anticipated five possible places where they [the Germans] may
strike and at each of them we know alongside whom we shall be
fighting, our replacements and command posts. The brigade is
stationed in the rear, but our trenches and shelters are ready up in
front, and the routes by which we are to get there are marked out.
The ground, of which we have made a topographical survey, has been
provided with guide marks. The depths of fords, the maximum loads of
bridges are known to us. Liaisons with division have been doubled,
codes and signals are arranged. Often alerted by day or night, our
men are familiarised with their task in any eventuality . . .
This confidence, and certainty as to their role and objectives,
was as definite in the "front" commands as it was in the
small field units. Once the salient had been strengthened,
reinforcement turned to the "western" and "Bryansk"
fronts of Popov and Sokolovski, who were to hold themselves ready to
strike against Model's left flank in the Orel bulge when Zhukov
judged the moment ripe. A new "reserve front" called the
"steppe front" was created and put under Koniev, as a
reservoir of fresh units which could be directed on critical points
once the battle had started, and for the exploitation—which
Zhukov and Vasilievski knew would surely follow once the German force
was spent. Most of the Russian tank strength was integrated with the
defence for close support, but one very strong force, the 5th Tank
Army, was held back in Koniev's front for mobile action against the
Panzers, should any of them break through. Indeed, few major
operations since the disastrous "Nivelle offensive" of
April 1917 have been so long and so carefully anticipated as the
German attack against Kursk in 1943.
[At the beginning of 1917 the new Commander in Chief of the French
Army, General Nivelle, began to draw up plans for assaulting a
vulnerable sector of the German line, held by nine German divisions,
with forty-four French divisions. Plans were circulated down to
N.C.O. rank, and some fell into German hands in February. In March
the Germans withdrew from their vulnerable salient and stepped behind
the Hindenburg Line, which they reinforced with an additional
thirty-four divisions. Nivelle, in spite of misgivings in the French
Cabinet and among his own colleagues, insisted on mounting the
otlensive directly against the new German position, but with
practically no alteration to the tactical planning. The result was a
complete disaster. A recent account can be found in
Dare Call It
Treason
, by Richard M. Watt.]
The new atmosphere in the Red Army was summarised by a tank
captain when he declared, "At the beginning of the war
everything was done in a hurry, and time was always lacking. Now we
go calmly into action."
Paradoxically, while Russian preparations were going, ahead with
such energy and resource, the Germans were suffering continual delays
and rumours of alteration and cancelling. June came, and the Panther
target had duly been reached. But now the reports of Russian
preparations were so alarming that it was decided to wait for another
three weeks' production, which would allow two extra battalions of
Panthers to go to Model's divisions in the north, in addition to
those with the 11th Panzer,
Gross Deutschland
, and the three
divisions of Hausser's SS Panzer corps. This meant that D-Day was
again postponed, from the second week in June to the beginning of
July. Manstein now came out in the open and protested that the
operation was no longer feasible and must be abandoned, but it was
too late. The united stand of orthodox General Staff opinion, Keitel,
Zeitzler, Kluge, had persuaded the Führer, whose mind, once made
up, was never altered. H-Hour was set for the 4th of July,
"Independence Day for America," gloomily observed the Chief
of Staff of the 48th Panzer Corps, "the beginning of the end for
Germany."
In the light of his earlier misgivings it must be assumed that
Hitler, in agreeing to authorise
Zitadelle
, was not guided by
purely tactical considerations, but as to what these considerations
were, there is no direct evidence. Some observers, Warlimont in
particular, believe that the Führer's pathological aversion to
withdrawal was exploited by Zeitzler, who maintained that this was
the only alernative. Jodl's arguments concerning the dangers that
threatened in the Mediterranean theatre and the rumours of
Mussolini's insecurity in Italy combined to make it vital to check
any Russian approach, however distant, on the Balkans. But there was
also the mesmeric effect which the prospect of a great battle can
have on all associated with its planning. The generals argued, and
with reason, that they had always managed to penetrate the Russian
positions at the first blow; it was later, when the armoured impetus
ran out into the endless space of the plains, that difficulty had
begun. This time they had limited their aim—a mere seventy
miles, less than forty miles for each arm of the pincer! This,
surely, was within the capabilities of troops who had taken hundreds
of miles at a single thrust forward in the previous campaigns. The
firepower and mobility of the attacking forces would be greater than
in 1941 or 1942, their degree of concentration much higher, their
objectives incomparably less ambitious. Was it not the case that no
power on earth could stand up to the first shock of the German Army
in a major offensive?
Certainly, by any standard other than that of the Soviet
formations opposing them, the German order of battle, as it finally
took shape in the last days of June 1943, looked very formidable. The
number of Panzer divisions had been raised from the ten originally
allocated to seventeen by ruthlessly stripping the rest of the front
of its armoured protection. In the 9th Army, Model had no fewer than
three Panzer corps, and two army corps of supporting infantry. The
southern pincer, Hoth's 4th Panzer Army, was the strongest force ever
put under a single commander in the German Army. His attack frontage,
flanked by three army infantry corps, was from west to east—the
3rd Panzer,
Gross Deutschland
, the 11th Panzer, SS
Leibstandarte
, SS
Das Reich
, SS
Totenkopf
, the
6th Panzer, 19th Panzer, 7th Panzer—nine of the finest
divisions in the German Army, shoulder to shoulder along less than
thirty miles of front!
In the last days before the attack a strange feeling, not so much
of confidence as of fatalism, pervaded the German tank forces—if
this strength, this enormous agglomeration that surrounded them on
every side, could not break the Russians, then nothing would. In
dutiful obedience to security regulations long since nullified by
Russian intelligence, the Panzer officers discarded their black
uniforms before visiting the forward positions to make their final
reconnaissance. As they peered across no man's land at the enemy they
saw
a far-flung plain, broken by numerous valleys, small copses,
irregularly laid out villages with thatched rooves, and some rivers
and brooks; of these the Pena ran with a swift current between steep
banks. The ground rose slightly to the north, thus favouring the
defender. Large cornfields covered the landscape, making visibility
difficult.
This was the ground on which was to be fought the last major
offensive by the German army in the East; the greatest armoured
battle in history, and one of the most important and most bitterly
contested engagements of World War II.
On 2nd July the
Stakva
had issued front commanders a
warning that the attack could be expected at any time between the 3rd
and the 6th, and on the night of the 3rd-4th a Czech deserter from an
engineer battalion of the 52nd Army Corps recounted that all units
had been issued a special issue of schnapps and rations for five
days. Judging that the attack was imminent, Vatutin ordered a
bombardment of German forward positions and assembly points, and this
was carried out at an intense rate by Russian medium artillery for
four hours, although the antitank artillery was under strict orders
to stay silent. While they were suffering this destructive, and
ominous, attention from the Soviet artillery, the waiting German
soldiers received a personal message from the Führer:
Soldiers of the Reich!
This day you are to take part in an offensive of such
importance that the whole future of the war may depend on its
outcome. More than anything else, your victory will show the whole
world that resistance to the power of the German Army is hopeless.
That curious lack of imagination and adaptability which is a
recurrent characteristic of the German military attitude, and whose
leaden influence upon the tactical planning of
Zitadelle
has
already been the subject of remark, soon became uncomfortably
apparent in its execution. Once again the old
Blitzkrieg
formula—Stukas, short, intense artillery bombardment, massed
tanks and infantry in close contact—was fed into the computer,
with little regard for the changed conditions save a simple
arithmetical increase in the strength of the respective components.
At two o'clock in the afternoon the German tanks, about two
thousand strong in the first wave, clambered out from the sunken
lanes and dried up
balkas
where they had been lying and moved
slowly forward, hatches closed, across the billowing yellow-green
corn of the upper Donetz valley.
As we advanced the Russian artillery ploughed the earth around
us [wrote the radio operator in a Tiger]. Ivan, with his usual
cunning, had held his fire in the weeks before, and even that morning
when our own guns were pounding him. But now the whole front was a
girdle of flashes. It seemed as if we were driving into a ring of
flame. Four times our valiant "Rosinante" shuddered under a
direct hit, and we thanked the fates for the strength of our good
Krupp steel.
The Germans started with virtual parity in armour to their
opponents (although no German account will admit this), and a
definite qualitative superiority in the Tigers and Panthers, but
Russian artillery was incomparably stronger in weight, numbers, and
direction. Manstein's guns had been unable either to saturate the
forward Russian defence zone or to achieve much in the way of
clearing avenues through the mine fields. The result was that many of
the tanks were disabled by mines in the first half mile and were soon
overtaken by the supporting infantry. The Panzer crews had received
strict orders that
. . .
in no circumstances
will tanks be stopped to
render assistance to those which have been disabled. Recovery is the
responsibility of engineer units
only
. Tank commanders are to
press on to their objective as long as they retain mobility. Where a
tank is rendered immobile but the gun is in working order (e.g., from
mechanical failure or track damage), the crew will continue to give
fire support from a static position.
This was virtually a death sentence on the crews of disabled
tanks, for the Russian guns were so thick on the ground that they
could pick off the crippled Panzers within minutes of their striking
a mine. There were also special tank-destruction squads of infantry,
which had been positioned in slit trenches in the middle of the mine
fields and which, as will be seen, operated with particular and
gruesome success in the north, against Model.
German tactics were to advance in a succession of armoured
wedges—known as the
Panzerkeile
—with the Tigers
bunched at the tip of the wedge and the Panthers and PzKw IV's fanned
out behind. Lightly armed infantry with carbines and grenades moved
close behind the tanks, and heavier forces with mortars followed at
the base of the wedge in tracked personnel carriers. This tactic
amounted to a rejection of the traditional principle of the Panzer
army, as a sword, to be used in a deep, narrow thrust to the enemy's
rear, and substituted an axe which was to break down the opposing
front along a considerable length. It had been forced on the Germans
by the tenacity of the Red Army in holding close to the sides of the
breach, and the multiplication of their firepower in the last year,
which made independent action by the Panzers too dangerous—at
least in the early stages of the battle.
Both Model and Manstein were in fact using the same tactics
Montgomery had employed at Alamein, opening the battle with the
armour in an infantry-support role, in the hope that there would
still be enough battleworthy tanks left for exploitation once a
breach had been made. But here, in contrast to Alamein, the
defenders' strength was at parity with the attackers', and the way in
which they had prepared for the battle allowed them to keep back a
large proportion of their armour until a late stage in the fighting.
The Russians had developed a method of fire control, known to the
German troops as a
Pakfront
, based on the use of groups of up
to ten antitank guns under a single commander which would
concentrate on a single target at a time in broadsides. The mine
fields had been laid so as to channel attacking tanks into the field
of fire of clusters of these groups, which were sited in depth over
about five miles. As each broadside could be expected to take out one
tank, it can be seen that the approaching Panzers would have to
endure very heavy losses before they could close with the gunners and
attain their initial objectives.
In the operational orders it was made clear that the tanks were
not expected to deal with all the Russian gun positions on their own,
but to leave this to the accompanying infantry, although they were,
of course, to engage guns which were actually holding them up. The
difficulty in this plan was first, that the number and depth of the
Pakfront
had been greatly underestimated; second, that the
Russian guns were themselves protected by machine-gun and mortar
nests, with strict orders not to fire except at German infantry, and
then only in support of their own battery.