Furthermore, 2,200 anti-tank and 2,500 anti-personnel mines had been laid across every single mile of the front, a density four times that which had defended Stalingrad and six times that of Moscow. In all, 503,993 anti-tank mines and 439,348 anti-personnel mines were laid by the Red Army prior to the battle of Kursk. Lieutenant Artur Schütte, a tank commander in the Grossdeutschland Division, was pardonably exaggerating when he said that the minefields he had to cross were laid so densely ‘that it would have been impossible to put even a medal between them’.18 Mellenthin recorded that the Russians could lay 30,000 mines in two or three days and that ‘it was no rare thing to have to lift 40,000 mines a day in the sector of a German Corps’.19 This was laborious, time-consuming and dangerous work for the German engineer corps but vitally necessary, though it could never be 100 per cent successful.
The hundred days of waiting before the German attack also gave the Red Army plenty of time to build miniature fortresses, reconnoitre the battlefield, gauge the depths of fords and strengths of bridges, and to train day and night. By the time they had finished, noted the chief of staff of XLVIII Panzer Corps, they had ‘converted the Kursk front into another Verdun’.20 Furthermore, Mellenthin complained that the terrain in the southern sector across which his 300 tanks and 60 assault guns had to attack was not good tank country, with ‘numerous valleys, small copses, irregularly laid out villages and some rivers and brooks; of these the Pena [river] ran with a swift current between two banks.’ Walking the battlefields of Kursk and taking the journey known as the Death Ride of the Fourth Panzer Army alert one to the fact that Mellenthin slightly exaggerated the ‘valleys’, which are little more than undulations. As he himself admitted elsewhere, ‘It was not good “tank country”, but it was by no means “tank proof”.’21 The ground rises slightly to the north between Belgorod and Kursk, further aiding the defender.
It was an unusual luxury for the Russians to be able to prepare to this extent. ‘At the beginning of the war everything was done in a hurry,’ commented a Red Army tank captain, ‘and time was always lacking. Now we go calmly into action.’22 The Luftwaffe’s aerial reconnaissance, even allowing for Russian camouflage, ought to have been enough for Hitler to have stuck to his original instincts and look for somewhere else to fight, especially as Manstein hardened his view against the attack as time went on. Yet the all-powerful ‘Greatest Warlord of All Time’, as Goebbels’ propaganda machine was still describing Hitler, seems to have been persuaded by Keitel, Zeitzler and Kluge to set H-Hour for dawn on 4 July. ‘Independence Day for America’, complained Mellenthin afterwards, ‘and the beginning of the end for Germany.’ As a tank purist and theorist, Mellenthin could not bear to see the way that the Wehrmacht was fighting to Russian strengths, in the same way that had led to Stalingrad, rather than to its own, in the way that had led to the sweeping victories of 1941. ‘Instead of seeking to create conditions in which manoeuvre would be possible,’ he complained, ‘by strategic withdrawals or surprise attacks in quiet sectors, the German Supreme Council could think of nothing better than to fling our magnificent Panzer divisions against Kursk, which had now become the strongest fortress in the world.’23 It was as though they had chosen deliberately to attack the Maginot Line head-on in 1940, rather than skirting around it. Like Napoleon, who by the time of Borodino no longer cared about the lives of his men, too many decision-makers at OKW – principally of course Hitler himself – had given up worrying about how to husband troop numbers. A Materialschlacht (war of attrition) was precisely what the Germans had to avoid after Stalingrad, but it was what they got with their constant postponements of Zitadelle. Before Hitler kept putting off the attack, Kursk was an undefended town set in hundreds of miles of virgin countryside; by the time it took place it was indeed a citadel.
*
The ‘bad news’ of the death of the Polish Prime Minister General Sikorski as well as his liaison officer, the Tory MP Victor Cazalet, in a plane crash at Gibraltar was broken to the War Cabinet by Churchill on 5 July 1943. Portal reported that the Czech pilot was still alive, but it was ‘impossible to say at the moment what happened’ beyond the fact that it was a ‘very serious loss to Poland and to us’. Churchill said it was the ‘Moment [for the Poles] to try and patch it up with the R[ussians]’, but the Minister Resident in the Middle East, the Australian diplomat Richard Casey, thought General Anders, though a good soldier, had ‘no political sense’ and so was unlikely to do this. ‘I’ll say something in the House,’ said Churchill, ‘quite out of the ordinary.’24 The fact that the War Cabinet privately thought Sikorski’s death a blow implies that the conspiracy theory that SIS had assassinated him (along with a Conservative MP) is absurd.
‘Soldiers of the Reich!’ read the Führer’s message to his troops for Zitadelle on Monday, 5 July 1943. ‘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.’25 Although probing attacks did begin on the afternoon of 4 July, the main German assault in the south was not finally unleashed until 05.00 the next day, and in the north half an hour later. The Russians had already heard from a Czech deserter from an engineering battalion of LII Army Corps that all ranks had been issued with a five-day schnapps and food ration, so the Germans did not even enjoy the advantage of tactical surprise. The Lucy spy ring operating from Switzerland had also furnished the Stavka with reasonably accurate reports of German capabilities and intentions, as did Ultra decrypts from Bletchley Park delivered in a suitably opaque form by the British Ambassador to Moscow. Vatutin could thus further disrupt the opening stage of Zitadelle by ordering a bombardment of the areas where the Germans were forming up, just prior to the assault.
The German attacks above and below the salient were almost mirror images of each other. In the north, Model’s Ninth Army drove southwards from Orel towards Kursk on a 35-mile-wide front against Rokossovsky’s Central Front. In the south, Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army attacked northwards from Belgorod towards Kursk on a 30-mile-wide front against Vatutin’s Voronezh Front. Zhukov decided deliberately to allow the attack to get well under way before counter-attacking its exposed flanks. The German Army elsewhere in Russia had been denuded of armour in order to provide the seventeen Panzer divisions necessary to spearhead this formidable fifty-division assault, leaving Hoth’s Panzer army ‘the strongest force ever before put under a single commander in the German Army’.26 Yet their hopes for victory due to the combination of Stuka dive-bombing, fast tank advances and close infantry support – Blitzkrieg, in effect – failed to take into account the fact that by July 1943 their enemies had finally learnt all about the tactics that had proved so devastating against Poland in 1939, France in 1940 and Russia herself in 1941–2. Furthermore, one of the essential elements of Blitzkrieg – surprise – was entirely missing from the mix.
Because the Red Army had learnt to fight on even when penetrated by Panzer formations, the Germans were forced to adopt a Panzerkeil (armoured wedge) tactic of having the heaviest tanks, such as Tigers and Panthers, in the middle of a formation with the others, such as Mark IVs (by then the majority of Panzers), on the wings, supported by infantry, grenades and mortars behind the centre of the wedge. The Russians responded to Panzerkeil tactics with what the Germans termed Pakfront, where up to ten Russian guns welded into a single unit would concentrate all their fire on one tank before moving on to the next. ‘Neither minefields nor Pakfronts could be detected until the first tank blew up,’ recalled Mellenthin, ‘or the first anti-tank gun opened fire.’27 Red Army mortar operators were particularly feared: a skilled one could put a third bomb into the air before the first and second ones landed.
The sheer numbers involved, as well as its crucial outcome, make Kursk a remarkable battle. The Germans had around 900,000 troops, 2,700 tanks and self-propelled guns, 10,000 artillery pieces and 2,600 aircraft.28 Facing them, Rokos
sovsky, Vatutin and Konev had around 1.8 million men, 3,800 tanks and self-propelled guns, 20,000 artillery pieces and 2,100 aircraft.29 Kursk therefore fully justifies its popular designation as the greatest tank battle in history. Despite their two-to-one superiority in numbers of troops, it was nonetheless a terrifying sight for the Red Army when the German tanks, in Alan Clark’s words, ‘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 Donets valley’. (The heat inside the tanks in Russia’s summer weather was stifling.) Hoth deployed no fewer than nine of the best Panzer divisions in the German Army – from west to east the 3rd Panzer, Gross Deutschland, 11th Panzer, SS Leibstandarte (Lifeguard) Adolf Hitler, SS Das Reich, SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head), 6th Panzer, 19th Panzer and 7th Panzer – all across a mere 30 miles of front.
‘The whole front was a girdle of flashes,’ recalled a Tiger tank radio operator Sergeant Imboden; ‘it seemed as if we were driving into a ring of flame… We thanked the Fates for the strength of our good Krupp steel.’ When German tanks were disabled by mines or by special Red Army squads hiding in slit trenches in the middle of minefields, their crews were ordered to stay inside and give covering fire for the rest of the battle. This was a virtual death sentence for them, as their becalmed tanks were almost always hit only a matter of minutes afterwards. Those Waffen-SS Panzer crewmen who did get out immediately ripped the death’s-head insignia off their uniforms, as those wearing it were almost never allowed the luxury of being taken prisoner.
Although the long, slim 76.2mm Russian anti-tank gun could knock out a Tiger’s frontal armour only at point-blank range, it was effective against the Mark IVs, and anyway there was plenty of point-blank-range fighting at Kursk. Mines accounted for many German tanks, and there was only so much the Panzergrenadiere – who fought throughout the night – could do against well-entrenched Russian anti-tank groups that no longer turned and ran as in earlier days. As Konstantin Simonov recorded in his novel Days and Nights, Red Army veterans had learnt by experience that ‘Under mortar fire it is no more dangerous to move forward than to stay where you are. They knew that tanks most often kill soldiers who are running away from them, and that German automatic rifle fire from two hundred metres away is always intended more to frighten than to kill.’30
Although Hoth broke through the first line of Soviet defence on the first day of the assault, fire from the second and strongest line had been pre-ranged and self-propelled guns had been dug in so that their hulls were pointing downwards, the best defensive positions for fire. Between 6 and 7 July, Hoth’s force was reduced in the fierce fighting from 865 operative vehicles to 621.31 Lieutenant Schütte complained to his commander after capturing a village only to take heavy losses from pre-registered artillery fire that ‘Having driven Ivan out, we should have withdrawn ourselves and let him bomb the place out of existence. Then we could have moved the armour forward relatively safely.’32 This is what Schütte did successfully at a hamlet the following day, though losing several tanks to mines because there was ‘no time for laborious mine-clearing’. Schütte recalled this period before the Soviet counter-attack as being characterized by a desolate battlefield, with ‘miles of devastated corn, dozens of destroyed tanks and dead bodies swelling obscenely in the summer heat’. On one occasion his company commander looked up in a small copse to see the face of what he thought was an enemy sniper. He fired a full clip of his pistol into what turned out to be ‘a bodiless head, which had been blown off by an artillery blast and tossed up into the tree, where it had lodged’.33
After a week of continual fighting, Hoth could boast only a rectangular salient 9 miles deep by 15 across in the Voronezh Front’s line, and no immediate prospect of breaking through to Kursk itself. As Alan Clark noted of the Waffen-SS: ‘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.’34 On 9 July the Soviets went on to the counter-offensive, having drawn in the Germans across their defences in a way most expensive to the Wehrmacht, with a barrage so long and heavy that Schütte said it felt like ‘a continual earthquake’. Meanwhile, in the northern part of the salient, Model’s Ninth Army managed only to penetrate the 6 miles to Ponyri, and had ground to a halt by the night of 11 July, with the Soviets counter-attacking the next day. A major problem overtook the vast Ferdinand assault gun, which XLVII Panzer Corps had hoped would be a battle-winning weapon. Although they had very thick armour-plating, these monsters had no machine guns, and were therefore defenceless against Russian soldiers who would bravely run up to them, board them with flame-throwers and incinerate everyone inside through the engine’s ventilation shafts. Guderian had spotted that using Ferdinands to fight infantry was akin, in his words, to ‘going quail-shooting with cannons’, but the requisite changes had not been made.35 In the first two days of fighting at Kursk, forty of the seventy Ferdinands were destroyed, and, because they failed to silence Russian machine-gun emplacements, Lieutenant-General Helmuth Weidling’s infantry could not support those that did break through. It was a classic example of a foreseeable design defect leading to disaster, and the assault guns had to be refitted with machine guns before being sent to Italy to oppose the Anzio landings.
The Russian assault against the Orel salient to the north of the Kursk bulge, Operation Kutuzov, led by General Marian Popov’s Bryansk Front and General Vasily Sokolovsky’s West Front, which Zhukov had held off until the most opportune moment, forced Kluge to withdraw four divisions from the spearhead of the Ninth Panzer Army, thereby effectively condemning its chances of breaking through. Zhukov was thus in the enviable position one week into Zitadelle of having blocked Model in the north and slowed Hoth in the south, and so was able to send an elite part of his uncommitted mobile reserve, the 793 tanks of General Pavel Rotmistrov’s Fifth Guards Tank Army, into action against XLVIII Panzer Corps and SS-General Paul Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps, which were working their laborious way across the Donets river to the rail junction at Prokhorovka, hoping to outflank Vatutin and find a way to Kursk north-eastwards. The crossing of the Donets by Lieutenant-General Werner Kempf’s detachment with two Panzer corps has been described as ‘the only element of surprise in the entire operation’.36 ‘Success at Prokhorovka’, writes an historian of Zitadelle, ‘would ensure the encirclement and destruction of the two main Soviet groupings in the southern half of the salient and open a new road to Kursk, bypassing the stronghold of Oboyan to the east.’37
Yet motoring towards Prokhorovka just as fast as the Germans was Rotmistrov, who vividly recalled the first day of his army’s 200-mile drive up to the front line:
It grew hot as early as 08.00 hours and clouds of dust billowed up. By midday the dust rose in thick clouds, settling in a solid layer on roadside bushes, grain fields, tanks and trucks. The dark red disc of the sun was hardly visible through the grey shroud of dust. Tanks, self-propelled guns and tractors (which towed the artillery), armoured personnel carriers and trucks were advancing in an unending flow. The faces of the soldiers were darkened with dust and exhaust fumes. It was intolerably hot. Soldiers were tortured by thirst and their shirts, wet with sweat, stuck to their bodies.38
It was about to get an awful lot hotter.
It was the eight-hour tank battle of Prokhorovka on Monday, 12 July that was described by Mellenthin as the ‘veritable death ride of the 4th Panzer Army’. The army had begun Zitadelle with 916 mission-capable vehicles, but was down to 530 by 11 July. The II SS Panzer Corps meanwhile had dropped from 470 to about 250. The numbers of tanks involved in the battle of Prokhorovka is a complex historical problem, as sources differ, politics and propaganda become involved, and the geographical extent of the battlefield is disputed, but the best estimate is that 600 Soviet tanks fought 250 German.39 If one includes the units in the areas of Prokhorovka and Jakovlevo, not all of which saw action that particular day, the numbers swell to 900 Ger
man (including about 100 Tigers) versus just under 900 Russian, which does indeed make it the largest tank battle in history.40 Whereas the Germans had been fighting for a week, found it hard to refuel under fire and were having engineering problems with the Panther tanks’ propensity to break down, the Russians were fresh into battle, and as well as T-34/76 tanks they deployed the SU-85, a self-propelled gun with an 85mm armour-busting shell built on the chassis of the T-34. Fighting with one basic make of tank meant spare parts were far easier to find, whereas the Germans had five different types – the Panzers Marks III and IV, the Panther, Ferdinand and Tiger – with all the concomitant supply problems which that implied. Many Panther tanks at Kursk ‘went into action belching flame from unproven engine systems’, and others broke down with transmission problems.41 In all, as many as 160 tanks of the Fourth Panzer Army simply broke down on the battlefield, which with German output numbering only 330 tanks a month – much less than the 1,000 Speer had promised the Führer – was disastrous, and a far cry from the much lauded Teutonic industrial miracle of wartime and post-war myth.
A vast dust cloud was flung up by the hundreds of tanks and self-propelled guns on both sides as they clashed head-on at the rail junction at Prokhorovka, a battlefield of only 20 square miles. ‘We found ourselves taking on a seemingly inexhaustible mass of enemy armour,’ recalled Sergeant Imbolden; ‘never have I received such an overwhelming impression of Russian strength and numbers as on that day. The clouds of dust made it difficult to get help from the Luftwaffe, and soon many of the T-34s had broken past our screen and were streaming like rats all over the old battlefield.’42 The T-34s and some KVs needed to get into close quarters as soon as possible with the larger, more powerful German tanks – especially considering the 88mm gun on the Tiger – and there are accounts of Russian tanks deliberately ramming into German ones.43 ‘Once at close range with scores of machines churning about in individual engagements,’ writes John Erickson, ‘front and side armour was more easily penetrated, when the tank ammunition would explode, hurling turrets yards away from shattered hulls or sending up great spurts of fire.’44
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