SS, but take over its southern positions, allowing Das Reich in particular to add muscle to the drive on Oboyan. And that would require finishing the Russians south of Prokhorovka, specifically the Sixty-ninth Army and the tank units that had just reinforced it.
The plan was christened Operation Roland: perhaps a semiconscious reference to the Carolingian paladin mythologized for a forlorn-hope operation in the Pass of Roncevaux. The XLVIII Panzer Corps pulled itself together on the night of July 13 for one more effort. Totenkopf’s reconnaissance battalion had established tenuous contact with 11th Panzer Division but had been strained to its limits on July 13 holding its own positions. The chances of meaningful support from the SS were correspondingly nil. As was increasingly the case, a disproportionate hope and a disproportionate burden were placed on an elite formation. Once again it was Grossdeutschland’s turn to carry the flag—and the can.
The division’s orders for July 14 were to shift its axis left and cooperate with 3rd Panzer Division in enveloping Oboyan from the west. This turned out to be an old story on a different page. Grossdeutschland, which had reassembled most of its elements during July 13, attacked at 4:00 A.M. into a wasteland of shattered trees, burning underbrush, and random minefields—and into the teeth of Fifth Guards Tank Corps and 10th Tank Corps. Grossdeutschland’s intention was for its armored battle group to skirt the western edge of the devastated forest and continue north. A second battle group, built around the division’s assault gun battalion, would flank the forest from the opposite direction. As soon as Grossdeutschland’s leading elements crossed their start lines, however, they came under heavy fire from Soviet tanks, then faced an assault across ground supposed to be controlled by 3rd Panzer. That division, ordered and expected to go forward on Grossdeutschland’s left, began its attack at 7:00 A.M., encountered a minefield, and lost two tanks. Unsupported, the panzer grenadiers were unable to crack the Russian defenses. “Requested” by Grossdeutschland to shape up and close up, 3rd Panzer’s headquarters called for air support. The response was that the Stukas were otherwise engaged.
A Soviet counterattack drove the 3rd’s riflemen back as the tanks evaded the minefield, only to be immobilized in a mudflat. The 3rd Panzer shouldered forward against increasingly heavy opposition. The Luftwaffe now went all out to help. Heinkel 111s of VIII Air Corps were diverted from their normal targets in the rear echelons to support the panzers directly and did especially accurate work bombing just ahead of 3rd Panzer’s attack. Half a dozen of the increasingly scarce Stukas were shot down by Soviet fighters and light flak. Not until late afternoon, however, did the division’s 3rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment close in on the Russian positions around Hill 258.5. And not until 6:30 P.M. did it capture the objective and finally clear the way for Grossdeutschland.
That division’s advance had been thrown on its heels around 11:00 A.M. by a surprise tank-infantry attack with devastating rocket and artillery support. A battalion of the 332nd Infantry Division, ordered forward to take over ground presumably occupied by Grossdeutschland’s panzers, found empty space. Corps headquarters had lost contact with Grossdeutschland’s headquarters. It was 5:30 P.M. before the advance resumed, helped as much by 3rd Panzer’s initiative as from any fresh internal momentum. The forward elements immediately came under fire from local Russian reserves hastily redeployed. Gains averaged a little over a mile—a long way from the morning’s expectations. The XLVIII Panzer Corps had failed. The 3rd Panzer was a spent force. Grossdeutschland was almost as badly worn. Only a handful of Panthers remained operational or repairable. Aircrew losses included two
The First Tank Army was staggering but had done its job. On July 13, Vatutin visited Katukov’s headquarters and extended congratulations all around. The army, he declared, deserved Guards status for its work since July 5. In fact, he had already submitted the recommendation. That was the good news. The bad news was that while First Tank might hope for reinforcements, Stavka had decided: Not one man, not one vehicle. That meant repairing damaged tanks and returning lightly wounded to their units, both as quickly as possible. Then Vatutin concluded with the other good news: First Tank Army was to be withdrawn into reserve and begin preparing for its future role in the great summer offensive.
At 10:00 A.M. on July 16, Vatutin ordered Voronezh Front to “go over to the stubborn defense of its current lines.” That sentence reflects the difference ten days had made in the tactical, operational, and strategic situations on the Eastern Front. The Russians were able to replace their battle-worn formations and able to hold ground as opposed to attacking across it. And one of Manstein’s projected windows of opportunity was closed.
IV
Vatutin and Rotmistrov were no less anxious about the situation on their left flank than Manstein and Kempf were hopeful. The advance of III Panzer Corps had been on a northeast axis that left the Sixty-ninth Army and its reinforcements caught in a narrow salient between Breith’s panzers and Das Reich, with limited maneuver room and a chance of being cut off at the salient’s base. Vatutin’s initial orders for July 14 were for the Sixty-ninth and Fifth Guards Tank Armies to destroy the Germans. Stavka-pleasing rhetoric out of the way, the real mission was to above all prevent a breakthrough on either flank of the newly created salient. Voronezh Front backed its words by reinforcing the Sixty-ninth Army with a number of artillery, antitank, and Katyusha units. But its rhetoric of attack was challenged by reports from the front line. The 81st Guards Rifle Division was typical. It described its men as physically exhausted, without food and water for as long as three days, a fifth of them unarmed. Another rifle division reported such a shortage of horses that it had been forced to abandon eight guns and a quarter of its artillery ammunition.
Such statements read like excuses to political officers. Efforts to restore discipline included, again, creating blocking detachments of “thoroughly checked” officers and men, with the assignment of “detaining” everyone moving to the rear without authorization and sending them back. By July 17, almost seven thousand shirkers had been accounted for. Enough men remained in the ranks, however, to hold ground tenaciously and give ground stubbornly on Breith’s sector throughout July 14.
Army Detachment Kempf had been informed that it could expect help from SS Wiking Division—eventually. Until then, Breith was on his own. The III Panzer Corps attacked north-northwest in the early morning of July 14 with 6th and 7th Panzer Divisions, and 19th Panzer to secure the left, or western, flank. Linking up with the SS was part of the corps’s objective, but the wider intention, as outlined in Operation Roland, was to create and seal a pocket, disrupting or trapping the Soviet forces south of Prokhorovka, then to relieve the SS so they could cooperate with XLVIII Panzer Corps in attacking toward Oboyan. The 6th Panzer Division, on the corps’s right, would block any Soviet advance around Alexandrovka, capture the town, then continue attacking northwest with an armor-heavy battle group. Depending on the circumstances, 7th Panzer, in the center, was to either support the 6th or drive for Prokhorovka independently while 6th Panzer covered its right. The 19th Panzer, badly worn from the previous days’ fighting, would hold the bridgehead and follow up any Russian retreat northward.
A clear indication of Breith’s intended
That opportunity was long in coming. Alexandrovka’s forward positions fell to the tanks’ cannon and machine guns as the Tigers crushed riflemen under their treads and T-34s exploded. But then the tank-to-tank fighting grew closer and the work grew harder. One Russian report described a German tank somehow opening radio contact across the battle line to lure the T-34 that responded into an ambush. As pioneers and riflemen improvised paths across the second defensive line’s antitank ditch, the panzers engaged the guns covering it. A Russian gunner described the consequences of a missed shot: “We … saw the turret traverse toward us. The next thing I remember was lying on my back—I went back to find … just scraps of uniform and a gory mess.”
It was evening before Breith’s headquarters received definitive word of Alexandrovka’s capture. By then, losses in men and tanks had been so heavy that the best that could be done was to set up a defensive perimeter and regroup. Across its sector, 6th Panzer had gained ground and taken a locally impressive toll of tanks, antitank guns, and artillery pieces. But 6th Panzer was still a long way from Prokhorovka—or indeed any other operationally useful objective. The 19th Panzer, reinforced by a panzer grenadier battalion from the 6th and a battalion of 88s,
