Nor did all of the disabled vehicles drop out due to battle damage. Some suffered from new-vehicle teething troubles. Others needed routine maintenance—particularly the Tiger. But neither condition was likely to take a vehicle off the line for more than a day. Combat damage as well was often superficial even for the Mark IIIs and IVs. Hits from antitank guns, especially the smaller ones, were by no means always fatal. Barring a fuel or ammunition explosion sufficient to burn out or blow apart a vehicle, damage could be repaired, interiors cleaned of body parts, and casualties replaced, in days or hours.
Crews could often repair track damage themselves, and the risks from exposure were far outweighed by those involved in remaining a large stationary target. Maintenance under fire, while not exactly common, was familiar: some damaged tanks were repaired three times in a day and sent back in for a fourth round. On-site repairs, however, were more often made after dark, accepting the risks of showing light from welding torches and flashlights. As the Russian tankers had warned, armor dug in could not be dug out in a hurry. When the Germans held the ground at day’s end, they kept control of the disabled or abandoned tanks of both armies, making Russian losses permanent.
When the numbers were tallied and cross-checked, the SS Panzer Corps had ten more AFVs at the end of July 7 than at the day’s beginning. Given fuel, water, and ammunition and a few hours of bomb-interrupted and adrenaline-disturbed sleep, the tankers of Leibstandarte and Das Reich might yet fulfill their next day’s mission and in cooperation with XLVII Panzer Corps destroy the Russians to their front.
III
Manstein was increasingly disturbed by III Panzer Corps’s failure to advance. He gently reminded Breith that success depended on coordinating his divisions. But on July 7, the Russians had other ideas. On the corps’s left flank, held by the 19th Panzer Division, the 73rd Panzer Grenadiers captured the railroad station and the village of Kreida, then, closely supported by a tank battalion, took Blishnaya Yigumwenka and the high ground around and beyond it. Meaningless names; barely discernible spots on a map. But the Russian 81st Rifle Division held its ground until literally overrun by the panzers. The 73rd Panzer Grenadiers lost their colonel, leading from the front in approved German fashion. One of the regiment’s companies was down to ten men at day’s end. At the end of the day, the German battle group commander declared there were no reserves and there would be no relief: “All that’s left for you is to dig yourselves in where you are.”
The 6th Panzer Division, in the corps center, moved out at 7:30 A.M. under Stuka cover, its four operational Tigers in the lead. Mines slowed the advance before the division’s armored battle group reached and cleared its first objective, the strongpoint of Sevrukova. But the Rasumnaya River proved a more formidable obstacle. It was a typical steppe watercourse: meandering from here to there, with banks so waterlogged that fords were impassable—and both bridges were blown. Pioneers and pontoniers commenced constructing a bridge capable of taking the Mark IIIs and IVs. They were shot off it by Soviet artillery and rockets. The division’s half-track panzer grenadier battalion, whose lighter vehicles could negotiate the boggy ground, covered the pioneers, crossed the river, and established a bridgehead but was pinned in place by tank-tipped counterattacks. The German panzers remained on the far bank, under heavy artillery fire. Not mate—but check.
The 7th Panzer Division began its day by driving into a killing zone of 76 mm antitank guns. It continued it by clearing the Miassoyedovo strongpoint house by house, taking two hundred prisoners in the process. The division ended it by being drawn into a de facto ambush set up by the Seventh Guards Army. The counterattacks were strong enough for Breith to divert Tigers to the sector and call on the Luftwaffe for another battalion of 88s. By day’s end, it was clear that 7th Panzer was unlikely to be able to do more on July 8 than protect the corps flank. Erhard Raus’s infantry divisions in XI Corps on Army Detachment Kempf’s extreme right, farther south, had their own plate full, overextended and pinned in place by superior Russian forces. That sector too was anything but a rest cure. On July 5, signal intelligence intercepted a Russian phone conversation. A regimental commander reported having taken 150 prisoners and asked what to do with them. The reply was, “Keep a few for interrogation and have the others liquidated.” Later that evening, the junior officer reported the order executed: most killed immediately, the rest after interrogation—whose nature is better left unimagined.
It is difficult to ascertain whether or when Erich von Manstein became nervous. But by the night of July 7–8, Army Group South’s maps presented a disconcerting image. Hoth’s tanks were indeed working through the defenses—the SS had advanced more than twelve miles—but they were still creating salients rather than sectors. The resulting flanks were under growing pressure as they grew longer. The attacking divisions were diverting increasing forces, tanks as well as infantry, to shore them up. Neither the army group nor the Fourth Panzer Army had any effective disposable reserves left. Hoth’s headquarters reported two fresh tank corps moving into the Oboyan road sector and increasing truck activity on the panzer army’s eastern flank. Again Manstein made his case to the high command for committing XXIV Panzer Corps. But that corps represented the hole card of the entire southern sector, even though its two understrength panzer divisions made it more a five-spot than a face card in Citadel’s contexts.
Had Manstein’s recreational reading included Joel Chandler Harris, he might have recalled the image of a tar baby and the experience of Brer Rabbit. Instead he ordered XLVIII Panzer Corps and the SS to advance north on July 8 as rapidly as possible, envelop the Russian armored forces to their front, and destroy them. Simultaneously, the SS were to secure their own right flank against any threat from the northeast. The plan was a necessary departure from Hoth’s proposal to turn the entire SS corps northeast. Fourth Panzer Army’s two salients had to be consolidated in order to secure the army’s flanks. And the best way out was through—or at least forward. With the salients converted to a sector, Knobelsdorff could drive forward toward Kursk and a junction with Model. Hausser would cover the advance and take care of whatever emerged from Steppe Front’s sector on the projected killing ground of Prokhorovka.
Vatutin had originally intended to use the still largely intact Thirty-eighth and Fortieth Armies from his right flank to attack Knobelsdorff’s left in force. Instead, implementing Stalin’s order, he transferred the bulk of their respective mobile forces to confront the German advance directly. That essentially took his counterattack off the board. The reinforcements, however, gave the hard-pressed front line a combination of tank and motorized battalions strong enough to require Grossdeutschland to swing west and support 3rd Panzer more closely than either division commander intended.
In any case, XLVIII Panzer Corps was going nowhere until it took Syrzevo. The 3rd Panzer and Grossdeutschland hit the strongpoint again at dawn. Grossdeutschland’s Tigers and Mark IVs repeatedly broke up tank attacks that amounted to berserker headlong charges, hoping to bring at least some T-34s to killing range. But Syrzevo itself held out, its garrison exhorted by the political officers to fight to the death. They came close. It was well into the afternoon before Grossdeutschland’s panzer grenadiers and elements of 3rd Panzer Division’s tank regiment cleared a village that by then resembled a cross between a wrecking yard and a slaughterhouse. Katukov and Popel witnessed the final scene, Katukov reporting as he looked through his binoculars: “They’re regrouping … advancing … I think we have had it.”
What the First Tank Army saw was Grossdeutschland’s tanks assembling to continue the advance north. They had anything but an easy time of it.
Earlier in the morning, one of the division’s panzer grenadier battalions reported that it had captured Verkhopenye—a village far enough north of Syrzevo to suggest that Russian defenses were finally beginning to unravel. The division commander committed his immediate reserves, the reconnaissance battalion and the assault gun battalion, to push north, go around Verkhopenye itself, and occupy Hill 260.8, across the Oboyan road.
The half-tracks, armored cars, and assault guns advanced, only to find that the panzer grenadiers had misread their maps. They were on the Oboyan road, right enough—but in another village several miles away from Verkhopenye. XLVIII Panzer Corps chief of staff Friedrich von Mellenthin opined later that such mistakes are in the nature of war. But lofty Clausewitzian aphorisms were no help to troops a long way out on a shaky limb. Advancing up the road was impossible: it was bisected by a tributary of the Pena River, and the bridge was not designed for armored vehicles. Division ordered the battle group to hold its ground while headquarters thought of something. The battle group sent the assault guns across the bridge one by one, set up a perimeter on the far bank, and began passing the recon battalion across the by now very shaky bridge. While that enterprise was under way, the
