been previously explained in detail. On the other hand, those orders amounted to little more than “drive on and keep going”—toward objectives ten or twelve miles away. Perhaps the corps commander considered his assignment a mission impossible and intentionally fudged the preparations. Perhaps his performance was affected by the wounds he had suffered a few days earlier. Perhaps Katukov was looking for a scapegoat. Nevertheless, once the Russian attack did go in, Grossdeutschland, with no help in any form arriving from the west, had more than it could handle in its sector despite the command confusion that initially slowed the Russian attack. Rocket-firing Shturmoviks of the 291st Ground Attack Division joined in. Without air cover of their own, first the reconnaissance battalion and then the panzer grenadiers were “temporarily compelled … to withdraw.”
Anodyne officialese obscures the hand-to-hand fighting that resulted in the annihilation of an entire Grossdeutschland company and impelled a battalion commander to ignore two wounds and lead the counterattack that retook his lost forward positions. By some German accounts, the Russians were on the verge of breaking into Grossdeutschland’s rear areas—until once again German armor saved the situation. This time it was Grossdeutschland’s organic tanks that did the job in a counterattack as well timed as it was well executed. The Tigers made a particular impression on already tired Soviet gunners and riflemen. All but the latest design of 76 mm armor-piercing rounds bounced off side and frontal armor alike. Lighter antitank guns did no more than dent the thick steel even at close range. However, Grossdeutschland’s hard-hammered infantry were unable to do more than retake some of their original positions—and that as much through local Soviet withdrawals as by counterattacks on any scale.
At around 4:00 P.M., First Tank Army essentially shifted to a holding action across its sector—a decision encouraged by 11th Panzer’s successful attack on its left-flank rifle division. The 11th Panzer remained a bone in the throat of the Russian offensive. The panzer grenadier companies were down to two or three dozen exhausted men, and the attacks and counterattacks had taken a disproportionate toll of junior leaders and their potential successors. But what the 11th had left proved enough—just enough. When the 5th Guards Tank Corps’s commanding officer reported that he could no longer advance, Katukov ordered him to halt in place and hold his present lines.
Analysis and recriminations indicate that the Rusians were significantly disappointed with the results of July 12 in the Oboyan sector. Vatutin and his staff perhaps had overestimated Voronezh Front’s capacity to shift from to-the-last-man defense to flexible offense in a matter of hours. If, however, personal responsibility is to be assessed, it is reasonable to describe Katukov as more cobbler than blacksmith. He could stitch and mend; his gifts did not extend to swinging the nine-pound hammer of a mass armored assault. It should also be noted that the First Tank Army had borne the brunt of the German northern drive for a week. Staff and line, officers and men, including the commanding general, had fallen into a tactical routine without time to shift mentalities to another approach. Tank and mechanized brigades had been shuffled and borrowed so often to meet emergencies that not merely chains of command but command relationships had been disrupted. And in the Red Army, obeying orders from the wrong general could be as professionally and personally fatal as obeying orders from the right general. A reasonable conclusion is that the front command and the army commander expected their subordinates to demonstrate German-style flexibility and initiative. That time would approach—but it was months and miles, and many dead bodies and burned-out tanks, ahead.
Across the fighting line, at the end of the day prospects for an immediate advance on Oboyan were as close to zero as XLVIII Panzer Corps’s staff could determine. Grossdeutschland, with the drive’s key role, was already shifting to a defensive posture, concentrating its by now extended panzer grenadiers and grouping its tanks behind the grenadiers’ as a sector counterattack force. Around 4:00 P.M., Manstein appeared at corps headquarters. In contrast with Model, Manstein rarely made impromptu visits to the front; they were not a usual part of his command style. His presence indicated a corresponding concern. He did not, however, challenge Knobelsdorff’s eventual orders for July 13–14. The 11th Panzer would hold in place and try to restore contact with Totenkopf. Grossdeutschland was to send its armor group—what remained of it—to reinforce 3rd Panzer, with the combined force then attacking not north toward Oboyan, but west.
Hoth concurred but remarked that he had seen the need himself that morning. Knobelsdorff’s proposed strike was at right angles to the corps’s original axis. Its objective, the Rakovo–Kruglik road, lay in the middle of nowhere in particular. If it was reached, the most likely result would be to cut the Russians’ local supply lines and relieve local Russian pressure. Yet that relief had become vital to Knobelsdorff’s corps and to the Fourth Panzer Army. The corps’s left flank was hanging by a thread, making an advance farther northward out of the tactical question. The Oboyan sector had become a high-risk salient whose best hopes lay elsewhere in the southern sector. As on the Fourth Panzer Army’s right flank, the situation on the left can best be described as balanced—but on a knife’s edge.
III
The creation of that balance set the stage for Kursk’s defining event: the tank battle at Prokhorovka. All the elements of myth were at hand. Prokhorovka offered a head-on, stand-up grapple between the elite troops of the world’s best armies, on a three-mile front under conditions that left no room for fancy maneuvers or for air and artillery to make much difference. The drama is heightened by a familiar image of both sides attacking simultaneously—an encounter battle in the literal sense, suggesting predators in rut. Like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Prokhorovka offered an emotional turning point: afterward, nothing was ever the same. Afterward, the tide of war rolled only one way—toward Berlin. Marshal Konev called Kursk the swan song of the panzers. He was in a position to know. Prokhorovka had its Homer as well: Pavel Rotmistrov, whose dramatic narrative of a heroic attack that left dozens of Tigers ablaze was for years one of the centerpieces of Soviet commemoration and one of the few accounts from the Red Army’s front lines generally available in the West.
As for the Germans, they could and did content themselves with countermyths of fighting to the last man and the last tank. That was no trifling detail in the context of a Western culture of heroic defeat that celebrates last stands from Thermopylae to the Alamo, Dien Bien Phu, and beyond, no matter their provenance or matrix.
Throughout the night of
July 11–12, the frontline elements of Leibstandarte and Das Reich were kept awake by the ubiquitous single-engine “sewing machines” of the night witches and by the sound of Russian tank engines—a lot of tank engines. The question was, Were the Soviets concentrating for an offensive or redeploying elsewhere? Shortly after midnight, a panzer grenadier battalion, pushed forward as a reconnaissance force, provided the hint of an answer when it fell back before strong and alert resistance. The next step to confirmation came at dawn, when Shturmoviks materialized out of the fog. Coming in at treetop height, they shot up everything that crossed their gun sights, no matter its direction. Around the same time, Russian artillery opened fire—initially not a massive barrage, but ranging fire. That meant the real barrage might begin at any time, and as mortars joined, Leibstandarte began adjusting its frontline dispositions to meet what was becoming the certainty of a full-scale attack at daylight.
The attack Hoth and Hausser had ordered was contingent on Totenkopf’s advance on the SS left. Leibstandarte’s intention was to hold in place until the Death’s-Head tanks began applying pressure to the Russian flank. Now that mission appeared more complicated. Totenkopf’s forward artillery observers reported large tank formations approaching Leibstandarte’s left flank. Patrols and observers confirmed increasing ground activity to the division’s front, including exhaust fumes heavy enough to smell even at long range. Among the panzer grenadiers, the focus by then was not on attacking in any direction, but on preparing to hold out against what appeared to be the most powerful Soviet attack since Citadel began.
By the book, Leibstandarte had the ground in its favor. The terrain to its front was relatively open; the ravines crossing it randomly from end to end were shallow; the extensive fields of grain and sunflowers were not high enough to shelter any force larger than an infantry patrol. Antitank guns began moving cautiously forward into ambush positions. The Germans had the further advantage of being able to reverse some of the Russian defenses they had captured on July 11. In two world wars, a significant and overlooked difference between Germans and their British and American opponents was that the Landser did not object so strenuously to digging. And if reversed entrenchments were not as effective as the original version, the trenches and bunkers occupied by the SS, especially on Hill 252.2 in the center of their line, were nevertheless a significant improvement over a grave-sized foxhole scratched out with entrenching tools. Even the replacements were not so young and so green as to think, “Let ’em come!” But as extra grenades were brought to hand, as the MG 42s and their ammunition belts were rechecked, there was no sense that the cigarette lit during the intervals was the last one. Best not to think about it. Best to do one more equipment check and trust to “soldier’s luck.”
Armor and Blood Page 21