Russians began a sequence of armored counterattacks. Shifting from position to position, the outnumbered German assault guns managed more than fifty kills during an extremely long afternoon. The bridgehead held until relieved by a second Grossdeutschland battle group, accompanied by bridging equipment.
The column reached Verkhopenye by twilight, thanks in good part to the Stukas. SG 2 and 77 flew seven hundred sorties between them on July 8, in formations up to fifty strong, and paid the heaviest price of the fighting to date. The Russian fighter pilots were learning on the job: dividing their forces tactically with one element first engaging the covering Luftwaffe fighters, then a second one going for the suddenly unprotected Stukas. The resulting losses were unsustainable over any length of time—especially when only in the wake of these attacks was Grossdeutschland’s column able to “claw” its way into a town the division’s history calls a “hard nut to crack.”
Verkhopenye, whose buildings straggled along both sides of the Pena River, was critical for its bridge, which could support Mark IVs. Also able to support T-34s, the bridge was too important to the Soviet defense network to be condignly demolished. The result was a bitter fight, with the Germans taking heavy losses from artillery and antitank guns massed on the river’s far side. A single Russian tank brigade sustained no fewer than twelve attacks before withdrawing behind the Pena and digging in as part of what the Germans hoped would be a last stand the next morning.
Their immediate opponents were reeling. The 3rd Mechanized Corps had borne the brunt of the fighting in the Oboyan-Syrzevo sector for three blazing days. The commander of its 1st Mechanized Brigade duly noted that by the evening of July 8, his tank regiment could no longer hold its position. His radio communications were out. His supply of armor-piercing shells was almost exhausted. The wounded were piling up. The neighboring brigade had retreated; 1st Mechanized seemed to be “on an island in the midst of a sea of fire. It was senseless to stay in this sector any longer.”
Grossdeutschland were the army’s glamour boys: first in line for new weapons and trained replacements —with a postwar status in the Federal Republic that enabled the publication of a three-volume divisional history. But the 11th Panzer Division’s warriors for the working day kept pace on Grossdeutschland’s right. It was no easy task. Vatutin’s continuing shift of his reserves to Oboyan created a situation where once a line was penetrated, the attackers faced fresh troops in even greater numbers. Nevertheless, without matching its neighbor’s advance to the Pena, 11th Panzer protected Grossdeutschland’s flank and pushed forward toward the advance units of the SS Corps, which was simultaneously shifting its axis and redeploying its assets.
IV
For July 8, Hausser proposed to send the combined armored strength of Leibstandarte and Das Reich northwest toward the Psel. Das Reich’s panzer grenadiers would continue toward Prokhorovka—whether as spearhead or mobile flank guard was still an open question. Totenkopf was to turn over its flank-security mission to the 167th Infantry Division, currently deployed between Das Reich and 11th Panzer, and move northwest to Leibstandarte’s left flank. This maneuver, if it succeeded, would establish firm contact with 11th Panzer, get the SS across the Psel, and open a clear way north for the SS and XLVIII Panzer Corps in tandem, as opposed to the existing parallel salients.
The “if” was a big one. Totenkopf’s relief began at 2:15 A.M. but took most of the day to complete—at that a remarkable piece of staff work by an SS often described as indifferent to such details. The corps reported a “quiet” night—at least by Citadel standards—but by 8:00 A.M., patrols and troop movements were visible all along the front. The SS tanks and assault guns pushed forward in stops and starts, scoring heavily against the outranged T-34s in the relatively open terrain. Repeated counterattacks by T-34s that seemed to find every gap in the German front gave way during the day to increasingly formidable air-armor-infantry strikes, built around as many as a hundred tanks. Leibstandarte gained about twelve miles at the price of losing contact with the 11th Panzer Division, stopped three miles west of the Oboyan road. Das Reich made about eight miles, cutting westward behind the Soviet defenders and coming within a few miles of Voronezh Front’s third line and ten miles of Prokhorovka itself.
The way into the First Tank Army’s rear seemed open. The 31st Tank Corps reported defenses broken and men fleeing in panic. A shaken Khrushchev contacted Vatutin. The front commander promised an immediate counterattack. He also ordered what was left of 31st Tank and 3rd Mechanized Corps to fall back to new positions north of Verkhopenye, across the Oboyan road, and along the Solotinka River to the Psel. Vatutin hoped that Katukov could hold on until his blow from the northeast had time to develop.
The First Tank Army’s survival already owed much to the increasing pressure on the SS right flank. Das Reich, in particular, beginning around 11:00 A.M., reported having to divert forces to secure the immediate right flank of its armored battle group and to take some pressure off the division’s hard-pressed panzer grenadiers. The reconnaissance battalion, the assault gun battalion, and finally the panzer regiment itself turned to meet armored counterattacks. Toward evening, the Luftwaffe appeared in force. Its Stukas and medium bombers were welcome sights to men left on their own most of the day.
The SS Panzer Corps reported 290 Soviet AFVs destroyed—a third of them by infantrymen using “close combat means.” That meant grenades, explosive charges, Molotov cocktails. It also meant fighting power. One of Das Reich’s panzer grenadier regiments had “organized” an intelligence section of half a dozen Russian “auxiliaries,” prisoners of war who for many reasons chose working for their captors over life as a POW. Part of its job was to monitor radio traffic—often in plain Russian rather than code, for the sake of haste or as a consequence of fatigue. When two higher headquarters began exchanging threats over the nonappearance of reserves, an SS company infiltrated Russian lines, made its way to the command post of a rifle brigade, and returned with the commander, his staff, and the whole headquarters company. The stunt was facilitated by the area’s lack of the built-up defenses characteristic of main combat zones. But call it a “hussar trick,” as in the German idiom, or a “John Wayne,” in Vietnam-era argot—either way it remains the sort of performance the Waffen SS expected of itself. They may have been willing servants of a criminal regime, but the men of SS Panzer Corps were also men of war.
Following his communication with Stalin during the evening of July 7, Vatutin reoriented the focal point of his intended major counterattack. Front orders issued at 11:00 P.M. sent the fresh II SS Panzer Corps southwest down the road from Prokhorovka in the direction of Teterivino. To the left, 5th Tank Corps would attack directly west. The 2nd Guards Tank Corps, deployed on the 5th’s left, would move against the right flank and rear of the SS while covering the front’s counterattack against a III Panzer Corps assumed to be too busy in its own sector to have much impact elsewhere.
The combined strength of the four corps amounted to around four hundred AFVs. The attack would be supported by thirty minutes of artillery preparation, making up in intensity what it lacked in duration, and by a maximum effort from the Second Air Army. Things began going wrong when Leibstandarte and Das Reich crossed their start lines ahead of 10th Tank Corps’s projected dawn attack. The corps, one of the two just assigned to Vatutin by Stavka, was getting its first taste of armored war Citadel-style. Its brigades were caught off balance; its commander reacted by initiating the attacks mentioned above, delaying the Germans without stopping them.
The 2nd Guards Tank Corps, Stavka’s other contribution, provided—unwittingly and unwillingly—the most spectacular initial results of Vatutin’s counterattack. It too had deployed slowly, going in only around noon, and was essentially uncommitted when Vatutin ordered it forward in response to Khrushchev’s report. The somewhat disorganized advance was promptly spotted by a patrolling Hs-129 piloted by the tank busters’ commander.
The Hs-129B was a defining artifact of the later Third Reich. It was a promising, indeed futuristic, design, whose main armament also redefined state of the art. The 30 mm MK-101 automatic cannon was accurate, hard- hitting, and able to fire nine kinds of ammunition, from conventional high explosives to tungsten-cored armor- piercing rounds. But tungsten was in short supply, and the MK-101 had teething troubles. The aircraft itself was powered by two Gnome-Rhone engines looted from France, whose low horsepower further reduced an already limited airworthiness. To date, the Henschels had been held back. Their large size and limited maneuverability rendered them disproportionately vulnerable to fighters and antiaircraft guns, especially when compared with the Stukas. But on July 6 they had shown—against the same 2nd Guards Tank Corps—what even small numbers of them could do in the right conditions. Four squadrons of them came in at carefully timed intervals: one attacking,
