one on the way, one taking off, and one returning to refuel and rearm. A participant described the formula for success: a low-level run and a carefully timed, well-aimed shot at just the right time. “I would say that it was a real art,” he concluded. Its practice required ignoring the small-arms fire returned by the desperate tankers. It required as well the kind of battle-space control achieved by Luftwaffe fighters vectored in from everywhere in the sector, which gave the Henschels an entirely free hand.
After two hours, despite missed signals, jammed cannon, and similar examples of fog and friction, more than fifty T-34s were burning or immobile. The rest of the corps was in one of the few disorderly retreats made by either side during Citadel. It was a tour de force the SS Panzer Corps acknowledged wholeheartedly: “good cooperation with the Luftwaffe” had made the day’s “full defensive success” possible. It was also an unpleasant jolt to the tank crews and the armor generals of Voronezh Front. Unlike the bombs dropped by the Stukas, which might do only superficial damage even by a direct hit, a tungsten-cored 30 mm high-velocity round through a T- 34’s rear deck was a certain kill and an almost certain flameout. For the first time in history, a large armored force had been destroyed entirely from the air. How many of the cursed planes did the Fritzes have? And where were the vaunted Red Falcons?
The most obvious direct response was to make no more large-scale moves of armor in the daylight. That in turn slowed the movements of local reserves to block German penetrations—a key to Vatutin’s conduct of the battle. And if that were not enough, the Germans seemed on the point of developing a new, potentially decisive surge in an unexpected sector of the front: that held by III Panzer Corps. The corps’s advance of July 7 had actually extended the gap between it and II SS Panzer Corps to about twenty miles. Breith’s response depended on the infantry division assigned to his corps. The 168th had been holding the Donets line on the left of the corps’s three panzer divisions since Citadel’s beginning. The 19th Panzer Division was ordered to swing hard left, take the Russians in the rear, and clear that sector. In by now predictable fashion, the attack made initial gains, then was halted by minefields and an untouched second line of defense.
Things were little better in the rest of the 19th’s sector, where the two panzer grenadier regiments were reduced during the morning to the combined strength of a battalion. Breith had to commit the 168th Infantry Division to restore the situation. In III Panzer Corps’s center, the 6th Panzer Division was delayed an hour when the scheduled artillery barrage failed to materialize. The armored battle group went in on 19th Panzer’s flank, was stopped by the same minefield, and was targeted by a massive artillery and Katyusha barrage. The pioneers cleared a path. A few minutes later, the panzers encountered an antitank ditch. It took three hours for the pioneers to blow in the sides. It was 4:00 P.M. by the time 6th Panzer, by now with Tiger support and covered by the division’s artillery and a flak battalion, reached Melikhovo. It took heavy losses from T-34s dug in to their turrets, from Russian infantry who seemed to have to be killed twice, and from antitank guns. One Tiger crewman recalled, “There were so many of them that they gave me permanent diarrhea.” Every thirty minutes “I squatted down at the rear of the tank without the enemy noticing me.”
Another victory for a regimental war diary; another day that led nowhere in particular, only creating another salient needing protection. The 7th Panzer Division spent its day covering the 6th Panzer’s right when the 106th Infantry Division was unable to fulfill its assignment and take over the screening role. Indeed, the 106th was pushed so hard that 7th Panzer had to send tanks to its support.
Raus, among the best German armor commanders, was not easily shaken—one reason for giving him the unglamorous but vital job of commanding the army group’s flank guard. But the 106th was sufficiently overextended that on the previous day a Soviet tank reached its command post. Raus himself led the counterattack that restored the line. He also requested reinforcements: the Red Army’s spare change was taking his XI Corps to its limits. At that point, Napoleon’s rejoinder to Ney at Waterloo may have crossed Manstein’s mind: “Troops? Do you think I can make them?” The army group commander consulted Zeitzler, only to be told in effect to do more with less: Germany and its Fuhrer were watching.
V
A commander’s best friend is an obliging enemy. An obliging enemy is not one who merely makes mistakes, but one who acts as though his orders had been written by his opponent. In Walther Model, Rokossovsky had found—or rather, his soldiers had created—an obliging enemy. For July 9, Model concentrated five panzer divisions on a ten-mile front: more than three hundred AFVs, the Ninth Army’s last resources. Central to the effort was the fresh 4th Panzer Division, including a hundred tanks, most of them the new models of Mark IV with long- barreled 75 mm guns. It had suffered from a night of unremitting air attacks as it deployed. The weather had broken as well, meaning saturated ground, reduced visibility, and limited air support. But all that seemed needed was one more push.
Rokossovsky for his part had used the time bought by his forward units to transfer everything that could be spared from quiet sectors to Teploye-Olkhovatka-Ponyri: two rifle divisions, an artillery division, a mixed bag of smaller units. Rokossovsky too was reaching the bottom of Central Front’s barrel. Specifically, morale in the Second Tank Army was also fraying at the edges. Soviet, and now Russian, treatments of World War II state or imply that almost all the comrades were valiant in defense of the motherland, communism, and Stalin. In fact, the T-34 crews were in much the same situation their Sherman-riding U.S. and British counterparts would face in Normandy. For a year, the T-34s had been the technical masters of the armored battlefield. Now they were being picked off at ranges from which they could make no reply. Charging forward only brought them closer to German AFVs that seemed able to adjust their fire automatically against tanks on the move and zero in on them when they halted to use their own guns. Rokossovsky responded by detaching two fresh brigades from the tanks corps he had left covering Kursk as a final defense against a massive German breakthrough. Those tanks were his last hope, he declared in his memoirs. As Wellington said at Waterloo, it was hard pounding. The question was who could pound the longest.
At 8:00 A.M. on July 8, 2nd Panzer Division went forward against Olkhovatka. The 4th and 20th followed a new axis, on XLVII Panzer Corps’s right toward the village of Samodurovka, seeking to realize a breach that so far had proven a mirage by developing a gap between the Thirteenth and Seventieth Armies. Luftwaffe radio intelligence scored the first points by picking up the Sixteenth Air Army’s order for a major Shturmovik strike at dawn, supporting a counterattack against German positions at Ponyri. A group of 190s was waiting at altitude and scattered the attackers. By the time the ground attack began, the weather had closed in and closed down. For three hours, the 307th Rifle Division grappled with German infantry in mud that matched that of Passchendaele, with fog and rain reducing the fighting to hand-to-hand flounderings in the mire that left the Red Army riflemen in possession of part of Ponyri—how much depends on which report one reads.
Artillery on both sides was firing nearly blind, but the Soviets had far more guns in action and were more used to area barrages. On the German right, 20th Panzer Division’s grenadiers led the way toward Samodurovka. Companies reduced to platoon strength were being commanded by sergeants in the first hour of a daylong series of attacks that pinned the Russians in place but otherwise made little progress against the 17th Guards Rifle Corps. An observer called El Alamein a modest operation by comparison and declared that even Stalingrad took second place. The 20th Panzer Division had only one tank battalion, and its war diary describes a day of being shuttled from place to place, supporting the infantry, checking Russian counterattacks, dodging close-attack teams, and running into minefields. The battalion had gone into action on July 5 with seventy-five tanks. Thirty-nine remained operational when the unit took up positions for the night.
The 4th Panzer Division’s prospects might have improved had not XLVII Panzer Corps commander Joachim Lemelsen detached the division’s panzer regiment to form part of a provisional tank brigade, replacing it with an assault gun battalion that left the 4th with just about half its standard number of AFVs. As it was, a battle group of the division fought through to Teploye and moved toward the high ground south of the village. When the panzer grenadiers could go no farther into Russian fire, the armor continued alone. A platoon, well led or simply lucky, took out enough of the first-line gun positions to give the infantry a chance to move forward against the high ground south of the village. Tank-supported Russian reserves threw the Germans back repeatedly. Russian antitank guns held their fire to as near as four hundred yards. In a single battalion, one battery was reduced to a single gun and three crewmen. Another gun, its carriage shattered, was propped up on ammunition boxes and aimed by sighting down the barrel. The antitank riflemen evoked German praise for the “courage and coolness”
