The Second World War (92 page)

The situation was deemed so serious that Konev’s Steppe Front was ordered to prepare to move forward, and Lieutenant General Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army was allocated to support Vatutin immediately. On Stalin’s personal order, the 2nd Air Army would cover its 300-kilometre march during daylight, because the dust clouds thrown up by the tank columns would instantly attract the Luftwaffe.

The 5th Guards Tank Army set off in the early hours of 7 July, its advancing columns spreading some thirty kilometres wide across the steppe. ‘
By midday
,’ Rotmistrov wrote, ‘the dust rose in thick clouds, settling in a solid layer on roadside bushes, grain fields, tanks and trucks. The dark red disc of the sun was hardly visible. Tanks, self-propelled guns, artillery tractors, armoured personnel carriers and trucks were advancing in an unending flow. The faces of the soldiers were dark with dust and exhaust fumes. It was intolerably hot. Soldiers were tortured by thirst and their shirts, wet with sweat, stuck to their bodies.’

The monstrous battle along the southern side of the Kursk Salient
continued on 7 July, with a furious self-sacrificial defence by Soviet rifle divisions, tank brigades and anti-tank units of the 6th Guards and 1st Guards Tank Army. Hoth’s forces found that, as soon as they destroyed one division, another appeared just behind to bar their way. Nobody had time to bury the bodies, which crawled with flies. Men on both sides went out of their minds from fear, stress and the inhuman din of battle. One German soldier even began dancing a can-can until pulled down by his comrades. At one point it looked as if the
Grossdeutschland
Division was about to achieve a major breakthrough towards Oboian, but then it ran into a brigade of the 6th Tank Corps, which had been moved across just in time. The SS
Leibstandarte
and
Das Reich
Divisions had managed to push up the road towards Pokhorovka on the east flank of the 6th Guards Army, but they continually had to fight off counter-attacks on their own exposed flanks.

Luftwaffe pilots accounted for large numbers of Soviet aircraft. The fighter ace Erich Hartmann shot down seven that day, and he later became the highest-scoring pilot of the whole war with 352 victories. Red Army aircrew were also achieving successes. They destroyed around a hundred fighters and bombers on the southern sector. The Luftwaffe, with its priority fixed on ground support for the troops, was unable to engage as many enemy aircraft as it wished, and a severe shortage of fuel forced it to ration the number of sorties. The Soviets began to achieve air superiority for the first time in the battle and soon they were bombing German airfields every night. Yet, despite heavy losses, one of Rudel’s pilots wrote that they were in the air again before dawn. ‘
With an unbroken Stuka-spirit
we plunged our birds on the enemy and hurled at them our destruction-laden bombs.’

On 8 July, Hausser switched the SS
Totenkopf
Division from the right flank of his panzer corps to the left, to help push their line of advance away from the direction of Prokhorovka back towards Oboian on the main road to Kursk. As the corps was redeploying, the Soviet 10th Tank Corps attacked, but in such an uncoordinated fashion that it was repulsed with heavy losses. And the Soviet 2nd Tank Corps, which was supposed to smash into the exposed flank of the SS Panzer Corps, was battered by Henschel HS-109 tank-destroying aircraft armed with 30mm cannon. Hausser’s divisions (perhaps including the Luftwaffe’s kills in their own tally) claimed to have destroyed 121 Soviet tanks that day.

On 9 July the II SS Panzer Corps began their attack on Vatutin’s last line of defence. ‘
Those wearing [SS] camouflage
uniforms fought extremely well,’ one of the Soviet defenders in the 6th Guards Army acknowledged. He also watched as a Tiger knocked out seven T-34s, one after another. Although completely exhausted, the panzer crews kept going on Pervitin pills, which dulled a sense of danger as well as keeping them awake.
Hausser was also hoping for support on his right flank, but Army Detachment Kempf was still struggling against determined resistance east of Belgorod, while its right flank was threatened by General Shumilov’s 7th Guards Army.

A panzergrenadier regiment of the SS
Totenkopf
reached the River Psel. But the rest of the II SS Panzer Corps’s advance had been slowed by the Soviet divisions thrown in to keep the 6th Guards Army and 1st Guards Tank Army in the battle. Late that afternoon, the German command decided to change Hausser’s axis of advance again, back towards Prokhorovka. The Germans hoped that Army Detachment Kempf on the right, which had been slow to achieve a breakthrough earlier, would now advance north rapidly. But Kempf’s divisions were under constant attack on both flanks.

On 10 July, the day the Allies landed in Sicily, the 1st Tank Army and the remnants of the 6th Guards Army continued, at fearful cost, to slow the attacks on the Oboian axis. This kept General Otto von Knobelsdorff’s XLVIII Panzer Corps too occupied to assist Hausser’s advance on Prokhorovka. The
Grossdeutschland
was utterly exhausted, yet its panzergrenadiers still managed to capture two key hills with its panzer regiment commanded by Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz, the ‘Panzer-Kavallerist’, who had first reached the Volga north of Stalingrad. Oboian was clearly visible through binoculars, but they sensed they would never reach it. For Strachwitz it must have been a familiar feeling. In 1914 his cavalry patrol had been in sight of Paris, until the French counter-attacked on the Marne.

Hausser’s SS divisions failed to advance as rapidly on Prokhorovka as they wanted, mainly because so many regiments were caught up in battles on every side. Yet the
Leibstandarte
pushed on with part of the
Das Reich
, despite a storm of artillery fire. The SS
Totenkopf
had managed to cross the River Psel five kilometres to the left, but was held up by the desperate Soviet defence of a hill beyond, which prevented it from moving up the valley to the north-east. By now the wet ground had dried out. ‘
It’s now very hot
here,’ a medic wrote home, ‘and the roads are knee-deep in dust. You should see my face, it’s coated with dust a millimetre thick.’ For Stuka pilots, the rhythm of attack sorties never slackened. ‘
In five days
,’ a lieutenant wrote, ‘I have carried out thirty combat missions, bringing my total to 285.’ They were playing a decisive part in the great tank battles, he added.

On 11 July, Vatutin redeployed his defence line south-west of Prokhorovka, bringing in fresh divisions from the 5th Guards Army to block the advance of the II SS Panzer Corps. Kempf, who was under heavy pressure from Manstein to achieve a breakthrough, used his Tigers from the 503rd Heavy Panzer Abteilung and the 6th Panzer Division to overrun the defences of two Soviet rifle divisions. An Obergefreiter in the 6th Panzer
wrote that it was the fifth day in which they had not been out of their tanks. ‘
The Russians are keeping
us busy, since in the last three months they’ve had enough time to build a defence line the like of which we’ve never experienced.’ The 19th Panzer Division also pushed north on the other bank of the Donets heading towards Prokhorovka.

Vatutin, well aware of this threat and closely supervised by Marshal Vasilevsky, who kept in constant contact with Stalin, told General Rotmistrov to deploy his 5th Guards Tank Army as soon as it arrived. But that evening, on a reconnaissance visit to the front with Vasilevsky, Rotmistrov saw through his binoculars that the tanks they had spied in the distance were German. The II SS Panzer Corps, in a sudden advance, had already reached the point from which Rotmistrov had intended to launch his counter-attack the next day. He drove back as fast as possible in his Lend–Lease Jeep to update the plans.

He and his staff worked through the night preparing new orders, but at 04.00 hours on 12 July Rotmistrov heard from Vatutin that the 6th Panzer Division was approaching the River Donets at Rzhavets. This meant that Army Detachment Kempf was outflanking the Soviet 69th Army and could threaten the rear of his 5th Guards Tank Army.

In fact a
Kampfgruppe
of the 6th Panzer Division had already slipped through in the dark and reached Rzhavets, using a captured T-34 to head its column. Although Red Army engineers blew the roadbridge over the Donets, in the confusion a footbridge was left intact, and the panzergrenadiers were across the river by dawn. A
Kampfgruppe
of the 19th Panzer Division raced forward to reinforce them, but the Luftwaffe was not informed of the success at Rzhavets. A formation of Heinkel 111s bombed the bridgehead, wounding Generalmajor Walther von Hünersdorff, the commander of the 6th Panzer Division, and Oberst Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski, the
Kampfgruppe
leader.

To meet this threat near Rzhavets, Vatutin ordered Rotmistrov during that turbulent night to divert his reserve as a blocking force. To the west of Prokhorovka, Knobelsdorff’s XLVIII Panzer Corps was clearly intending to attack again towards the town of Oboian, so Vatutin ordered in a pre-emptive strike with tank brigades from the 1st Tank Army and the 22nd Guards Rifle Corps. Hoth’s forces were exhausted. Having started the offensive with 916 panzers, they were by now reduced to fewer than 500. Heavy rain had also turned the thick dust to a muddy paste again, which made the going more difficult for the Germans than for the Soviets with their broad-tracked T-34s.

On 12 July, shortly after dawn, General Rotmistrov reached the 29th Tank Corps command post bunker in a hillside orchard overlooking the wheatfields below and the railway line south-east of Prokhorovka. All
his rewritten orders for the counter-attack had been distributed, and the massed artillery and Katyusha regiments had redeployed during the early hours of the morning. Beyond the fields lay a forest in which part of II SS Panzer Corps was concealed. The clear sky was again covered by storm clouds, foreshadowing more heavy rain.

The battle opened with Stuka attacks. Yak and Lavochkin fighters of the 2nd Air Army soon appeared to fight them. They were followed by Soviet bombers, whose attack was accompanied by the deafening thunder of artillery and the heart-stopping scream of Katyusha rocket batteries which set the wheatfields ablaze. When the II SS Panzer Corps emerged from the edge of the forest and advanced into the open, Rotmistrov issued the codeword ‘Stal’! Stal’! Stal’!’ for his tanks to charge. They had been concealed on the rear slope of small hills, and on the signal of ‘Steel!’ moved forward at full speed. He had told them in his orders that their only chance against the Tigers was to get in close and overwhelm them with numbers.

Obersturmführer Rudolf von Ribbentrop, the son of the foreign minister, described the scene from the turret of his Tiger tank in the 1st SS Panzer Regiment. ‘
What I saw left me
speechless. From beyond the shallow rise about 150–200 metres in front of me appeared fifteen, then thirty, then forty tanks. Finally there were too many to count. The T-34s were rolling towards us at high speed, carrying mounted infantry.’

The battle resembled a medieval clash of armoured knights. Neither artillery nor aircraft could help either side, so mixed up were the forces. Formation and control was lost on both sides, as tank fought tank at point-blank range. When ammunition and fuel blew up, the turret of the tank would be sent flying. German gunners first concentrated their fire on a command tank because it was the only one with a radio, then they aimed for the big round metal barrel fixed to the rear of a T-34 which carried its fuel reserve.

‘
They were around us
, on top of us and between us,’ wrote an Untersturmführer with 2nd Panzergrenadier Regiment. ‘We fought man to man.’ All German superiority in communications, movement and gunnery was lost in the chaos, noise and smoke. ‘
The atmosphere was choking
,’ a Soviet tank driver recorded. ‘I was gasping for breath, with perspiration running in streams down my face.’ The psychological stress was immense. ‘We expected to be killed at any second.’ Those who were still alive and still fighting a couple of hours later were astonished. ‘
Tanks even rammed one another
,’ wrote a Soviet onlooker. ‘The metal was burning.’ The concentrated area of the battlefield was filled with burned-out armoured vehicles, exuding columns of black, oily smoke.

Hoth’s hopes that Army Detachment Kempf would turn the flank of Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army were dashed. It had been blocked
nineteen kilometres away, but only just, by Rotmistrov’s reserve. The only success appeared to come on his left, when the SS
Totenkopf
looked about to break through the 5th Guards Army to the north-east of Prokhorovka. Soviet reinforcements, however, arrived in time to seal the gap. And although Knobelsdorff’s XLVIII Panzer Corps fought back the preemptive onslaught which Vatutin had prepared, this partial success was too late to achieve a breakthrough.

When heavy rain began to fall again at dusk, both sides pulled back their forces to refuel and rearm. Medical teams evacuated the wounded and recovery teams roamed the battlefield that night, where several hundred tanks lay battered and burned. Even the ruthless Zhukov was moved by the sight when he toured the battlefield two days later.

SS prisoners were killed out of hand in the knowledge that they did not spare their captives either. And there was little respect for the fallen. ‘
Germans were crushed
by vehicles,’ recorded a young Soviet officer. ‘There were piles of dead Germans with map holders and all their stuff still on them. I saw tanks drive over their bodies.’

Hoth did not know until that evening that to the north of the Kursk Salient the Red Army had just launched Operation Kutuzov to retake Orel. Model’s exhausted Ninth Army and the Second Panzer Army were surprised by the size of the offensive. Once again, German intelligence had underestimated the Red Army’s concentration of forces to the rear. General I. Kh. Bagramyan’s 11th Guards Army attacked Model’s rear, and advanced sixteen kilometres in two days. Building on this success, the 4th Tank Army, the 3rd Guards Tank Army and even Rokossovsky’s exhausted 13th Army went on to the offensive.