on July 9—certainly as far as Hoth was concerned.
The Fourth Panzer Army’s commander had the maps on his side. And of the two possible solutions, his came closest to enabling a meaningful breakout. Geographically, Prokhorovka was in the middle of the land bridge between the Psel and the Donets Rivers. West and south of the town, relatively high ground overlooked open steppe. Control of that terrain was operationally and tactically a major element in Hoth’s projected economy-of- force defense against odds. That success, however, would be only stage one. Prokhorovka was also a major road and rail junction on the Belgorod–Kursk axis. By the time the SS had seen off the Russians from the northeast, Hoth expected that at least Grossdeutschland would have completed the secondary mission of securing its corps’s left flank and resumed its position on the Oboyan road. Along with 11th Panzer, and perhaps 3rd Panzer as well, it would then either support the SS directly or be part of a two-pronged drive toward Kursk from Prokhorovka and Oboyan. Either alternative was a chance to move Citadel from the level of minor tactics to at least the lower rung of operational art.
Both Hoth and Manstein were masters of maneuver warfare in the context of modern technology. Manstein had demonstrated as well his understanding of positional warfare during his 1941–42 conquest of the Crimea. That operation had been executed against fixed defenses in a limited geographic area, with forces far less formidable than those available for Citadel. Even in those circumstances, Manstein had sought with some success to avoid a simple battle of attrition, and Citadel was coming too close to that model for his comfort. Manstein was also an accomplished bridge and chess player. One of his gifts as planner and commander was an ability to think several moves ahead. Another, less often demonstrated because Manstein’s talent gave it fewer opportunities, was to recognize when a subordinate thought even a step further. Focusing on a frontal assault was to risk tunnel vision for limited results. Hoth had made the bid. Manstein said, “Make the contract.”
III
Fourth Panzer Army’s frustrations on July 10 began on its always troublesome left flank. From Citadel’s beginning and before, Grossdeutschland had been Hoth’s trump card, with more expected from it than from the SS. Even with the remaining Panthers of the attached 10th Panzer Brigade, the division counted fewer than ninety AFVs at 3:30 A.M., when its armored battle group went forward against the high ground across the road south to Berezovka and 3rd Panzer Division. That road—little more than a country track by Western standards—was also the main north-south artery in the sector and the defenders’ major link to the Soviet supply base at Kruglik. Cut it permanently and XLVIII Panzer Corps’s flank problems would take a long step toward resolution.
Grossdeutschland secured enough of a tactical surprise to overrun 6th Tank Corps’s 200th Tank Brigade and draw two more brigades into a swirling encounter battle in which the Germans had a combined-arms advantage. Grossdeutschland’s artillery and the attached rocket batteries were complemented, when the rain and thunderstorms permitted, by massive level-bomber and Stuka strikes. A battalion war diary commented on the “wonderful precision” of the dive-bomber attacks, which seemed able to target and destroy T-34s almost at will. In a model example of battle group tactics, Grossdeutschland’s reconnaissance battalion, its mechanized panzer grenadiers, and the assault guns seized Hill 247. After three hard hours, the panzer regiment led truck-riding panzer grenadiers onto neighboring Hill 243. The 6th Tank Corps fought desperately to reopen the route north, but desperation evoked improvisation—still not a Red Army strongpoint. Attacks ordered in brigade strength devolved to battalion- and companylevel strikes, further disrupted and misdirected by the woods, small forests, and ravines that dotted the fighting zone. Meanwhile, 3rd Panzer Division finished its bridge and crossed the Pena in a short left hook that flanked stubborn Russian rear guards and brought the division’s armored battle group into line with Grossdeutschland. During the afternoon, the two German divisions caught the Russians in a vise that by nightfall put the front line on the Berezovka heights and reduced 6th Tank Corps to fewer than fifty AFVs, and half of those were light T-70 tanks, little more than panzer fodder.
But again the Russians bent without breaking. Some encircled units made their way out across the same kind of terrain that had disrupted their attacks and that now obstructed the Germans. Others fought to the finish, using Katyushas against AFVs until the panzers found the range. But the corps commanding officer, Major General A. L. Getman, formed a new, shorter line around the village of Novoselovka. Katukov backed it with reinforcements, including the 10th Tank Corps. The panzer grenadier regiment that Grossdeutschland left facing the Psel came under repeated attacks from units that even by Eastern Front standards should have been considered ineffective. But Citadel was different. The Germans committed anything on tracks or with a high muzzle velocity. Thinly armored, open-topped, self-propelled antitank guns took the places of assault guns otherwise employed. The 88 mm antiaircraft guns anchored improvised ground positions, their crews grateful that the weather inhibited Soviet air strikes. And at nightfall, exhausted Germans stood in place—still a long way from where Hoth and Knobelsdorff had expected them to be.
The 11th Panzer Division reached high ground to its front but then stalled. From there it was literally downhill into the Psel valley and twelve or thirteen miles to Oboyan. The town’s buildings were visible through binoculars. But the Russians held Hill 244.8, on the Oboyan road itself, against anything 11th Panzer committed. The division commander called in vain for Stuka support. As a result, the 11th Panzer Division spent July 11 consolidating its positions and patrolling forward toward the Psel. It seemed military housekeeping. But the prospects of a single division attacking into even a disrupted Citadel-style defensive system were close to zero. Most of Grossdeutschland, along with 3rd Panzer, was still engaged in clearing XLVIII Panzer Corps’s left flank of Soviet fragments, probing the new defense lines in that sector, and regrouping.
As if Knobelsdorff did not have enough problems, at 11:30 A.M. on July 10, his headquarters welcomed a visitor. Heinz Guderian, in exile since Barbarossa’s failure, had been recalled as inspector general of armored troops on March 1, 1943. The Army High Command had tasked him with finding out why the Panthers seemed to be performing so badly.
The German army had a word for such visitors:
That absolution did not solve Knobelsdorff’s tactical dilemma. To understand what may seem to be limited activity by XLVIII Panzer Corps on July 11, it is worth noting that clearing sectors, reorganizing units, and carrying out resupply and maintenance all took time. Moreover, the corps’s newly gained rear area had not even a developed network of trails, much less roads. As combat units and supporting echelons began shifting positions, traffic control was a major challenge. A week’s worth of combat of a kind that pushed endurance to its outer limits had human consequences as well, ranging from misunderstood orders to temper outbursts to simple physical mistakes made by men exhausted or traumatized. German personal memoirs and unit histories dealing with the Eastern Front encourage overlooking such factors. They are commonly infused with a kind of heroic vitalism implying that fear and fatigue were weaknesses to be acknowledged but overcome. Otto von Knobelsdorff was no Erwin Rommel or Erhard Raus when it came to inspiring—or compelling—supreme efforts. But he kept control of his sector and was confident that his system could stay far enough ahead of its Russian counterpart to give him the edge on July 12. There was material reason for optimism as well. The provisional Panther regiment, still attached to Grossdeutschland, had gone into action on July 10 with only ten runners. During July 11, twenty more were returned to service from workshops whose personnel were beginning to get abreast of the tank’s mechanical quirks. By day’s end, the regiment’s commander reported thirty-eight Panthers operational. Properly played, their long 75s might yet prove a trump card.
IV
Nikolai Vatutin did not survive the war. He was mortally wounded in February 1944—ironically by a band of
