the town’s outskirts, against ever-stiffening resistance reinforced from the air by medium bombers and Shturmoviks, which dropped over seventy-five hundred shaped-charge bombs across the fighting line that day.
At 3:30 P.M., the Germans came again, taking even heavier losses for almost no purpose. The town could be neither stormed nor enveloped. On what by now seemed to both sides a day that would never end, enough light remained at 7:00 P.M. for XLI Panzer Corps to make a final try. Its commander, Lieutenant General Josef Harpe, was an avowed Nazi sympathizer and as hard-boiled a tanker as any in the German army. He committed his last reserves. The 307th Rifle Division—what remained of it—finally abandoned its forward positions. For a few minutes around 7:30, a way into the Russian flank and rear appeared open. Then the antitank guns shut it once more, and the sorely tried Germans retreated to their blood-bought start lines, about halfway into Ponyri.
Model’s intended
The Germans’ optimal reply was to halt and take advantage of their quicker training guns and their superior sighting apparatus. But the achieved kills were bought at the price of momentum. An initial steady pace became a series of stops and starts that gave the Russians time to breathe and recover. Soviet accounts have the 140th Rifle Division, which was in the thick of the fighting, repulsing no fewer than thirteen attacks before finally giving ground. It was noon before the panzers broke through in the center. Teploye was less than three miles away, Olkhovatka a mile farther, and the ground seemed open and rolling all the way. But again the Soviet rifle divisions on the flanks held and counterattacked, cutting off tank and infantry spearheads caught in unseen minefields and halted by camouflaged strongpoints on the right. Shturmoviks, supported by modified Yak-9s with fuselage- mounted 37 mm cannon, saturated a German defense whose fighters were heavily outnumbered. The 1st Air Division managed only 307 sorties against 731 for the Russians, flown by men whose skills had improved through experience in the learn-or-die battles of the previous days. By July 7, in the Olkhovatka sector, the Shturmovik groups claimed thirty-four kills for no losses. The German frontline flak could be reinforced only at the expense of leaving the Ninth Army’s rear areas uncovered to Soviet attacks that grew in numbers and effectiveness each day.
Lack of numbers was critical in another area as well. A panzer division had only four infantry battalions, one mounted on armored half-tracks and three in ordinary trucks. These “panzer grenadiers,” as they had been retitled in 1942, were intended to work with the tanks, attacking alongside or ahead of them against fortified positions or minefields. To facilitate taking out strongpoints quickly, the battalions included a formidable array of supporting weapons: mortars, light infantry guns, half-track-mounted short 75 mm cannon. The trucks and half-tracks enabled the infantry to move deeper into the battle zone before dismounting and catch up quickly with the tanks once the defensive lines had been breached and the remaining pockets of resistance eliminated or contained. On the Ninth Army’s front, however, the strength of the defenses forced the panzer grenadiers onto their feet almost from the beginning of any advance. From then on, their additional firepower became a literal burden: carry it forward or resort to bayonets, grenades, and sharpened entrenching tools against the omnipresent strongpoints. Tanks that stayed to help the infantry became easy targets. So did tanks that moved forward independently. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the panzers’ tactics. It was rather that the forces applying them were too weak for the specific situation. The combination of the rifle divisions’ defense and the massive air and armored counterattacks brought the panzers to a halt before nightfall.
In most cases, the tanks and infantry set up perimeter defenses on the ground they had gained—a reflection not only of a determination to hang on, but of a recognition that they would have to fight their way back, as they had fought forward. Better to scratch foxholes and slit trenches, keep alert for the ubiquitous Red Army patrols, and curse the no less ubiquitous “sewing machines” with their flares and bombs.
In principle, the Germans’ significantly superior tactical skill outweighed the advantages inherent to the defense. In practice, the Ninth Army had taken more than thirteen thousand casualties in two days, an overwhelming number of them in the infantry and correspondingly irreplaceable even by warm-body cannon fodder. Actual tank losses at this stage are difficult to determine accurately. On the German side, no one was counting; across the fighting line, so many weapons engaged each target that the Soviets were counting triple. Since the start of the offensive, German mechanics were repairing tanks and replenishing ammunition supplies depleted enough that Model had phoned Berlin for an emergency shipment of a hundred thousand rounds. Total write-offs in tanks—around fifty—were strikingly modest. But how long the field repair jobs would last was anyone’s guess. The crews were suffering not merely from combat stress but from sheer fatigue. Three days without sleep was not unusual among the tankers. The Luftwaffe’s shortfalls in fuel and general overexertion had also grown worse.
Attrition on the wrong side of the balance sheet? Perhaps. But German intelligence calculated that the Russians had lost more than sixty thousand men, three hundred tanks, and even more aircraft. Model, who had again spent the day traveling among his headquarters, was not stupid, but neither was he reflective. It would have been against his character to take a detached, critical approach to the intelligence reports—or, indeed, to the events of the past seventy-two hours. The Ninth Army’s hard fighting had to have eroded the Soviet reserves in front of it. And if the Russians were planning something massive on Army Group Center’s front, the best way to deter that was to divert it. Manstein was making solid progress in the south. Apart from any sense of competition with a colleague so different in background and temperament, continuing the attack in Ninth Army’s sector clearly seemed to Model the most promising and least worst option available.
III
Manstein and Model had little in common as commanders, but their initial orders were almost exact duplicates: two strong corps going down the center, covered on each flank by weaker elements. Army Group South was to attack with concentrated force from the line Belgorod–Tomarovka, break through the Soviet defenses, and meet Model somewhere east of Kursk.
Nikolai Popel, chief political officer of the opposing First Tank Army, later compared the Fourth Panzer Army’s attack to a knight’s move in chess. The metaphor was mistaken. Army commander Hermann Hoth’s plan had nothing in common with the freewheeling spontaneity associated with chessboard knights. It was a straight force-on-force exercise. Hoth’s main attack, toward Oboyan, was assigned a sector only fifteen miles across, and his geographic objective, the town of Oboyan, was thirty miles away—a long distance for a narrow front.
Should a hammer blow fail, one option was to send for a bigger hammer. But the Fourth Panzer Army already had the heaviest hammer Germany could provide. The XLVIII Panzer Corps and the Waffen SS had almost eleven hundred tanks and assault guns between them. The Fourth Air Fleet counted almost 1,100 aircraft, and 966 of those were concentrated in VIII Air Corps, which specialized in direct ground support. Almost 250 were Stukas; 75 more were tank-busting He-129s—and Manstein expected to need every one of them from the beginning.
On May 10, Manstein met with Hoth and the senior commanders of XLVIII Panzer Corps. Manstein had by then decided that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points. Given his sector’s geography, the best option was a massive frontal armored attack, using the limited infantry forces to provide flank protection. The
