Armor and Blood

by Dennis E. Showalter

  The Soviet tanks nevertheless kept coming. As the ranges closed, their alternatives grew fewer. A Tiger’s real killing range began at around a thousand yards. But for a T-34, even damaging a Tiger at ranges much over eighty or a hundred yards required a steady aim and a lot of luck. And Bellona tends to bestow fortune on those who do not need it. Experienced Tiger drivers—the only kind left by July 12—had learned to halt at an angle, so even direct hits on the frontal armor were likely to glance off. When T-34s flamed, Tigers threw sparks.

  Desperate Russian tankers set nearly suicidal examples to reduce the odds. The most familiar, arguably Citadel’s defining incident, occurred when a T-34 was hit at near point-blank range and set on fire. The crewmen pulled the badly wounded commander to safety. Then the driver saw a Tiger approaching. He reentered the burning tank and set out to ram the German. Rotmistrov’s version of the story has the effort succeed, with the resulting fire and explosion destroying both vehicles. The German account is more detailed. The German crew was startled when the flaming T-34 started for them. The commander ordered an advance, to get clear of the smoke. The gunner fired—and the shell bounced off. The Russian kept coming and rammed the Tiger. As flames covered both tanks, the German suddenly backed up. At five yards’ distance, the T-34 exploded. The Tiger resumed its original position with little more than scratched paint and—presumably—five sets of shaken nerves.

  If the point of the story needs establishing, it is that even after a week of close-quarters, high-tech combat, courage was not a scarce commodity on either side. And though courage was no proof against 88 mm armor-piercing rounds, surviving tankers of the 170th had enough fighting spirit to enter the still-desperate melee on Hill 252.2. Their commander died there—according to Peiper, in hand-to-hand combat with an SS officer who killed the Russian with his own knife. It was not enough. Even when the battered Soviet remnants were finally ordered back, for the rest of a long afternoon, episodic Russian attacks continued. The overall result was to keep the exhausted Germans in the sector pinned firmly in place.

  The 25th Tank Brigade escaped the debacle at the antitank ditch, but ran full tilt into the 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment and, more important, Leibstandarte’s antitank battalion. Its lightly armored, open-topped, self-propelled vehicles were no direct match for a T-34. But their high-velocity three-inch guns were deadly firing from concealed positions. SS riflemen tackled the tanks directly, boarding them to grapple with the survivors of the “tank marines,” pry open hatches, and drop grenades inside fighting compartments. The regiment’s commander described seeing half-track drivers repeatedly attempting to ram T-34s with their lighter vehicles. “Everywhere,” recalled a German antitank gunner, “were the shells of burning tanks…. One hundred twenty tanks or more were supposed to have been in the attack…. Who counted?”

  It is easy enough to write repeatedly from the comfort of a book-lined study, facing no risk greater than a paper cut, about burning and exploding tanks. After the war, a veteran of the 10th Tank Corps in the Oboyan sector wrote:

  The T-34 has 3 100-liter fuel tanks on the right side, and an additional 100-gallon drum with motor oil on the left side. When an armor-piercing shell penetrates the side, fuel oil or motor oil spills into the tank and a cascade of sparks falls on the uniform and everything blazes up. God forbid a living being from ever having to witness a wounded, writhing person who is burning alive, or ever have to experience the same. That is why there exists among tankers a unique, unofficial measure of courage … the number of times you’ve been on fire inside a tank….”

  Twenty-six of the thirty-four T-34s that led this attack were destroyed. All of their supporting assault guns were lost, at least one of them in ramming a German AFV. The level of heroism was such that the number of decorations awarded was unusual in the context of a failure. And failure it was. The German line held. The attacks subsided and the fighting broke off, partly from mutual exhaustion and partly because on the Russian side nothing of consequence remained to commit. Rotmistrov’s attack had spent its force; Leibstandarte, too, was finished, at least temporarily, as an attack formation.

  In Das Reich’s sector, the relationship of myth and reality was closer. Perhaps stung by a strongly implied failure to pull its weight on July 11, division command proposed to break through in battalion strength on its left, then move its Panzergruppe through to roll up the Russians to its front. The panzer grenadiers initially made good progress, then ran headfirst into the attack of 2nd Guards Tank and 2nd Tank Corps. The Guardsmen were ordered to break through the German positions to their front, then swing south to cover the Fifth Guards Tank Army’s main attack and exploit as far as possible their own success. Instead, they ran into and overran the forward elements of a panzer grenadier battalion, broke into the parent regiment’s rear echelons, and were driven back after fierce street fighting in and around German-occupied villages.

  Early in the afternoon, the Russian second wave entered the scene as 2nd Tank Corps hit the SS positions. This was the weakest of Rotmistrov’s major formations. One of its brigades was down to eighty rifles and twenty tanks, half of them T-70s. Another counted forty men and fourteen tanks. Nevertheless, about thirty of the corps’s tanks broke through, only to meet Das Reich’s panzers, who, having long since given up any thought of an offensive, were backing up the main line of resistance. The Germans made particularly effective use of an improvised company of captured T-34s, whose familiar silhouettes meant far more to their opponents than the hastily applied German markings and paint jobs. The German crews had enough time to learn the T-34’s vulnerabilities from the inside and systematically went for flank shots and targeted the external fuel barrels. According to an official report, “In a short period of time all 50 tanks … were set ablaze.”

  During the afternoon, Das Reich’s sector was struck by violent rainstorms that turned the battleground into a morass, limiting the mobility of even the T-34s. The 2nd Guards Tank skidded and slipped back to its start lines, leaving dozens of wrecks behind and reporting that the Germans were hot on the corps’s heels. Das Reich’s headquarters in fact understood that the division was unable to do anything more than secure its own positions and see what its opposite numbers were able to do the next day. But as the Russians fell back in disorder, Das Reich’s panzer grenadier regiments pushed forward. Their local counterattacks were nothing like a serious attempt at a breakthrough or a flanking movement, but served to keep the Soviets well off balance as the day waned. Around 5:00 P.M., Rotmistrov arrived at 2nd Tank Corps headquarters and issued orders to renew the attack at 6:30. But a few hours later, Vatutin was informing Stalin that major reinforcements were urgently necessary to complete the destruction of the enemy. Das Reich was not the only headquarters playing for time as July 12 came to a water-soaked end.

  Events on Das Reich’s and Leibstandarte’s fronts were heavily contingent on Totenkopf’s performance. At dawn, Totenkopf’s advancing panzer group discovered that the Russian infantry to its front had been relieved by the Fifth Guards Army’s fresh 3rd Guards Rifle Corps: three divisions reinforced by extra guns, rocket launchers, and antitank guns. Its orders were to destroy the German bridgehead across the Psel. Each side’s plans were disrupted when the attacks got in each other’s way. Totenkopf’s panzer grenadiers were sufficiently hard pressed that tanks repeatedly had to be brought forward in support. Heavy Soviet artillery fire forced SS riflemen to seek protection under their own tanks—a last resort for an experienced infantryman. Then the Shturmoviks joined in—unopposed. The initial objectives of Totenkopf’s armor, however, remained: two hills high enough to command the surrounding terrain.

  Occupying that ground were two Guards rifle divisions. The 52nd, moving into its own assault positions, was taken by surprise when the SS appeared to the front. But the Guardsmen were a match and more for Totenkopf’s panzer grenadiers in both courage and tactical skill. According to a political commissar, their political spirit was also high. Positions changed h
ands so often that the exact course of events remains vague. The SS, with Stuka support as welcome as it was belated, made enough initial progress to generate hope for the long-delayed linkup with Leibstandarte. Then the armored battle group’s leading elements encountered more and more tanks from Rotmistrov’s 181st Brigade. German accounts describe spectacular explosions, huge fireballs—and enough losses of their own to instill caution by the time Hill 226.6 was firmly in German hands. The tanks and panzer grenadiers encountered a series of defensive positions, some prepared and others improvised, all bristling with antitank guns. Totenkopf’s tankers made a point of crushing trenches and foxholes, burying defenders alive under their treads. But not until 3:00 P.M. did the Germans begin breaking Soviet defenses beyond immediate restoration.

  Not all the comrades were valiant. Some of the 52nd’s regiment and battalion commanders reported sick, straggled to the rear, or just ran away. When the panzers reached Hill 236.7, elements of the 95th Guards Rifle Division also broke and scattered. But around 4:00 P.M., 33rd Corps ordered maximum protective fire: every gun and rocket launcher that could come to bear was to target Totenkopf’s tanks, even if they were in Russian positions. The barrage removed the impetus from an SS attack already eroded by a defense stubborn enough in some positions to be suicidal.

  Small-scale advances nonetheless continued. As of 10:45 P.M., Totenkopf was comfortable reporting that its panzer group had reached the Karteschevka–Prokhorovka road—a day late and a large number of men and tanks short. On the map, only a few miles separated Totenkopf from the road leading into Voronezh Front’s rear zone. On the ground, Leibstandarte’s reconnaissance battalion had established fingertip contact but was itself too stretched out to be more than a trip wire with nothing behind it. In absolute terms, the day’s casualties had not been high—a few more than three hundred. But the losses were cumulative. By now, Totenkopf’s panzer grenadier companies were down to fifty men or fewer, so tired after days of close combat that the standard stimulants were having an opposite effect. The panzer regiment had lost almost half its tanks fighting its way out of the Psel bridgehead. Forty-five had been destroyed or damaged, including all the Tigers. The crews of the fifty-six remaining Mark IIIs and IVs were exhausted. Fuel and ammunition were low. Although only a few of the disabled tanks were permanently lost, the maintenance crews were on the far side of the Psel. Either bringing their men and vehicles forward or moving the tanks backward meant challenging higher priorities of food, gasoline, and ammunition in one direction, or evacuation of the wounded in the other. The bridges remained vulnerable to air attack and to the still-existing possibility of a surprise enemy breakthrough.

  Totenkopf’s original cadre came from the concentration camps. Its first commander had spent time in a mental hospital—not a usual step to high command even in the Third Reich. Not surprisingly, the division’s ethos was to get the job done at whatever cost; imagination was not a valued virtue. So when on the evening of July 12 Totenkopf expressed concern about the Soviet forces and the number of reinforcements that seemed to be arriving by the hour, when it began buttoning up in preparation for an even stronger attack on its still-small bridgehead, it was a clear signal that the SS Corps had been fought to a standstill—at least in the minds of those bearing the brunt of the day on the Soviet side and reading the decoded radio interceptions.

  IV

  Much—perhaps too much—has been made of the myths of Prokhorovka, which in good part still define the Battle of Kursk. The original, Soviet version has more than fifteen hundred tanks, half German and half Russian, grappling tread to tread in a three-mile-wide arena that at day’s end was strewn with over four hundred disabled or burning panzers, seventy of them Tigers. It was a fair price for what even Rotmistrov admitted were roughly equivalent Red Army losses.

  Back-of-the-envelope arithmetic based on long-available statistics tells another story. The SS divisions involved, Leibstandarte and Das Reich, had a combined total of around two hundred AFVs available on July 12. The reports for July 10–13 for Leibstandarte and Das Reich list three tanks as total losses. The commander of a Leibstandarte tank company noted only one for July 12, despite odds of ten to one. The best calculation of material losses has over three hundred Soviet armored vehicles destroyed. Most of their crews were blown up or incinerated. Rotmistrov’s tank corps listed more than seven thousand casualties. More—thirty-six hundred—were dead or missing than wounded: an unusual statistic even on the Russian front. Replacing such losses was only half the generals’ problem. Stalin made a point of requiring immediate phone reports on major operations. Neither Vasilevsky nor Rotmistrov would have dared to dissemble regarding the Fifth Guards Tank’s losses. Like God, the Vozhd was not mocked. Stalin, famous for describing a million deaths as a statistic, called Rotmistrov to account, demanding to know what had happened to his “magnificent tank army.” Loss of command, perhaps a court-martial, may have been threatened and was certainly implied. A one-on-one session with Stalin in November 1942 had left Rotmistrov shaking from the stress and with no desire for a repeat experience. His response, supported by Vasilevsky and Khrushchev, presented a highly embellished account that mollified the Vozhd and was memory-holed by a subsequent field performance solid enough to bring Rotmistrov assignment as deputy commander of Red Army armored and mechanized forces in November 1944. With face saved all around, Rotmistrov’s 1972 memoirs repeated the embellished story, giving it canonical public status while the Soviet Union endured.

  Stalin remained sufficiently disturbed to transfer Vasilevsky to the Southwestern Front and personally order Zhukov down from the Bryansk Front as a troubleshooter despite the imminent launch of a major offensive in that sector. Zhukov’s presence was not required. For the revisionist accounts describing Fifth Guards Tank Army’s Prokhorovka attack as a mistake, a defeat, a fiasco have obscured the situation on the other side of the line.

  On the evening of July 12, Manstein “thanked and praised” the SS divisions for their “outstanding success and exemplary conduct.” Reports of Soviet tank losses, and the firsthand accounts of what had happened to them, further reinforced Manstein’s belief that chances were good the Reds had been bled white. Breith’s corps was on the move. Manstein was so confident of further armored reinforcements, in the form of XXIV Panzer Corps, that at 9:10 P.M. on July 12, Hoth’s headquarters ordered II SS Panzer Corps to make room in its rear areas for the newcomers.

  The actual situation merited a more subdued mood. Hoth was edgy. Both of his leading corps had been hit hard across their fronts by Soviet tanks whose numbers far exceeded the original concern that had led Hoth to plan for the SS turn toward Prokhorovka in the first place. Nor had subsequent intelligence and reconnaissance reports prepared the Fourth Panzer Army’s command for tank corps and tank armies that seemed to materialize from the very forests and steppes. For XLVIII Panzer Corps to continue its offensive, the threat to its left, or western, flank must be removed. Neither the panzer army nor the army group had any reserves to send. Knobelsdorff would have to cope. And his coping mechanisms were limited. Among them, the corps’s three panzer divisions counted about a hundred tanks when the day’s fighting ended. It was reasonable to expect that number to increase by morning once the repair shops set to work. At best, however, the increase would be in the low double figures.

  The day’s personnel losses were not in themselves crippling. The SS counted around 200 dead, and missing presumed dead. But the numbers of wounded were far higher. Leibstandarte alone reported 321 wounded, most from the tank and rifle companies. And—to repeat Citadel’s universal threnody—nothing could replace the veterans, the platoon and company commanders, the tank commanders, and the noncommissioned officers who were increasingly sacrificing themselves by taking suicidal risks to compensate for declines in skill, energy, and morale in overtired, undermanned units.

  Mentally, emotionally, and physically, the SS tankers and the panzer grenadiers, the riflemen and the gunners, had been tried to
the limit by the nature and intensity of the fighting since July 5. A fair number of men still in the ranks were lightly wounded or mildly concussed, preferring to stay with their outfits than chance an overworked medical evacuation system. The combination of humid heat and torrential rain took its toll as well. Thirst to the point of dehydration was a special problem for the tankers. Food was if and when, with anything hot, even coffee, a welcome anomaly. The universal constant, however, was lack of sleep. When darkness ended the fighting, the digging and carrying began. When these tasks were concluded, finding a dry spot for anyone not a vehicle crewman was pure serendipity. Harassment from the air was a constant. Daylight began around 4:00 A.M. So did the next cycle of stress. A Tiger crewman described diarrhea so severe that he relieved himself outside the tank regardless of the situation—“nothing mattered to me any more.” By Citadel’s end, his weight had dropped below 110 pounds.

  It belabors the obvious to note that things were no better on the Russian side of the line. But what in 1941 was an already toxic combination of ideological racism and cultural arrogance in the German military was two years later becoming a survival mechanism. Given the overwhelming Russian material advantage, soldierly superiority and warrior spirit were mutating into survival mechanisms. Anything—anything at all—that challenged those defense mechanisms was a harbinger of collective disaster and individual death sentences. For the Germans at Kursk’s sharp end, denial was not the proverbial river in Egypt.

  On the whole and on balance, by the evening of July 12 Prokhorovka nevertheless seemed a vindication for the Fourth Panzer Army’s commander. He had foreseen since Citadel’s beginning the threat provided by Rotmistrov’s powerful tank army. He had planned for the contingency of its deployment almost exactly where it emerged. The two tank corps that were its offensive core had been crippled by the SS at a very acceptable price. Hoth considered breaking off the attack northwest and returning the SS Panzer Corps to its original axis of advance. Two panzer corps might be able to succeed in destroying the Russians in the Oboyan sector where one had not. But as closely and successfully as the SS appeared to be engaged, fighting it out in two sectors, even though they faced in two directions, was the better option. Fourth Panzer Army’s initial orders to Hausser for July 13 were delivered by phone at 6:35 P.M.: Continue the flanking operation from the Psel bridgehead. When Manstein called later in the evening, Hoth stated that he considered Totenkopf’s opposition to have been sufficiently weakened during the day’s fighting that solid prospects existed for a breakthrough against weakened Soviet forces.