to Spies”)—to prevent further abandonment of the battlefield. By 4:00 P.M. on July 13, the responsible senior officer reported 2,842 officers and men “detained” and the mass retreat stopped. Otherwise, the front commander was playing with an empty pocket. Every available formation of any useful size was committed to the defense or the counterattack. Russian air intelligence tended to count armored half-tracks in with the panzers—a logical action given the absence of such vehicles in the Red Army at the time. As a result, reports indicated about two hundred tanks in the break-in zone. Rotmistrov calculated twice as many.
Perhaps that was why he cooperated so thoroughly with Vatutin’s completely unexpected order at 5:00 A.M. on July 12 to dispatch a strong force to the Rshavezh area. Rotmistrov instructed his deputy, Major General K. G. Trufanov, to assemble the 2nd Guards Tank Corps, two mechanized brigades from 5th Guards Mechanized Corps, and supporting units, turn south, and destroy the enemy in the area of Rshavezh. Trufanov was also to report his progress every two hours. It was a substantial downsizing of the Fifth Guards Tank Army’s main assault force. But having three panzer divisions emerge on an open flank while frontally engaged with the Waffen SS was an even bleaker prospect.
Trufanov’s fire brigade arrived in increments, reaching its concentration areas by 2:15 P.M.: 160 tanks, each of them a welcome sight to the men of Sixty-ninth Army and their commander. Trufanov did not have a headquarters; the two subordinate formations, 5th Guards Mechanized and 2nd Guards Tank, took charge of whatever units they found in their geographic zones—a quasi–battle group system that diffused effort and transformed an intended large-scale counterattack into hole-plugging and sector-level ripostes.
That is the hindsight version, formed by consulting orders, reports, and maps, with as many hours to evaluate decisions as commanders had minutes to make them. The 11th Mechanized Brigade went in around noon against 19th Panzer. Its chief political officer later reported the brigade was thrown in without intelligence information, without artillery preparation, and on an untenable defense line. The results included failure of air- ground cooperation, poor liaison with neighboring units, and haphazard exercise of command.
Fighting in this sector was fierce from the beginning, and the defenders were left largely to their own devices. Companies and battalions—what remained of them—abandoned positions without orders even in the absence of German pressure. One battalion commander led his unit away from the front until the rout was stopped by the division chief of staff, around Alexandrovka. Russian tanks opened fire on one another while Shturmoviks shot up the positions of the rifle division the tanks were supposed to be supporting. In the same sector, a tank regiment’s ordered withdrawal (ordered at least according to the official report) drew groups of infantry with it. Antitank guns mistook the result for a German breakthrough and were barely prevented from opening fire on the whole mass. The commander of the 81st Guards Rifle Division ordered his regimental commanders to “introduce the strictest discipline” and “implement Order No. 227.”
Order No. 227, mentioned earlier in the text, was Stalin’s “not a step back” directive of July 28, 1942, forbidding any commander to retreat without orders and allowing the summary execution of “panic-mongers and cowards” by specially organized “blocking detachments.” That aspect of the order had been unofficially dropped a few months later. But on July 12, the Sixty-ninth Army’s SMERSH detachment improvised seven of them. But if the Soviet defenses were shaken, the front never cracked. The 19th Panzer Division was still fighting its way through its immediate opponents at day’s end.
Voronezh Front was staging no celebrations. On the night of July 12, Vasilevsky informed Stalin that the threat of a breakthrough from the south was real and that he was doing everything possible to reinforce the sector with the rest of 5th Guards Mechanized Corps and four additional antitank regiments. Nevertheless, the Soviets had stabilized their positions without resorting to large-scale summary courts and ad hoc executions. The Germans were unable to convert their advance into a breakthrough.
One might call this an and/or/both proposition. The fighting in this sector on July 12 has been relatively neglected, even in detailed accounts of the battle. Usually the Germans are given credit for their gains, with a deduction of varying size for falling short of the objective. In fact, the experience of Breith’s corps reflects the intersection of two performance curves. The Russians, both the original defenders and Rotmistrov’s reinforcements, were learning how to respond to emergencies on the spot and not resort to the large-scale retreats and advances that had highlighted their tactics as late as the aftermath of Stalingrad. For their part, the Germans were showing the effects of wear, tear, and grit in the machinery. Here, as elsewhere in Manstein’s sector, it was not just a matter of too few tanks at the sharp end. Too many veteran crewmen, too many experienced company officers, were gone. Too many of the replacements were learning the nuances of their crafts on the job, against an enemy whose tuition rates were increasing. And although records, memoirs, and memories combine to deny it, the strain of combat seems to have begun eroding not so much courage as judgment: the fingertip feel, the situational awareness, central to the German approach to war. Opportunities, discovered or created, were not being developed with the speed and flair of earlier months, to say nothing of years. That required an obliging enemy—and the Red Army was not all that obliging.
II
Turning to the opposite flank, Voronezh Front had spent most of July 11 providing the muscle for the straight right-hand punch of its intended counterattack. The orders were delivered at various times during the afternoon and evening of July 11. According to First Tank Army commander Mikhail Katukov, Vatutin on July 10 said he was not expecting much: a kilometer or two of ground, and keeping the Germans in the sector from reinforcing Prokhorovka. But Katukov’s orders were more optimistic—or so it seemed. He told his corps commanders that the objective was a deeper penetration. After all, men with limited objectives could not be expected to fight with the determination of those set to break through the full depth of the enemy defenses. Motivational psychology Red Army–style, circa 1943.
The revised plan assigned 3rd Mechanized and 31st Tank Corps, reinforced by two rifle divisions, to hold their positions east of the Oboyan road, taking the offensive only when the Germans gave way to the main attack of 5th Guards Tank and 10th Tank Corps against Grossdeutschland and 3rd Panzer at 8:30 A.M. Katukov was not acting entirely on his own initiative. Intelligence reports had revealed both XLVIII Panzer Corps’s tactical reshuffling and the movement of two infantry divisions from LII Corps to cover the flank positions now occupied by 3rd Panzer Division. From a Russian perspective, the developing German deployment looked like a smaller version of the SS salient at Prokhorovka. A break-in there was worth a try, especially given the expectations placed on Rotmistrov’s attack. And the best opportunity was while the Germans were regrouping, settling into new positions, and reconnoitering potential routes of advance.
Grossdeutschland’s sideways shuffle went as according to plan as anything ever did on the Russian front: artillery and antitank units moving out first, with the reconnaissance battalion and a panzer grenadier regiment waiting for 3rd Panzer to shift into place. But the German tankers had taken heavy casualties the day before, and the route of advance was thick with mines, German and Russian, many of them randomly sown. By 5:00 P.M., the Russians had advanced nearly ten miles in 3rd Panzer’s sector and come close to throwing 332nd Infantry Division into the Psel River. A panzer grenadier battalion and the division’s antitank gunners did blunt the Soviet drive, and 3rd Panzer was even able to mount a counterattack as the day ended; but when losses were tallied, 3rd Panzer’s operating tank strength had been reduced by the evening of July 12 to around twenty. Not only could the division offer Grossdeutschland no help, it would require support against what seemed a Soviet attack with the potential power to split XLVIII Panzer Corps in half.
That the German front held owed a fair amount to the delay of 19th Tank Corps, on 5th Guards’s left, in going forward. With more than 120 AFVs, it had the muscle to give First Tank Army the initiative. But by Katukov’s account, the corps commander failed both to deploy his units appropriately and to clarify orders that had been previously explained in detail. On the other hand, those orders amounted to little more than “drive on and keep going”—toward objectives ten or twelve miles away. Perhaps the corps commander considered his assignment a mission impossible and intentionally fudged the preparations. Perhaps his performance was affected by the wounds he had suffered a few days earlier. Perhaps Katukov was looking for a scapegoat. Nevertheless, once the Russian attack did go in, Grossdeutschland, with no help in any form arriving from the west, had more than it could handle in its sector despite the command confusion that initially slowed the Russian attack. Rocket-firing Shturmoviks of the 291st Ground Attack Division joined in. Without air cover of their own, first the reconnaissance
