Armor and Blood

that cost one company 70 percent casualties. But by the end of the day, the panzer grenadier companies too were reduced to fifteen or twenty men. With the division commander and one of the regimental commanders wounded, a breakthrough in the sector seemed impossible.

Lemelsen had not “borrowed” 4th Panzer’s tanks on a whim. An artilleryman by trade, he was highly rated by Kluge as a corps commander. He had had three days to experience the limits of tank-infantry cooperation following currently accepted German armor doctrine. And it is worth remembering that the Wehrmacht’s original panzer divisions were armor-centric and armor-heavy even though equipped with light tanks. It was not prima facie chimerical to reason that a large, concentrated force of AFVs—around two hundred when the panzer regiments from 2nd and 4th Divisions, the Tigers, and some stray assault guns were added together—could break through what had to be the final Soviet positions. Instead, the 6th Infantry Division— what remained of it—was stopped on the slopes of Hill 274 outside Olkhovatka, the key point of the defense in that sector and manned by the Seventeenth Army. The panzers went forward repeatedly and were repeatedly thrown back. At the end of the day’s fighting, around 5:00 P.M., only three Tigers remained in action. And the high ground remained in Soviet hands.

Model’s first reaction to another futile day was to consider relieving a number of his subordinate commanders. His second was to order the panzer regiments returned to their proper divisions. His third was to plan for a renewed attack the next morning. Then the Ninth Army’s staff weighed in. Over thirty-two hundred men had been sacrificed for gains at best measured in hundreds of yards. Half the panzer grenadiers in 2nd, 4th, and 9th Divisions were casualties. Hundreds of tanks were undergoing major repairs. Fuel and ammunition reserves were low. The only plentiful commodity was fatigue, with four sleepless days the norm in the infantry divisions. Model responded by using July 9 to rest and reorganize—everywhere except around Ponyri, where elements of the 292nd Division finally took and held Hill 239 east of the village. On a map, the success offered a chance of a breakthrough. On the ground, it presented another fortified hill, 253, on the new German right flank. The 292nd was fought out. And by now it is almost redundant to say that the Russians literally crowded Hill 253 and its environs with every weapon that could find a position, from T-34s to light machine guns.

Model’s decision to suspend operations led Kluge to call a senior officers’ conference for the morning. He met Model, Harpe, and Lemelsen at XLVII Panzer Corps headquarters and opened the discussion with an implied “What now?” Harpe said he was running out of infantry; Lemelsen said he was running out of tanks. When Kluge offered three more mobile divisions as reinforcements, Model responded that the best to be expected was a rollenden Material-abnutzungsschlacht, a “rolling battle of material attrition.” The World War I subtext of this Teutonic circumlocution was not lost on men who had been junior officers in 1914–18. Were Kluge and Model, recognizing that the northern half of Citadel had failed, seeking to provide a smoke screen against Hitler’s expressed insistence to continue? Certainly both men were concerned with the developing risk of a major attack in the central sector. Certainly as well, Army Group Center’s headquarters, physically isolated and responsible for a static front, had become a focal point for anti-Hitler plotting. But there was no sign of a smoke screen in the attack XLVII Panzer Corps sent in on July 10.

Once again, the initial objectives were the high ground south and southwest of Olkhovatka and the much- contested village of Teploye. The 1st Air Division, somewhat revitalized by its weather-assisted stand-down on July 9—only about four hundred bomber and attack sorties were flown—mounted almost seven hundred sorties against the gun positions that had scourged the attacks two days earlier. Its fighters took the action to Sixteenth Army’s airfields, effectively controlling the sky most of the morning. On the ground, Model replicated Lemelsen’s action of July 8, combining tanks from 2nd, 4th, and 20th Panzer Divisions into an improvised brigade. It got as far as Teploye, which was finally cleared by 4th Panzer Division’s infantry. Rokossovsky had reinforced the defense with a fresh rifle division from Seventieth Army. On the night of July 7–8, he committed his last immediate armored reserve, the 9th Tank Corps. It proved to be enough, and once again the Germans were held or thrown back along the front of Seventeenth Rifle Army, sacrificing some of their small earlier gains. The previous day’s success at Ponyri had led Model to relieve the 298th with one of Kluge’s fresh divisions and make one more try in that sector as well. The 10th Panzer Grenadier Division came on line slowly, handicapped by high wind and rain, and despite close support from the surviving Ferdinands, its late-afternoon attacks foundered like all the rest on Soviet determination and Soviet firepower.

The Central Front on July 11 mounted a series of counterattacks all along its sector. Retrospectively, these were local operations—or at least held to local gains by Germans whose resistance was no less determined than their Red Army counterparts. But the gains were serious enough to tired men and tired generals. Initially optimistic notions of wearing down and breaking through were giving way to a nearly visceral sense that the Russian reserves might, after all, well be inexhaustible.

By the end of the day, Model had nothing left with which to change the situation. The Ninth Army’s immediate rear zones were by this time a combination wasteland, junkyard, and butcher shop. Disabled vehicles, destroyed weapons, and abandoned gear littered an area overrun by stragglers and Versprengten— men literally knocked loose from their units by the intense, uninterrupted combat. Kursk was an early instance of a phenomenon that fully manifested itself two years later on Okinawa. High-end industrial war, with tanks and aircraft added to artillery and machine guns, the whole combined with an extreme environment, could break men in a matter not of weeks or months, but of days. It was not a case of systemic demoralization, as in the German rear echelons when the Russians enveloped Stalingrad. The Russians were not immune. As defenders, Rokossovsky’s men had stable positions whose abandonment often entailed more risks than sticking it out. Perceived shirkers or fugitives were likely to get even shorter shrift from the Soviet military police and the NKVD than from the legitimately feared “chain dogs” of the Wehrmacht. On July 10, the Sixteenth Air Army’s commander responded to reports that his fighters were defensively minded, patrolling at a safe distance behind the front line, by threatening “cowards” with transfer to a penal battalion or execution on the ground.

The OKW (Armed Forces High Command) reacted to the impasse by noting the necessity of reversing the balance of attrition. Model responded with a revised plan. Kluge had previously promised Model the 12th Panzer and 36th Infantry Divisions. Now he offered as well, once they arrived, the 5th and 8th Panzer Divisions, freshly refitted and assigned to Army Group Center. Model’s intention was to reinforce the as yet unengaged XLVI Panzer Corps and use it to envelop the Olkhovatka heights on their left flank. Its four infantry divisions were the last relatively fresh troops of the Ninth Army’s original order of battle. But only a battle group of 12th Panzer Division reached Ninth Army’s sector, and it was too late in the day to be of any use. A limited night attack in XLVI Panzer Corps’s sector went nowhere; by then, the Red Army owned the night all along Model’s front. The Ninth Army had lost only about seventy-five AFVs. The 1st Air Division held control of the skies as the Soviet Sixteenth Air Army cut back activity to rest its crews, but without some major change in the overall situation, the rational prospects of a renewed attack seemed no more than adding to a casualty list already exceeding twenty-two thousand.

That major change would soon be provided by the Red Army. Rokossovsky’s Central Front had stopped the Germans almost in their tracks. The Thirteenth Army and Second Tank Army had chewed up half a dozen panzer divisions. Nowhere had the Tigers and the Ferdinands contributed to anything but limited tactical victories. The price had been high—almost half the front’s tanks, and almost half of those were evaluated as write-offs. Human costs remain debatable. The former Soviet archives lists thirty-four thousand casualties between July 5 and 11— almost half killed. But strength figures for the Central Front during the same period show a reduction of almost ninety-three thousand with no major changes to the order of battle. A discrepancy of fifty-nine thousand cannot be overlooked but as yet remains unexplained.

Rokossovsky noted that the Germans’ fighting power and tactical skill had forced him to commit reserves earlier than he intended and to hold sectors as opposed to mounting a general counterattack. He dismissed the supply situation as chaotic. What was nevertheless important was Rokossovsky’s confidence that the Central Front had won its battle. What was even more important was Zhukov’s agreement.

Early on July 9, Stalin had phoned Zhukov to express his opinion that the offensive in the Orel sector was ripe for launching. Zhukov agreed. The Germans, he declared, no longer had the resources to achieve a breakthrough against the Central Front. That, however, would not stop them from continuing to try. Let the Germans bleed themselves for another day or two while the inevitable loose ends of what had been titled Operation Kutuzov were tightened. Timing was everything. If Kutuzov started too soon by even a day, the Ninth Army might still be able to pull one of the almost patented German rabbit-out-of-the-helmet shifts and hit the Russian left flank. It does no disrespect to Rokossovsky and his men to say that the Central Front would at best face extreme difficulty mounting an attack strong enough to hold the Germans in place.