subjects of the military oath, their knowledge of the Stavka directives, hidden sabotage, the approach of the hour of revenge…. Applications for Party membership were written up…. The political awareness and morale were high.”
Morale was probably better served by the hot meal provided to most of the forward units—at least for those able to eat it. Even more welcome was the vodka that accompanied the food—or replaced it. Everyone knew that the attack would have to cross open ground. It did not help to know that the T-34, designed to save internal space, was not easy to get out of in an emergency and that its poorly fitted turret hatches frequently jammed of their own accord. Nor was it useful to remember that tankers’ uniforms had no fire resistance. Germans regularly commented on the burning tanks that spawned human torches, when a pulled trigger meant a mercy shot and not a war crime.
Not all the Russian tankers at Kursk were men. How many died there remains unknown. But women had been folded into the Red Army’s tank units since before Stalingrad, being particularly valued as drivers. Their generally smaller size made it easier for them to fit into the T-34’s cramped forward compartment—and to get out as well. Others were commander/gunners. Aleksandra Samusenko was decorated for destroying three Tigers and eventually became Russia’s only woman tank battalion commander, killed in action during the Battle of Berlin.
Like so many other details of Kursk, exactly when and how what one survivor called “the devil’s waltz” began remains obscure. Rotmistrov arrived at the command post of 29th Tank Corps just before dawn and was told all was ready. At 5:15 A.M., he informed Vatutin that everything was in order. The full artillery preparation would start at 8:00 A.M. and the tanks would go in thirty minutes later. Leibstandarte’s records, on the other hand, describe a number of probing attacks around that time, but no serious Soviet movement. Probably the best evidence against either a preemptive or a simultaneous German attack was that the men of a Leibstandarte tank company in the target sector, exhausted by the previous day’s fighting, were literally caught in their blankets as the Russians completed their final deployment. The company commander banged his head and nearly stunned himself when he came crawling out from under his tank in response to a summons from his battalion commander. The order he received was vague: Make contact with the infantry and prepare to intervene if they needed support.
Since the company had only seven tanks that morning, “intervene” was all that it could do. Captain Rudolf von Ribbentrop had returned to his unit and was drinking coffee when he looked eastward and saw “a wall of purple smoke.” Purple was the color of the flares and shells that announced a tank attack. A motorcyclist from the panzer grenadiers appeared in a cloud of dust, pumping his fist in the signal to advance. When the panzers reached the crest of the high ground to their front, “what I saw left me speechless…. In front of me appeared fifteen, then thirty, then forty tanks. Finally there were too many of them to count, rollling toward us at high speed.”
Ribbentrop responded by taking his tanks downslope toward the Russians—not on a suicide run, but to keep from being silhouetted on the crest. An advance made sense as well, because the Soviet barrage was falling short of expectations and requirements—at least in hindsight. There was an ample number of gun tubes and rocket launchers somewhere in the combat zone. But regiments and batteries had moved into position in a helter-skelter fashion that led to a neglect of communications. Ammunition supplies were similarly distributed at random. The assault brigade commanders were too concerned about their own missions to coordinate systematically with the gunners supporting them. Target acquisition was also random: available sound and flash equipment failed to range the guns with anything like precision.
The result was a Russian artillery preparation closer in method and effect to 1915 than to 1943, let alone the barrages that would open the Red Army offensives of 1944–45. In German reports, the overall impression is that the SS infantry found the shelling disturbing, but not devastating—not the kind that drove men to the ground and silenced any reaction beyond a near mindless wanting it to stop. Nor was Hausser’s corps artillery quiescent. Its counter-battery fire grew increasingly effective, especially against Prokhorovka itself and the roads leading from it toward the Russian positions.
Rotmistrov was able to do no more than report to Vatutin that the artillery preparation was insufficient. Rotmistrov was well aware of something that later accounts and analyses tend to overlook: this was the Fifth Guards Tank Army’s first battle. It was newly organized—indeed, one might say thrown together—from units with limited experience working together. Ordinarily, the quality of individual senior officers would have been less a central issue. All they would have to do was get their tanks forward, never mind how, and pin the Germans down until succeeding waves could complete the breakthrough and exploitation. But Vatutin’s early-morning order to reinforce the front’s left flank against Breith had cost Rotmistrov three brigades from his already weak second echelon. Moreover, Rotmistrov had independently created his own flank guard from independent assault gun regiments—more striking power unavailable for the main attack.
When all the chopping and changing was done, Fifth Guards Tank Army’s deployable reserve was down to two brigades with fewer than a hundred tanks between them. Front intelligence credited the Germans in Rotmistrov’s sector with 250 to 300 tanks—but provided no detailed information of the possible number facing Rotmistrov’s attack. Although his plan was hardly unraveling, enough grit was finding its way into the machinery that Fifth Guards Tank Army’s first wave would have to do more than just bull its way forward until it was expended. One of its corps commanders, moreover, was new to that level. Rotmistrov considered the other of sufficiently dubious quality that he sent the army chief of staff to keep an eye on him. Communications between corps and brigades, and brigades and battalions, were so haphazard that the kind of control prescribed by Red Army doctrine and encouraged by experience would prove difficult to maintain.
The time for tinkering ended at 8:30 A.M., when the last Katyusha salvo was fired. The guns and launchers fell silent—the signal to attack. The code word for the attack went out over the army’s radio network: “Steel! Steel! Steel!” Repeated over and over, it released a spring by now tautened almost to the snapping point. Some of Rotmistrov’s
That was just the beginning. Messerschmitts cleared the sky above and ahead of the attack planes. Wave after wave of medium bombers sought out artillery positions. Guided by a still-efficient ground control system, the Henschels of Schlachtgeschwader (Attack Wing) 1 and JG 51’s tank destroyer squadron would combine for almost 250 sorties on July 12. The twin-engined Henschels had repeatedly proven their worth against armor. Working with them were not only the conventional dive-bombers, but a new variant. The Ju-87G was a pure tank buster, with additional armor and two 37 mm cannon in underwing pods. Even with their heavy earlier losses, the Stuka wings were manned largely by experts, and none was better than Hans-Ulrich Rudel. A veteran of more than a thousand combat sorties in the Ju-87, he was an early advocate of the specialized tank killer and now flew one of the first delivered.
Like many another pilot, Rudel could tell a war story to advantage: “The first flight flies behind me in the only cannon-carrying airplane…. In the first attack four tanks exploded under the hammer of my cannons; by the evening the total rises to twelve. We are all seized with a kind of passion for the chase….” The number and timing of Rudel’s kills remain controversial. But on that day and in that place, his claims are reasonable. The effect of the hits the Germans scored was enhanced by the extra fuel carried by the cautious Russian tank commanders. The best place to carry extra cans was on the rear deck, and machine-gun fire from above was usually enough to turn the vehicle into a torch as blazing gasoline came through the ventilators and reached engines already running hot.
The attacking planes had the further advantage of relatively limited aerial opposition. The Russians had neither the Germans’ sophisticated air-ground liaison system nor the Luftwaffe’s smoothly working maintenance capacities. Russian sortie times were appreciably longer, especially in high-stress situations. The Russian fighters made a showing poor enough that ground-force reports uniformly described air support so limited that the Germans were able to pick their targets without interference.
