Armor and Blood

II

The day was so hot, in the high eighties, that some crews went into action with their hatches open. The fighting grew even hotter when what was intended as a breakthrough also became an encounter battle as the Second Tank Army entered the fight. The geographic objectives of the panzer divisions became unimportant; what mattered was getting forward. Model concentrated every available gun, rocket, and plane to blast the way for the panzers. The Russians responded in kind. Accounts from both sides describe a steadily intensifying kaleidoscope of shell bursts, screaming rockets, and exploding bombs, tanks bursting into flame or slewing to a stop, crews desperately seeking to escape and being machine-gunned when anyone on the other side had time to notice.

Model had tasked the Sixth Air Fleet with providing maximum support, and the Luftwaffe threw in every flyable plane. Elements of JG 51, scrambled in a hurry, caught a group of Shturmoviks and their fighter escort coming in at low altitude. The result: fifteen Il-2s downed in minutes. But when the next wave arrived, the fighters had returned to their bases to refuel. That made it the Shturmoviks’ turn. With a temporarily clear attack zone, the “flying tanks” reported fourteen flamers and forty more put out of action in minutes. The Luftwaffe responded with formations of level bombers and Stukas as large as a hundred at a time—or so it seemed to the Soviet troops under the bombs. Sixteenth Air Army had several veteran fighter regiments, flying not only La-5s but some of the best of a new generation of fighters: La-7s and Yak-9s, which would serve the Red Air Force well even after 1945. But the Germans took their measure and kept the ring as the panzers advanced.

That advance was by meters rather than kilometers and led the Germans only deeper into a defense system of dominating terrain devoid of natural cover, swept by some of the heaviest fire of the war. Infantry movement of any kind became near suicidal. It was not so much that the Landser immolated themselves trying vainly to advance. Langemarck was three decades past, and there were no innocents on the Russian front. Ordinary riflemen or panzer grenadiers constrained to fight that day on foot—it made no difference. Veterans and replacements alike went to ground and stayed there. The 6th Infantry Division had seven combat battalions. Their total combat strength was around 3,100 on July 4. By July 10, it was down to 1,600.

Forty percent frontline casualties in a week is no bagatelle, but neither was it uncommon under similar conditions in Russia or the West. The problem involved absolute numbers. A battalion of two hundred men was as much a group of survivors as a fighting force; its fighting power was likely to be even less than its reduced strength suggested. And as early as July 6, the Ninth Army divisions’ replacement pools held no more than two hundred or three hundred men apiece.

It took at least a squad, preferably a platoon, but in any case a dozen or two foot soldiers to screen a tank effectively. In their absence, as on July 5, AFVs drove unwittingly into minefields, and were ambushed by antitank strongpoints and T-34s dug in to their turrets and enveloped by close-assault teams. At ranges of a hundred yards and less, even Tigers were vulnerable. Rokossovsky handled his reserves effectively, committing them as needed to hold the line or restore it, always with another rifle regiment or tank brigade as a hole card. A long afternoon of desperate fighting for the fortified village of Olkhovatka and the Olkhovatka heights ended with the Russians still in control of both.

The story was the same across the front. Model’s 78th, 86th, and 292nd Infantry Divisions went into Ponyri at dawn, their surviving Ferdinands and mine-clearing vehicles reinforced by the 9th Panzer Division and what remained of the 18th Panzer. Ponyri was a railway station and a collection/distribution center for the region’s collective farms. Its main buildings—the factory station, the school, the railroad station, the water tower—were solidly constructed: natural, heavily defended strongpoints that Rokossovsky initially supported with Katyushas and artillery as opposed to committing reinforcements directly. Germans described an intensity of shelling never before experienced and compared the seesaw fighting for buildings and houses with the worst Stalingrad had offered. The Germans captured and held Hill 253.5 but made no further progress when they tried to swing west and take the Olkhovatka heights in the flank and rear.

The XXIII Corps, lacking the kind of armor and air support concentrated in the center of Ninth Army’s front, had even less success against Maloarkhangelsk. The day ended with the Germans everywhere still stuck—one might say trapped—in the second line of Russian defenses. Model had taken a chance. He believed that the 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions would spearhead a breakthrough of the Soviet defenses but now accepted that they would be left too battered to develop the success. That left him a single division, the 4th Panzer, to lead the Ninth Army into Kursk.

Model’s real gamble was not the attack itself. It was the belief he could use it to force Kluge’s hand. At 5:40 in the morning, well before his own tanks were committed, Model phoned Army Group Center and asked for the 10th Panzer Grenadier and 12th Panzer Divisions. Kluge temporized. That would leave him with no strategic mobile reserve and increasing evidence of a Red Army buildup on his front. Kluge had another problem as well. Second Panzer Army’s commander, General Rudolf Schmidt, had grown so openly acidic about the Fuhrer and the party that he had been relieved on April 10, with the recommendation he be committed to a mental hospital. Kluge apparently offered a deal: The divisions now, with the condition that if the Russians did attack, Model would assume command of both armies.

Model’s acceptance suggested that whatever his previous reservations, Citadel’s success was the best counter to a massive strike at Army Group Center. Or perhaps he just had the bit between his teeth. Fortiter in re, not suaviter in modo, was Walther Model’s trademark. He spent the day trying to drive the Ninth Army forward by willpower, dodging Shturmoviks in the morning as he moved among subordinate headquarters, then settling with 2nd Panzer Division for most of the afternoon. He might as well have been at a battalion command post. A division’s communications facilities were insufficient to control an army-level battle—particularly when the division itself was heavily engaged.

Second-guessing and hindsight are staples of military history. Nevertheless, it should have been clear after the first day that Kursk in 1943 was not France in 1940 or Russia in 1941. This situation needed a battle manager rather than a battle captain. To develop a victory it was first necessary to win one, and that called for oversight rather than intervention. As the commander toured his front, fleeting opportunities went undeveloped; local gains went unsupported.

Not until 9:30 P.M. did Model finally return to his headquarters, to plan what became the next day’s mistake. It amounted to using 9th and 18th Panzer plus what remained of the 86th and 292nd Infantry to take Ponyri and start south toward Olkhovatka. The 2nd and 20th Panzer and 6th Infantry, plus a dozen or so hastily repaired Tigers, and supported by 4th Panzer, would hit the Olkhovatka ridgeline and Hill 274, then break through to Teploye. By this time, Model was leading with tanks because the Ninth Army was running out of infantry. Nor was that the only problem. The Luftwaffe was running short of fuel. Domestic slowdowns in production had been exacerbated by partisan attacks on fuel trains—vulnerable targets that provided spectacularly gratifying results.

Calculating his resources, 1st Air Division’s commander, Brigadier General Paul Deichmann, arguably more than Model, staked the game on a July 7 breakthrough. Beginning at 5:00 A.M., the 190s of JG 51 and 54 cleared Shturmoviks from the panzers’ lines of advance. The level bombers went in behind them, then the Stukas. The Soviets had spent the night repairing wire entanglements, laying new minefields, deploying more guns and rockets, and bringing up tanks to reinforce the hard-pressed rifle formations. The air strikes were the signal for a massive barrage, heavier than anything unleashed anywhere to date during the entire war. The attack zones were so narrow that for the panzers, maneuver was virtually impossible. Tank after tank went up as heavy artillery shells fired at long range penetrated their thin rear deck and turret roof armor. The survivors emerged from the smoke and dust to find themselves in a fifteen-mile high-velocity killing zone of antitank guns supported by dug-in T-34s. Anything looking like dead ground was in fact a minefield, usually covered by close-attack teams.

The Russians saw Ponyri as the key to Central Front’s position and believed the Germans were determined to capture it at all costs. The defenses were correspondingly reinforced as the fighting developed. The 307th Rifle Division was directly supported by three tank brigades and two more independent regiments, by enough antitank guns to provide a ratio of over 100 per mile, and by no fewer than 380 guns—a density never matched on the Russian front or anywhere else. The Germans hit Ponyri five times in the early morning of July 7. Each time, the 307th held its ground and counterattacked. Not until around noon did the Germans gain a permanent foothold in