Armor and Blood

for the purpose. Hoth argued that this was insufficient—if Citadel had proven anything, it was that no serious operation could succeed if mounted on a shoestring. He made a powerful case for using the entire SS Panzer Corps.

With or without Hoth’s proposed addenda, Manstein’s plan invited careful consideration as being unacceptably risky. German air and ground intelligence had provided a reasonable sense of what Stavka was concentrating around the salient the Fourth Panzer Army had created. Mounting a major offensive into the teeth of an even more massive Soviet attack was something approaching a dice roll. But the panzers’ strengths were mobility and flexibility. The best chance of defeating the Red Army was to confuse it, to turn it back on itself. An encounter battle promised far more in that context than holding in place.

That again brought the focus back to III Panzer Corps. If Breith broke through to the north in force on July 12, even if Prokhorovka remained out of reach, it might begin the process of throwing the Reds off balance for the first time in this misbegotten operation. Across the front, the Sixty-ninth Army had managed to put together a defense line that still held the panzer spearheads fifteen to twenty miles away from Prokhorovka. But its reserves were nearly exhausted. For practical purposes, it had no AFVs at all. The Sixty-ninth’s commanding general was sufficiently dubious about his prospects that late on July 11 he appealed to Vatutin for help.

Stalin was looking over the shoulders of both generals, demanding action. The III Panzer Corps proposed to give Lieutenant General Vasily Kriuchenkin even more to worry about on July 12. The action began when Breith ordered 6th Panzer Division, on the corps’s left and the closest to Prokhorovka, to reach the Donets at Rshavets and establish a bridgehead, enabling 19th and 7th Panzer to cross and mount a full-strength drive toward the Waffen SS. The initial plan was for a full-scale daylight attack. The commander of the 11th Panzer Regiment and the CO of its panzer battalion developed an alternate: a high-risk, high-gain nighttime operation that might have an even more decisive morale effect than another direct attack.

Shortly before midnight, the battle group moved out: two weak tank companies, a panzer grenadier battalion, truck-mounted so as—hopefully—to be less conspicuous, and the Tigers, bringing up the rear in a situation where speed and surprise were essential. On point were two captured T-34s, manned by German crews and clearly marked with the German Balkenkreuz, the Greek cross, replacing the Red star. In passing, given the Wehrmacht’s nearly systematic abuse of deception tactics, this one was an accepted ruse de guerre, legitimated since eighteenth-century navies incorporated one another’s captured ships and captains had to pay attention to colors flown rather than hull and rigging designs.

Assisted by a moonless night, the German column advanced for three hours, encountering only a Russian truck convoy, which it allowed to proceed on its way. Then the T-34 leading the main body broke down in the middle of the road! Still no Soviet reaction, even from bystanders. One can almost hear tired men muttering, “Let the damn tankisty do their own work!” as German crewmen climbed out and reboarded the remaining vehicles. Around 4:00 A.M., the vanguard, a platoon’s worth of Panzer IVs led by the remaining T- 34, entered Rshavets and passed through the town unchallenged. Whispering, the commander reported around two dozen T-34s in his immediate vicinity. The officer in charge of the strike force, the tank battalion’s commander, was a reservist: Major Dr. Franz Bake. Most Wehrmacht officers with doctorates held them in some branch of the humanities. Bake was a practicing dentist in peacetime. In war, he had built a reputation as aggressive, successful, and lucky. He took a tank company forward, setting a fast enough pace that no Soviet straggler sought to hitch a ride. Then the Germans met a column of T-34s going in the opposite direction. The Russians were tired and felt safe in their own rear zone. When a voice from the lead German tank said in Russian, “Keep right,” the Soviet column obligingly made place, until someone noticed that they were making way for tanks with German markings. The resulting melee featured grenades, submachine guns, and hand-delivered explosive charges as well as point-blank gunfire. When the fighting died down, about a dozen Russian tanks had been knocked out, several of them by Bake and one of his crewmen running from tank to tank and placing hollow-charge bombs by hand.

The French colonial army had a word, baraka. Its original meaning was religious and referred to spiritual force. Its militarized version meant “fighting man’s luck,” and surely the baraka had been with 6th Panzer’s pencil thrust into the Soviet rear. But Bellona, the goddess of war, is no one’s trull. Bake’s lead tanks were within three hundred yards of the bridge when a series of explosions announced its destruction. The Germans had driven past the turn leading to it. Check—but not yet mate. At around 6:00 A.M., 6th Panzer Division’s battle group was twelve miles from Prokhorovka, with a good road ahead. The column’s panzer grenadiers threw a footbridge across the Donets, then expanded it to a bridgehead. Taken by surprise, Russian tanks and infantry fell back in small groups instead of counterattacking. A division staff reported being encircled by three hundred tanks. A division commander declared himself so chivied about by other German tanks that he had lost control of his formation for fourteen hours. And Sixty-ninth Army HQ repeated its call to Voronezh Front for help.

Still, the situation was not all that promising for the Germans. But more had been made from less since Barbarossa’s first days. Leading from the front, Hunersdorff and his command group set up shop on the Donets’s north bank to expedite and coordinate the bridgehead’s expansion. About the same time, the Luftwaffe began softening-up raids on the Soviet positions ahead. A group of Heinkel 111s coming in at low altitude spotted a number of tanks and vehicles in the open: the kind of target increasingly difficult to find as Citadel progressed. They mistook the Germans for Russians and took out 6th Panzer’s forward headquarters. Fifty men were killed or wounded, including Hunersdorff himself and two regimental commanders. The Heinkels had guided in on a clearly visible T-34 in the midst of the massed vehicles! Friendly fire and combat karma with a vengeance. The subsequent investigation declared that all precautions had been taken and no one should be held responsible.

Though local counterattacks rendered control of Rshavezh uncertain until around 9:30 A.M., by 10:00 A.M. the village was in German hands and they were reinforcing the bridgehead. The Tigers’ weight still kept them on the river’s far side, but by 11:15 the Germans were making clear progress. Had those hundred tanks seen by Vatutin’s airmen actually been available, the Russian situation would have been grim. The crucial question now became, “Where was everybody else?” The 19th Panzer Division had been expected to advance up the river’s bank, through Kiritsevo, and link up with 6th Panzer sometime after nightfall. That proved easier ordered than accomplished. Not until 2:15 P.M. did 19th Panzer’s advance guards reach the 6th’s positions. Other elements of the division closed on the village of Shchplokovo with the intention of forcing another crossing of the Donets. But the Sixty-ninth Army’s riflemen, eventually reinforced by 5th Guards Mechanized Corps, held, counterattacked, and counterattacked again. Around 11:00 P.M., a panzer grenadier element finally crossed the Donets in boats. Shortly afterward, pioneers completed a bridge heavy enough to carry Mark IVs to the far bank.

Bake, now in command of the 11th Panzer Regiment, was nevertheless ordered to attack with everything the Germans could bring across the Donets. The set time was 6:00 P.M.: the forces were far too little to make headway; the hour was far too late to do the SS any immediate good. In the end, Bake’s attack was canceled. His battle group was ordered to reinforce its parent division while 19th Panzer took over the bridgehead on which so much hope had been placed. For III Panzer Corps, tomorrow would have to be another day. That declarative sentence reflects the fact that 1943 was not 1941. What the Germans had done in the morning would have been enough to create an exploitable breakthrough in 1941. What Vatutin and Rotmistrov did during the rest of the day showed that the tactical game was now even.

From Vatutin’s perspective, Voronezh Front had to deal not only with the German bridgehead at Rshavezh, but with the unexpectedly successful advance of the 168th Infantry Division. Disregarded by the Russians as Kempf’s left-flank security force, it fought its way to the Donets, took more than two hundred prisoners, and was working to force a river crossing with its own resources. Germans across rivers, in whatever strength, was a bad omen. Specifically, Breith’s panzer battle groups had shown a high standard of mobility, repeatedly turning up unexpectedly where they had no business being. And as the Sixty-ninth Army began shuffling its forces one more time to cope with the morning’s developments, the continuous line of defense in their sector facing Army Detachment Kempf grew even more ragged.

At 1:15 A.M. on July 12, Stalin, increasingly concerned about what seemed an unstoppable German advance, issued orders to Steppe Front to concentrate a rifle army and two mechanized corps for dispatch to the threatened southeast sector of the Kursk salient. The deadline, however, was the end of July 13. That left Vatutin to restore the immediate situation with his own resources. The Sixty-ninth Army had taken a predictable initiative by ordering its counterintelligence department—a uniformed branch of SMERSH (the Russian acronym for “Death