combined with vehicle traffic, had turned the Psel’s banks into a five-hundred-yard mudflat, virtually impassable even for tanks. At 3:00 A.M., Totenkopf radioed that the bridges would be ready by 7:00. From 3:20 A.M., the division also reported at frequent intervals of increasingly heavy Soviet attacks, growing shortages of artillery ammunition, and worsening road conditions. Then came news that the heavy bridging equipment, under artillery fire, had taken cover in a deep gully, become stuck, and would be delayed indefinitely. The pioneers were improvising a corduroy road out of whatever timber they could scrounge. The tanks, instead of preparing for battle, were straining their transmissions hauling bridging equipment through the morass. Totenkopf, in short, was going nowhere in a hurry.
Once again, Leibstandarte was on its own. Its forward elements moved out in the aftermath of overnight heavy rains in a south Russian summer. Mud made cross-country movement almost impossible; fog and mist did the same for air support; and muggy humidity wore down men doing stressful physical work. The road Leibstandarte expected to take into Prokhorovka was the central feature of a terrain corridor bordered on the north by the Psel River and on the south by a railroad embankment, built unusually high because of the frequent floods. Small satellite villages along the Psel offered concealment to tanks and antitank guns. The focal points of the Russian position, however, were the unusually large October State Farm and the neighboring hill 252.6. Both had been transformed into formidable strongpoints featuring minefields, antitank barriers, and barbed-wire entanglements. Prokhorovka was unlikely to prove a walk in the sun—assuming the defenders matched their positions. The front line was initially held by remnants of the 52nd Guards Rifle and 183rd Rifle Divisions. Backing them up was the 2nd Tank Corps. This was an improvisation. A Russian tank corps was armor-heavy, tailored for breakthroughs and exploitiations, and 2nd Tank Corps had taken heavy losses in the past two days. It was able to issue detailed deployment orders to its component units only around midnight on July 10–11, and these emphasized establishing strongpoints for defense rather than preparing for counterattacks.
The Russian situation brightened around dawn. Since Citadel’s beginning, Voronezh Front had been focused on the situation in the Oboyan sector. Vatutin’s decision to shift two tank corps and supporting elements from Prokhorovka to Katukov’s front had been a gamble, contingent on the imminent arrival of reinforcements from Stavka reserve. On July 10, Vasilevsky informed the Fifth Guards Army commander that the Germans might seek to break through at Prokhorovka and he must move quickly. During the night, two of the army’s divisions began forming a second defense line in the Psel-Prokhorovka sector: 95th Guards Rifle on the left, and 9th Guards Airborne directly across Leibstandarte’s projected line of attack. Like their Luftwaffe counterparts, Russian airborne troops were by this stage of the war configured more for ground fighting than for jumping out of planes. But they saw themselves as an elite—doubly so since acquiring Guard status. If any division in the Red Army’s order of battle was likely to give the SS all the fighting they wanted, 9th Guards Airborne was top of the list.
Marshal Vasilevsky visited the headquarters of 2nd Tank Corps shortly after 4:00 A.M on July 11, asked for a situation report, then interrupted to deliver his real message. Hold on at all costs for twenty-four hours. Tomorrow things would improve. Fifth Guards Tank Army would attack in this sector. Hold on!
Leibstandarte’s main thrust was down its sector’s middle. The 2nd Panzer Grenadiers, backed by assault guns and the four Tigers that had done such good work on July 10, would follow the railroad to and over Hill 252.2. Simultaneously, the reconnaissance battalion was to clear the villages along the Psel and link up with Totenkopf’s vanguards. Once the panzer grenadiers had opened the way, the panzer group—fifty-two tanks and the half-track battalion—would go forward to Prokhorovka. This thin offensive gruel reflected and replicated Citadel’s fundamental dilemma. Neither the division north of the corps nor the Fourth Panzer Army had any reserves left. Hausser’s intention was to allow Das Reich to have as much of a down day for rest and refitting as the Russians might allow, in order to exploit Leibstandarte’s expected breakthrough. That meant Leibstandarte had to provide its own flank security. Instead of lending weight to the main attack, a full panzer grenadier regiment was responsible for clearing threatening Russian positions—likely to be a full day’s work in itself. To make matters worse, Leibstandarte had nowhere near enough artillery to neutralize the Soviet batteries. The Luftwaffe again reported the weather too bad to fly. But riflemen were still able to walk. Almost immediately, they were driven to ground by overwhelming fire from the front and both flanks. Adrenaline-fueled Soviet combatants described over two dozen German AFVs disabled or destroyed—including Tigers. Then the sun shone, the ground mist cleared, and the Stukas that had been ready for takeoff since before dawn intervened.
From Citadel’s beginning to its end, successful German attacks depended heavily on the pinpoint-accurate close support delivered in particular by the obsolescent Ju-87s. Absent German air cover gave the ubiquitous Soviet antitank guns increased opportunities for close-range kill shots. Now, as dive-bombers struck and silenced artillery positions, panzer grenadiers pushed toward Hill 252.2, the few Tigers leading as their turret and frontal armor defied nearly continuous shell hits. By 10:00 A.M., the preliminaries were finished: the SS and the Guards Airborne met and grappled.
Vasilevsky’s speech at 2nd Tank Corps headquarters reached the rifle companies in blunter form: “Remember Order 227! Not a step back!” By 10:30, the minefields had been sufficiently cleared for Leibstandarte to commit its panzer group. This was as much a response to desperate Soviet resistance as an attempt to develop a breakthrough. The Luftwaffe cooperated with an eighty-plane strike, but the key defensive positions remained functional, if not entirely intact. It required the commitment of Leibstandarte’s half-track battalion to secure the crest of 252.2 around 1:30 P.M. About the same time, the reconnaissance battalion broke through in the 95th Guards Rifle sector. As the hasty initial deployment of the two Russian divisions began to show strain, the Germans pressed toward the October State Farm. The defenders, a mixed bag of riflemen low on ammunition and gunners firing over open sights, held out for more than two hours as the Germans probed for weak spots. Russian accounts speak of an absence of centralized command, handicapping the direction of supporting artillery fire and the allocation of reinforcements. The Sixty-ninth Army, nominally in charge of the sector, was fighting an even more desperate battle against Breith and spared no time for Prokhorovka. Three things, however, can be discerned. Russian units did erode under pressure; officers were stopping fleeing men at pistol point. Russian casualties nonetheless indicated they fought with grim determination; 2nd Tank Corps’s motorized brigade alone reported six hundred dead, wounded, and missing. And the SS overwhelmingly spoke respectfully of their opponents as soldiers and tankers.
Apart from a few occasional fighters, thus far the Red Air Force had been conspicuous by its absence— particularly in the ground troops’ judgment. Most of Voronezh Front’s available air assets had been sent south against III Panzer Corps, and much of the rest were deployed covering, to good effect, the vulnerable rear zones against German medium bombers. Those dispositions, however, had subtexts. Increasing losses to German fighters combined with the high number of sorties were generating stress-based caution. Voronezh Front’s Second Air Army had replaced some of its hardest-hit formations, including an entire fighter division, and the newcomers needed adjustment time. Voronezh Front also ordered the temporary grounding of its Shturmoviks as a preliminary to Vatutin’s intended offensive. In late afternoon, an emergency Shturmovik strike temporarily held back the Germans around the October State Farm. Around 5:00 P.M., the panzers came again, only to be caught in a series of counterattacks mounted by what remained of the 95th Rifle Division and 2nd Tank Corps. Frontline units spoke of heavy casualties, die-hard resistance from cutoff Russians, and daylong stifling humidity. Prokhorovka remained just out of German reach—about five hundred yards from its outskirts was the best the panzers could manage before securing for the night.
In its daily report, Leibstandarte blamed what it called limited success primarily on Totenkopf and Das Reich. Their failure to keep pace had created a salient badly exposed on both flanks and a strongly defended tactical objective, Prokhorovka, unlikely to be carried by an armored rush. The division command recommended suspending operations in their sector and concentrating all corps assets on bringing Totenkopf forward next morning. That task completed, Leibstandarte and Das Reich could finish off the Russians around Prokhorovka. Hausser phoned Leibstandarte, consulted his own staff, then agreed.
Leibstandarte still hedged its bet slightly, proclaiming its intention of continuing the attack next day—but only “with the strongest Stuka preparation” and only once Totenkopf secured Hill 226.6, thereby establishing solid contact. In mitigation, Totenkopf could have pleaded a long, hard day in the mud. One of its panzer grenadier battalions was holding defensive positions east of the crossing site on the Psel’s south bank. Its initial mission was to secure Totenkopf’s right flank and the bridges, and Totenkopf considered a good offense the best defense— especially since this was the closest unit to Leibstandarte’s open left flank, about two miles distant. Around noon, a battalion of the Totenkopf Theodor Eicke Regiment, whose “honor title” commemorated a former commandant of Dachau, started toward the village of Vasilyevka. By 2:00 P.M., it had most of the burning houses in hand but was
