The Second World War (91 page)

As dawn broke, Red Army aviation launched pre-emptive strikes against German airfields, but they were virtually bare of aircraft. The Luftwaffe had taken off even earlier and soon a mighty air battle began, to the advantage of the German pilots. With the command ‘Panzer march!’, the armoured spearheads moved forward at 05.00 hours. On the southern sector, Hoth’s ‘wedges’ consisted of Tigers and huge assault guns in the van, with the Panthers and Panzer IVs on the flanks and the infantry following behind. The Panthers, which had been rushed forward from production lines in Germany, soon proved mechanically unreliable, with many catching fire. Yet even though fewer than 200 Tigers were committed to Citadel out of a total of 2,700 tanks, they still represented a formidable battering ram.

German morale appears to have been high. ‘
I believe that this
time the Russians are going to get a very heavy beating,’ wrote a Fahnenjunker in a flak battalion. And an Unteroffizier in the 19th Panzer Division thought that the explosions and shot-down Soviet fighters would make ‘
a wonderful image for the newsreels
, only probably nobody would want to believe it’. Officers had also been keeping up their men’s morale with another encouraging thought. Stalin was getting angry with England about the lack of a Second Front. ‘
If something of the sort
were not to happen soon,’ wrote a soldier in the 36th Infantry Division, ‘then he will make a peace offer to us.’

Hoth had attacked the southern sector with three prongs. On the left the 3rd and 11th Panzer Divisions flanked the
Grossdeutschland
Panzergrenadier Division. In the middle, he deployed Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps, with the
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
, the
Das Reich
and the
Totenkopf
Panzergrenadier Divisions. And on the right, the 6th, 19th and 7th Panzer Divisions led the III Panzer Corps. To their right rear, Army Detachment Kempf attacked south of Belgorod, attempting to cross the northern Donets River. In the north, Model’s central thrust towards Ponyri consisted of two panzer corps, each one spearheaded by a Tiger battalion and vast, lumbering Elefant self-propelled guns, also known as Ferdinands.

The rolling open terrain ahead, with a few woods and farming hamlets, may have presented ideal tank country, yet the panzer crews soon found that it was hard to spot the hundreds of concealed anti-tank guns. They were attached to the forward Red Army divisions ordered to sacrifice themselves while absorbing the shock of the German armoured spearheads in a battle of attrition. Heavy artillery shells had been buried in front of many of the positions to be detonated by remote control.

Overhead, their sirens screaming, ungainly gull-winged Stukas dived on Soviet positions and dug-in T-34 tanks. The Stuka ace Hans Rudel experimented with his own invention, a ‘
cannon-bird
’, with two 37mm guns fixed beneath the wings. Other T-34s, unconvincingly disguised as haystacks, were soon dealt with. Crew members who survived the impact of the armour-piercing shells then had to scramble out through blazing straw. German soldiers were thrilled by the effect. ‘
Our Luftwaffe is really fantastic
’, a Hauptfeldwebel in the 167th Infantry Division wrote home. ‘And as soon as the enemy’s been hit, our panzer arm can get going at full steam.’

Soviet anti-tank guns, however, were better concealed. Experienced crews often held their fire until a panzer was barely twenty metres away. On the northern sector, just west of Ponyri, where the Tigers broke through, Vasily Grossman heard how the 45mm anti-tank ‘
shells hit them
, but bounced off like peas. There have been cases when artillerists went insane after seeing this,’ he added. Things were no better on the southern sector, he also found. ‘
A gun-layer fired
point blank at a Tiger with a 45mm gun. The shells bounced off it. The gun-layer lost his head and threw himself at the Tiger.’

Although most of the anti-tank gun shells bounced off the heavy frontal armour of the Tigers, their tracks were vulnerable to mines. With suicidal bravery, Soviet sappers ran in with spare anti-tank mines to place them in their path. Red Army soldiers also crept up to throw grenades, satchel charges and Molotov cocktails.

Fearing a breakthrough west of Ponyri, Rokossovsky sent in anti-tank, artillery and mortar brigades. He also summoned fighters from the 16th Air Army to combat the German bombers and Messerschmitts, but they were badly mauled. German commanders were shaken to find that they had achieved no surprise at all, and that Soviet soldiers were not fleeing from their armoured onslaught. Despite heavy casualties, the German spearheads forced their way forward to a depth of almost ten kilometres on a fifteen-kilometre front. Rokossovsky prepared to counter-attack the next day, but the chaos of the vast battlefield made it hard to coordinate.

The air battle overhead was equally pitiless, with the German Sixth Air Fleet and the Soviet 16th Air Army scrambling virtually every serviceable aircraft available. Focke-Wulfs, Stukas and Messerschmitts tangled with Shturmoviks, Yaks and Lavochkins. On some occasions, desperate Soviet pilots simply rammed German aircraft.

The air battle over Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army in the south of the salient was even more intense. The Luftwaffe’s Fourth Air Fleet, having just escaped the pre-emptive strike by Soviet aviation at dawn, inflicted heavy losses on its attackers. The Kursk campaign has long been portrayed, sometimes with exaggerated numbers, as the greatest tank battle in history, yet the aerial engagements were among the most intense of the whole of the Second World War.

In the south, the
Grossdeutschland
Division’s advance became bogged down in a minefield made treacherously muddy by the storm of the night before. Pioneer battalions sent in to help the tanks came under heavy fire, and only a desperate charge by panzergrenadiers on foot managed to clear the Soviet defences covering the minefield. It still took many hours to extricate the tanks and clear paths through the danger zone. To dent German morale further, a brigade of the new Panther tanks brought up in support again started to suffer from mechanical breakdowns. The problem was not just limited to Panthers. ‘
My division is already
going to the dogs,’ wrote an Unteroffizier in the 4th Panzer Division. ‘Half-track breakdowns very many, Panzer no fewer, also the Tigers are not the true love.’ But the advance resumed.

Reshat Zevadinovich Sadredinov, a Tatar, was part of an anti-aircraft battery, with all its four guns knocked out by Stukas. The tall rye around it was on fire. The guncrews hid in earth bunkers, as the German tanks pushed on past them. When the Red Army soldiers finally emerged, they found that they were now a long way to the rear of the fighting. Sadredinov and his companions took the uniforms off dead Germans and put them on over their own. Sentries challenged them as they approached the Soviet front line. Once the Red Army soldiers found that they were
Russians in German uniform, they yelled: ‘
Ah, you bastards, you’re Vlasov men
.’ They were badly beaten up. Sadredinov and his companions were finally able to prove their identity when allowed to contact the chief of staff of their division.

‘
The Luftwaffe was bombing
us,’ recounted Nikifor Dmitrievich Chevola, commander of the 27th Anti-Tank Brigade brought up against the
Grossdeutschland
. ‘We were there amid the fire and smoke, yet my men became wild. They kept firing, paying no attention to all this.’ Mess-erschmitt fighters, or ‘Messers’ as Red Army soldiers called them, strafed the trenches from end to end. Even after being wounded several times, men seldom went back to dressing stations. ‘Constant thunder, the ground was trembling, there was fire all around. We were shouting. As for radio communications, the Germans tried to trick us. They howled over the radio: “I am Nekrasov, I am Nekrasov.” [Colonel I. M. Nekrasov commanded the 52nd Guards Rifle Division adjoining their sector.] I shouted back: “Bullshit! You aren’t. Get lost!” They jammed our voices with howling.’

‘
This was face-to-face
battle,’ said a gun-layer called Trofim Karpovich Teplenko. ‘It was like a duel, anti-tank gun against tank. Sergeant Smirnov’s head and legs were torn off. We brought the head back, and also the legs, and put them all into a little ditch, and covered them over.’ Dust from the black earth and cordite smoke turned their food dark grey, assuming the rations arrived. And during the odd lulls in the battle, the men found it hard to sleep in the silence. ‘The quieter it is, the more tense it feels,’ Lieutenant Colonel Chevola explained.

A dozen kilometres to the east, the II SS Panzer Corps, supported by a Nebelwerfer rocket-launcher brigade, had smashed into Nekrasov’s 52nd Guards Rifle Division. Behind the leading tanks, flamethrower teams moved forward to clear bunkers and trenches. Theirs was an almost suicidal task, since they immediately attracted enemy fire. But if successful, their belching blast of flame left a stench of burned flesh and petroleum.

The
Leibstandarte
on the left advanced the furthest towards Prokhorovka, with
Das Reich
and
Totenkopf
pushing forward north-eastwards on their right. But even the
Leibstandarte
was brought to a halt that evening by another anti-tank brigade sent in to hold the line. Thirty kilometres to the south-east, Army Detachment Kempf, having crossed the River Donets south-east of Belgorod, managed to achieve only minor successes. Its objective of advancing to protect Hoth’s right flank was clearly going to be difficult.

German panzer crews, especially the loaders, frequently suffered from heat exhaustion on that blazingly hot day. The Tigers had been adapted to take 120 of their 88mm shells instead of 90. Targets were so plentiful that the loaders, working rapidly in the boiling confines of the turret, were
dropping with fatigue. On some occasions, their tanks had to be replenished two or three times during the day, and stowing the rounds inside was also tiring, even with help. A German war correspondent who had been attached to a Tiger company was almost driven mad with the noise of mush and screech in the headphones, the constant thudding of the machine guns and the heavy boom of the main armament.

Vatutin, having relied primarily on his anti-tank units during the first day of fighting, started to bring up Lieutenant General Katukov’s 1st Tank Army and two guards tank corps to strengthen the second major line of defence. Although his decision to use these armoured reserves in defence, rather than in a great counter-attack, was criticized later, Vatutin was almost certainly right. A mass attack across the open would have exposed them to the Tigers whose 88mm guns could knock out the Soviet T-34s up to two kilometres away, long before they themselves were within range to take on the panzers. One of the Tiger crews managed to destroy twenty-two Soviet tanks in under an hour, an achievement which won its commander an immediate Knight’s Cross.

During 6 July, while the
Grossdeutschland
Division was held up by the marshy ground and fierce resistance on the left, the
Leibstandarte
thrust further north with the
Das Reich
, breaking the second line of defence. But their flanks were exposed, and the Soviet pressure on the western side forced them away from their axis of advance to the north. This pushed them north-eastwards towards the railway junction of Prokhorovka.

On the northern sector, meanwhile, Model’s Ninth Army units were suffering heavy losses. His infantry, even the panzergrenadiers, had failed to keep up with the armoured wedges. Soviet infantrymen, who had stayed hidden, ambushed the giant Elefant self-propelled guns, while sappers continued to lay mines in their path. To German dismay, even these monsters did not cause
Panzerschreck
, or tank panic, in Soviet ranks.

In the tank battle round Ponyri station on 7 July, ‘
everything was on fire
, both vehicles and people’. Almost every house and village for miles around had been destroyed. Red Army soldiers were horrified by the badly burned tank crewmen carried past them. ‘
A lieutenant, wounded
in the leg and with a hand torn off, was commanding the battery attacked by tanks. After the enemy attack had been halted, he shot himself because he did not want to live as a cripple.’ Mutilation was the greatest fear of all Red Army soldiers. This was hardly surprising when considering the way their disabled comrades were treated. Limbless veterans were callously known as ‘samovars’.

Model realized that, even though his forces had managed to advance
over a dozen kilometres in one sector west of Ponyri, Soviet defence lines were proving far deeper than they had imagined. Rokossovsky was also worried. His tank counter-attack, planned for dawn, had failed to come together. All he could do was to order them into hull-down positions to strengthen the line. This was just as well, for Model had decided to throw his main reserve into a desperate attempt to break through.

The intense fighting which continued in the north until the night of 8 July ground down Model’s armoured spearheads. In spite of the terrible losses inflicted on the defenders, the Red Army’s numerical superiority in tanks and anti-tank guns was just too great. Their Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft also began to take a heavy toll on German panzers and assault guns. Model’s
Ninth Army
had lost around 20,000 men and 200 tanks. Once it became clear that the enemy onslaught was grinding to a halt, Rokossovsky and General Popov of the Briansk Front began to prepare their counter-attacks against the Orel Salient scheduled for 10 July. It would be called Operation Kutuzov after the great Russian commander in 1812.

On the southern side of the Kursk Salient, Vatutin’s armies were in danger. The Stavka had expected the Germans’ major effort on the northern flank, when in fact it had come in the south, with Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army. The German drive towards Prokhorovka led by the II SS Panzer Corps looked as if it would prevail, even against Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army which had been pulled into the defence. On the evening of 6 July Vatutin, supported by General Vasilevsky the Stavka representative, requested Moscow to provide reinforcements urgently.