The Road to Berlin (25 page)

Stalin had become seriously concerned at the fairly deep penetration of the Voronezh Front. The splintering of the 6th Guards Army Front, where a deep incision had been made, was due basically to the fact that Vatutin (unlike Rokossovskii) had spread his forces more thinly over greater distances; local
German superiority soon made itself felt very painfully. The defence of the Prokhorovka area had now been handed over to the two
Stavka
representatives, Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Vasilevskii, who had assumed the general supervision of operations here after 11 July. Marshal Vasilevskii had supported Vatutin in his submission of the counter-attack plans due to be executed on 12 July, though the severe crisis at Prokhorovka itself, with two masses of German armour driving on it from the west and the south, gravely hampered the preparations for an attack. Marshal Zhukov had assembled ten regiments of artillery into ‘tank fists’, clenched in the area of Prokhorovka, to assist in holding off the German columns, while Rotmistrov of 5th Guards Tank Army and Zhadov’s 5th Guards fought heavy defensive actions and made their units ready for the counter-blow. Zhadov’s divisions, directed to the Oboyan–Prokhorovka line, had gone into action off the march. His anti-tank artillery had been taken away to strengthen the general defences; his left-flank formations were due to attack along with Rotmistrov, but 5th Guards Army badly needed more infantry support tanks.

The night of 12 July, when the Soviet relief attack opened a long way north against the Orel bulge, was a very tense one in the Prokhorovka area. Few men slept in the two Guards armies. The day broke with overcast skies and intermittent, scudding rain. The battle area itself was a comparatively narrow sector, bounded on one side by the river Psel, on the other by the railway cutting. Ahead of Prokhorovka itself lay the steppe, dotted with small cultivated plots and gardens; in the cornland round about, Soviet anti-tank batteries and tank units lay hidden in their camouflage. Up on the high ground Rotmistrov had established his forward command post, affording him good observation of the entire area.

With the advance of 6th and 7th
Panzer
Divisions, striking northwards to Rydinka and Rzhavets and thus to within some seven miles of the
SS Panzer
corps operating against Prokhorovka from the west, a highly dangerous situation was building up by dawn on 12 July. Rotmistrov’s flank formations were ordered down to block this movement at all costs, while the prospect of another heavy German attack on Prokhorovka—and with it a doubling of the danger—had to be forestalled by speeding up the planned Soviet attack by two hours. Thus in the area of Prokhorovka two great bodies of armour, Soviet and German, rushed into a huge, swirling tank battle with well over a thousand tanks in action. The two groups of German armour, one west, the other south of Prokhorovka, mustered some 600 and 300 tanks respectively; Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards just under 900 tanks—approximate parity, except that the German forces were fielding about 100 Tigers. Both Soviet and German planes massed at Prokhorovka, pounding away at the area of the heaviest tank fighting which ran roughly three miles in length by four in depth. At 0830 hours, after a short artillery bombardment and a salvo from the
Katyushas
, four masses of Soviet tanks attacked on the sector running from Petrovka to the station at Belenikhino (a line facing west of Prokhorovka); west of Prokhorovka, along the line of the Psel, XVIII
Panzer
Corps was attacking at the same time. The Soviet tanks tore into the first German
echelon, and by closing the range the T-34s deprived the Tigers of the advantage of their heavier armament. The tanks fought it out practically at point-blank range as the Soviet T-34s and a few KVs raced into the German formation, whose Tigers stood immobile to deliver their fire: once at close range, with scores of machines churning about in individual engagements, front and side armour was more easily penetrated, when the tank ammunition would explode, hurling turrets yards away from the shattered hulls or sending up great spurts of fire as burning Soviet tanks rammed the Tigers. Driving along the road and railway line to the south-east of Prokhorovka, 29th Tank Corps (with 9th Guards Parachute Division in support) plunged into some of the heaviest fighting of the day as it collided with
SS Totenkopf
and
Adolf Hitler;
2nd Guards and 2nd Tank Corps by the early afternoon had managed to break into the woods west of Belenikhino and the farms east of the village of Kalinin, but at 1500 hours tanks from
SS Adolf Hitler
and
Das Reich
were themselves attacking. The fighting in the Kalinin–Belenikhino–Storozhovoe area went on far into the darkness.

South and south-east of Prokhorovka, where
Abteilung Kempf
was attacking 69th Army and part of 7th Guards, the situation had taken a dangerous turn during the early hours of 12 July; at 0400 hours Rotmistrov received orders from Vatutin to move an armoured brigade into 69th Army area, followed by two mechanized brigades and artillery regiments which were to be moved up a few hours later from Rotmistrov’s second echelon on the orders of Vatutin and Vasilevskii. Attacking straight off the march, the fresh brigades operating under the command of General Trufanov pushed German units back over the northern Donets and out of the village of Rydinka. With units of 7th Guards, the tanks of 5th Guards Army also pushed 6th and 7th
Panzer
Divisions out of the villages of Kuzminka and Aleksandrovka. The attack from the south towards Prokhorovka was temporarily localized by mid-afternoon when Rotmistrov had to look suddenly to the west of Prokhorovka, to the area of 18th Tank Corps round about Andreyevka and to the security of his right flank. At this point Rotmistrov poured the last of 5th Guards into the battle, 10th Guards Mechanized and 24th Guards Tank Brigade, the last of his second echelon. Along some axes, the tanks of 5th Guards were fighting offensive actions; along others they were pursuing tense defensive battles, setting up tank ambushes or putting in short, jabbing counterstrokes. The whole of this ‘giant tangle of tanks’, rolling about and locked with each other between Prokhorovka and Rzhavets to the south, wound and re-wound itself over full eighteen hours.

With the coming of the deep night, when thunderclouds piled over the battlefield, the gunfire slackened and the tanks slewed to a halt. Silence fell on the tanks, the guns and the dead, over which the lightning flickered and the rain began to rustle. The
Prokhorovskoe poboishche
, the ‘slaughter at Prokhorovka’, was momentarily done, with more than 300 German tanks (among them 70 Tigers), 88 guns and 300 lorries lying wrecked on the steppe; more than half the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army lay shattered in the same area. Both sides
had taken and delivered fearful punishment. The German attack, from the west and the south, however, had been held. At Oboyan the attack had been halted. On the broad slopes of the Sredne-Russki heights on Rokossovskii’s Central Front the attack on Kursk from the north had also been halted, and Rokossovskii had considerable reserves in hand.

Map 5
The Prokhorovka tank battle, July 1943

For three more days, from 13 to 15 July, German troops stabbed at the Soviet defences in the Prokhorovka area. While Rotmistrov’s headquarters was analysing the results of the Prokhorovka tank-battle and assessing what had happened at Rzhavets, Zhadov’s infantrymen from 5th Guards were still involved in very heavy fighting north-west of Prokhorovka. Two divisions of 5th Guards (95th and 52nd Guards Rifle Divisions) had been fighting for long hours to contain the
SS
bridgehead on the right bank of the Psel to the east of Krasnyi Oktyabr. Rotmistrov had had to throw in his tanks to ward off a threat to his flank and rear, a commitment that scarcely sweetened relations between Rotmistrov and Zhadov. During the night of 12–13 July
SS
troops continued to hammer at the Soviet infantry between Veselyi and Polezhaev; at 1000 hours on 13 July Zhadov’s
Guards counter-attacked and seized the high ground between the villages, only to be thrown off by a German tank attack, followed by a Soviet counter-attack in the afternoon which finally cleared the heights and pushed the
SS
back to the Psel, flattening the bridgehead completely. The
SS
could get neither through Prokhorovka nor round it, although Fourth
Panzer
prowled about making local gains here and there.

As a major offensive operation,
Zitadelle
(Citadel) had been smashed up beyond recovery. Army Group Centre reported that Model’s Ninth Army in the north was totally blocked and Army Group had now to fight off the Orel offensive. Manstein pleaded for more time to finish off Soviet armoured reserves, but by 19 July this attempt sputtered out completely. Hitler had already called off
Zitadelle
and after 13 July Army Group South was slowly easing itself back. Guderian recognized the failure as ‘a decisive defeat’; the armoured divisions that had rolled against the Soviet breakwaters at Kursk were now, through grievous losses in men and machines, ‘unemployable for a long time to come’. Coming from the inspector-general of the Germany army’s
Panzertruppen
, who had nursed the Tigers and the Panthers through the boiling battles—the whole
Materialschlacht
which had now recoiled upon the
Wehrmacht
—this was no light judgement. The Russian artillery especially had contributed to this mangling of the
Panzer
arm; the Russians claimed that at Kursk 70,000 German officers and men were killed, 2,952 tanks and 195 assault guns destroyed, along with 844 field guns, 1,392 planes and over 5,000 lorries. Certainly the losses in individual
Panzer
divisions were calamitous; 3rd
Panzer
had 30 tanks left out of almost 300, 17th
Panzer
after Prokhorovka was left with 60 tanks,
Panzer
General Schmidt’s 19th had 17 patched-up machines left to it. The infantry divisions were torn to tatters with companies down to 40 men and regiments not much stronger, even including wounded. On the southern face, the Germans reckoned that 10 Soviet armoured formations had been smashed up, no less than 1,800 tanks crippled, more than 1,000 anti-tank guns destroyed and 24,000 prisoners captured. Immediately after Prokhorovka, Soviet tank strength was certainly down to half what it had been eight days before; the losses in anti-tank guns were heavy indeed, and battle casualties high. The
Ostfront
had more than once seen some appalling fighting, but German infantrymen insisted that there had never been anything like this. Ponyr in the north had been the site of one of these savage, blood-soaked grapples; in the south at the Belgorod blood-bath,
‘die Blutmühle von Belgorod’
, the arrogant, merciless ideological shock-troops of Nazi Germany, whose very emblem was so often their automatic death-warrant once they were prisoners in Soviet hands, had been impaled on the stakes of Oboyank and Prokhorovka. When the Russians came to excavate the Prokhorovka battlefield, they reported coming upon 400 shattered tank-hulls. In the small outlying woods they found the tank workshops, and though in previous battles the time won by covering troops had always been used to tow off damaged machines, this time the Tigers stood mostly where they had been knocked out, some straddling Soviet trenches, others inert in firing
positions, the crews splayed out beside them or interred within these steel tombs, mainly fragments of men in a horrifying litter of limbs, frying-pans, shell-cases, playing-cards and stale bread.

On the evening of 14 July the right-flank formations of Rokossovskii’s Central Front, holding the northern face of the Kursk salient, prepared to attack the following day; Pukhov’s 13th Army would drive into the Orel bulge from the south, aiming for Kroma.
Panzer
and motorized units from Model’s Ninth Army were already moving north to stiffen Second
Panzer
Army, whose lines Bagramyan’s 11th Guards had already pierced to a depth of more than ten miles; to reinforce Bagramyan a second army, the 11th Army under Fedyuninskii (deputy commander of the Bryansk Front, well known for his operations on the Volkhov Front) was moving into 11th Guards area and the
Stavka
was rushing Badanov’s 4th Tank Army up to the scene. The Germans nevertheless won the race to the gap, and by 17 July Bagramyan’s advance was greatly slowed down. The Soviet air force could not check the flow of German reinforcement. The
Stavka
had already handed Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army over to Popov to use in the drive on Orel, though the 3rd and 63rd Armies of the Bryansk Front were making but slow progress. On the evening of 18 July Bagramyan’s forward units were only a dozen miles from Khotinets and Karachev (north-west of Orel) on a sector that the Germans had not reinforced; but Bagramyan had no striking force to exploit this—although if Col.-Gen. Fedorenko’s suggestions had been adopted when the Orel operation was planned, he would now have had 3rd Guards Tank Army ready to push in. It was Popov who had the tank army, and he now proposed to commit it on 19 July; Rybalko was to crash through to the river Oka, cut off German units to the east and outflank Orel from the south, while 11th Guards and 63rd Army came on from the north and north-east. Rybalko’s tank formations were well supplied with bridging units and even had tanks fitted for an underwater crossing of the Oka. At noon on 18 July Antonov telephoned from the General Staff; to help Rokossovskii’s right wing, the tanks were to be switched to an attack on Stanovoi-Kolodez and Kromy on Stalin’s orders. Sandalov, Popov’s chief of staff, protested that the front was just about to launch the operation to encircle German forces in the Mtsensk and Bolkhov area; Antonov replied that 3rd Tank would still attack Stanovoi-Kolodez, since Bagramyan was now getting 4th Tank Army from Narofominsk and 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps from Medyn as well as 11th Army. On the morning of 19 July, its path previously bombarded by Golovanov’s long-range bomber group, Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army went into action, turning south-west on Stanovoi-Kolodez only to collide with two
Panzer
formations.