emotional development than the brutish Slavs they confronted. To a significant degree, Russian mythology contributes to the trope by stressing the Soviet soldier’s toughness: his unique ability to endure and overcome any conditions he faced.
Alleged racial/cultural differences were far less relevant than the fact that the consequences of combat exhaustion were more salient for the Germans than the Russians. Russian doctrine was based on control from above. At the sharp end, what was ultimately important was the will to obey. The Germans, on the other hand, were forced to compensate for numerical and material inferiority by intangibles: flexibility, initiative, situational awareness. Blunted by stress and fatigue, they could not readily compensate. A company commander in Leibstandarte’s reconnaissance battalion presented his mental state in a diary entry written several days later: “I couldn’t deal with it. It was too much for me. The mental pressure threatened to tear me apart…. I don’t want to list all the dead here…. How old our men have become.”
Wehrmacht mythology has Hitler living in a world of shadows and abstractions. How many corps, army, and army group commanders as well were by the time of Citadel acting on their own illusions about the men they kept ordering forward? How many plans were based on the half-conscious subtext that “the boys up front” could make anything work? These are by no means rhetorical questions. The Soviets facing Manstein had been badly shaken by the fighting on July 11–12. But any chance of exploiting their condition depended on the kind of smoothly working German response that would not only regain the initiative, but shorten reaction times and exacerbate stress points across the battle line. Was that still possible?
The answer began emerging on Totenkopf’s front. During the night, Rotmistrov had reinforced the Psel sector with two brigades of his 5th Guards Mechanized Corps and the 6th Guards Airborne Division, fresh from reserve. There was no time for the usual camouflage, and German reconnaissance aircraft duly noted and reported the newcomers’ presence and positions. Then at 9:30 A.M., Totenkopf informed Hausser that the panzer group still could not be resupplied because of the road conditions. This neat example of delaying bad news and hoping for a miracle was especially significant because Totenkopf’s tanks had been under increasingly heavy attack since dawn. Should the Russians break through, the Psel bridgehead was a matter of yards rather than miles away. Division ordered a retreat—back to Hill 226.6, still a charnel house from the previous day’s fighting. Its garrison of panzer grenadiers was promptly hit by Rotmistrov’s two fresh tank brigades.
The SS fought as hard to hold the hill as they had to capture it, but the Russians kept coming. By 11:15 A.M., the tough Guardsmen had forced the defenders down the reverse slope. With heavy rainstorms blinding artillery observers and grounding Stukas, the way to the Psel bridges seemed open. But minutes later—three minutes by Russian reports—the armor appeared. One of Totenkopf’s tank battalions had managed to take on enough ammunition to reenter the fight. Its guns did just enough damage to halt a Soviet thrust that itself had been bled white on Hill 226.6. A counterattack caught the Soviets before they could consolidate, splitting the infantry from their supporting tanks. By 12:30 P.M., Hill 226.6 was back in German hands. By 3:00 P.M., the Russians had been pushed back almost to their original start lines. Some idea of the day’s shock and frustration is indicated by a Soviet tank corps report describing an attack by no fewer than thirty-three Tigers—more than the whole army group could field—and listing as trophies of the day one machine gun and a lone machine pistol.
Events on Totenkopf’s left took a similar, no less dramatic course. In that sector, a Russian battle group overran a panzer grenadier battalion and made for the bridges. Totenkopf threw in its half-track panzer grenadier battalion as a tank substitute. Its desperate charge scattered the Soviet infantry and confused the tanks, relieved the overrun battalion, then itself foundered against hastily emplaced antitank guns. A second Russian wave, supported by Shturmoviks and another of the sophisticated barrages the Red Army artillery was now capable of unleashing on small scales, ran into a battery of hull-down assault guns that held long enough for Totenkopf’s tank battalion and an antitank battery to add their high-velocity guns to the defense. The antitank gunners, manning a dozen open-topped, lightly armored, highly vulnerable vehicles, were credited with thirty-eight T-34s by the end of the day.
At 6:45 P.M., Totenkopf informed SS Panzer Corps headquarters that the Russian breakthroughs had been halted, the division was reoccupying its former positions, and the Luftwaffe was still nowhere to be seen. The rain and overcast skies had not kept the Shturmoviks from incessant attacks on the bridges and the supply columns struggling to cross them, but their successes were harassing rather than decisive. As the skies cleared in the early evening, German fighters reemerged. Tactically, it had been a good day for Totenkopf. The bridgehead was intact. Over sixty Russian tanks littered the killing grounds. Hill 226.6 was in SS hands. The Russians had been sufficiently hurt that a tank brigade and an assault gun regiment were entirely withdrawn.
Operationally, however, July 13 in the Psel sector was somewhere between a disaster and a catastrophe. SS Panzer Corps’s movements had been predicated on Totenkopf’s breakout from the bridgehead. Instead, the division had been fought to a near standstill just to stay where it was. The last of its Tigers had been bogged down or disabled. And lest the day’s events be considered an aberration, an intercepted Soviet dispatch declared that the bridgehead must be taken at all costs. Based on recent experience, that order was best interpreted literally. During the night, Russian ground patrols and their harassing aircraft seemed everywhere. Mortar, artillery, and rocket fire deluged forward positions and rear echelons. Just before midnight, corps headquarters confirmed the obvious and ordered Totenkopf to hold its positions against all attacks. Any renewed German offensive would have to be sparked by someone else, somewhere else.
That someone else would not be Leibstandarte. Its positions came under air and artillery attack at daylight. An attempt by the reconnaissance battalion to make contact with Totenkopf was stopped almost immediately. Then the Soviet attacks began. Rotmistrov had ordered a start time of 8:00 A.M. His forward units, still stunned from the day before, were slow off the mark and poorly coordinated; they made no headway. At 11:40 A.M., Rotmistrov informed Vatutin that the SS seemed to be preparing a major attack for the next day and strongly hinted that he wished to suspend operations and prepare an appropriate reception. Vatutin called the Fifth Guards Tank Army’s offensive essential and ordered it continued, promising air support.
Rotmistrov saluted electronically, then spent the rest of the day shadowboxing. So did Hausser. His initial attack orders for Das Reich were frustrated internally by “administrative delays”: a euphemism for everybody still shaking off the previous forty-eight hours. After token gains of ground, Das Reich halted for the day. Das Reich’s commander declared himself unwilling to order a full-scale attack without appropriate preparation and air support—a fairly emphatic gesture of defiance, especially in the Waffen SS. Fourth Panzer Army’s daily report described II SS Panzer Corps as repelling heavy, tank-supported infantry attacks. It mentioned Totenkopf’s withdrawals. It also, however, described ground reconnaissance reports of a Soviet retreat from what seemed an exploitable pocket developing between Breith’s advancing corps and Das Reich. Though unverified by the Luftwaffe, this at least suggested an opportunity.
Manstein too was looking to Army Group South’s flanks. The XLVIII Panzer Corps, variously and legitimately described as dazed and mechanical, had spent July 13 regrouping, patrolling north, and shoring up its trailing left flank. On the right, the forward elements of III Panzer Corps were less than nine miles from Prokhorovka on the night of July 12. The 7th Panzer Division was stalemated and pinned. The 6th Panzer was down to fourteen tanks at day’s end. But the corps as a whole mustered sixty-two, including half a dozen Tigers. With 7th Panzer covering the flank, 6th and 19th Panzer Divisions went forward on the morning of July 13, gaining ground slowly in the teeth of a well-coordinated “shield and sword” defense: frontline infantry fighting—almost literally—to the last man, supported by armored counterstrikes that repeatedly set the Germans back on their heels. The defenders’ tactics differed from the Red Army’s norm for Citadel in that there had not been time to prepare more than rudimentary defensive positions. Instead the intention was to stop the Germans by inflicting unsupportable losses in the open. The tankers and riflemen of Trufanov’s task force did not fall short by much. When the fighting died down, III Panzer Corps was nowhere near in any of its divisional sectors to a junction with the SS around Prokhorovka.
From Manstein’s perspective on his return from Rastenburg, none of these developments stopped him from translating the general intention he had developed over the few previous days into a revised plan. Although July 13 might seem a lost day, if Army Group South had been able to catch its breath, time remained—and time was vital. The XLVIII Panzer Corps and the SS would still carry the main burden, but in a new direction: driving north to Oboyan, then shifting west, and crushing the Russians along the Psel. But for that attack to succeed, a continuous, solid front to the east/northeast was necessary. In other words, III Panzer Corps must not merely link up with the
