These demonstrations of precision bombing were more necessary than XLVIII Panzer Corps expected or wanted. It advanced three divisions abreast: 3rd Panzer, Grossdeutschland, and 11th Panzer, over 450 tanks and assault guns. More than 350 of those were in Grossdeutschland’s two-mile sector of the front. Two hundred were Panthers, combined with Grossdeutschland’s two tank battalions into a provisional 10th Panzer Brigade that seemed formidable enough to break through defenses weakened the day before in raids made by GD’s panzer grenadiers.
Hoth’s decision to attack without any reserve has been questioned cogently. A two-division front, with the 3rd or 11th Panzer held ready to exploit any tactical success, was one alternative. Another was to use the Panthers as the nucleus of a reserve force in a sector where arguably too many tanks were committed on too narrow a front. Hoth and his chief of staff, Major General Friedrich Fangohr, discussed both options and rejected them on the grounds that Grossdeutschland would need strong armored support on both flanks in order to force an immediate breakthrough. Hoth was nevertheless confident enough to set XLVIII Corps’s objective for July 6 as the Psel River—thirty miles away. But that meant cracking the nut of Cherkassoye, a village three miles behind the panzers’ start line, whose elaborately camouflaged defenses were manned by an entire Guards rifle division, the 67th, the one hit by five Stuka attacks just before the Germans appeared.
A year or two earlier, that might have been enough. This time the 67th’s positions and their supporting echelons responded with the heaviest fire GD had experienced. The Panthers had reached Army Group South on July 1: too late for field-testing the tanks, much less attempts at training. Even their radio equipment remained untested for the sake of communications security. Tension between the commanders of the Panthers and GD’s tanks further complicated planning.
The improvised panzer brigade went in around 9:00 A.M. The Panthers were slowed by wet ground, then drove into a minefield. Some lost treads. Others spun tread-deep in muck trying to extricate themselves. The battalion of GD infantrymen the Panthers were supposed to be escorting and supporting pushed forward but was pinned down and shot to pieces. It took ten hours for Grossdeutschland’s pioneers to clear paths through the minefield and for the maintenance crews to replace damaged tracks.
That was only one sector. Grossdeutschland’s tank commander, who rejoiced in the name of Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz von Gross-Zauche und Camminetz—his men called him “Panzer Count” and “Panzer Lion”—was a member (apparently nominal) of the Allgemeine (General) SS, courtesy of Heinrich Himmler. He had also won the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross during Barbarossa for taking his tank across a bridge and single-handedly annihilating a Soviet convoy. When he saw the Panthers halted, he shifted his own tanks, including GD’s organic Tiger company, to support 11th Panzer.
The Russian defenses were the usual maze of entrenchments, minefields, and strongpoints, strengthened further by wet ground that slowed the armor. The ideal result for a German attack was a more or less simultaneous penetration of a defense sector, then a swing right and left, attacking bunkers and strongpoints from the flank. Like Japanese positions in the Pacific theater, Red Army defenses depended on an interlocking chain of enfilade fire. The more bunkers taken out, the more gaps opened in the firewall, the more vulnerable became the entire system to coordinated attack from front and flank.
That was the theory. In practice, the heavily built bunkers often resisted anything but armor-piercing rounds. For two years, the panzers had usually been able to generate “tank fright” as they came to close quarters. Around Cherkassoye, Guardsmen took on the Mark IVs hand to hand with near suicidal determination, jumping onto the vehicles to blow off turrets with mines. Tankers responded by rediscovering the Great War tactic of straddling a trench, then turning to collapse it and bury the defenders alive. In contrast with events in Model’s sector, the panzer grenadiers were able to maintain contact and supplement the mutual covering fire of the tanks’ machine guns.
But Cherkassoye held even after the surviving Panthers and their panzer grenadiers finally escaped their personal bog and came up in support of GD. The 11th Panzer was able to bring up in its sector a number of Mark IIIs converted to flamethrowers and burn out defenders who at times served their guns until roasted alive. Even then the Soviet survivors of the 67th and the antitank regiments that stood with them maintained a foothold in the village outskirts, falling back to the second line only with the end of daylight, and only under orders.
The 3rd Panzer Division, on GD’s left, had easier going. With its left effectively covered by the 332nd Infantry Division, the 3rd’s panzer grenadiers took the strongpoint of Korovino by day’s end, and a tank battalion took advantage of the transfer there of local reserves to break through the 71st Rifle Division’s forward defenses and drive a narrow salient three miles into the Soviet rear.
IV
Hoth’s final attack orders to the SS panzers, replicated in the corps order of July 1, were to break through the first two Russian defense lines, then advance in force to the Psel River in the area of Prokhorovka. The II SS Panzer Corps thus had the most demanding assignment on Manstein’s sector—and expected it. The identity of the Waffen SS was constructed around its panzer divisions. From unpromising military beginnings, they established a deserved reputation as some of the most formidable combat formations in the brief history of armored war. The Waffen SS began life in 1925 as a security force to protect Nazi meetings and officials. From its beginnings, the force was a party instrument. Its personal loyalty to Hitler was manifested in the regiment-sized Leibstandarte (Bodyguard) established in 1933. The Totenkopf (Death’s-Head) units were created the same year as concentration camp guards. In 1935, a number of local “Emergency Readiness Formations” were grouped into three regiments of Special Service Troops (Verfugungstruppen). All three were expanded to motorized divisions; Leibstandarte was the last to be reconfigured in May 1941.
Ideologically, the SS was projected as a new human type, able to serve as a model and an instrument for revitalizing the Nordic race. Militarily, the SS way was headlong energy and ruthless, never-say-die aggressiveness, emphasizing speed and ferocity. SS training stressed physical toughness and incorporated risk to an extent far surpassing the army’s training. Operationally, the results were initially mixed. Not until Barbarossa did the Waffen SS come into its own. Not until after Stalingrad did it join the first team. Only at Kursk did it begin defining combat on the Eastern Front.
From the Leibstandarte, the Waffen SS drew an identity as the Fuhrer’s personal elite. The Verfugungstruppe, which had become the Das Reich Division, contributed a willingness to learn soldiering from the professionals. Totenkopf emphasized ferocity as a norm. All three qualities attracted attention. An army report singles out the SS riflemen of Das Reich for “fearlessness and bravery” during the drive for Moscow; on one occasion they swarmed over heavy tanks to set them afire with gasoline when antitank guns proved useless. A Leibstandarte rifle company set up the victory at Rostov by seizing a vital railway bridge before it could be blown. Totenkopf was the heart and soul of the defense of the Demyansk Pocket, created by the Soviet Northwest Front’s massive offensive of February 1942. The SS men held nothing back; their spirit of “no quarter, no surrender” left four-fifths of the division as casualties by the time the pocket was relieved in April 1942.
The chosen three of the Waffen SS spent most of 1942 in France, being rebuilt, reconfigured, and upgraded to panzer grenadier status. In fact, all three had two-battalion tank regiments, at least one of their six panzer grenadier battalions in armored half-tracks, generous allowances of supporting weapons, and by Citadel, a company of Tigers. Authorized strength was more than twenty thousand. The newly created SS Panzer Corps was supremely confident that it was the instrument needed to restore the situation and turn the tide in the East. Redeployed in January 1943, the SS panzers played a crucial role in Manstein’s offensive, paying for Kharkov’s recapture with more than twelve thousand casualties. Leibstandarte’s fighting strength was reduced by almost half, the city square was renamed in its honor, and its men were accused postwar of clearing a hospital by the simple expedient of shooting its seven hundred patients. When Manstein received the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, he owed a good deal of the award to the men in SS black.
Left to right, the alignment for Citadel was Leibstandarte, Das Reich, and Totenkopf: another five hundred AFVs on a front of less than eight miles.
Manstein and Hausser believed that mass and fighting spirit, plus Luftwaffe support, would carry the SS
