Stalin concurred. Not until the night of July 11 did normal patrolling in Kutuzov’s designated sectors give way to battalion-level probes and initiatives that provided information for a final readjusting of attack formations and artillery targets. Not until July 12 would the Red Army begin changing the parameters of Operation Citadel and the Russo-German War.
DECISIONS
ERICH VON MANSTEIN’S FORTE was the maneuver battle: mass multiplied by impulsion. To date, Army Group South’s impulsion had been episodic. The mass had been provided by the Russians. On the night of July 8, Vatutin and Vasilevsky had one mission: Hold the Germans in place for the coming counteroffensives on either side of the Kursk salient. That meant hold the center, from Prokhorovka to the Oboyan road, and keep hitting Knobelsdorff and Breith as they attacked into the defenses on their front.
I
That in turn required shuffling. Vatutin took advantage of the night, and a diminishing German air effort, to order 5th Guards Tank Corps to move west to the Oboyan road and join the First Tank Army. The 10th Tank Corps would also shift to the Oboyan sector, while 2nd Tank Corps took over on the Prokhorovka road. The 31st Mechanized and 3rd Tank Corps would fall back to a new line from the Oboyan road to the Psel River. Reinforcements—rifle divisions; tank, artillery, and antitank regiments from Stavka reserve; and replacement tanks—were lavishly distributed as they arrived. The Soviet high command ordered Sixty-ninth Army to move between Sixth Guards and Seventh Guards Armies on Vatutin’s left, increasing the general pressure on the Germans. It also ordered Fifth Guards Army, seven first-class divisions, from the Steppe Front to the Oboyan- Prokhorovka sector.
That reinforcement was no less welcome for requiring several days’ march. Fifth Guards Army had fought in Stalingrad as the Sixty-sixth Army, retaining four of the divisions tempered in that cauldron, and adding three new ones: two airborne and one rifle, all Guards, and fully equipped. It was a sign of the shifting balance of the Eastern Front that Stavka had this kind of an elite infantry force available for a near routine commitment, while the Germans were scrambling to man their “quiet” sectors with anyone able to sight a rifle and walk unassisted. Stavka’s major initiative, however, was to transfer Fifth Guards Tank Army from the Steppe Front to Vatutin’s command. Fifth Guards Tank was a high card. It had been formed on February 10, 1942, and its 5th Guards Mechanized and 18th and 29th Tank Corps were considered to be well trained, well equipped, and well officered. Its commander, Lieutenant General Pavel Rotmistrov, was a colorful figure by the relatively anonymous standards of the post-purge Red Army. He had worn the Soviet uniform since 1919 and carried himself with somewhat the air of Tolstoy’s Vaska Denisov, or Denisov’s real-life counterpart, Denis Davydov. A combat-experienced tanker, he had done well commanding a brigade and a corps. It remained to be seen whether he could walk the walk as head of an army.
On the other side of the line, Hoth too was testing the wind. Fourth Panzer Army was down to six hundred AFVs ready for action on the morning of July 9—a 40-percent loss. The army’s spearheads were still fifty miles from Kursk, almost a hundred from Model’s bogged-down front, and three days short of the initial objective of a two-corps bridgehead over the Psel.
Hoth had not lost confidence in the prospects of an eventual breakthrough and a victory. But XLVIII Panzer Corps was still under such heavy pressure on its left flank that it could not deploy its full strength frontally. Breith’s panzers remained enmeshed in the Soviet defenses on the Donets’s east bank. Luftwaffe reconnaissance was reporting large and increasing Soviet armored forces moving west and south, toward the Psel.
Official doctrine and common sense alike called for an all-out effort to interdict the movement. The Luftwaffe had been originally configured for just that type of mission. But the need for direct ground support had so intensified that no aircraft could be spared from the front lines. The counterattacks engaging the SS from the northeast thus could only be expected to increase in strength and fighting power—until they matched and overmatched the panzers. Hoth’s original concept for this contingency had been to draw the Soviets into a fight on ground of German choosing: open terrain, where their tank guns’ longer range and excellent optics would give them the kind of technical advantage denied in the earlier fighting at close quarters. The burden of the plan rested squarely on the Waffen SS. Hoth would not admit it willingly, but ideology, experience, and armament made the SS more suited than the army’s panzers to force a breakthrough in a frontal attack. As party troops in an army war, moreover, they were more readily expendable.
Hoth had originally expected the army and the SS to keep pace and be in a position to act in tandem as they approached the Psel. Instead, XLVIII Panzer Corps was lagging behind: a function of the resistance to its front and the continuing threat to its left flank. Fourth Panzer Army’s Order No. 4 for July 9 was ambiguous. The XLVIII Panzer Corps would push a strong right flank up the Oboyan road, throw the Russians over the Psel, and simultaneously secure its left flank for good—all by attacking and enveloping the 6th Tank Corps. The II SS Panzer Corps would drive northeast with “all available force” while simultaneously maintaining a strong flank guard against any attacks from the direction of Prokhorovka. On July 10, Hausser was expected to be ready to shift its axis of advance toward Prokhorovka itself—should the movement become necessary as Soviet reinforcements arrived.
Manstein backed Hoth’s play directly by giving Hausser priority for air support. More consequential was Manstein’s continued pressure on Kempf and Breith to get III Panzer Corps moving north, toward Prokhorovka, broadening and integrating his front, covering the SS by intercepting the Fifth Guards Tank Army. But first Breith had to clear his own sector. The 19th Panzer Division spent a long, hot, frustrating July 8 in a series of back-and- forth engagements with counterattacking Russians who nearly broke through the overextended lines of the 168th Infantry Division, making heavy weather of its advance up the Donets from Belgorod. It took the last four operable Mark VIs of a Tiger company, plus half a dozen flamethrowing tanks, before the 19th could even consider breaking out and moving forward on any scale. On the other flank of III Panzer Corps, the 7th Panzer Division remained committed to its flank guard role: “No changes planned for today … I had slept well,” in the words of one Tiger company commander. But an infantry division, the 106th, was being rushed into position to relieve the panzers, making the 7th available to support what seemed the first real tactical opportunity Breith’s corps had created since the fighting started.
That was the work of 6th Panzer Division, whose day began when two of its tank companies were shot up while resupplying in a forward area and continued when a green and ambitious lieutenant took his tank platoon in a head-down charge to the top of a hill, only to find himself pinned down by the usual heavy Soviet defensive fire. But matters improved as the division’s armored advance guards found enough exploitable points in the 92nd Guards Rifle’s defenses to reach and capture the high ground north of Melikhovo, a dozen miles northeast of Belgorod, before running into impassable belts of minefields, guns, and antitank ditches. As yet, it was just another salient, another extended middle finger. But if 19th and 7th Panzer could manage to close on the 6th, the result might be a paralyzing closed-finger karate strike.
Might be—the mantra of Citadel on the German side. Knobelsdorff initially responded to Hoth’s revised orders by redeploying a battle group of Grossdeutschland; two panzer grenadier battalions, and more than fifty tanks and assault guns, including a Tiger company, turning them west to cooperate with 3rd Panzer and the 332nd Infantry in finishing off 6th Tank Corps. Knobelsdorff believed the diversion would be temporary. But despite “outstanding” Stuka support, the advance took ninety minutes to reach the last houses in the north part of Verkhopenye against the tank-supported 67th Guards Rifle Division. That, moreover, was nowhere near the same thing as having the village cleared and secured. The battle group was also coming under heavy artillery and
