battalion and then the panzer grenadiers were “temporarily compelled … to withdraw.”
Anodyne officialese obscures the hand-to-hand fighting that resulted in the annihilation of an entire Grossdeutschland company and impelled a battalion commander to ignore two wounds and lead the counterattack that retook his lost forward positions. By some German accounts, the Russians were on the verge of breaking into Grossdeutschland’s rear areas—until once again German armor saved the situation. This time it was Grossdeutschland’s organic tanks that did the job in a counterattack as well timed as it was well executed. The Tigers made a particular impression on already tired Soviet gunners and riflemen. All but the latest design of 76 mm armor-piercing rounds bounced off side and frontal armor alike. Lighter antitank guns did no more than dent the thick steel even at close range. However, Grossdeutschland’s hard-hammered infantry were unable to do more than retake some of their original positions—and that as much through local Soviet withdrawals as by counterattacks on any scale.
At around 4:00 P.M., First Tank Army essentially shifted to a holding action across its sector—a decision encouraged by 11th Panzer’s successful attack on its left-flank rifle division. The 11th Panzer remained a bone in the throat of the Russian offensive. The panzer grenadier companies were down to two or three dozen exhausted men, and the attacks and counterattacks had taken a disproportionate toll of junior leaders and their potential successors. But what the 11th had left proved enough—just enough. When the 5th Guards Tank Corps’s commanding officer reported that he could no longer advance, Katukov ordered him to halt in place and hold his present lines.
Analysis and recriminations indicate that the Rusians were significantly disappointed with the results of July 12 in the Oboyan sector. Vatutin and his staff perhaps had overestimated Voronezh Front’s capacity to shift from to-the-last-man defense to flexible offense in a matter of hours. If, however, personal responsibility is to be assessed, it is reasonable to describe Katukov as more cobbler than blacksmith. He could stitch and mend; his gifts did not extend to swinging the nine-pound hammer of a mass armored assault. It should also be noted that the First Tank Army had borne the brunt of the German northern drive for a week. Staff and line, officers and men, including the commanding general, had fallen into a tactical routine without time to shift mentalities to another approach. Tank and mechanized brigades had been shuffled and borrowed so often to meet emergencies that not merely chains of command but command relationships had been disrupted. And in the Red Army, obeying orders from the wrong general could be as professionally and personally fatal as obeying orders from the right general. A reasonable conclusion is that the front command and the army commander expected their subordinates to demonstrate German-style flexibility and initiative. That time would approach—but it was months and miles, and many dead bodies and burned-out tanks, ahead.
Across the fighting line, at the end of the day prospects for an immediate advance on Oboyan were as close to zero as XLVIII Panzer Corps’s staff could determine. Grossdeutschland, with the drive’s key role, was already shifting to a defensive posture, concentrating its by now extended panzer grenadiers and grouping its tanks behind the grenadiers’ as a sector counterattack force. Around 4:00 P.M., Manstein appeared at corps headquarters. In contrast with Model, Manstein rarely made impromptu visits to the front; they were not a usual part of his command style. His presence indicated a corresponding concern. He did not, however, challenge Knobelsdorff’s eventual orders for July 13–14. The 11th Panzer would hold in place and try to restore contact with Totenkopf. Grossdeutschland was to send its armor group—what remained of it—to reinforce 3rd Panzer, with the combined force then attacking not north toward Oboyan, but west.
Hoth concurred but remarked that he had seen the need himself that morning. Knobelsdorff’s proposed strike was at right angles to the corps’s original axis. Its objective, the Rakovo–Kruglik road, lay in the middle of nowhere in particular. If it was reached, the most likely result would be to cut the Russians’ local supply lines and relieve local Russian pressure. Yet that relief had become vital to Knobelsdorff’s corps and to the Fourth Panzer Army. The corps’s left flank was hanging by a thread, making an advance farther northward out of the tactical question. The Oboyan sector had become a high-risk salient whose best hopes lay elsewhere in the southern sector. As on the Fourth Panzer Army’s right flank, the situation on the left can best be described as balanced—but on a knife’s edge.
III
The creation of that balance set the stage for Kursk’s defining event: the tank battle at Prokhorovka. All the elements of myth were at hand. Prokhorovka offered a head-on, stand-up grapple between the elite troops of the world’s best armies, on a three-mile front under conditions that left no room for fancy maneuvers or for air and artillery to make much difference. The drama is heightened by a familiar image of both sides attacking simultaneously—an encounter battle in the literal sense, suggesting predators in rut. Like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Prokhorovka offered an emotional turning point: afterward, nothing was ever the same. Afterward, the tide of war rolled only one way—toward Berlin. Marshal Konev called Kursk the swan song of the panzers. He was in a position to know. Prokhorovka had its Homer as well: Pavel Rotmistrov, whose dramatic narrative of a heroic attack that left dozens of Tigers ablaze was for years one of the centerpieces of Soviet commemoration and one of the few accounts from the Red Army’s front lines generally available in the West.
As for the Germans, they could and did content themselves with countermyths of fighting to the last man and the last tank. That was no trifling detail in the context of a Western culture of heroic defeat that celebrates last stands from Thermopylae to the Alamo, Dien Bien Phu, and beyond, no matter their provenance or matrix.
Throughout the night of July 11–12, the frontline elements of Leibstandarte and Das Reich were kept awake by the ubiquitous single-engine “sewing machines” of the night witches and by the sound of Russian tank engines —a lot of tank engines. The question was, Were the Soviets concentrating for an offensive or redeploying elsewhere? Shortly after midnight, a panzer grenadier battalion, pushed forward as a reconnaissance force, provided the hint of an answer when it fell back before strong and alert resistance. The next step to confirmation came at dawn, when Shturmoviks materialized out of the fog. Coming in at treetop height, they shot up everything that crossed their gun sights, no matter its direction. Around the same time, Russian artillery opened fire—initially not a massive barrage, but ranging fire. That meant the real barrage might begin at any time, and as mortars joined, Leibstandarte began adjusting its frontline dispositions to meet what was becoming the certainty of a full- scale attack at daylight.
The attack Hoth and Hausser had ordered was contingent on Totenkopf’s advance on the SS left. Leibstandarte’s intention was to hold in place until the Death’s-Head tanks began applying pressure to the Russian flank. Now that mission appeared more complicated. Totenkopf’s forward artillery observers reported large tank formations approaching Leibstandarte’s left flank. Patrols and observers confirmed increasing ground activity to the division’s front, including exhaust fumes heavy enough to smell even at long range. Among the panzer grenadiers, the focus by then was not on attacking in any direction, but on preparing to hold out against what appeared to be the most powerful Soviet attack since Citadel began.
By the book, Leibstandarte had the ground in its favor. The terrain to its front was relatively open; the ravines crossing it randomly from end to end were shallow; the extensive fields of grain and sunflowers were not high enough to shelter any force larger than an infantry patrol. Antitank guns began moving cautiously forward into ambush positions. The Germans had the further advantage of being able to reverse some of the Russian defenses they had captured on July 11. In two world wars, a significant and overlooked difference between Germans and their British and American opponents was that the
Rotmistrov’s tankers were no less nervous. They fiddled with engines and breechblocks. They loaded extra ammunition and additional gasoline, accepting the corresponding increase in the risk of being torched by even a glancing hit. A T-34 halted was a T-34 destroyed; fuel was even more vital to survival than were shells. Crewmen waited “with dry mouths and wrenching stomachs.” A political officer described conducting discussions “on the
