the flat, open ground east of the Psel and opposite Fifth Guards Tank Army’s center offered the best opportunity for the kind of attack he had sketched to Vatutin on his arrival: a charge supported with every gun, Katyusha, and plane the front could muster. Made at full throttle, it would come to close quarters before the Germans had time to react. It might mean taking a week’s losses in a few hours if necessary, but superior numbers would enable Fifth Guards Tank to break in, break through, and break out.
Vatutin approved; Rotmistrov’s preparations continued. With the time for reflection denied formations struggling to get into position while topping up fuel tanks and ammunition racks and maintaining camouflage discipline, one point becomes clear. The Fifth Guards Tank Army was expected to implement both the breakthrough and the immediate exploitation with its own resources, but a tank army lacked organic heavy artillery. The two tank corps Vatutin attached, when maintenance and straggling are calculated, gave the Fifth Guards Tank Army more than eight hundred AFVs available on the morning of July 12. This was almost a hundred tanks per mile of front, a concentration unprecedented in armored war. But forgetting the Germans, or underestimating them, could change any prognosis in a hurry.
V
It was 10:00 P.M. on July 9 before Hausser’s final orders for the next day were ready. Synthesized, they described a full-scale turn northeast, with security on both flanks left to isolated strongpoints unless a major threat emerged. Totenkopf, now on the corps’s left, would get its assault gun battalion back from the 167th Division, cross the Psel in force, turn right, and be ready to mount a division-strength attack by 10:00 A.M. in support of Leibstandarte. That division, led by a panzer grenadier regiment accompanied by Tigers and assault guns, would advance at 6:30, then capture and hold Prokhorovka. Das Reich would keep pace en echelon on Leibstandarte’s right and occupy the high ground southwest of the town.
What that amounted to in distance was an average advance of around seven or eight miles. In the context of the previous two days, the expectation was not unreasonable. Leibstandarte’s commander, with the advantage of an actual paved road on his axis of advance, expected to be in Prokhorovka by nightfall. But the division’s armored battle group had only forty tanks, four of them Tigers. Its progress correspondingly depended on Totenkopf’s ability to throw bridgeheads across the Psel, then swing right to come in on Leibstandarte’s left flank. The high ground northeast of the Psel was stiff with guns, heavy mortars, and rocket launchers. The terrain on Leibstandarte’s front was open—good tank country, but providing very little cover and presenting a potential killing ground. The Stukas and fighter-bombers of VIII Air Corps were expected to compensate by bombing the attack forward. But at 8:45 A.M., Hausser was informed that visibility was too poor for the forward air controllers to direct close-support strikes. That same bad weather, plus heavy artillery fire, was delaying Totenkopf. Leibstandarte’s supporting rocket launchers were also stuck in the mud, and its artillery observers were no better off than their Luftwaffe counterparts.
That placed the burden on the panzer grenadiers—nothing exactly new in Citadel. Jumping off at 10:45 A.M., they endured artillery fire, engaged tanks with hand grenades and explosive charges, and by 1:00 P.M. had fought their way into the Komsomolets State Farm on the Prokhorovka road. Russian resistance was no less determined. It was grenades and entrenching tools and pistols, and sometimes knives and bayonets, for the close work as the SS struggled up the slopes of their next objective: Hill 241.6. Then came the Tigers: four of them, moving slowly forward as bullets and shell fragments struck sparks on their armor. Leibstandarte’s attack struck the 183rd Rifle Division. This was one of the Red Army’s anonymous formations that histories of the Eastern Front usually consign to tables of organization and indexes. It put up a fierce fight despite the appearance in force of Stukas as the weather cleared. The dive-bombers and the tanks worked forward, taking out dug-in T-34s while accompanying pioneers cleared minefields. It took the Germans two hours to reach the crest of Hill 241.6 and two hours more to secure it.
An area the Germans were never expected to reach did not have the elaborate defensive system of more exposed sectors. Elements of Leibstandarte, some of the riflemen riding tanks Red Army style, pushed along the railway leading to Prokhorovka Station until checked by a Guards heavy tank regiment equipped, of all possible anomalies, with British Lend-Lease Mark IV Churchills. Their six-pounder guns were no match for a Tiger, but their relatively thick armor helped enough to blunt the attack. Nevertheless, only one of the twelve Churchills remained operational at the finish as Leibstandarte buttoned up and dug in to resume its advance next morning.
For most of the day, Leibstandarte had been slowed by heavy, albeit intermittent, artillery and antitank fire from the Psel sector. Totenkopf spent a long, difficult night moving its heavy equipment through the boggy ground on its side of the river. Its orders were to force a crossing, establish a bridgehead, and turn northeast to secure Leibstandarte’s flank by taking the high ground along the riverbank, especially Hill 226.6. Then the division’s tanks were to cut the Oboyan-Prokhorovka road, severing Soviet supply lines and communications, and setting the stage for a final attack on Prokhorovka itself.
The weather and the Russians had something to say about all three objectives. The rain grew heavier before dawn—so heavy that the Luftwaffe was unable to support the river crossing. Soviet aircraft had no difficulty, however, harassing German deployments consistently and effectively. The core of the defense was Sixth Guards Army’s 52nd Guards Rifle Division. Well supported by artillery, it repelled initial German attempts to cross the Psel in rubber boats. A foothold established around 11:00 A.M. was more of a toehold as Russian fighters strafed the riverbank continuously, without Luftwaffe interference. Another temporary bridgehead had to be withdrawn under heavy fire. Then during the afternoon the skies cleared. German artillery and rocket launchers engaged their Soviet counterparts. Stukas made a welcome appearance. Russian guns fell silent; Russian infantry began falling back. More and more rubber boats reached the Psel’s far bank and made return trips. German pioneers had earlier seized a small, undamaged bridge. Now it became simultaneously a funnel and a choke point for a small, precarious bridgehead less than a thousand yards wide and foxhole-shallow in many places. Not until 4:00 P.M. was division headquarters sufficiently satisfied with the situation to report success after “bitter fighting.” And that success was highly contingent on the ability of specialist pioneers to throw stable bridges over the Psel during the night.
Das Reich spent most of July 10 holding its positions as ordered. Initiative was limited by a tank battalion reduced to fifty-six effectives, including a single Tiger and seven captured and refurbished T-34s. Das Reich also reported constant tank and troop movements across the line, but its outposts were unable to determine whether they involved reinforcements or position shifts. The best response seemed to be to give the mechanics time to build up the division’s armor resources and await developments, especially since the Russians mounted numerous small-scale attacks on the division’s right flank, where the 167th Infantry Division was relieving a regiment of SS panzer grenadiers for the next day’s operations. More significant from the corps perspective were the similar spoiling attacks in Das Reich’s left sector. The battalion assigned to support Leibstandarte was unable to move forward until 1:45 p.M.—too late to do any good—and at nightfall remained over a mile behind its neighbor’s spearhead. Was the SS Panzer Corps in a state of high-risk overextension or in potential position to initiate the breakthrough of Citadel’s original vision?
At 7:45 P.M., Hausser reported to Hoth that the weather was cloudy with occasional rain, the roads partly bad, but on the whole drivable. The enemy was resisting strongly to the north and northeast and seemed to be deploying tanks and motorized infantry on his corps’s right flank. He complained about the absence of air support and reported the successes of Leibstandarte and Totenkopf.
The SS general stuck closely to the facts. Although his report was hardly spectacular, it seems to have encouraged Hoth. His comprehensive army report, issued at 8:30 P.M., mentioned without particular alarm that reserves from “areas distant from the front,” specifically the Fifth Guards Army, were deploying in the Psel sector. Nothing was said about the Fifth Guards Tank Army because neither air reconnaissance nor signal intelligence had as yet delivered word of its transfer, much less its arrival. What army group intelligence did report were high Soviet tank losses and corresponding evidence that Soviet armored and mechanized formations were either redeploying to shore up weak points or withdrawing altogether, ground down and burned out by the German attack. The XLVIII Panzer Corps and the SS were therefore to continue their advance: the former toward Oboyan, the latter to Prokhorovka.
Hausser’s intention on July 11 was to move forward at daylight. But the rain in Totenkopf’s sector,
