through any defense the Soviets might put up. Front and army commands were aware of whom they faced in this sector: “Hitler’s guard.” The position had been entrusted to a Soviet counterpart, the heavily reinforced 52nd Guards Rifle Division. The panzers rolled out at 4:00 A.M. and from the beginning encountered determined compound resistance—staff-speak for everything the Red Army could throw at them.
The advance was across relatively open ground, through grain fields and across steppe grass. As the tanks moved forward and the Soviet positions opened fire, the Tigers took on the bunkers while the lighter tanks covered the infantry, who began clearing the trenches, and the pioneers, who blew up the antitank ditches to create ramps for the tanks to advance. The tanks would repeat the performance as the pioneers and infantry “reduced” surviving bunkers with grenades, demolition charges, and flamethrowers.
It reads like a staff exercise but played like a never-ending scene from Dante. A war correspondent rhapsodized about “the hour of the tank.” An SS officer described—from a safe distance—tanks charging “like knights in combat with horse and lance.” Reality was Soviet crews countering with Katyusha rocket launchers fired horizontally over open sights and Soviet tank crews charging forward to engage at ranges nullifying the long-range advantage of the German high-velocity 75s and 88s. Each antitank gun had to be silenced individually, each trench cleared from traverse to traverse, each bunker taken in close combat. A flamethrower crewman from Das Reich wrote of the “strange feeling to serve this destructive weapon and it was terrifying to see the flames eat their way forward and envelop the Russian defenders.” A more matter-of-fact veteran of the day mentioned to the author in passing that ever since then he had been unable to tolerate the smell of roast pork.
There was nothing to choose between the adversaries in terms of courage and determination. Tactical skill was at a discount in the close-quarters fighting. But the Germans had three things in their favor. One was their tank armament—not only its long range, but the excellent sighting equipment that enabled precise targeting of the Russian positions once they revealed themselves. The second advantage, this one sector-specific, was the third infantry battalion in each of the SS panzer grenadier regiments and the increased strength and flexibility it provided. The third German trump card was the Luftwaffe. The 52nd Rifle Division took fifteen hours of virtually uninterrupted, unopposed air attack by as many as eighty aircraft at a time. These wreaked havoc not so much on forward positions, but in the second-line trenches, the mortar, gun, and rocket positions constructed to resist shelling but vulnerable to direct air strikes.
By 9:00 A.M., the Germans were through the first defense line. But every report reaching higher headquarters confirmed resistance of an unprecedented nature and scale despite the relative ineffectiveness of Soviet air attacks. A Russian tank commander described the intensity and scale of the battle as challenging human comprehension. The sun itself was obscured by dust and smoke. But the Russians held on and fought back. Not until 4:00 P.M. did the key strongpoint of Bytkova fall to Leibstandarte, and by then a third of the 52nd Guards’s original eight thousand men were dead or wounded. Thirty minutes later, the SS panzers were ordered forward: Break through the next defense system and throw a bridgehead across the Psel. It took ninety more minutes to organize the attack, which promptly ran into an antitank “front”—an integrated system of gun positions that checked the Tiger spearhead to a point where division command ordered a halt.
Das Reich had kept pace on Leibstandarte’s right despite initial problems, caused by wet ground, of maintaining tank-infantry contact. During the night assault, parties of the 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment had infiltrated the outpost line and cleared part of the way before the main attack went in around 6:00 A.M. By around 8:15, Das Reich had reached its major initial objective, the strongpoint village of Berezov, and the panzer grenadiers were clearing it with flamethrowers. Not until 4:00 P.M., however, did the division’s final objective fall to a hastily committed reserve battalion. Totenkopf had also done well initially in a supporting role, pushing the opposing 155th Guards Rifle Regiment back and out of its way, but then was stopped by a tank brigade that blocked the road to Oboyan. Nevertheless, Hausser, his division commanders, and Hoth saw the next day’s prospects for the SS as favorable.
The same could not be said for Army Detachment Kempf. Its first assignment involved crossing the Donets. No aircraft were available. The artillery was so weak that three Luftwaffe flak regiments were temporarily assigned as substitutes: an indirect-fire role ill-suited to the high-velocity 88s. Kempf and his corps commanders correspondingly agreed on a broad-front crossing spearheaded by their three panzer divisions. German armor had been leading river crossings since 1940, and the multiple attack sites were expected to throw the Soviets into predictable confusion. But at the end of Manstein’s post-Stalingrad counterattack, the Germans had established a bridgehead at Mikhailovka, across from Belgorod. Steadily reinforced during the run-up to Kursk, it represented enough of an immediate threat that the Seventh Guards Army was on local alert all along its front.
Around 2:30 A.M. on July 5, the Russians opened a full-scale barrage. Katyushas took out one of the pontoon bridges connecting Mikhailovka to the main German positions. Another was blocked when an assault gun and a pontoon truck collided. That meant 6th Panzer Division had to improvise—and the 81st Guards Rifle Division spent the day demonstrating that tactical flexibility was not inevitably a substitute for determination backed by firepower. By 4:00 P.M., the 6th Panzer Division had captured a couple of dots on the map, but its commander acknowledged that “considering the sacrifices … you can’t call this a victory.”
In Army Detachment Kempf’s center, the 19th Panzer Pioneer Battalion spent the night building a pontoon bridge and the early dawn clearing minefields—with bayonets, since the wooden box mines were invisible to metal detectors—and cutting wire. The Russians observed and waited. Minutes before 19th Panzer’s attack went in, guns, mortars, and Katyushas flogged the assembly areas and the crossing site. With no reports from forward observers, the division’s artillery remained silent or fired blindly into the dust and smoke. Their Russian opponents had observation points on high ground and a communications system that the Germans failed to disrupt. Kempf had divided the Tiger battalion he had been assigned: one company to each panzer division. The 19th’s Tigers lost thirteen of fourteen before noon, mostly to mines. Thanks to the panzer grenadiers’ success in exploiting the boundary between two Russian rifle divisions, 19th Panzer made enough gains to consolidate a bridgehead. But the division’s artillery had used so much ammunition that at 4:15 it reported that is was likely to need resupply to support the next day’s operation. Part of that resupply capacity was provided by literal horsepower— demodernization in practice. The bridgehead was more a foothold. As the division commander summarized events, “The whole thing was almost a failure.”
In Kempf’s southern sector, the 7th Panzer Division’s lead elements crossed the Donets at first light on a pontoon bridge placed by the division’s pioneers. A textbook operation—until Soviet artillery took out the bridge and left the 7th’s advance battle group isolated under increasing air strikes and artillery fire. The 7th’s attached Tigers were too heavy to cross the first bridge and bogged down when they tried to ford the river. Not until 2:00 in the afternoon were the pioneers able to construct a bridge that could bear the Tigers’ weight. Until then, the most they could do was bunker busting for the sorely tried panzer grenadiers on the far bank.
Here, as in every sector the Tigers attacked, Russian infantry initially let them pass and concentrated on the infantry following them. The Tigers in turn sought desperately for concealed antitank guns that scored hits that may not have penetrated armor but disconcerted crews. The Seventeenth Air Army weighed in with a continuing series of air strikes that around 3:00 P.M. had the German air liaison officers calling urgently for fighters. The 109s responded; the Russians increased the ante; and by 6:00 P.M. what began as a series of small-scale fights turned into what World War I pilots called a “furball.” Shturmoviks and Messerschmitts mixed it up for more than an hour in one of Citadel’s more one-sided aerial engagements. One German pilot claimed four kills, another six. The Seventeenth Air Army recorded a loss of no fewer than fifty-five Shturmoviks in the sector. By day’s end, the German bridgehead was secure. That, however, was a long way from a breakthrough.
The study of Operation Citadel has been dominated, arguably overshadowed, by statistics. That does not make them irrelevant. In Manstein’s sector, the Luftwaffe owned the air, scoring more than 150 Soviet kills for a loss of two dozen. On the ground, Army Group South had suffered more than 6,000 casualties for no more than limited tactical gains on narrow fronts. Given the nearly empty replacement pipeline and the distance between the fighting zone and its base areas, 6,000 men arguably meant more than the relatively few tanks and assault guns —no more than forty or fifty—permanently written off on July 5. The raw number, however, hardly compared with the first day of Verdun or July 1, 1916, day one of the First Battle of the Somme. The Panthers’ combat debut had been a fiasco. But only two of them had been destroyed by gunfire: a tribute to their survivability. The balance of attrition by itself, in short, was not discouraging.
In comparing the first day’s fighting in Model’s, Hoth’s, and Kempf’s sectors, three points nevertheless stand out. First is the Soviet ability at all levels to conceal their strength and their dispositions even as the battle developed;
