It all makes for another fascinating and unprovable story among the many spawned in the Third Reich. What the records show is that by the night of July 13–14, Ninth Army’s 2nd Panzer Division and 8th Panzer from the high command’s reserve were moving into Rendulic’s sector. The 12th, 18th, and 20th Panzer were backing the sorely tried 5th Panzer against Bagramyan. That simple statement had a backstory. Emergency German redeployments on the Eastern Front might have become routine, but the process was anything but. The 12th Panzer had spent a week vainly seeking a breakthrough in the direction of Kursk. At 12:45 A.M. on July 12, it was ordered to the Orel sector. The order was a surprise, and its timing could not have been worse for all those trying to catch some sleep in the four hours before sunrise. But by 1:00 A.M., the 5th Panzer Grenadier Regiment and the reconnaissance battalion were on their way—eighty miles on dirt roads pounded to dust by weeks of military traffic. An hour later, the leading elements were taking position around Bolkhov, the previously anonymous spot on the map where army headquarters deemed their presence most necessary.
The tanks took longer. So did the rest of the division. The 12th Panzer moved ad hoc, by small improvised groups each going all out, each eroding as fuel tanks emptied, transmissions failed, and engines quit. To drive with windows and hatches open was to choke on the fine dust. To shut them was to broil in the heat. Vehicles were loaded and dispatched almost at random. Rest stops were equally random. A company commander took an unauthorized twenty-minute halt in Orel to check on the well-being of his aunt, a nurse in the local soldiers’ home. Roads were blocked by collisions and breakdowns. Tanks, each hulled in its own dust cloud, lost contact with one another. Less than half of 12th Panzer’s original starters made the finish line.
Model, predictably, lost his temper with the regiment’s commanding officer—and just as predictably gave him command of one of the battle groups the field marshal and his staff officers were throwing in as fast as they could be organized. By this time, everyone in Second Panzer Army’s rear areas was seeing Russians everywhere, and 12th Panzer was risking dismemberment as rear-echelon officers demanded tanks and men to restore their situations and calm their nerves.
The 5th Panzer Grenadier Regiment had been on the front line from the war’s first days. Poland, France, Barbarossa, Leningrad: its men had seen as much combat as any in the Wehrmacht. So when its veterans spoke of Bolkhov as “the threshold to battle hell,” it was more than retrospective melodrama. The regiment reached its assigned sector around midnight on July 12, and began advancing at 9:00 A.M. on July 13. At first all seemed routine: a steady advance against light opposition. Then suddenly “all hell broke loose.” Bryansk Front had sent in the Sixty-first Army and its supporting 20th Tank Corps. The strength, intensity, and duration of the supporting fire exceeded anything the regiment’s veterans had experienced: a “fire ball” that enveloped the entire front. Under the shelling, the panzer grenadiers’ advance slowed, then stopped, then inched forward again. First the Stukas, then twenty or so of the division’s tanks, sustained the momentum for a time, until dug-in tanks and camouflaged antitank guns drove the infantry first to ground, then to retreat.
As in the other sectors of the offensive, there was no breakthrough, but limiting the Soviet advance nevertheless took its toll on the defenders. Thus far, they had held—but for how long could another large-scale tactical stalemate be sustained? The reports and the recollections of the divisions that fought first in Ninth Army’s attack on Kursk and then in the Orel salient convey an unwilling, almost unconscious sense that this time there was something different about the Russians. It was not only the intensity of their artillery fire. It was the relative sophistication. It was not only the depth of the defensive positions or the determination of their defenders. It was a more general sense that the Red Army’s mass and will were being informed by improving tactical and operational sophistication—the levels of war making most likely to influence and frustrate German frontline formations directly, and in ways impossible to overlook.
II
If, to paraphrase Napoleon after Wagram, the animals were learning something, the consequences became clear in Kursk-Orel’s wider context. For the first time in World War II, Nazi Germany found itself in a strategic, as well as a grand strategic, cleft stick. On July 10, the British and Americans invaded Sicily. Even before that, the Reich’s position was shaky. The Mediterranean theater was geographically extensive and operationally complex. Success required combined arms: a synergy of land, sea, and air the Wehrmacht had been able to achieve only in the limited context of the Norwegian campaign. The destruction of the Axis forces in North Africa had confirmed Allied air and sea superiority in numbers and effectiveness. Even on land, growing partisan activity in the Balkans combined with the endless demands of the Russian theater had left German forces stretched to the limit.
Militarily and diplomatically, Italy was a broken reed. The government was requesting war material on an unprecedented scale, and it was obvious that the German war industry could not possibly fill the inventory. There was not much less question, in Berlin, at least, that Italy knew it. The all too logical conclusion was that Italy was looking for an excuse to withdraw from the war and from the alliance. Politically, Mussolini’s Fascist regime was straining at its seams. By 1943, casualty lists were growing longer, Allied bombing raids heavier, German contempt more obvious. Political and economic elites who had collaborated with Mussolini for advantage were developing projects for throwing the Duce under the wheels of the war he had bestowed on Italy. And the Germans were making their own plans to disarm and occupy Italy at the first sign of disaffection—perhaps earlier if expedient or convenient.
It is difficult to imagine a less promising situation for a Wehrmacht whose way of war was based on flexibility and maneuver. An Allied invasion was a foregone conclusion. But where? Hitler favored the Balkans as a likely site. Sardinia and Corsica were natural bases for a future invasion of southern France. Sicily was in the same position relative to Italy. The eventual outcome was a more or less even distribution of available forces in the three most obviously threatening sectors. It absorbed the bulk of Germany’s available mobile divisions, most of them formations destroyed in Tunisia and reconstituted with inexperienced men. The Italian troops deployed in forward sectors were seen as little more than filler. An already badly stretched German army would have to take over the Mediterranean theater’s entire tactical/operational spectrum.
Objectively, Hitler’s concept of “Fortress Europe” called for recalibration. Objectively, the Reich’s policy and strategy in Russia merited reconsideration. But the short-term crisis demanded immediate attention. On July 12, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Germany’s Oberbefehlshaber Süd (Commander in Chief South), weighed in. His reputation for optimism had earned him the nickname “Smiling Albert,” and it was a corresponding shock when he reported the situation as hopeless. Almost as disconcerting was Kesselring’s request for another mechanized division to help hold the ring in Sicily until an evacuation could be prepared and implemented. Hitler authorized sending the 29th Panzer Grenadiers—and that left the Reich’s panzer cupboard close to empty.
What all this meant for the Eastern Front was that for the first time since Barbarossa, it would be at best competing for resources and probably expected as well to provide men and machines for the emerging southern European front. At all levels, the Reich’s strategic can had been kicked down the road since December 1941. On July 10, 1943, it bounced into a rut.
Hitler’s decision on Citadel may well have been made by the time he summoned Kluge and Manstein to his East Prussian headquarters for a conference on July 13. These were the senior officers most immediately involved in relevant major operations. Manstein later grumbled that Hitler should have come forward to the army group headquarters rather than remove their commanders at such a crucial time. One might say that his complaint was a trope for the way the Reich and the Wehrmacht fought and lost World War II: by
microfocusing. Manstein was not encouraged when he arrived in the early morning and discovered that the conference would be held that evening. A swim in a nearby lake did little to cool him off. Nor did a chance meeting with Erwin Rommel, just recalled from Italy and being touted by the army’s rumor mill as the new commander in chief of the Eastern Front. Rommel described himself as taking a sunlamp cure: soaking up sun and faith. Manstein had taken his swim in the nude and was at a corresponding disadvantage conversing with someone fully dressed. When he asked Rommel if they would meet later under more formal circumstances, the reply was, “Of course, under the sun-ray lamp.”
The reference to Hitler, impossible to miss, was no substitute for clear thinking. Hitler’s presentation was on the apocalyptic side. Sicily, he declared, was finished. The next step would be larger-scale Allied landings in Italy or the Balkans. Meeting such a threat would require entire fresh armies, and the only possible source of such forces was the Kursk salient. Citadel must be canceled. Kluge agreed. Already there were three deep penetrations on the Second Panzer Army’s front. The Ninth Army had been stalemated even before the latest Russian attack, its losses already amounting to twenty thousand men. Its remaining resources were vitally necessary to keep not merely the Orel sector but Army Group Center’s entire front from collapsing. Citadel was finished. It could be neither continued nor resumed even should the Orel crisis be successfully resolved.
Manstein was either more sanguine, more cautious, or more contrary, depending upon one’s perspective. In Army Group South’s sector, he asserted, the battle was at its decisive point. To break it off would be to throw victory away. The field marshal cited the victories of July 12, gained against not only the forward Russian elements, but their operational reserve as well. He described the destruction of eighteen hundred Soviet tanks in a week. If the Ninth Army could hold in place the Russians on its front, Manstein was confident that he could break them in his sector once he was authorized to send his reserve, XXIV Panzer Corps, to reinforce Army Detachment Kempf. The SS and XLVIII Panzer Corps would then face north, cross the Psel, and take Oboyan on a two-corps front, then hit the Russians from behind.
What began as pincers was therefore to become a hammer and anvil. What happened afterward would depend on developments in the Orel salient. If the Ninth Army had no chance of resuming its original attack against Kursk, Manstein asserted, his proposed operation would at least give his army group time and space to disengage: “an easy respite.” But halfway measures, inflicting only partial damage, would mean a crisis in Army Group South’s operational area even greater than anything befalling Army Group Center.
Hitler agreed that the Fourth Panzer Army should continue its efforts to destroy the Russians facing it south of the Psel, but undertake only limited offensives north of the river. Army Detachment Kempf would cover these attacks, operating to the east. Hitler also finally released XXIV Panzer Corps to Manstein—but not for use at the field marshal’s discretion. Any successes against Soviet forces in Manstein’s sector were to be utilized only for breaking contact and withdrawing forces for use elsewhere. Operation Citadel was to be concluded forthwith. Manstein’s new mission was to prepare his army group to meet a major Russian offensive farther south, in the Donets Basin region, whose resources Hitler considered vital to the Reich’s war effort.
That prospect was far down Manstein’s list of concerns. The conference had reflected a significant shift in the opinions of the two field marshals involved. Kluge had been a leading advocate of Citadel in its planning stages. Now he made obvious his conviction that it was time to fold the hand. The Ninth Army had failed to break through, and the chances of its ever succeeding were receding almost by the hour. The Russian attack on the Orel salient, on the contrary, was succeeding all too well. Manstein, who had expressed consistent doubt when Kursk was on the drawing board, now spoke as though confident of victory, with XXIV Panzer Corps to be its instrument. Manstein had sought since the beginning to convince Hitler that Citadel must be an all-or-nothing proposition—no bets hedged, even if it meant putting the Donets Basin at risk. Kluge finished the job by reiterating that there was no way the Ninth Army could hope to resume the offensive at Kursk. Rather than even holding its present positions, the Ninth was going to have to retreat in the coming days.
This was a game Hitler had played like a champion since his political career began: bring opposing viewpoints together, let the proponents exhaust themselves, and hold back his decision until it was a welcome end to gridlock—and until the unhappiness of one party was balanced by the other party’s sense of having won the Führer to its point of view. The conference ended with Hitler repeating his decision to shut down Citadel, adding that he was acting as well in response to the escalating requirements of the Mediterranean theater.
By then it was too late in the day for either commander to return to his army group. They joined Rommel in the headquarters guesthouse for what Manstein’s aide described as a convivial evening, with enough good wine to loosen tongues and invite confidences. Kluge was the first to retire. His evening benediction was to declare that the end would be bad and to announce his willingness to serve under Manstein in an implied consequence of that catastrophe. Rommel lingered, and as the wine continued to circulate he also predicted “the whole house of cards” would collapse. Manstein replied that Hitler would resign the supreme command before that happened. Rommel said Hitler would never give up command. When Manstein stood up, preparing to exit, Rommel too declared himself “prepared to serve” under him.
Turning to the wider issues raised in the marshals’ discussion, the relationships of the participants to the German resistance are outside the scope of this work. It is nevertheless appropriate to contextualize this exchange with an increasing number of similar ones taking place in 1943. In the seventeenth century a Scottish general declared, “He either fears his fate too much / Or his deserts are small / That dares not put it to the touch / To win or lose it all.” The point is clear, though the Earl of Montrose was referring to love, not war. Suggestive as well is the fable of the mouse who fell into a barrel of whiskey and emerged licking his whiskers and slurring, “Bring on that [expletive deleted] cat!”
If Manstein was conscious of having been nominated to bell the beast, he gave no sign of it upon returning to his headquarters on July 13. Erich von Manstein is arguably the first great captain since Julius Caesar to define his own place in history through his writing. Lost Victories depicts the field marshal as the embodiment of the German way of war: master alike of strategic planning, operational command, and tactical innovation, a consummate professional who earned and kept the respect of his peers, the confidence of his subordinates, and the trust of his troops. Always thinking ahead, remarkably successful in most of his engagements, above all this Manstein is cool, rational. Not for him the emotions and enthusiasm of a Model or a Rommel. Not for him a visceral commitment to last stands and lost causes.
The real Manstein was proud to the point of hubris. He knew his worth to the last reichsmark. In the Crimea, at Stalingrad, and during the following months, he had developed in his own mind into the Reich’s master of lost causes: creating triumph when others saw only disaster. He attended and departed Hitler’s latest conference believing he could once again restore a desperate situation on his terms. His approach to evaluating the results of July 13 in the sector of Army Group South was a logical extension of that premise.
III
Across the battle line, Vatutin’s headquarters had been doing the same thing, albeit with less righteous certainty. Vatutin was all too aware that the SS had held their ground, and even gained ground, against the best and the most Voronezh Front could throw at them. He was equally aware that the Germans were digging in along their front, but that did not preclude further offensive operations. Late in the afternoon of July 12 he and Vasilevsky, still at Rotmistrov’s headquarters, compared notes. They agreed the best response was to maintain pressure. Vatutin’s orders for J
uly 13 tasked Voronezh Front with forestalling what he considered the most likely German initiatives. Specifically, the front’s armies were to prevent reinforcements from reaching Prokhorovka, to destroy the Psel bridgehead and the forward units of III Panzer Corps, and to continue attacking in the Oboyan sector. How all this was to be done given the losses of July 11–12 was not specified. Typical was Vatutin’s injunction to the commander of the Fifth Guards Army not to shift to the defensive prematurely. Measures were being taken to destroy the enemy; until they should be implemented, Fifth Guards’s pressure in its sector would yield a great deal. Therefore, act with more energy—and by implication, trust the system!
Vatutin also informed Stalin that no fewer than eleven German tank divisions had been concentrated in his sector. Despite that massive opposition, Voronezh Front had held its ground and inflicted heavy casualties. Encircling and destroying what remained would constitute a major defeat for the Hitlerites. That, however, would require a greater superiority of force than the front possessed. Vatutin requested reinforcements: a tank and a mechanized corps, plus a full corps of Shturmoviks. The request was countersigned by Nikita Khrushchev.
By all accounts, Stalin was not pleased. Stavka had been pouring resources into Voronezh Front since Citadel began. Rokossovsky had successfully made do with bits and pieces. The Vozhd responded by sending Zhukov by air and Vasilevsky by car to Vatutin’s headquarters. Konev, whose Steppe Front would be first in line to provide the requested support, was also present at the resulting council of war in the early morning of July 13. That was an unusual concentration of alpha personalities and high-profile talent out of Stalin’s direct reach, even at this stage of the war. The stated purpose of the meeting was to coordinate Voronezh and Steppe Fronts’ roles in future offensive operations. Unstated but implied was a parallel task: evaluating, and if necessary sorting out, the immediate situation. The result was a stated intention to mount a counteroffensive on the heels of the retreating enemy. The necessity was first to compel that retreat. Zhukov ordered energetic counterattacks to keep the Germans off balance. Neither he nor Vatutin, however, specified how the army and corps commanders were to implement the process. Unstated but clear enough was the general recognition that Voronezh Front, and the Fifth Guards Tank Army in particular, would need some time, at least a day or so, to regroup and refit.
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