Citadel’s last avatar was off the table. But Hitler’s decision to revoke his earlier authorization to Manstein to continue attacking was anything but spontaneous. Stalin and Stavka were anxious to begin the projected southern offensive as soon as possible. Zhukov did not exactly counsel caution, but he did insist both Voronezh and Steppe Fronts would require a few days of recovery and regrouping before they could play their assigned parts. That meant taking extra pains to attract German attention elsewhere. On July 17, the Southwestern Front struck the First Panzer Army and the Southern Front attacked the Sixth Army along the Mius River. Neither were feint attacks or diversions, in the sense the Germans understood the term. These were full-scale operations, spearheaded by Guards rifle armies and tank and mechanized corps, backed by air, armor, and artillery assets their overextended opponents could not come near countering.
Hitler and the Army High Command, without fully comprehending the grand Soviet plan of a series of sequential offensives across the entire Eastern Front—another spectacular failure of German intelligence—finally recognized the obvious. The Orel offensive was not a local, one-off enterprise to disrupt Citadel. No structure and no plan could survive a continuous series of the kinds of emergencies the Red Army was now capable of creating. Citadel had been an attempt to regain the initiative. Now not only was Citadel
That the German front in the Orel salient held more or less together reflected in good part Model’s disregard of Hitler’s order that no secondary defensive positions be established. Even before Kursk, Model had initiated the preparation of a series of phase lines that by the time of Kutuzov were more than map tracings. Model handled his sparse reserves with cold-blooded skill, committing them by batteries and battalions in just enough force to blunt and delay Soviet attacks. The decisive tool in his hand, however, was the Luftwaffe.
The 1st Air Division mounted over eleven hundred sorties on July 18 alone, almost half by Stukas and ground-attack planes. The next day, Bagramyan’s lead tanks emerged from the forest and the Germans struck at dawn. The Stukas, Henschels, and Fw 190s bored in at altitudes so low that one Hs 129 pilot flew his plane into the tank he was attacking. By this time, experience and rumor had taught the Russian tankers all they wished to know about German attack planes. Some crews undertook random evasive maneuvers, scattering in all directions. Others simply abandoned their vehicles. The 1st Air Division claimed 135 kills on July 19 alone. Soviet records admit that by July 20, 1st Tank Corps had only thirty-three tanks left. The pilots credited themselves with preventing a “second Stalingrad.” Model, never an easy man to impress, wired congratulations for the first successful halting of a tank offensive from the air alone.
On July 19, Bryansk Front threw the Third Guards Tank Army into the attack. Over seven hundred AFVs, supported by the full strength of the Fifteenth Air Army, advanced almost eight miles by nightfall and kept hammering. Despite Stalin’s direct “encouragement,” what was projected as a breakthrough became a battle of attrition. Model used his aircraft to compensate for steadily eroding ground strength. Luftwaffe medium bombers were flying as many as five sorties a day, and 88 mm flak guns pressed into antitank service claimed more than two hundred tank kills. Russian and German fighters grappled for control of the air, with one Soviet report describing a pilot landing near a downed Me-109 and capturing the pilot himself. What counted was that as 1st Air Division’s planes were ruthlessly shifted and ruthlessly committed, pilot judgment diminished and aircrew losses increased. A disproportionate number of them were among the veteran flight and squadron leaders, correspondingly irreplaceable at short notice.
V
As early as July 16, again strictly against orders, Model had begun work on a fallback position along the Desna River at the salient’s base. On July 20, Hitler forbade any further retreat by Army Group Center. Model requested Kluge to change the Fuhrer’s mind. The current position was untenable. The storm emerging in Manstein’s sector meant the redeployment of the indispensable air assets sooner rather than later. Germany’s strategic and political position in the Mediterranean was steadily eroding. As the Allies advanced through Sicily, Mussolini’s hold on reality and power grew increasingly tenuous, and Hitler met with him on July 19 for a final, very one-sided discussion. On July 23, Mussolini was deposed and arrested. By then, there were sixteen German divisions in Italy. Were they there to defend the country, to occupy it, or both? What was certain was that in neither case would they be available for the Eastern Front. It is easy, moreover, for British and American scholars, with their deep roots in cultures of sea power, to overlook the influence on the Germans of Allied naval supremacy—no longer even superiority—and what seemed an accompanying, nearly mystical power to strike when and where they would at a time of their choosing. Operationally as well as strategically, the Reich seemed suddenly caught between enemies able to behave similarly: one on sea, the other on land.
On July 22, Hitler had agreed to an elastic defense on Model’s immediate front. On July 26, he summoned Kluge and informed him that the SS Panzer Corps was to be transferred to Italy immediately. Other unspecified divisions would be taking the same route. This meant, the Fuhrer asserted, that the Orel salient must be evacuated, also immediately. When a shocked Kluge mentioned that the fallback positions for that contingency were barely under construction, Hitler stood firm. On July 28, the OKH issued the specific orders.
Army High Command and the Fuhrer had responded to the Red Army’s southern offensive by dispersing not only Manstein’s long-sought reinforcements, but the core of the Fourth Panzer Army. SS Wiking was assigned to the First Panzer Army. The 23rd Panzer was sent to the Mius. It was followed by the SS Panzer Corps—minus Leibstandarte, which was eventually dispatched to Italy. Grossdeutschland, pulled out of the line at short notice, initially went north to reinforce the hard-pressed Army Group Center. On a tactical level, Citadel’s dismantling went unpredictably smoothly. From corps to companies, a sense of relief at getting out of Citadel’s killing ground is palpable alike in official reports and private communications. From the Russian perspective, events were progressing sufficiently according to plan that no pressure was applied for close pursuit. In particular, Voronezh Front and its component armies had taken the kind of mauling that made even dedicated Communist warriors require some breathing space—like the Union army after Gettysburg.
The same might be said for Manstein. Hitler’s orders brought him back to his kind of war—both against the Russians and against his superiors. He recorded his perceptions in his memoirs. The Russians facing his army group enjoyed a seven-to-one superiority in men and material, providing the capacity to strike at will. They had a related capacity to replace losses that the Reich could not match. The Germans still possessed a qualitative edge, though it was wearing thin in the crucial categories of experienced frontline soldiers, company officers, and (not least) field officers. From Citadel’s beginning to the end of August, Army Group South alone lost 38 regimental commanders and no fewer than 252 battalion COs.
Such assets must be expended with care, for maximum advantage—not wasted in last stands for lost outposts. And that was the responsibility of the senior commanders. Bean counting and number crunching had never characterized the German way of war. What mattered at high command levels was willingness to forget odds and trust one’s
For a few days, Army Group South seemed to be fighting Manstein’s war. The SS restored the Mius sector. The First Panzer Army mounted a locally successful counteroffensive. But Manstein and his staff were incorrect in their estimate of the time required for the full-scale Soviet attack to materialize. Fog and friction were in fact omnipresent on the Russian side. Citadel’s losses in men and equipment had been made up haphazardly, if at all.
