well enough in limited situations that three companies of the developed version had been assigned to the Ninth Army. Put to the test in front of Panzer Hill, they drew so much artillery fire that the resulting sympathetic detonations obscured the lane they cleared.
The Ferdinands went forward anyway. Enough of them reached the defenses, and enough infantry managed to follow, that the hill fell to close assault—a polite euphemism for a series of vicious fights in which bayonets were civilized weapons. But the “tank fright” that so often characterized Russian behavior in the war’s earlier years had disappeared. The Ferdinands, built without machine guns for close defense, proved significantly vulnerable to infantrymen at close range. Grenades, mines—even antitank rifles took their toll. By day’s end, only twelve of the original forty-five Ferdinands were still able to fight. The often-cited lack of hull-mounted machine guns was less a factor in the Ferdinands’ discomfiture than the absence of their own infantry. Tank-infantry contact had been lost at the sharp end almost from the beginning—an unpromising portent. By the standards developing in the salient, Maloarkhangelsk was still a long way away.
Ninth Army’s initial
The 6th Infantry Division had been built around one of the Reichswehr’s original regiments. Recruited in Westphalia, it had a solid nucleus of old-timers and two years of hard experience fighting Russians. By 8:00 A.M., it had made enough progress to commit the temporarily attached 505th Tank Battalion, with its two companies of twenty-six Tigers and a company of a dozen mine clearers. Closely supported by Stukas and artillery, the Tigers crossed the Oka River and faced three hours of counterattacks spearheaded by waves of T-34s. Since the T-34’s first appearances, the panzers had countered by maneuver. Now the Tigers halted, engaged their optic sights, and broke charge after charge at long range. Around noon, the big cats led elements of 6th Division’s infantry into the village of Butyrki, leaving over forty burned-out T-34s in their wake. Three hours earlier, the 20th Panzer Division on the Westphalians’ right had overrun a rifle regiment and gained three miles toward the fortified village of Bobrik.
For the 505th, this was the time to double down and commit the reserves, envelop the first lines of defense, and turn a breakthrough into a breakout. The 6th Division’s commander later said that had the tanks been sent in, Kursk itself might have been reached the first day. Perhaps. But the Tigers were less of a surprise to the Russians, having been committed in small numbers on the Eastern Front since the previous August. The Russians had had corresponding opportunities to develop counters. Since Barbarossa, German tank armor had been vulnerable to Russian guns, but Tiger hunting required more refined skills: letting them close the range and then concentrating on the treads. Cool heads and steady aim were decisive. The Russians had both. In XLI Panzer Corps’s sector, once the Ferdinands had passed through, the overrun Russians had emerged from their maze of trenches to tackle the mammoths with Molotov cocktails, satchel charges, and even antitank rifles, useful against thinner side and rear armor. The 20th Panzer Division was stopped around Bobrik by a similar combination of minefields, antitank guns, and close-assault teams. The 258th Infantry Division on Ninth Army’s far right never got past the second defense line of the 280th Rifle Division in what amounted to a straight-up one-on-one fight. Were there enough Tigers anywhere to make a difference?
The Red Air Force was becoming a presence as well. Initially thrown off balance by Luftwaffe numbers and effectiveness, the Sixteenth Air Army found its equilibrium around noon. Shturmoviks challenged the German fighters and made effective use of the new shaped-charge bombs against tanks. One ground-attack group alone reported thirty-one tanks knocked out—an exaggerated figure, like similar claims in any war, but suggestive.
On the ground, Model committed over five hundred armored vehicles on July 5. About half were out of action by the end of the first day. Many of these could be repaired; the effect on crew morale was nevertheless significant. So were the consequences of occupying ground, shuttling back to relieve pinned-down or hung-up infantry, then repeating the entire performance a few hundred yards farther forward. The infantry too had suffered—not only in numerical terms, but because the nature of the fighting took a disproportionate toll on the aggressive and the leaders: those first around a trench traverse or across what seemed dead ground.
The often-cited criticism that Model failed to commit his armor on the first day is to a degree refuted by evidence that well over half of the Ninth Army’s AFVs were in fact engaged on July 5. But the Tigers and the Ferdinands were organized in independent battalions, not as part of the combined-arms teams that were the real strength of the panzers. Their effectiveness most likely would have been maximized by using them to assist the infantry into and through the Soviet defenses. By early afternoon, the Germans had nevertheless gained more than a foothold in the Russian defenses. By the end of the day, the lodgment would be around nine miles broad and five miles deep. But it was a series of nibbles as opposed to a coordinated bite.
Walther Model was anything but a rear-echelon commando. He spent the first hours of the day with the two panzer corps and then returned briefly to his headquarters, where the reports were not all so optimistic. The Ninth Army’s commander spent most of the afternoon visiting headquarters, shifting armor and artillery in response to what seemed crises or opportunities, and coming to the conclusion that the situation warranted committing his immediate reserves, the 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions, the next day to exploit the gains in XLVII Panzer Corps’s sector. That was arguably the consequence of a genuine miscalculation: underestimating the depth of Soviet defenses and the strength of Soviet resistance. But for Citadel to succeed, even if the Soviet threat to Army Group Center proved a chimera, Model had to break through and out, and quickly.
Whatever the fleeting prospects for an early-afternoon German breakthrough, they were insufficient to panic Rokossovsky. From the Soviet perspective, it was clear that the Germans were barely through the first defensive belt. Rokossovsky, freed of an immediate need to improvise, planned to reinforce the Second Tank Army and move it into position for a counterattack early on July 6. The barrage began at 2:50, followed by waves of medium bombers targeting positions and vehicles on the front line.
This was a major departure from the usual Soviet practice of using these planes to strike deeper into the rear. It was also an expedient. The previous evening, Stalin had phoned Rokossovsky. When the general began describing the day’s events, Stalin interrupted: “Have we gained control of the air or not?” Rokossovsky temporized. Stalin repeated the question. When Rokossovsky said the problem would be solved the next day, Stalin asked whether the Sixteenth Air Army’s commander was up to the job. A few minutes later, Zhukov arrived at Rokossovsky’s headquarters to report a similar phone call with the same question.
For the Sixteenth Air Army’s commander, Lieutenant General Sergei Rudenko, it was an underwear- changing moment. All too recently, such a question from the Vozhd had been a likely preliminary to dismissal or to a “nine-gram pension”: the weight of a pistol bullet in the back of the neck. Rudenko quickly proposed mass attacks to saturate German air and ground defenses and to encourage the hard-pressed ground troops. Four successive waves of bombers literally caught the Germans napping: the commander of 1st Air Division had authorized his exhausted fighter pilots to rest that morning. But the Russian armor was slow getting into position in an already crowded battle zone. Their attacks were delivered piecemeal, the tanks and infantry poorly coordinated. The 20th Panzer gave ground, then held, then counterattacked successfully toward Bobrik. It seemed a good omen. And the Tigers were waiting.
The 505th Battalion’s Tigers took out forty-six of a fifty-strong Soviet tank brigade, T-34s and light T-70s, the T-60’s also obsolete successor, in a few minutes. The 2nd and 9th Panzer joined the fight by midmorning. With the 18th already on line, that brought the German AFV strength to around three hundred on a front of less than eight miles—as narrow as any major attack sector had been in the Great War and a correspondingly long distance from any concept of mechanized maneuver. The panzers’ objective was a low ridgeline, the Olkhovatka heights, extending from Teploye on the left of the attack to Ponyri on its right and anchored by Hills 272 near Teploye, 274 at the village of Olkhovatka, and 253.5 east of Ponyri. Little more than high knolls, they nevertheless offered not only Tantalus’s view of Kursk, but passage to relatively open terrain: ground favoring the Germans. And the only way out was through.
