The Road to Berlin (23 page)

At 2230 hours on the evening of 4 July, with rockets and flares soaring along the Soviet perimeter between Belgorod and Tomarovka, 600 guns and mortars in the two army areas (6th and 7th Guards) loosed off the first artillery
kontrpodgotovka
, disruptive fire aimed at German troops moving into their jumping-off positions. At Central
HQ
, Rokossovskii had to decide quickly, on the basis of prisoner interrogation, what orders to give his own artillery—no light decision, because the
kontrpodgotovka
meant firing off more than half the ammunition
boekomplekt
. It was 2 am before the Front Military Soviet got the full interrogation report, and with only twenty minutes left there was no time for an involved exchange of signals with the
Stavka:
the artillery and infantry commanders knew that if they blundered now, ‘he’—and all of them knew who was meant by ‘he’—would make them pay dearly. Rokossovskii finally decided to open fire and to bring ‘Variant No. 2’—envisaging the main German thrust in the Glazunovka–Ponyr–Kursk direction—into effect. At 0220 hours on the morning of 5 July Central Front guns in 13th Army area opened fire. An hour later on Vatutin’s front 6th Guards fired off a second
kontrpodgotovka
with the Front commander’s special permission. Soviet commanders now sweated out the remaining hour or so to dawn.

‘Nachalos’:
‘It’s begun’. At 0430 hours German guns opened fire against the Central Front, while on the Voronezh Front German guns and aircraft were in action even before first light. Under cover of the darkness, four German battalions with tank support were already attacking Soviet forward positions. Shortly after 5 am both Soviet Fronts reported tank and infantry attacks in great strength, aimed at 13th Army on the Central Front and 6th Guards on the Voronezh Front. Fourth
Panzer’s
massive tank fist of 700 machines was aimed at Chistyakov’s 6th Guards; first came the Tigers, followed by the Panthers and assault guns, the infantry in armoured personnel carriers or riding on the tanks, four
Panzer
and two infantry divisions—3,000 men, over 40 tanks and 50 assault guns to the kilometre, on some sectors up to 100 massed tanks. The attack on 6th Guards was mounted north-west of Belgorod: to the south-east, where Shumilov’s 7th was deployed on the eastern bank of the northern Donets, eight battalions of German infantry were across to the Soviet side, investing the Mikhailovka bridgehead, which had been heavily shelled during the
kontrpodgotovka
. The Soviet bombardment played havoc with the work of the German engineers shifting the bridges into position for 19th
Panzer
Division’s 60-ton Tigers. Further south, two German bridges were in position just before noon and German armour began rolling over the Donets, ready to strike east and north-east. From the Mikhailovka bridgehead German tanks and infantry ran straight into the dense minefields laid down in 81st Guards Rifle Division positions.

At 0510 hours German bombers appeared over the forward positions of Lt.-Gen. Pukhov’s 13th Army on the northern face: on the half hour German tanks and infantry attacked along the 25-mile sector from Krasnaya Slobodka to Izmailovo, falling on 13th Army and the right flank of the 70th. For this first attack, Model had concentrated nine infantry divisions and a
Panzer
division, using his Tiger tanks and Ferdinand assault guns in small but powerful battalions—a deployment governed by his view of the Soviet defensive system, which Model intended to break by constantly feeding in new units to grind down the defenders. His main thrust narrowed down to a ten-mile sector with six infantry divisions and a
Panzer
division, supported all the while by Tiger and Ferdinand units whose job it was to smash through the Soviet defences. The infantry came on
in open order or with the tanks, or in their armoured carriers; behind the massive Tigers came the light and medium tanks, overhead German planes operating in groups of 50–100 machines. This was the
Wehrmacht
, biting into the Soviet defences, more grimly formidable than it had ever been seen. Soviet gunners and infantrymen fought like madmen, even bringing 45mm guns into action to fire at the tracks of the monster tanks. Firing over open sights, Soviet guns were left with only one or two men alive, while the ‘anti-tank squads’ went in with their explosive charges and petrol bottles. After its fifth battering, the junction of 15th and 81st Rifle Divisions (13th Army) began to give way; fifteen Tigers were on the Oka, firing on the move at Soviet troops, with clumps of medium tanks up to fifty strong sweeping into the first line of Soviet positions. At noon Rokossovskii decided that he had discerned the German plan; the attack was not coming down the railway line for Ponyr but was aiming to the west of it in the direction of Olkhovatka (which meant altering ‘Variant No. 2’): here Rokossosvkii planned to put in a counter-blow with 2nd Tank Army, while moving up 17th Guards Rifle Corps, with two anti-tank and a mortar brigade to reinforce 13th Army. The original plan had been for the 13th Army to hold on and 2nd Tank first to concentrate in the rear of the defensive field, stiffening 13th Army, and on the second day of operations to counter-attack to destroy German forces at Ponyr. Now the tank and infantry corps had to re-deploy rapidly—3rd Tank Corps to the south of Ponyr, 16th Tank to the north-west of Olkhovatka and 19th Tank to the west of it, 17th Guards Rifle Corps to the rear of 13th Army’s defensive zone and 18th Guards Rifle Corps to Maloarkhangelsk to prevent the Germans widening the breakthrough on the flank. Towards the close of the first day, 5 July, Model’s tanks and infantry had penetrated four miles into the Soviet defences. Rokossovskii assumed—correctly—that not all the German divisions had been committed (two
Panzer
divisions and two motorized divisions were waiting south of Orel to exploit success), and he anticipated heavier attacks.

At midnight Rokossovskii reported to Stalin, who promised 27th Army under Lt. Gen. Trofimenko from the
Stavka
reserve as reinforcement, relief which Stalin within a few hours had to withdraw since the situation on the Voronezh Front on the Oboyan axis had become very serious. Trofimenko was now going there with his troops, Rokossovskii would have to make do, and would also be responsible for the defence of Kursk itself in the event of a German breakthrough from the south. Vatutin had decided on the morning of 5 July that Oboyan was the main German objective, while the attacks against Shumilov aimed at Korocha were designed to draw off Soviet front-line reserves. During the morning and afternoon, the full weight of Hoth’s
SS Panzer
formations and 11th
Panzer
Division crashed down on the Cherkasskoe–Korovino sector held by rifle troops of Chistyakov’s 6th Guards: under a gleaming sky, where Soviet fighters were making their maximum effort, German dive-bombers and ground-attack planes laid down a roadway of high explosive, a lane of fire in the narrow sector between Cherkasskoe and Korovino, down which more than 200 German tanks with
infantry now began to push. To hold Cherkasskoe, Chistyakov rushed in two regiments of anti-tank guns, which fought side by side with units of 67th Guards Rifle Division defending the village. In the afternoon the Tigers came and Cherkasskoe was half-encircled, outside it a litter of smashed and mined tanks and a trail of pulverized Soviet guns. A Soviet rearguard of fifteen Guardsmen, all of them finally wiped out, covered the withdrawal from Cherkasskoe. At 1640 hours Vatutin personally ordered Katukov of 1st Tank Army to move two corps (6th Tank, 3rd Mechanized) to cover Oboyan, and to prepare a counterattack towards Tomarovka for dawn on 6 July; two more reserve tank formations, 5th Guards and 2nd Guards Tank Corps, were to concentrate to the east of Luchki to attack in the direction of Belgorod. To strengthen Shumilov fighting off the tanks and infantry of
Armee-Abteilung Kempf
, Vatutin at 1940 hours brought three rifle divisions of 35th Guards Rifle Corps to reinforce 7th Guards Army and to cover the Korocha axis. Shumilov was ordered to clean up the Germans who had broken over the northern Donets.

Within twelve hours both sides were furiously stoking the great glowing furnace of the battle for Kursk. The armour continued to mass and move on a scale unlike anything seen anywhere else in the war. Both commands watched this fiery escalation with grim, numbed fascination: German officers had never seen so many Soviet aircraft, while Soviet commanders—who had seen a lot—had never before seen such formidable massing of German tanks, all blotched in their green and yellow camouflage. These were tank armadas on the move, coming on in great squadrons of 100 and 200 machines or more, a score of Tigers and Ferdinand assault guns in the first echelon, groups of 50–60 medium tanks in the second and then the infantry screened by the armour. Now that Soviet tank armies were moving up into the main defensive fields, almost 4,000 Soviet tanks and nearly 3,000 German tanks and assault guns were being steadily drawn into this gigantic battle, which roared on hour after hour leaving ever-greater heaps of the dead and the dying, clumps of blazing or disabled armour, shattered personnel carriers and lorries, and thickening columns of smoke coiling over the steppe. With each hour also, the traffic in mangled, twisted men brought to steaming, blood-soaked forward dressing stations continued to swell. The Russian
svodka
, the communiqué on the first day’s fighting, revealed the scale of operations in its mammoth total of reported German tank losses: ‘During the course of the day [5 July], 586 tanks were destroyed or put out of action.’

On Rokossovskii’s Central Front, the dawn counter-attack on 6 July enjoyed a moment’s success, only to be rolled back by a force of 250 German tanks with infantry in their wake; the three right-flank divisions of Pukhov’s 13th Army also counter-attacked and were also rolled back by tanks. The main German tank force, reinforced by 2nd and 9th
Panzer
Divisions, was now concentrated on a sector running from Ponyr-1 to Soborovka (to the west of Ponyr itself and the railway line), six miles holding more than 3,000 guns and mortars, 5,000 machine-guns and over 1,000 tanks. To stiffen his reserve, Rokossovskii now
drew troops from sectors that were momentarily inactive: Lt.-Gen. Chernyakhovskii’s 60th Army would have to take the place of the 27th Army, promised by Stalin but now re-directed to the Voronezh Front. One division was taken from Chernyakhovskii, and men, weapons and supplies moved by lorry to 13th Army area; Batov’s 65th Army had to give up two tank regiments. Throughout 6 July Model’s and Rokossovskii’s men were literally locked in face-to-face combat. Rodin’s 2nd Tank Army had not made much gain by its counter-blow, but German troops attacking on the left and centre had made only a quarter of the progress they had managed the first day, for now they were right in Pukhov’s main defensive zone. Rokossovskii ordered his tank formations over to the defensive, the tanks to be dug in with only the turrets showing at ground level, tank counter-attacks to be made only against light tanks and German infantry. So far Pukhov and Rodin’s tank-men were holding six German infantry and three
Panzer
divisions, attacking in great strength on a narrow sector; for the morrow, the German command held a fresh
Panzer
division (the 18th) with over 200 tanks ready to attack, plus 4th
Panzer
approaching the battlefield and three divisions south of Orel (12th
Panzer
, 10th and 36th Motorized) at a further state of readiness.

On the morning of 7 July the German offensive rolled on: 18th and 9th
Panzer
attacked on a narrow sector west of the railway line towards Olkhovatka, 2nd and 20th
Panzer
further west towards Samodurovka–Molotych, and a powerful assault group making for Ponyr, a major junction on the Orel–Kursk line against which Soviet troops were now leaning their backs. Ten infantry divisions and four
Panzer
divisions, all with massed tank forces, were now in action as Model bit through the Soviet defences. The main German thrust was now developing towards the vitally important high ground near Olkhovatka, control of which would command the eastern, southern and western area. From here, the Germans would look out to Kursk. Rokossovskii proceeded to strengthen the defences at the approaches to the Olkhovatka heights and at Ponyr, by moving up more artillery, mortars and heavy guns including howitzers. Soviet commanders reckoned that the heavy German attack on Ponyr was designed to distract their attention from Olkhovatka; while savage fighting for Ponyr raged as more massed German tank attacks ran into Soviet minefields, artillery barrages, buried tanks and the squads of ‘tank-busters’, there was momentary pause in German attacks on Olkhovatka, which were nevertheless resumed when 4th
Panzer
moved up. Up to 300 German tanks now broke through to Kashara and Samodurovka: at Ponyr the tank and infantry fighting continued, with the junction changing hands several times, and only the school and the western tip was in German possession on the morning of 8 July. That morning at 0800 hours, after an initial bombardment, 18th, 9th, 2nd, and 4th
Panzer
Divisions with the 6th German Infantry Division renewed their attack along the sector running from Ponyr-2 to Samodurovka towards Olkhovatka. Putting in thirteen attacks by noon, German tanks and tommy-gunners had to crunch their way on
towards the south and south-west. North-west of Olkhovatka, one Soviet anti-tank brigade, the 3rd, under Colonel Rukosuyev, faced a massed tank attack, with one battery taking the full shock. At a little over 700 yards the Soviet anti-tank guns opened fire; in a little while, the battery was left with one gun and three men alive, who managed to knock out two more tanks. This remaining gun was destroyed along with its crew by a direct hit from a bomb, and the battery was totally wiped out. Just before noon Lieutenant Gerasimov’s battery, with its remaining anti-tank-gun—its shield blown away and the trail shattered—propped up on ammunition boxes and aimed by the barrel, was also pounded to pieces. The brigade commander finally signalled Rokossovskii: ‘Brigade under attack by up to 300 tanks. No. 1 and No. 7 batteries wiped out, bringing last reserve, No. 2 battery, into action. Request ammunition. I either hold on or will be wiped out.
Rukosuyev
.’ The 3rd Brigade did both: it held but it was destroyed almost to a man. For forty-eight hours the fighting raged on, with the German formations bumping up against the prepared positions on the Sredne–Russki heights, the high ground some twelve miles inside the northern face of the salient which the German command knew it could not assault frontally.