German timetables. Since the start of the war, the Germans had been able to set the timing and force the pace of any attack they initiated. Manstein’s successes at the turn of the year made it possible for the Germans to interpret the disaster of Stalingrad as an exception, if not an accident. Now, in the initial stages of a long-projected, long- prepared offensive, the Russians were controlling the agenda to a unexpected degree. Finally, Kempf’s experiences in particular suggested that the Germans’ ability to work inside what today is called the Red Army’s “observe, orient, decide, and act” loop was a diminishing, when not a wasting, asset. The Germans were expert players of military thimblerig: getting the Soviet yokel to bet on which shell contained the pea. Facing Kempf, and Hoth and Model, the Red Army was demonstrating the most effective counter: refusing to play the game by trying to stay ahead of it.
A senior staff officer with a bit of time to reflect on the maps and the strength reports might have put the pieces together. But under the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht had adjusted to Adolf Hitler’s five-minutes-to-midnight pace and to a pattern of so much multitasking and overstressing that this kind of calculation, once a general staff trademark, had become outmoded, retrograde. There was tomorrow’s action to prepare. That morning, a Leibstandarte tanker had shouted, “Lunch in Kursk!” as the attack went in. Bravado must become reality—and soon.
GRAPPLE
FROM THE RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE, the Germans were doing all too well for comfort. Lieutenant General Ivan Chistiakov, commanding the Sixth Guards Army, managed his reserves carefully enough that he was able to deploy two fresh divisions in his second-echelon defenses in the afternoon and evening of July 5. Vatutin ordered his armor forward to block the German penetration and restore Sixth Guards Army’s front. Two corps of the First Tank Army would confront XLVIII Panzer Corps, while two independent Guards tank corps took the SS in front and flank.
I
On paper, that raised the total number of Russian tanks committed against the Fourth Panzer Army to around a thousand. On the ground, the First Tank Army’s commander, Lieutenant General Mikhail Katukov, was receiving alarming reports on the performance of the Tigers. The riflemen of the Sixth Guards Army were holding on by their fingertips but did not offer a stable base for a full-scale counterattack. Katukov, working in his undershirt in the July heat, recommended his armor go over to the defensive until the next day. Vatutin agreed, authorizing his subordinate to resume the attack only when the German advance was halted. The air armies too needed time to count their losses and regroup for the next day.
Whether or not Vatutin had been shaken by the force of the German attack, he estimated his situation as unlikely to benefit from desperation and improvisation—at least at the operational level. Tactically, it was another story. Over the objections of his armor officers, Vatutin ordered his forward units to dig their tanks in—not just throw up berms, but bury the T-34s sometimes up to their turrets, converting them into pillboxes. The reasoning behind Vatutin’s high-risk decision was that based on initial reports of what Tigers and Panthers could do in the open, staging more than local, spoiling counterattacks invited the destruction of Voronezh Front’s armor to no purpose. The best chance of defeating Citadel was to use operational reserves defensively, a breakwater against which the panzer waves would dash themselves until Stavka’s grand plan unfolded and the Red Army’s strategic reserves inverted the battle’s dynamic.
Zhukov’s angry reaction was that Vatutin’s order violated armor doctrine, common sense, and Stalin’s wishes. Nikita Khrushchev threw his weight behind Vatutin. A political officer he might be, but he had garnered enough frontline experience at Stalingrad to appreciate Vatutin’s points—and the front commander’s personal and professional qualities. The orders went out: Dig them in. The simple command cannot convey the blind, stumbling exhaustion of the tankers, infantrymen, and engineers who shoveled during the night.
By “flying light” on July 6, the Soviet Second Air Army was able to mount large-scale, wing-strength fighter sweeps in temporarily empty air. A storm front had shut down VIII Air Corps’s fields, but when Hoth resumed his attack around 9:00 A.M., the Stukas were overhead. They proved less effective at ground support than the day before. Since 6:00 A.M., the Seventeenth Air Army had resumed sending its remaining Shturmoviks against Army Detachment Kempf’s bridges and bridgeheads. Experience indicated fighters were best employed in masses, and VIII Air Corps commander Brigadier General Hans Seidemann responded by dispatching his Messerschmitts to support Kempf. That left the Stukas and the ground-attack 190s in Hoth’s sector as unexpected but welcome meat on the table for the La-5 pilots. JG 77 alone had 10 of its 120 Stukas shot down or badly damaged. The dive- bombers kept coming. The 6th Tank Corps alone reported four strikes of sixty to seventy planes each day. The XLVIII Panzer Corps was nevertheless forced to depend on its own ground resources. The 3rd Panzer Division’s war diary noted laconically, “Fewer fighters today.”
The attack began with a ninety-minute artillery barrage that the Russians countered with their own guns and with repeated air strikes that inflicted heavy losses on the advancing tanks. In the center of the panzer corps’s front, Grossdeutschland sent its panzer grenadiers closely supported by tanks against the high ground north of Cherkassoye—and into the 250 AFVs of Katukov’s 3rd Mechanized Corps. Originally intended as part of an armored counterattack, the corps found itself in an infantry support role intermingled with the 90th Guards Rifle Division and what remained of the 67th. Almost immediately, Vatutin’s improvised tank pillboxes proved their worth. Each of them was a strongpoint in itself that had to be fought for individually. Turrets posed small targets, and their 76 mm guns were too dangerous to ignore. The Tigers and Panzer IVs had to close the range, sacrificing the advantage of their high-velocity guns. Given the heavy, well-sloped armor of a T-34 turret, a direct hit was no guarantee of a kill. And the dug-in tanks were only half the panzers’ problem. Soviet commanders deployed other tanks in concealed positions in front of the immobilized ones. Panzers concentrating on the entrenched AFVs often overlooked the mobile ones—until taken under fire from the flanks or rear.
Tanks concealed in ambush seldom survived long once they revealed their positions. Their crews were dead men from the start. But they earned the thanks of the Soviet Union: their lives had a purpose. And the tankers’ sacrifice had an unexpected secondary effect. The Russians’ adjusted armor deployment tended to separate the panzers from the panzer grenadiers. When the tanks engaged, the infantry kept moving, and without the direct, immediate support of the tanks, infantry losses were heavy against the formidable trench and bunker networks of the Russian second line. Army and Luftwaffe antiaircraft guns kept the constant Russian air attacks distracted but could not generate enough firepower to choke them off.
Grossdeutschland made steady progress up the Oboyan road. But after as many as eight separate attacks, a breakthrough still eluded this elite formation when its forward elements “leaguered” for the night. It had begun Citadel with more than three hundred AFVs, attached and organic. Eighty remained operational.
On GD’s left flank, 3rd Panzer Division fought its way by midafternoon to the Pena River—a river by name, more of a stream in fact. But its banks were marshy enough to daunt even the Mark IIIs and IVs. High ground on its far side, while low by measurement, gave Soviet tanks and antitank guns enough of an advantage to block the panzers’ advance. With some tank help from GD and infantry from the 167th Division, the 11th Panzer got into Olkhovatka (a village with the same name as the one so hotly contested in Central Front’s sector), but advanced no farther against the 1st Mechanized Brigade and its supporting antitank guns and riflemen. Hoth was not pleased with the slow progress in Knobelsdorff’s sector. Otto von Knobelsdorff, however, was an old-time infantryman who did not expect miracles. His corps might be running late, but it would get through the second defense line. It would catch up with the SS: it needed just “one day more!”
On July 5, the men of the lightning runes had approached what had been expected from Citadel from the
