Rotmistrov’s tankers were no less nervous. They fiddled with engines and breechblocks. They loaded extra ammunition and additional gasoline, accepting the corresponding increase in the risk of being torched by even a glancing hit. A T-34 halted was a T-34 destroyed; fuel was even more vital to survival than were shells. Crewmen waited “with dry mouths and wrenching stomachs.” A political officer described conducting discussions “on the subjects of the military oath, their knowledge of the Stavka directives, hidden sabotage, the approach of the hour of revenge…. Applications for Party membership were written up…. The political awareness and morale were high.”
Morale was probably better served by the hot meal provided to most of the forward units—at least for those able to eat it. Even more welcome was the vodka that accompanied the food—or replaced it. Everyone knew that the attack would have to cross open ground. It did not help to know that the T-34, designed to save internal space, was not easy to get out of in an emergency and that its poorly fitted turret hatches frequently jammed of their own accord. Nor was it useful to remember that tankers’ uniforms had no fire resistance. Germans regularly commented on the burning tanks that spawned human torches, when a pulled trigger meant a mercy shot and not a war crime.
Not all the Russian tankers at Kursk were men. How many died there remains unknown. But women had been folded into the Red Army’s tank units since before Stalingrad, being particularly valued as drivers. Their generally smaller size made it easier for them to fit into the T-34’s cramped forward compartment—and to get out as well. Others were commander/gunners. Aleksandra Samusenko was decorated for destroying three Tigers and eventually became Russia’s only woman tank battalion commander, killed in action during the Battle of Berlin.
Like so many other details of Kursk, exactly when and how what one survivor called “the devil’s waltz” began remains obscure. Rotmistrov arrived at the command post of 29th Tank Corps just before dawn and was told all was ready. At 5:15 A.M., he informed Vatutin that everything was in order. The full artillery preparation would start at 8:00 A.M. and the tanks would go in thirty minutes later. Leibstandarte’s records, on the other hand, describe a number of probing attacks around that time, but no serious Soviet movement. Probably the best evidence against either a preemptive or a simultaneous German attack was that the men of a Leibstandarte tank company in the target sector, exhausted by the previous day’s fighting, were literally caught in their blankets as the Russians completed their final deployment. The company commander banged his head and nearly stunned himself when he came crawling out from under his tank in response to a summons from his battalion commander. The order he received was vague: Make contact with the infantry and prepare to intervene if they needed support.
Since the company had only seven tanks that morning, “intervene” was all that it could do. Captain Rudolf von Ribbentrop had returned to his unit and was drinking coffee when he looked eastward and saw “a wall of purple smoke.” Purple was the color of the flares and shells that announced a tank attack. A motorcyclist from the panzer grenadiers appeared in a cloud of dust, pumping his fist in the signal to advance. When the panzers reached the crest of the high ground to their front, “what I saw left me speechless…. In front of me appeared fifteen, then thirty, then forty tanks. Finally there were too many of them to count, rollling toward us at high speed.”
Ribbentrop responded by taking his tanks downslope toward the Russians—not on a suicide run, but to keep from being silhouetted on the crest. An advance made sense as well, because the Soviet barrage was falling short of expectations and requirements—at least in hindsight. There was an ample number of gun tubes and rocket launchers somewhere in the combat zone. But regiments and batteries had moved into position in a helter-skelter fashion that led to a neglect of communications. Ammunition supplies were similarly distributed at random. The assault brigade commanders were too concerned about their own missions to coordinate systematically with the gunners supporting them. Target acquisition was also random: available sound and flash equipment failed to range the guns with anything like precision.
The result was a Russian artillery preparation closer in method and effect to 1915 than to 1943, let alone the barrages that would open the Red Army offensives of 1944–45. In German reports, the overall impression is that the SS infantry found the shelling disturbing, but not devastating—not the kind that drove men to the ground and silenced any reaction beyond a near mindless wanting it to stop. Nor was Hausser’s corps artillery quiescent. Its counter-battery fire grew increasingly effective, especially against Prokhorovka itself and the roads leading from it toward the Russian positions.
Rotmistrov was able to do no more than report to Vatutin that the artillery preparation was insufficient. Rotmistrov was well aware of something that later accounts and analyses tend to overlook: this was the Fifth Guards Tank Army’s first battle. It was newly organized—indeed, one might say thrown together—from units with limited experience working together. Ordinarily, the quality of individual senior officers would have been less a central issue. All they would have to do was get their tanks forward, never mind how, and pin the Germans down until succeeding waves could complete the breakthrough and exploitation. But Vatutin’s early-morning order to reinforce the front’s left flank against Breith had cost Rotmistrov three brigades from his already weak second echelon. Moreover, Rotmistrov had independently created his own flank guard from independent assault gun regiments—more striking power unavailable for the main attack.
When all the chopping and changing was done, Fifth Guards Tank Army’s deployable reserve was down to two brigades with fewer than a hundred tanks between them. Front intelligence credited the Germans in Rotmistrov’s sector with 250 to 300 tanks—but provided no detailed information of the possible number facing Rotmistrov’s attack. Although his plan was hardly unraveling, enough grit was finding its way into the machinery that Fifth Guards Tank Army’s first wave would have to do more than just bull its way forward until it was expended. One of its corps commanders, moreover, was new to that level. Rotmistrov considered the other of sufficiently dubious quality that he sent the army chief of staff to keep an eye on him. Communications between corps and brigades, and brigades and battalions, were so haphazard that the kind of control prescribed by Red Army doctrine and encouraged by experience would prove difficult to maintain.
The time for tinkering ended at 8:30 A.M., when the last Katyusha salvo was fired. The guns and launchers fell silent—the signal to attack. The code word for the attack went out over the army’s radio network: “Steel! Steel! Steel!” Repeated over and over, it released a spring by now tautened almost to the snapping point. Some of Rotmistrov’s tankisty might well have anticipated the order. Now the rest gunned their engines and raced at full throttle for the heights to their front. At 9:20 A.M., Vatutin notified Stalin that Voronezh Front had gone over to the offensive according to plan. But “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” and Voronezh Front’s was no exception. Rotmistrov declared that as Fifth Guards Tank went in, the Luftwaffe mounted a massive air attack. Hausser had requested air support against the armored threat suddenly looming in his sector. Brigadier General Paul Deichmann, commander of the 1st Air Division, had put everything he had into preparing to support Hausser’s originally projected attack. Ground crews had worked around the clock to restore planes to the order of battle. As a result, VIII Air Corps could reply immediately that two ground-attack groups were on their way.
That was just the beginning. Messerschmitts cleared the sky above and ahead of the attack planes. Wave after wave of medium bombers sought out artillery positions. Guided by a still-efficient ground control system, the Henschels of Schlachtgeschwader (Attack Wing) 1 and JG 51’s tank destroyer squadron would combine for almost 250 sorties on July 12. The twin-engined Henschels had repeatedly proven their worth against armor. Working with them were not only the conventional dive-bombers, but a new variant. The Ju-87G was a pure tank buster,
with additional armor and two 37 mm cannon in underwing pods. Even with their heavy earlier losses, the Stuka wings were manned largely by experts, and none was better than Hans-Ulrich Rudel. A veteran of more than a thousand combat sorties in the Ju-87, he was an early advocate of the specialized tank killer and now flew one of the first delivered.
Like many another pilot, Rudel could tell a war story to advantage: “The first flight flies behind me in the only cannon-carrying airplane…. In the first attack four tanks exploded under the hammer of my cannons; by the evening the total rises to twelve. We are all seized with a kind of passion for the chase….” The number and timing of Rudel’s kills remain controversial. But on that day and in that place, his claims are reasonable. The effect of the hits the Germans scored was enhanced by the extra fuel carried by the cautious Russian tank commanders. The best place to carry extra cans was on the rear deck, and machine-gun fire from above was usually enough to turn the vehicle into a torch as blazing gasoline came through the ventilators and reached engines already running hot.
The attacking planes had the further advantage of relatively limited aerial opposition. The Russians had neither the Germans’ sophisticated air-ground liaison system nor the Luftwaffe’s smoothly working maintenance capacities. Russian sortie times were appreciably longer, especially in high-stress situations. The Russian fighters made a showing poor enough that ground-force reports uniformly described air support so limited that the Germans were able to pick their targets without interference.
To the men beneath the wings, it seemed as if the entire Luftwaffe were overhead and seeking to kill them specifically. One rifleman spoke for many: “I did not see an aircraft diving toward us, but moments after a warning was yelled the ground in front of us levitated. It was like a giant had grabbed the battlefield and shaken it. I was knocked to the ground but was dragged to my feet and the platoon was told to look to its front and stand firm….” Even when they did not find a target, the bombs aided the German defenders by contributing to the clouds of dust thrown up by the charging tanks. At many points, the Russians were advancing almost blindly. The T-34 may have been the best battle tank of World War II, but its four-man crew required the commander also to act as the gunner. That made it nearly impossible for him to ride with the hatch open like his German counterpart, looking for obstacles, threats, and opportunities.
With losses about to mount, this is a good time to address the still-vexing question of numbers. History may not tolerate the subjunctive but is frequently forced to accept it. Just how many tanks ultimately confronted one another in the fields around Prokhorovka? The answer depends in part on how the battle zone is defined and in part on whose reports from what time periods are given most credence. The numbers also incorporate a mythic element. For Germans and Russians alike, the longer the odds, the greater becomes the heroism. But the Russians encounter a certain paradox. The Soviet Union’s success in World War II was and remains in good part defined in contexts of mass: the ability of the USSR and its people to submerge the Fascist monster in matériel and drown it in blood. The more tanks available, the more convincing is the meme.
Cutting to the chase against that background, the most recent and detailed analysis of the Russian forces puts 234 tanks in the first attack wave. The 181st Tank Brigade was on the right, next to the Psel River. The 170th was next, opposite the German positions around the October State Farm. The 31st and 32nd Tank Brigades of 29th Tank Corps aimed at Hill 252 from the right. The corps’s 25th Tank Brigade went forward on the army’s far right flank, south of the railroad. A senior officer riding with the 32nd described the scene:
Instantly the field, which had seemed barren of life, sprang to life. Crushing shrubs in their way and churning up the crops with their tracks, the tanks rushed forward, firing on the move…. The commanders understood the Tigers would take advantage of every halt, slightest hesitation in motion, or amount of indecision.
Initially, they faced only Ribbentrop’s company of Leibstandarte’s tank battalion. Tankers, like pilots, can tell stories to advantage. Ribbentrop’s might be titled “Alone at Prokhorovka.” For the first few minutes, at least, his seven Panzer IVs suffered an embarrassment of targets. Going for flank shots against relatively thin armor, each tank covering another, they were flaming Russians at under a hundred yards’ range. The only question was whether their ammunition or their luck would run out first. Ribbentrop’s own tank was bypassed in the Soviet charge. He found himself taking Russian tanks and infantry by surprise from the rear as he struggled to return to his starting point, ultimately winning a death duel with a T-34 at gun-barrel range.
Then, unexpectedly, the Russian momentum was broken—not from ground resistance or air strikes, but by an antitank ditch dug as part of the original Soviet defensive system. It was fifteen feet deep, and the speeding tanks drove right into it. There appears to have been no knowledge of its presence at any level of 29th Tank Corps. As a rule, such obstacles were clearly marked on relevant maps. But for the sake of security, map distribution was severely restricted, and Rotmistrov’s tankers were new to the sector. Ground reconnaissance might have changed that, but fighting was still going on during the night.
The result of this nighttime fog and friction was that next morning, drivers blinded by smoke, dust, and adrenaline raced headlong into a ditch designed to stop Tigers. Other tanks, swerving to avoid the ditch, collided with their neighbors. Gasoline flared and metal flew. Like World War I infantrymen facing barbed wire, tanks sought the few available crossing points as others piled into the melee. Ribbentrop described “an inferno of fire, smoke, burning T-34s, dead, and wounded Russians.” It speaks much for the ruggedness of the Russian tanks that so many were able to keep going after shocks and crashes that would have disabled any of their German counterparts. Command and control eroded, however, as senior officers, going forward to restore order and momentum, lost contact with front and rear alike. In Guards tank units, platoon commanders had radios, but they were fragile. Concussion from glancing hits often knocked them out of action. To the other two radioless tanks in a platoon, the rule was still to follow the leader. Limited visibility, large numbers, and German fire reduced practical maneuver options to two: forward or back.
By this time, Leibstandarte’s artillery regiment had come into action, laying a curtain of fire between the antitank ditch and the division’s frontline infantry. What started as a rush turned to a grind as the Soviet armor fought its way forward almost on an individual basis. The 31st Brigade lost around half its tanks in the mad rush to contact. But enough tanks reached their objectives to give the Germans some of Citadel’s fiercest fighting.
Most of the T-34s were carrying infantry—both the brigades’ organic “tank marines” and passengers shifted from the supporting rifle divisions. Other infantry on foot followed the tanks despite imminent risk of being run over by their own tanks or shot by their own men. But the Soviet riflemen, especially the 9th Guards Airborne, pressed forward, working their way past the junkpile at the antitank ditch. As the T-34s led the way to Hill 252.2, the panzer grenadiers used everything that came to hand: grenades, satchel charges, machine guns—the latter to hose off the tank-riding infantry before they could dismount and come to close quarters. On Hill 252.2, the Russians overran the headquarters of a Leibstandarte panzer grenadier battalion. Its commanding officer, the later notorious Jochen Peiper, personally took out a T-34 with a bundle of hand grenades—not the usual mission of a senior officer, even in the Waffen SS.
Ribbentrop’s tank and two others made it back to their own lines. German statistics credited Ribbentrop alone with fourteen kills in the brief melee. Another crew accounted for seven—five after the tank was disabled and firing in place. The exact numbers are debatable, but the Russians may well have done as much damage to themselves as did the half-dozen Mark IVs. But whether directly or indirectly, Ribbentrop’s tanks added significantly to the debacle at the antitank ditch.
Ribbentrop’s cr
ews also bought time for the other two companies of Leibstandarte’s tank battalion to deploy in support of their hard-pressed infantry. Arguably of more significance, Ribbentrop’s stand enabled the division’s Tiger company to take hull-down positions left of Hill 252.2, covering October State Farm. The 18th Tank Corps’s leading brigades had been tasked to break through Leibstandarte’s left flank, still wide open in the absence of Totenkopf’s panzers. Initially, four Tigers blocked their advance. One of them was commanded by an even more iconic SS hero than Ribbentrop. The legends enveloping Michael Wittmann obscure the facts that even at this early stage of his career, his comrades considered him unique for situational awareness and a cool head. That made him the right man in the right spot as a hundred Soviet tanks surged toward October State Farm. Beginning at ranges of eighteen hundred yards, the Tigers methodically picked off one T-34 after another. And there were too few Tigers to give the supporting Russian artillery a target.
Armor and Blood Page 22