Model, predictably, lost his temper with the regiment’s commanding officer—and just as predictably gave him command of one of the battle groups the field marshal and his staff officers were throwing in as fast as they could be organized. By this time, everyone in Second Panzer Army’s rear areas was seeing Russians everywhere, and 12th Panzer was risking dismemberment as rear-echelon officers demanded tanks and men to restore their situations and calm their nerves.
The 5th Panzer Grenadier Regiment had been on the front line from the war’s first days. Poland, France, Barbarossa, Leningrad: its men had seen as much combat as any in the Wehrmacht. So when its veterans spoke of Bolkhov as “the threshold to battle hell,” it was more than retrospective melodrama. The regiment reached its assigned sector around midnight on July 12, and began advancing at 9:00 A.M. on July 13. At first all seemed routine: a steady advance against light opposition. Then suddenly “all hell broke loose.” Bryansk Front had sent in the Sixty-first Army and its supporting 20th Tank Corps. The strength, intensity, and duration of the supporting fire exceeded anything the regiment’s veterans had experienced: a “fire ball” that enveloped the entire front. Under the shelling, the panzer grenadiers’ advance slowed, then stopped, then inched forward again. First the Stukas, then twenty or so of the division’s tanks, sustained the momentum for a time, until dug-in tanks and camouflaged antitank guns drove the infantry first to ground, then to retreat.
As in the other sectors of the offensive, there was no breakthrough, but limiting the Soviet advance nevertheless took its toll on the defenders. Thus far, they had held—but for how long could another large-scale tactical stalemate be sustained? The reports and the recollections of the divisions that fought first in Ninth Army’s attack on Kursk and then in the Orel salient convey an unwilling, almost unconscious sense that this time there was something different about the Russians. It was not only the intensity of their artillery fire. It was the relative sophistication. It was not only the depth of the defensive positions or the determination of their defenders. It was a more general sense that the Red Army’s mass and will were being informed by improving tactical and operational sophistication—the levels of war making most likely to influence and frustrate German frontline formations directly, and in ways impossible to overlook.
II
If, to paraphrase Napoleon after Wagram, the animals were learning something, the consequences became clear in Kursk-Orel’s wider context. For the first time in World War II, Nazi Germany found itself in a strategic, as well as a grand strategic, cleft stick. On July 10, the British and Americans invaded Sicily. Even before that, the Reich’s position was shaky. The Mediterranean theater was geographically extensive and operationally complex. Success required combined arms: a synergy of land, sea, and air the Wehrmacht had been able to achieve only in the limited context of the Norwegian campaign. The destruction of the Axis forces in North Africa had confirmed Allied air and sea superiority in numbers and effectiveness. Even on land, growing partisan activity in the Balkans combined with the endless demands of the Russian theater had left German forces stretched to the limit.
Militarily and diplomatically, Italy was a broken reed. The government was requesting war material on an unprecedented scale, and it was obvious that the German war industry could not possibly fill the inventory. There was not much less question, in Berlin, at least, that Italy knew it. The all too logical conclusion was that Italy was looking for an excuse to withdraw from the war and from the alliance. Politically, Mussolini’s Fascist regime was straining at its seams. By 1943, casualty lists were growing longer, Allied bombing raids heavier, German contempt more obvious. Political and economic elites who had collaborated with Mussolini for advantage were developing projects for throwing the Duce under the wheels of the war he had bestowed on Italy. And the Germans were making their own plans to disarm and occupy Italy at the first sign of disaffection—perhaps earlier if expedient or convenient.
It is difficult to imagine a less promising situation for a Wehrmacht whose way of war was based on flexibility and maneuver. An Allied invasion was a foregone conclusion. But where? Hitler favored the Balkans as a likely site. Sardinia and Corsica were natural bases for a future invasion of southern France. Sicily was in the same position relative to Italy. The eventual outcome was a more or less even distribution of available forces in the three most obviously threatening sectors. It absorbed the bulk of Germany’s available mobile divisions, most of them formations destroyed in Tunisia and reconstituted with inexperienced men. The Italian troops deployed in forward sectors were seen as little more than filler. An already badly stretched German army would have to take over the Mediterranean theater’s entire tactical/operational spectrum.
Objectively, Hitler’s concept of “Fortress Europe” called for recalibration. Objectively, the Reich’s policy and strategy in Russia merited reconsideration. But the short-term crisis demanded immediate attention. On July 12, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Germany’s Oberbefehlshaber Sud (Commander in Chief South), weighed in. His reputation for optimism had earned him the nickname “Smiling Albert,” and it was a corresponding shock when he reported the situation as hopeless. Almost as disconcerting was Kesselring’s request for another mechanized division to help hold the ring in Sicily until an evacuation could be prepared and implemented. Hitler authorized sending the 29th Panzer Grenadiers—and that left the Reich’s panzer cupboard close to empty.
What all this meant for the Eastern Front was that for the first time since Barbarossa, it would be at best competing for resources and probably expected as well to provide men and machines for the emerging southern European front. At all levels, the Reich’s strategic can had been kicked down the road since December 1941. On July 10, 1943, it bounced into a rut.
Hitler’s decision on Citadel may well have been made by the time he summoned Kluge and Manstein to his East Prussian headquarters for a conference on July 13. These were the senior officers most immediately involved in relevant major operations. Manstein later grumbled that Hitler should have come forward to the army group headquarters rather than remove their commanders at such a crucial time. One might say that his complaint was a trope for the way the Reich and the Wehrmacht fought and lost World War II: by microfocusing. Manstein was not encouraged when he arrived in the early morning and discovered that the conference would be held that evening. A swim in a nearby lake did little to cool him off. Nor did a chance meeting with Erwin Rommel, just recalled from Italy and being touted by the army’s rumor mill as the new commander in chief of the Eastern Front. Rommel described himself as taking a sunlamp cure: soaking up sun and faith. Manstein had taken his swim in the nude and was at a corresponding disadvantage conversing with someone fully dressed. When he asked Rommel if they would meet later under more formal circumstances, the reply was, “Of course, under the sun-ray lamp.”
The reference to Hitler, impossible to miss, was no substitute for clear thinking. Hitler’s presentation was on the apocalyptic side. Sicily, he declared, was finished. The next step would be larger-scale Allied landings in Italy or the Balkans. Meeting such a threat would require entire fresh armies, and the only possible source of such forces was the Kursk salient. Citadel must be canceled. Kluge agreed. Already there were three deep penetrations on the Second Panzer Army’s front. The Ninth Army had been stalemated even before the latest Russian attack, its losses already amounting to twenty thousand men. Its remaining resources were vitally necessary to keep not merely the Orel sector but Army Group Center’s entire front from collapsing. Citadel was finished. It could be neither continued nor resumed even should the Orel crisis be successfully resolved.
Manstein was either more sanguine, more cautious, or more contrary, depending upon one’s perspective. In Army Group South’s sector, he asserted, the battle was at its decisive point. To break it off would be to throw victory away. The field marshal cited the victories of July 12, gained against not only the forward Russian elements, but their operational reserve as well. He described the destruction of eighteen hundred Soviet tanks in a week. If the Ninth Army could hold in place the Russians on its front, Manstein was confident that he could break them in his sector once he was authorized to send his reserve, XXIV Panzer Corps, to reinforce Army Detachment Kempf. The SS and XLVIII Panzer Corps would then face north, cross the Psel, and take Oboyan on a two-corps front, then hit the Russians from behind.
What began as pincers was therefore to become a hammer and anvil. What happened afterward would depend on developments in the Orel salient. If the Ninth Army had no chance of resuming its original attack against Kursk, Manstein asserted, his proposed operation would at least give his army group time and space to disengage: “an easy respite.” But halfway measures, inflicting only partial damage, would mean a crisis in Army Group South’s operational area even greater than anything befalling Army Group Center.
Hitler agreed that the Fourth Panzer Army should continue its efforts to destroy the Russians facing it south of the Psel, but undertake only limited offensives north of the river. Army Detachment Kempf would cover these
