a few miles from the open country the panzers had sought for three brutal days.
It was then, around 5:00 A.M., that 6th Tank and 3rd Mechanized Corps counterattacked: more than a hundred T-34s covered by Shturmoviks, with the usual massive gun and rocket support. Grossdeutschland was stopped in its tracks for three hours in front of the village of Syrzevo when its attached Panthers ran into an unmarked minefield. By late afternoon, only 40 of the 184 that began the battle were still operational. That did nothing for the morale of even an elite unit. Questions were arising about whether the Tigers were being wrongly employed as a spearhead, whether they were not more effective using their long guns at ranges the T-34s could not match rather than be caught at close quarters by superior numbers. But on this day, any idea of using the Mark IIIs and IVs as the land-warfare counterpart of destroyers screening the Tiger battleships was abandoned when the lighter AFVs regularly had to be withdrawn to reverse slopes to escape the plunging fire of the Russian heavy howitzers. In back-and-forth close-quarters fighting that took the rest of the day, Grossdeutschland managed about three miles, finally reaching Syrzevo, the last major strongpoint before Oboyan. The 11th Panzer matched that gain, but no more, against equally strong resistance.
Every time it seemed the Russians were entering panic mode, they rallied and counterattacked. Vatutin shifted reinforcements from relatively quiet sectors and funneled them down the Oboyan road by brigades and battalions. The 6th Tank and 3rd Mechanized Corps stabilized the line around Syrzevo. Shturmoviks broke up advances Grossdeutschland’s history describes as “slow and laborious.” Grossdeutschland’s panzer grenadiers took heavy losses from artillery and mortar fire, and the last of the division’s Tigers was disabled during a Russian counterattack. The artillery duel continued even after dark, with guns and rocket launchers firing blindly or at previously located target sites now often abandoned.
It was slow; it was expensive. But it was progress—from the Russian perspective, dangerously steady progress. The problem was that Hoth had set the corps’s objectives up to three times farther than the actual advance. One bright spot was the capture of Hill 230 east of Syrzevo in a surprise attack delivered by Grossdeutschland’s reconnaissance battalion supported by the division’s assault guns. It was Citadel’s first success won by finesse and maneuver. It was correspondingly featured in the reports and the histories as a valuable starting point for the next day’s operations. This was putting the best possible face on circumstances, and it was cold comfort to the pioneers who spent another night marking and clearing minefields around Syrzevo to enable the panzers’ morning advance.
The Waffen SS did better—a good deal better. Hoth had reiterated to Hausser that the corps’s ultimate objective was Prokhorovka, and he “hoped” it could be achieved by day’s end. Leibstandarte and Das Reich moved out around 2:30 A.M. and crossed their start lines three hours later. Despite constant counterattacks, their forward armored elements, deployed in wedges with Tigers at the apex, pushed back what remained of the 5th Guards Tank Corps far enough during the morning to be into the Soviet third defensive line by the end of the day. The Luftwaffe controlled the air, keeping Soviet fighters off the backs of the Stukas and Henschels. Battle groups from Leibstandarte and Das Reich drove up the Prokhorovka road, leaving a trail of knocked-out vehicles, dazed prisoners, and dead men behind them. Leibstandarte claimed the destruction of 75 tanks and the capture of 123 more. The air crews responded that it was impossible to tell who was responsible for what in the growing tank graveyard.
But the SS spearheads faced seemingly endless counterattacks by tank forces between thirty and sixty strong. Without the “excellent Luftwaffe support” Das Reich described and corps headquarters affirmed, prospects would have been dim. As it was, the tankers were punching holes as opposed to opening fronts, getting forward as best they might, and letting the flanks take care of themselves.
A panzer division’s reconnaissance battalion was not configured to “sneak and peek.” Eighteen months in Russia had demonstrated that any information worth acquiring had to be fought for, and the panzer reconnaissance battalion had become a formidable instrument of war, with armored cars, light half-tracks, and a panoply of heavy weapons. Leibstandarte’s reconnaissance battalion joined a few still-operable tanks on a late- afternoon final drive to the Psel River, then ran into a minefield large enough and fire heavy enough to make discretion the best part of valor, at least for that night.
The drive to the Psel fit the SS self-image of brio and bravado. It was also a temporary option. Vatutin had ordered the 2nd Guards Tank Corps to strike the SS Corps’s right flank, and the attacks began around daybreak. Where Totenkopf’s guns were able to reach, they hit. The panzers’ maid of all work, the Mark IVs, proved almost as effective as the Tigers in taking out Russian tanks at long range from hull-down positions. By noon, enough T- 34s were out of action to blunt the counterattack. But the farther the other two divisions advanced, the more exposed their forward units became. Confederate general James Longstreet once described new troops as being “as sensitive about the flanks as a virgin.” But neither could veterans ignore constant groping. Both Leibstandarte’s and Das Reich’s commanders were increasingly forced to detail their panzer grenadiers to expand a corridor the Russians were determined to shut.
The mission was no bagatelle. The heavy fighting that continued into the night was epitomized by the experience of an SS rifle company pinned down in front of a railway embankment. The company commander was wounded; a young second lieutenant took over for six hours’ worth of close-quarters combat. Twice wounded, he appeared to be everywhere things seemed worst. When a T-34 hit the Germans from a flank, he attacked it single-handed. Then a stray bullet touched off a smoke grenade in his trousers pocket. Without hesitating, the lieutenant tore off trousers and underwear and continued to lead from the front, naked from shirttail to boots. The anecdote invites jokes about “risking all for the Fuhrer,” but it also evokes the part of the Waffen SS ethos that appealed, and continues to appeal, to males brought up in societies equating the progress of civilization with the elimination of challenge. Lieutenant Joachim Kruger’s luck ran out a week later. Not until June 1944 did he receive a posthumous Knight’s Cross, the Reich’s highest award for courage and leadership in combat.
Hausser submitted his report to Hoth at 10:40 P.M. It described a Russian “offensive defense” characterized by advances, flank attacks, and counterattacks, heavily supported by small-scale air strikes. The forward elements of Leibstandarte and Das Reich were still engaged too closely to provide details. Totenkopf, supported by an army infantry regiment, had made gains despite heavy air attack and artillery fire. But the weather was “sunny, dry, warm.” The roads were “passable for all vehicles.” And the corps was moving in the right direction.
That was unwittingly affirmed by a German-intercepted radio message Vatutin sent his subordinates that evening, stating that the Germans must on no account break through to Kursk. It was inspired by a pithy and unmistakable order to Vatutin from Stalin himself, eloquently reinforced by Khrushchev, that the Fourth Panzer Army must be stopped. It was plain that the USSR’s entire system of motivation and management stood behind the directive. The First Tank Army was still combat-capable, but Vatutin was deploying Stavka reinforcements behind its reorganizing forward units. Nikolai Popel, a battle-experienced armor officer as well as Katukov’s chief political officer, described July 7 as one of the hardest days in the Battle of Kursk, leaving First Tank Army with its strength substantially diminished. First Tank’s commander had previously called sober attention to the Germans’ “larger units” and “heavier tanks,” whose guns far outranged the 76 mm of his T-34s. And German ground-attack planes were inflicting heavy losses even before armored units reached the front.
The Red Army of 1943 was not kind to senior officers who saw ghosts and shadows. Vatutin and his subordinates were seasoned combat veterans. To speak of shaken nerves is to overstate the case. Yet the question simmered: What would it take to stop these Hitlerites? Since June 1941, they had won their victories through finesse: smoke, mirrors, and maneuver. Stalingrad had suggested they were vulnerable to hard pounding. Now, army and SS alike, they were taking what the Soviet Union had to give and they kept coming, as inexorable, as pitiless, and as nonhuman as Russian weather—or, perhaps, the Soviet system.
Such thoughts owed something to what seemed the Germans’ inexhaustible supply of Tigers. Soviet infantry, antitank crews, and tankers were reporting kills into the dozens—yet every day the Tigers led the attack. In part that reflected the effects of adrenaline, of fear, of distorted time frames, of smoke and dust, all of which tends to enhance a universal tendency to exaggerate the material number and the formidable nature of opponents. To aircrews in the Pacific, destroyers became battleships. The Allies on Normandy’s front lines reported every tank a Panther or a Tiger. In Kursk’s specific context, moreover, a Tiger and a Mark IV looked sufficiently alike at battle ranges that left no time for close verification.
Realities were substantially different. Army Group South’s Tigers were assigned by companies to the panzer divisions, which provided an initial maximum strength of fifteen or sixteen. Two or three days of combat would reduce a company to half that, another two or three days to a quarter. Then the numbers stabilized thanks to the maintenance crews.
