To the men beneath the wings, it seemed as if the entire Luftwaffe were overhead and seeking to kill them specifically. One rifleman spoke for many: “I did not see an aircraft diving toward us, but moments after a warning was yelled the ground in front of us levitated. It was like a giant had grabbed the battlefield and shaken it. I was knocked to the ground but was dragged to my feet and the platoon was told to look to its front and stand firm….” Even when they did not find a target, the bombs aided the German defenders by contributing to the clouds of dust thrown up by the charging tanks. At many points, the Russians were advancing almost blindly. The T-34 may have been the best battle tank of World War II, but its four-man crew required the commander also to act as the gunner. That made it nearly impossible for him to ride with the hatch open like his German counterpart, looking for obstacles, threats, and opportunities.
With losses about to mount, this is a good time to address the still-vexing question of numbers. History may not tolerate the subjunctive but is frequently forced to accept it. Just how many tanks ultimately confronted one another in the fields around Prokhorovka? The answer depends in part on how the battle zone is defined and in part on whose reports from what time periods are given most credence. The numbers also incorporate a mythic element. For Germans and Russians alike, the longer the odds, the greater becomes the heroism. But the Russians encounter a certain paradox. The Soviet Union’s success in World War II was and remains in good part defined in contexts of mass: the ability of the USSR and its people to submerge the Fascist monster in materiel and drown it in blood. The more tanks available, the more convincing is the meme.
Cutting to the chase against that background, the most recent and detailed analysis of the Russian forces puts 234 tanks in the first attack wave. The 181st Tank Brigade was on the right, next to the Psel River. The 170th was next, opposite the German positions around the October State Farm. The 31st and 32nd Tank Brigades of 29th Tank Corps aimed at Hill 252 from the right. The corps’s 25th Tank Brigade went forward on the army’s far right flank, south of the railroad. A senior officer riding with the 32nd described the scene:
Instantly the field, which had seemed barren of life, sprang to life. Crushing shrubs in their way and churning up the crops with their tracks, the tanks rushed forward, firing on the move…. The commanders understood the Tigers would take advantage of every halt, slightest hesitation in motion, or amount of indecision.
Initially, they faced only Ribbentrop’s company of Leibstandarte’s tank battalion. Tankers, like pilots, can tell stories to advantage. Ribbentrop’s might be titled “Alone at Prokhorovka.” For the first few minutes, at least, his seven Panzer IVs suffered an embarrassment of targets. Going for flank shots against relatively thin armor, each tank covering another, they were flaming Russians at under a hundred yards’ range. The only question was whether their ammunition or their luck would run out first. Ribbentrop’s own tank was bypassed in the Soviet charge. He found himself taking Russian tanks and infantry by surprise from the rear as he struggled to return to his starting point, ultimately winning a death duel with a T-34 at gun-barrel range.
Then, unexpectedly, the Russian momentum was broken—not from ground resistance or air strikes, but by an antitank ditch dug as part of the original Soviet defensive system. It was fifteen feet deep, and the speeding tanks drove right into it. There appears to have been no knowledge of its presence at any level of 29th Tank Corps. As a rule, such obstacles were clearly marked on relevant maps. But for the sake of security, map distribution was severely restricted, and Rotmistrov’s tankers were new to the sector. Ground reconnaissance might have changed that, but fighting was still going on during the night.
The result of this nighttime fog and friction was that next morning, drivers blinded by smoke, dust, and adrenaline raced headlong into a ditch designed to stop Tigers. Other tanks, swerving to avoid the ditch, collided with their neighbors. Gasoline flared and metal flew. Like World War I infantrymen facing barbed wire, tanks sought the few available crossing points as others piled into the melee. Ribbentrop described “an inferno of fire, smoke, burning T-34s, dead, and wounded Russians.” It speaks much for the ruggedness of the Russian tanks that so many were able to keep going after shocks and crashes that would have disabled any of their German counterparts. Command and control eroded, however, as senior officers, going forward to restore order and momentum, lost contact with front and rear alike. In Guards tank units, platoon commanders had radios, but they were fragile. Concussion from glancing hits often knocked them out of action. To the other two radioless tanks in a platoon, the rule was still to follow the leader. Limited visibility, large numbers, and German fire reduced practical maneuver options to two: forward or back.
By this time, Leibstandarte’s artillery regiment had come into action, laying a curtain of fire between the antitank ditch and the division’s frontline infantry. What started as a rush turned to a grind as the Soviet armor fought its way forward almost on an individual basis. The 31st Brigade lost around half its tanks in the mad rush to contact. But enough tanks reached their objectives to give the Germans some of Citadel’s fiercest fighting.
Most of the T-34s were carrying infantry—both the brigades’ organic “tank marines” and passengers shifted from the supporting rifle divisions. Other infantry on foot followed the tanks despite imminent risk of being run over by their own tanks or shot by their own men. But the Soviet riflemen, especially the 9th Guards Airborne, pressed forward, working their way past the junkpile at the antitank ditch. As the T-34s led the way to Hill 252.2, the panzer grenadiers used everything that came to hand: grenades, satchel charges, machine guns—the latter to hose off the tank-riding infantry before they could dismount and come to close quarters. On Hill 252.2, the Russians overran the headquarters of a Leibstandarte panzer grenadier battalion. Its commanding officer, the later notorious Jochen Peiper, personally took out a T-34 with a bundle of hand grenades—not the usual mission of a senior officer, even in the Waffen SS.
Ribbentrop’s tank and two others made it back to their own lines. German statistics credited Ribbentrop alone with fourteen kills in the brief melee. Another crew accounted for seven—five after the tank was disabled and firing in place. The exact numbers are debatable, but the Russians may well have done as much damage to themselves as did the half-dozen Mark IVs. But whether directly or indirectly, Ribbentrop’s tanks added significantly to the debacle at the antitank ditch.
Ribbentrop’s crews also bought time for the other two companies of Leibstandarte’s tank battalion to deploy in support of their hard-pressed infantry. Arguably of more significance, Ribbentrop’s stand enabled the division’s Tiger company to take hull-down positions left of Hill 252.2, covering October State Farm. The 18th Tank Corps’s leading brigades had been tasked to break through Leibstandarte’s left flank, still wide open in the absence of Totenkopf’s panzers. Initially, four Tigers blocked their advance. One of them was commanded by an even more iconic SS hero than Ribbentrop. The legends enveloping Michael Wittmann obscure the facts that even at this early stage of his career, his comrades considered him unique for situational awareness and a cool head. That made him the right man in the right spot as a hundred Soviet tanks surged toward October State Farm. Beginning at ranges of eighteen hundred yards, the Tigers methodically picked off one T-34 after another. And there were too few Tigers to give the supporting Russian artillery a target.
The Soviet tanks nevertheless kept coming. As the ranges closed, their alternatives grew fewer. A Tiger’s real killing range began at around a thousand yards. But for a T-34, even damaging a Tiger at ranges much over eighty or a hundred yards required a steady aim and a lot of luck. And Bellona tends to bestow fortune on those who do not need it. Experienced Tiger drivers—the only kind left by July 12—had learned to halt at an angle, so even direct hits on the frontal armor were likely to glance off. When T-34s flamed, Tigers threw sparks.
Desperate Russian tankers set nearly suicidal examples to reduce the odds. The most familiar, arguably Citadel’s defining incident, occurred when a T-34 was hit at near point-blank range and set on fire. The crewmen pulled the badly wounded commander to safety. Then the driver saw a Tiger approaching. He reentered the burning tank and set out to ram the German. Rotmistrov’s version of the story has the effort succeed, with the resulting fire and explosion destroying both vehicles. The German account is more detailed. The German crew was startled when the flaming T-34 started for them. The commander ordered an advance, to get clear of the smoke. The gunner fired—and the shell bounced off. The Russian kept coming and rammed the Tiger. As flames covered both tanks, the German suddenly backed up. At five yards’ distance, the T-34 exploded. The Tiger resumed its original position with little more than scratched paint and—presumably—five sets of shaken nerves.
If the point of the story needs establishing, it is that even after a week of close-quarters, high-tech combat, courage was not a scarce commodity on either side. And though courage was no proof against 88 mm armor- piercing rounds, surviving tankers of the 170th had enough fighting spirit to enter the still-desperate melee on Hill 252.2. Their commander died there—according to Peiper, in hand-to-hand combat with an SS officer who killed the Russian with his own knife. It was not enough. Even when the battered Soviet remnants were finally ordered back, for the rest of a long afternoon, episodic Russian attacks continued. The overall result was to keep the exhausted Germans in the sector pinned firmly in place.
