The 25th Tank Brigade escaped the debacle at the antitank ditch, but ran full tilt into the 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment and, more important, Leibstandarte’s antitank battalion. Its lightly armored, open-topped, self-propelled vehicles were no direct match for a T-34. But their high-velocity three-inch guns were deadly firing from concealed positions. SS riflemen tackled the tanks directly, boarding them to grapple with the survivors of the “tank marines,” pry open hatches, and drop grenades inside fighting compartments. The regiment’s commander described seeing half-track drivers repeatedly attempting to ram T-34s with their lighter vehicles. “Everywhere,” recalled a German antitank gunner, “were the shells of burning tanks…. One hundred twenty tanks or more were supposed to have been in the attack…. Who counted?”
It is easy enough to write repeatedly from the comfort of a book-lined study, facing no risk greater than a paper cut, about burning and exploding tanks. After the war, a veteran of the 10th Tank Corps in the Oboyan sector wrote:
The T-34 has 3 100-liter fuel tanks on the right side, and an additional 100-gallon drum with motor oil on the left side. When an armor-piercing shell penetrates the side, fuel oil or motor oil spills into the tank and a cascade of sparks falls on the uniform and everything blazes up. God forbid a living being from ever having to witness a wounded, writhing person who is burning alive, or ever have to experience the same. That is why there exists among tankers a unique, unofficial measure of courage … the number of times you’ve been on fire inside a tank….”
Twenty-six of the thirty-four T-34s that led this attack were destroyed. All of their supporting assault guns were lost, at least one of them in ramming a German AFV. The level of heroism was such that the number of decorations awarded was unusual in the context of a failure. And failure it was. The German line held. The attacks subsided and the fighting broke off, partly from mutual exhaustion and partly because on the Russian side nothing of consequence remained to commit. Rotmistrov’s attack had spent its force; Leibstandarte, too, was finished, at least temporarily, as an attack formation.
In Das Reich’s sector, the relationship of myth and reality was closer. Perhaps stung by a strongly implied failure to pull its weight on July 11, division command proposed to break through in battalion strength on its left, then move its
Early in the afternoon, the Russian second wave entered the scene as 2nd Tank Corps hit the SS positions. This was the weakest of Rotmistrov’s major formations. One of its brigades was down to eighty rifles and twenty tanks, half of them T-70s. Another counted forty men and fourteen tanks. Nevertheless, about thirty of the corps’s tanks broke through, only to meet Das Reich’s panzers, who, having long since given up any thought of an offensive, were backing up the main line of resistance. The Germans made particularly effective use of an improvised company of captured T-34s, whose familiar silhouettes meant far more to their opponents than the hastily applied German markings and paint jobs. The German crews had enough time to learn the T-34’s vulnerabilities from the inside and systematically went for flank shots and targeted the external fuel barrels. According to an official report, “In a short period of time all 50 tanks … were set ablaze.”
During the afternoon, Das Reich’s sector was struck by violent rainstorms that turned the battleground into a morass, limiting the mobility of even the T-34s. The 2nd Guards Tank skidded and slipped back to its start lines, leaving dozens of wrecks behind and reporting that the Germans were hot on the corps’s heels. Das Reich’s headquarters in fact understood that the division was unable to do anything more than secure its own positions and see what its opposite numbers were able to do the next day. But as the Russians fell back in disorder, Das Reich’s panzer grenadier regiments pushed forward. Their local counterattacks were nothing like a serious attempt at a breakthrough or a flanking movement, but served to keep the Soviets well off balance as the day waned. Around 5:00 P.M., Rotmistrov arrived at 2nd Tank Corps headquarters and issued orders to renew the attack at 6:30. But a few hours later, Vatutin was informing Stalin that major reinforcements were urgently necessary to complete the destruction of the enemy. Das Reich was not the only headquarters playing for time as July 12 came to a water-soaked end.
Events on Das Reich’s and Leibstandarte’s fronts were heavily contingent on Totenkopf’s performance. At dawn, Totenkopf’s advancing panzer group discovered that the Russian infantry to its front had been relieved by the Fifth Guards Army’s fresh 3rd Guards Rifle Corps: three divisions reinforced by extra guns, rocket launchers, and antitank guns. Its orders were to destroy the German bridgehead across the Psel. Each side’s plans were disrupted when the attacks got in each other’s way. Totenkopf’s panzer grenadiers were sufficiently hard pressed that tanks repeatedly had to be brought forward in support. Heavy Soviet artillery fire forced SS riflemen to seek protection under their own tanks—a last resort for an experienced infantryman. Then the Shturmoviks joined in— unopposed. The initial objectives of Totenkopf’s armor, however, remained: two hills high enough to command the surrounding terrain.
Occupying that ground were two Guards rifle divisions. The 52nd, moving into its own assault positions, was taken by surprise when the SS appeared to the front. But the Guardsmen were a match and more for Totenkopf’s panzer grenadiers in both courage and tactical skill. According to a political commissar, their political spirit was also high. Positions changed hands so often that the exact course of events remains vague. The SS, with Stuka support as welcome as it was belated, made enough initial progress to generate hope for the long-delayed linkup with Leibstandarte. Then the armored battle group’s leading elements encountered more and more tanks from Rotmistrov’s 181st Brigade. German accounts describe spectacular explosions, huge fireballs—and enough losses of their own to instill caution by the time Hill 226.6 was firmly in German hands. The tanks and panzer grenadiers encountered a series of defensive positions, some prepared and others improvised, all bristling with antitank guns. Totenkopf’s tankers made a point of crushing trenches and foxholes, burying defenders alive under their treads. But not until 3:00 P.M. did the Germans begin breaking Soviet defenses beyond immediate restoration.
Not all the comrades were valiant. Some of the 52nd’s regiment and battalion commanders reported sick, straggled to the rear, or just ran away. When the panzers reached Hill 236.7, elements of the 95th Guards Rifle Division also broke and scattered. But around 4:00 P.M., 33rd Corps ordered maximum protective fire: every gun and rocket launcher that could come to bear was to target Totenkopf’s tanks, even if they were in Russian positions. The barrage removed the impetus from an SS attack already eroded by a defense stubborn enough in some positions to be suicidal.
Small-scale advances nonetheless continued. As of 10:45 P.M., Totenkopf was comfortable reporting that its panzer group had reached the Karteschevka–Prokhorovka road—a day late and a large number of men and tanks short. On the map, only a few miles separated Totenkopf from the road leading into Voronezh Front’s rear zone. On the ground, Leibstandarte’s reconnaissance battalion had established fingertip contact but was itself too stretched out to be more than a trip wire with nothing behind it. In absolute terms, the day’s casualties had not been high—a few more than three hundred. But the losses were cumulative. By now, Totenkopf’s panzer grenadier companies were down to fifty men or fewer, so tired after days of close combat that the standard stimulants were having an opposite effect. The panzer regiment had lost almost half its tanks fighting its way out of the Psel bridgehead. Forty-five had been destroyed or damaged, including all the Tigers. The crews of the fifty-six remaining Mark IIIs and IVs were exhausted. Fuel and ammunition were low. Although only a few of the disabled tanks were permanently lost, the maintenance crews were on the far side of the Psel. Either bringing their men and vehicles forward or moving the tanks backward meant challenging higher priorities of food, gasoline, and ammunition in one direction, or evacuation of the wounded in the other. The bridges remained vulnerable to air attack and to the still-existing possibility of a surprise enemy breakthrough.
Totenkopf’s original cadre came from the concentration camps. Its first commander had spent time in a mental hospital—not a usual step to high command even in the Third Reich. Not surprisingly, the division’s ethos was to get the job done at whatever cost; imagination was not a valued virtue. So when on the evening of July 12 Totenkopf expressed concern about the Soviet forces and the number of reinforcements that seemed to be arriving by the hour, when it began buttoning up in preparation for an even stronger attack on its still-small bridgehead, it was a clear signal that the SS Corps had been fought to a standstill—at least in the minds of those
