In the result it was not until the late evening that the extent of
the Russian defences became apparent, and by that time the
Panzerkeile
had become badly distorted. The great majority of
the Russian antitank guns were the standard 76.2-mm. L 30, a weapon
which was no longer capable of penetrating the frontal armour of the
Tiger at other than pointblank range, and many of the monster tanks
thus managed to pass through the first belt of defences with only
superficial damage. In their rear, though, the PzKw IV's had suffered
severely, and many of the Panthers had broken down or been disabled
in the mine fields. Darkness fell on the battlefield with the mass of
the attacking strength still entangled in the gun positions and slit
trenches of the first belt, but with a few isolated packets of Tigers
deep in the main Russian defence zone. During the night groups of
Panzergrenadiere
struggled across the battlefield in attempts
to reach the stranded tanks and give them some protection; and the
short hours of darkness were savaged by the glare of star shells and
Very's, of dense white currents of tracer, and the hot orange stab of
portable
Flammenwerfer
as they clashed with the Russian
tank-killing squads and infantry patrols.
At four o'clock on the morning of 5th July the sun rose on a
classic tableau of positional warfare, almost as if the Great War had
been running continuously since 1917, with only the influx of more
sophisticated equipment to mark the passage of time. Clouds of brown
smoke from burning corn and the thatched root's of villages rolled
across the battlefield under a gentle westerly breeze, streaked at
intervals with the black, oily discharge of a flaming tank; the
continuous rattle and chatter of small-arms fire was overlaid by a
steady cannonade from the Russian 76-mm.'s and the scream of
Katyusha
rockets; periodically the high-pitched slap of the 88-mm.'s told of
the Tigers' defending themselves some three to four miles away.
Tremendous exertions by the German infantry during the night had
rewarded them with mastery of the first belt of Russian defences, to
the extent at least of silencing most of the antitank guns there,
although many sharpshooters remained and picked off engineers as they
tried to clear the mine fields. It was still proving almost
impossible to make any headway against the second, and strongest,
belt, whose gunfire, pre-ranged onto the points the Germans were now
occupying, raked them mercilessly. The Russians had moved up many of
their own tanks during the night and parked them in hull-down
positions which had been prepared in the weeks preceding the battle.
This meant that on the second day their firepower was almost as
strong as it had been on the first, in spite of the elimination of
their outpost line. The Germans, in contrast, were already badly
strung out between the leading Tiger companies, whose situation
reports and calls for help crackled incessantly across the short-wave
radio, and the truncated stumps of the
Panzerkeile
, struggling
to re-form for a second attack.
Of the two arms, which were meant to converge across the
sixty-mile base of the salient, Model's had fared worse. For it was
here in the northern sector, spearheading the attack of the 47th
Panzer Corps, that the ninety Porsche Ferdinands were being used.
Like the Henschel Tigers with the SS at Belgorod, they managed to
break into the Russian defence system with little difficulty because
of their heavy armour plating. But within hours of their appearance
the Russian infantry had discovered that these monsters had no
secondary armament. Devastatingly effective against the T 34,
formidable against static gun positions, they were useless against
infantry in slit trenches. They soon became separated from the
lighter tanks that escorted them and had given some protection with
their own machine guns, and fell victim one by one to groups of
Soviet infantry, which would board them while they were on the move
and squirt flame throwers over the engine ventilation slats.
Guderian's own judgment was:
They were incapable of close-range fighting since they lacked
sufficient ammunition [i.e., high-explosive as well as
armour-piercing] for their guns and this defect was aggravated by the
fact that they possessed no machine-gun. Once [the Ferdinands] had
broken into the enemy's infantry zone they literally had to go quail
shooting with cannon. They did not manage to neutralise, let alone
destroy, the enemy rifles and machine-guns, so that our own infantry
was unable to follow up behind them. By the time they reached the
Russian artillery they were on their own. Despite showing extreme
bravery and suffering unheard of casualties, the infantry of
Weidling's division did not manage to exploit the tanks' success . .
.
Nor was the advent of the Panthers as devastating as had been
hoped. The Chief of Staff of the 48th Panzer Corps reported that they
did not come up to expectations. They were easily set ablaze,
the oil and petrol systems were inadequately protected and the crews
were insufficiently trained.
After twenty-four hours of fighting, the Russian front had only
been dented in one place—the left centre of Manstein's attack,
by the combined strength of the 48th Panzer Corps and the SS. Here
the Russians had been driven back across a defence zone about two and
a half miles wide to a line of four small hamlets which bordered a
stream, Sawidowka-Rakowo, Alexeyevka, Luchanino and Ssyrzew.
During the night the
Panzergrenadiere
had succeeded in
clearing the houses on the south side, and Hoth decided to force the
3rd Panzer and the
Gross Deutschland
across the stream at
first light on 5th July. But during the night a cloudburst raised the
level of the stream by several feet and effectively increased its
breadth by turning the fields on either side into a glutinous swamp.
Under cover of darkness the Russians had moved tanks and guns forward
into the buildings and ruins on the opposite side, and the two Panzer
divisions were severely punished by direct fire while they assembled
in dense formation during the morning. Throughout the day the
engineers struggled under cover of an erratic smoke screen to lay
their bridging equipment. Over their heads a vicious artillery duel
raged between the Russian guns and the massed tanks of the 3rd Panzer
and
Gross Deutschland
, with hourly raids by the Stukas as
feeble compensation for Hoth's lack of heavy artillery. By nightfall
the Germans had suffered heavy casualties and not gained a yard.
During the night of 5th-6th July both divisions were pulled back and
reformed. A Russian counterattack had won back part of Sawidowka,
and the 3rd Panzer was moved back to the left wing to recapture the
village and get across the stream at its confluence with the Pena;
the 11th Panzer was to come in on the right of
Gross Deutschland
,
in another effort to make a breach between Luchanino and Ssyrzew—a
task which it was hoped would be facilitated by the progress of SS
Leibstandarte
and SS
Das Reich
, both of which had
ground their way forward to a depth of about four miles on the right
of the 48th Panzer Corps.
By 7th July, the fourth day of the attack, the ground had dried
out enough for German armour to get across the stream, and
Gross
Deutschland
captured Ssyrzew. At the same time the attacks of the
3rd Panzer were slowly prising the defenders away from their
positions on the Pena. During the evening Russian fire slackened, and
the 48th Panzer Corps was able to cross the line of the stream at
will. Hoth was now almost halfway through the Russians' defence zone,
and right up to their main "gun line." On the right of the
48th Panzer Corps, Hausser's three SS divisions had penetrated rather
deeper, but unlike Knobelsdorff, the SS commander had not succeeded
in taking the Russian front back along a continuous stretch; instead
each division had punched a hole of its own, through which at great
cost it had struggled northward, under a continuous enfilade fire
from its flanks. On 9th July it was plain to Hoth that the crisis of
the battle was approaching, for the majority of his troops had been
in action without respite for five days.
The rations and ammunition with which they had started the battle
were running low, and the intensity of Russian fire was making it
very difficult to operate breakdown and refuelling services for the
armour. The only gleam of light seemed to be in the centre of
Knobelsdorff's front, where
Gross Deutschland
had succeeded in
forcing a battle group through the village of Gremutshy, which lay
across the main Russian defence zone. During the afternoon and
evening of 9th July, General Walter Hoernlein, the commander, managed
to follow the battle group with the
Panzergrenadier
regiment
and about forty tanks, and began to swing them westward, behind the
Russian gun line, with the intention of loosening the defences that
were holding up the left flank of the Panzer corps. This was rewarded
that night when the Russians withdrew from Rakowo, where they had
been blocking the path of the 3rd Panzer, and also from
Knobelsdorff's right flank, which allowed the 11th Panzer to
establish some contact with SS
Leibstandarte
.
Hoth had been in consultation with Manstein that same night, and
on the morning of the 10th he told Hausser and Knobelsdorff that they
were to clean up the breach with assault guns and
Panzergrenadier
and collect all their available tank "runners" for what he
hoped would be the breakthrough thrust against the last Russian line
between Kruglik and Novoselovka. For two days the infantry of the 3rd
Panzer and
Gross Deutschland
struggled to force the Russian
gate back on its hinge. In continuous and savage fighting they
cleared the group of villages that straggled down the vale of the
Pena and by the evening of the 11th had forced the surviving Russians
back into the woodlands above Berezovka.
A rectangular salient, about nine miles deep and fifteen across,
had been driven into Vatutin's position—a poor result after the
effort and casualties of a week's fighting, but enough, at least, to
allow the tank commanders to reassemble out of range of the Soviet
artillery. That night
Gross Deutschland
pulled out of the
front and handed over to the 3rd Panzer.
On Hausser's front even this limited goal remained out of reach.
The SS infantry was so heavily engaged protecting the divisional
flanks that individual commanders had great difficulty in extricating
tanks from the tips of the separate spearheads. On the 11th,
Das
Reich
and
Leibstandarte
managed to effect a junction, but
Totenkopf
was still on its own, and suffering from the Russian
propensity to kill all prisoners wearing its insignia.
This was the last, and fiercest, fight of the purely Germanic SS.
After
Zitadelle
, Himmler opened the ranks of his army to an
increasing flood of recruits from the occupied countries, and to
general criminal riffraff from the Reich civil prisons. But the men
who fought at Kursk had all passed through the brutalising school at
Bad Tölz, where the regime was such that the recruit had been
turned out
as if he had just been unpacked to hang on a Christmas tree,
incredibly pink, fresh and teutonic, his well-flattened pockets
containing only a modest supply of paper currency which did not
bulge, his paybook, his handkerchief creased according to regulation,
and one prophylactic.
Having taken the SS oath, the recruit had to pass through the
armoured warfare school, where ". . . he might be called on to
dig himself into the ground, knowing that within a prescribed time
the tanks would drive over his head, whether the hole was completed
or not. If he was an officer cadet he might be required to pull the
pin out of a grenade, balance it on his helmet, and stand to
attention while it exploded."
Now these men were face to face with the
Untermensch
and
finding to their dismay that he was as well armed, as cunning, and as
brave as themselves.
In spite of the erosion of their position in the south, Zhukov and
Vasilievski cannot have been anything but satisfied with the position
on the night of 11th July. The blocking of Model's attack had left
them free to face Hoth, and the whole of their mobile armoured
reserve, the 5th Armoured Army, was still uncommitted. Realising that
a final trial of strength with the Panzers was less than twenty-four
hours away, Zhukov placed this force under Vatutin's orders, and
during the night of the 11th-12th July it began to move forward to
meet the expected eruption of the 48th Panzer Corps and Hausser's SS.
At the same time Sokolovski was ordered to lead off the succession of
counterattacks which the
Stavka
had planned against the Orel
bulge, on Model's denuded left flank, with Popov to follow him after
a further forty-eight hours.
All this was, of course, unknown to Hoth, but reports from the 3rd
Panzer indicated that the Russians' defences between Kruglik and
Novoselovka were hardening hourly, and their activity against his
left flank was increasing. Regardless of the state of Hausser and
Knobelsdorff, the commander of the 4th Panzer Army was determined to
force his armour through into open country before a defensive scab
could form over the thin membrane exposed in the remaining Russian
defences. On 12th July the whole mobile strength scraped together
from the three forces of Kempf, Hausser, and Knobelsdorff, about six
hundred tanks in all, started on their death ride. Before noon they
were in a head-on collision with the armour of the Soviet 5th Army,
and under a gigantic dust cloud and in stifling heat an eight-hour
battle was joined. The Russians were fresh, their machines were
unworn, and they had a full complement of ammunition. In addition two
of their brigades had been equipped with the new SU 85, a
self-propelled 85-mm. gun which had been mounted on the T 34 chassis
as a mobile answer to the Tigers and the new L 70 gun of the Panther.
The Germans, in contrast, had in many cases just come front fierce
fighting in support of the close infantry actions of the preceding
days. Many of their tanks had been patched up by engineers in the
field, and were soon, particularly in the case of the Panthers, to
break down again. In addition