initial objective was to cross the Psel River, then to capture the road-junction town of Oboyan. Kursk would be the next stop. In the course of a freewheeling discussion on how best to make that work, Manstein reinforced that it was going to be not only a hard fight but a long one. The main battle would begin only once the first defense lines had been penetrated. That alone would require detailed, precise planning based on the combined-arms tactics that were the essence of panzer doctrine. Lead with heavy tanks. Use artillery to take out antitank positions. Expect major Soviet air attacks from the beginning. The next day, Manstein communicated the same urgency to the SS at corps headquarters: Take nothing for granted. Assume strong defenses continually developed. Prepare thoroughly—this was no time for heroic improvisation.
Manstein may have been conveying doubts. He may also have been emphasizing the importance of an early breakthrough. In either case, in the weeks before the attack he honored the established German principle of delegation, allowing subordinates to plan the details and listening to their specific proposals. The panzer divisions rehearsed down to small-unit levels, emphasizing cooperation with the Luftwaffe and the tactics of overcoming antitank defenses in depth. And Hermann Hoth cogitated.
Hoth was what Germans call
And delay in turn, Hoth reasoned, was virtually guaranteed, because as configured, XLVIII Panzer Corps was unlikely to reach its objectives and secure its left flank as well in the same time frame. Hoth addressed part of the problem by convincing Manstein to add the 3rd Panzer Division to the corps’s order of battle, allowing its commitment from Citadel’s beginning. The other, larger element was beyond his control. To rest the tankers and panzer grenadiers, Fourth Panzer Army’s riflemen had been required to hold the front for days and weeks longer than doctrine or common sense recommended. The infantry divisions were rated “satisfactory,” but the evaluation was at best overly generous, at worst recklessly optimistic. Manstein understood the problem. On June 1, he warned Zeitzler that not only could the attack not succeed with the forces currently allotted, but the concentration of strength around Kursk opened wide opportunities for the Red Army to create crises elsewhere.
“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” To that end, Manstein put everything on Front Street, leaving no significant sector reserves. Hoth also reinforced Manstein’s conviction that breaking directly through the Russian defenses would be a long, absolutely expensive process. At Manstein’s May 10–11 visit to the Fourth Panzer Army, Hoth suggested that a straight line was not necessarily the shortest distance between two operational points. The terrain in front of the Psel River, and the course and configuration of the river itself, suggested that an opposed crossing would prove time-consuming. If his corps had to fight for bridgeheads, they would be wide open to a flank attack by Soviet strategic reserves, mounted from the northeast, through the passage between the Psel and the Donets.
Hoth recommended that instead of advancing straight ahead in tandem with XLVIII Panzer Corps, II SS Panzer Corps should swing northeast short of the Psel and draw the Russians onto their guns around the village of Prokhorovka. The III Panzer Corps in turn would shift its axis of advance northeast and strike the right flank of the Soviets attacking the SS. The XLVIII Panzer Corps, with Grossdeutschland doing the heavy lifting, would keep abreast of the SS, changing direction to correspond with its movements, and reinforce the expected decisive engagement as necessary. From there, the Fourth Panzer Army could advance in any appropriate direction: north to a direct junction with Model, northeast into the left rear of the Russians in the Orel salient—perhaps even due east, for another time-buying “forehand stroke.” A series of map exercises held by Kempf, Hoth, and their corps commanders beginning on May 29 developed the concept. On June 3–5, Army Group South conducted a final war game. Later that month, Hoth ran a command post exercise for the Fourth Panzer Army, testing the intended course of Citadel’s first days. By June 2, Fourth Panzer Army’s war diary was presenting the “Hoth variant” as settled.
The decision was minimally reassuring. Shifting the panzers’ axes of advance would still leave the right flank of Army Group South wide open. Addressing that by turning III Panzer Corps north left Army Detachment Kempf’s infantry divisions to secure with their own limited resources sectors that in one case extended ninety miles. This was a substantial risk, especially should the main advance be delayed.
Like many senior German generals, Manstein was horsey in a way only George Patton matched on the Allied side. To relax, he rode an hour or so each day—until Hitler exploded. Manstein’s aide responded to the Fuhrer’s expressed fear of partisans by arranging for a motorized escort. That, however, defeated the purpose of the exercise in both senses of the noun. Manstein condignly and unhappily dismounted. The field marshal embraced high tech, on the other hand, with the train he adopted as his mobile headquarters. Its half-dozen cars supported antiaircraft and ground security, maintained an elaborate communications system, and above all provided stable working and living conditions. Any fool can be uncomfortable, and while Manstein was not decrepit, at fifty-eight he was well past his youth. The train also enabled him to visit subordinate headquarters by day, then travel to the next destination by night and arrive rested and breakfasted.
Army Group South’s attack began in the late afternoon of July 4. In XLVIII Panzer Corps’s sector, the panzer grenadier battalions of Grossdeutschland and 11th Panzer Division went forward in a drivi ng rain against the Soviet outpost zone and its network of fortified villages. Grossdeutschland had begun the war as an elite infantry regiment, and it prided itself on maintaining traditional infantry skills. But mines, small arms, and artillery turned what was expected to be a shock attack into a stop-and-go operation extending into the late evening. The fighting was hard enough and the casualties high enough that division and corps assumed the defenses had been breached and ordered the main armored force to move into attack positions.
Dawn broke around 3:00 A.M., with the promise of clear, hot weather. During the night, there had been more heavy thunderstorms in Manstein’s sector, and much of the ground would remain frustratingly soft for most of the day. A more immediate concern was the Soviet bombardment that delayed the initial attack until around 4:10 A.M., when artillery and rocket fire pounded Voronezh Front’s forward positions for fifty minutes. The Stukas and the medium bombers of VIII Air Corps appeared as the barrage ended, hammering Kursk’s railway station and Russian gun positions in the rear zones, then shifting to the visible strongpoints of the forward defenses.
Luftwaffe airfields in this sector were closely concentrated. For two months, the Red Air Force had left them relatively undisturbed, hoping to take them out in a surprise attack. As the Russian barrage began, the Second and Seventeenth Air Armies sent 150 Shturmoviks, plus fighters and level bombers, across the front line to the German airfields, where 800 German planes sat waiting to take off, wingtip to wingtip. It might have been the Red Air Force’s chance to collect payback for the first day of Barbarossa, when it was caught by surprise on the ground and suffered catastrophic losses.
But German signal intelligence noted the sudden surge in communications among the Russian air units, and German radar picked up the incoming aircraft. The Germans were launching their own attack earlier than expected, to deal with the Soviet guns. Even so, the next few minutes were chaotic as bombers, scheduled to take off first, scrambled to clear the runways for the fighters, then sought to take off themselves. By now, the Luftwaffe specialized in emergencies. By the time the Soviet aircraft appeared, not only were the targeted airfields empty, but the German fighters had the advantage of height.
Their Me-109Gs technically were no more than an even match for the Red Air Force Yaks and LaGGs. But the pilots of JG 3 and 52 were among the Luftwaffe’s best. A number of the Shturmovik crews by contrast were flying their first missions with the Il-2. The Soviet fighter groups, also largely inexperienced, flew close escort, matching the Shturmoviks in speed and altitude. When they did break off to engage the German fighters, they too often lost contact. Russian attack routes were marked by shot-down Shturmoviks. The targeted airfields escaped significant damage. And VIII Air Corps had a free hand in its initial attack.
The impact was multiplied by the Germans’ highly effective air-ground liaison system. Luftwaffe radio teams accompanied corps and division headquarters into action, reporting the situation regularly to their headquarters, contacting formations, and vectoring strikes onto targets as they emerged. In the first hour, over four hundred aircraft appeared in a sector only twenty miles wide. One rifle division reported formations of eighty at a time. Another was hit by five Stuka groups in succession—on a front two miles wide and less than five yards deep!
