Although the SS troops were grateful for the ground support provided them by the Luftwaffe, they also had to contend with a growing threat from the Red Air Force, making the divisional antiaircraft units all the more important. During the night the waiting German troops had to contend with the Polikarpov Po-2. The aircraft’s distinctive engine sound gave it the name of the “flying sewing machine,” and while its tiny bomb load caused few casualties, its nocturnal presence over German lines was a constant irritant. By day they faced the formidable Ilyushin Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft, whose armored underfuselage made it extremely hard to shoot down.
Werner Volker, an antiaircraft gunner in the Totenkopf Division, recalled in the days just before the offensive that “as soon as the first rays of sun touched the ground you heard the humming of the Ilyushins that came over to attack our infantry and artillery positions.” Firing mixed clips of armor-piercing and explosive ammunition, Volkner and his 3.7cm gun crew took on the enemy aircraft: “Although it was the objective of the gunners to knock the enemy planes out of the sky, we were quite happy if we managed to divert their flight away from their targets, thereby protecting the infantry and artillery positions.”6
As the soldiers waited for the order to advance, the weather became increasingly hot and sultry, with a threat of thunderstorms. When the rainstorms materialized, they were sufficiently heavy to make the going difficult for all vehicles, tracked as well as wheeled. Otherwise, the terrain was nearly ideal for armored warfare: open, rolling steppe, across which were scattered small wooden villages that could offer little resistance to the advancing panzers.
On the night of 4–5 July 1943 SS combat engineers crept into the Soviet front line, removing mines and dismantling defenses in preparation for the attack at dawn. The strike element of the German forces in the South comprised XLVIII Panzer Corps on the left (which included the Grossdeutschland Division and a brigade of the new Panther tanks), Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps in the center, and III Panzer Corps on the right. The three corps were deployed in line, forming the densest concentration of German armor yet seen on the battlefield. The SS contribution comprised 343 tanks and 195 self-propelled assault guns.7
The troops of the three SS division had received Hitler’s order that this was to be a battle of supreme importance. On the morning of 5 July the SS Panzer Corps broke into the Soviet lines, with, at this point, Leibstandarte on the left, Das Reich in the center, and Totenkopf on the right.
Supported by an artillery barrage and dive-bomber attacks, the SS infantry crossed over no-man’s-land into the first Soviet defensive line. Among the advancing infantry was Hans Huber, part of a flamethrower detachment in “Deutschland’s” II Battalion. He recalled the fight for the village of Beresov:
The enemy artillery had forced us to take cover. Soon we knew from the Very lights being fired that our No. 2 Platoon had gained a foothold in the village. Section commander Kiesel grew impatient. He ordered me to get the flamethrower ready and we worked our way forward into the trenches ahead of us. I fired a burst of flame as we approached every zig-zag in the trench and at every enemy strong point. It was a strange feeling to serve this destructive weapon and it was terrifying to see the flames eat their way forward and envelop the Russian defenders. Soon I was covered black from head to foot from the fuel oil and my face was burnt from the flames which bounced back off the trench walls. I could hardly see. The enemy could not fight against flamethrowers and so we made good progress taking many prisoners.8
Once the infantry and supporting arms had cleared a path, the panzers were committed to the battle. A Tiger crewman from Das Reich recalled the attack:
Unnoticed, we had assembled at the bottom of the valley, the Tigers flanked by medium and light companies [Panzer IVs and IIIs]. Our field glasses searched the horizon, spying into the smoke of combat that covered the bunker heights like a veil of mourning. The engines howled. We loaded the guns and slowly the heavy panzers rolled onto the battleground. After 200 meters the first enemy Pak fired. With a single shot we blew it out of the ground. We rolled over the abandoned enemy trenches and waved from our open hatches to our brave infantrymen. They were enjoying a short rest on the heights they had just stormed.9
The SS armor pushed forward in large armored wedge (Panzerkeil) formations, designed to smash through the enemy lines. The emphasis was not on subtle tactics but on raw battering power. The Tiger tank had a key role here, able to destroy almost anything in its path yet remain virtually invulnerable to T-34s and antitank guns except from the flanks or rear (land mines were a different matter, knocking out many Tigers). The fighting at Kursk was also an opportunity for the Tiger commanders to demonstrate their growing skills; the tactical knowledge gained in the battle for Kharkov was put to good use.
On the first day of action the commander of Leibstandarte’s heavy (Tiger) company, Hauptsturmführer Heinz Kling, and his gunner Sturmann Warmbrunn were responsible for knocking out four T-34s and nineteen antitank guns, as well as destroying seven bunkers and ten fixed flamethrowers. Even allowing for the fact that claims for knocked-out tanks and other vehicles were exaggerated by all sides (similar to those made by airmen for aircraft destroyed), the Waffen-SS wreaked carnage among the Red Army’s armored units. Untersturmführer Michael Wittmann, a Tiger commander who had gained armored experience in Leibstandarte’s assault-gun battalion, claimed a score of eight tanks and seven antitank guns on 5 July. Combining bravery with meticulous attention to detail and a superb eye for the battlefield, Wittmann would become Germany’s most famous panzer commander.
In terms of individual exploits during the battle, arguably the most extraordinary was that of Leibstandarte’s Unterscharführer Franz Staudegger on 8 July. As the advance pushed on northward, Staudegger’s Tiger had been left behind in the village of Teterevino because of mechanical problems, but as the vehicle was undergoing repairs he was told of an advance by fifty to sixty Soviet tanks against a position held by Das Reich’s “Deutschland” Regiment. Despite having only just assumed the role of tank commander, the twenty-year-old Staudegger hurried the repairs and immediately set off in pursuit of the Soviet force.
The lone Tiger sighted the enemy and in a series of short, deadly engagements—lasting two hours—knocked out seventeen T-34s. The Red Army advance faltered, and its tanks retreated to regroup. Fearlessly, Staudegger followed and resumed the attack. When he had run out of armor-piercing rounds, he continued to score hits using high-explosive shells. Only when all his ammunition was exhausted did Staudegger slowly return to his lines—and the cheers of the “Deutschland” infantry who had witnessed the battle. All told he had knocked out twenty-two Soviet tanks and brought the enemy advance to a standstill. He became the first soldier in the Tiger company to win the Knight’s Cross.10
The Waffen-SS panzer divisions had made good progress during the opening phase of the offensive, breaking through two of the three belts of the Red Army’s first defensive line. Although progress was not as swift as Hausser and Hoth had originally expected, it certainly alarmed the Soviet commanders, who began to order up their reserves. On 8 July the SS Panzer Corps paused, mainly to allow the other panzer corps to keep up with their advance; III Panzer Corps was particularly slow in coming up to protect the SS right flank.
On 9 July the SS troops weathered a storm of Soviet counterattacks, while at the same time continuing to push forward. The fighting was intense and relentless. A battle report from the 10th Company of Das Reich’s “Der Führer” Regiment illustrated the bravery of its men. When the company commander was put out of action, Untersturmführer Krueger took over and despite being wounded on two occasions refused to give up the fight: “A rifle bullet struck his pocket and ignited an incendiary grenade he was carrying. Krueger tore off his trousers and underpants and continued to fight on dressed only in a jacket, shirt and with his lower limbs completely naked. He fought at the head of the company until the object was gained.”11
From the ninth onward,
Das Reich took on a more defensive position on the right flank of the panzer corps’ advance, while Totenkopf was redeployed to the left flank, its direction of advance due north. At the end of a day of hard fighting Standartenführer Karl Ullrich’s III Battalion (1st Panzergrenadier Regiment) had forced a crossing over the River Psel, the last natural obstacle before Oboyan and then the city of Kursk itself. But to Ullrich’s dismay, his men were forced to hold position as they waited for the bridging equipment to be slowly brought forward to allow the heavy units to cross the river.
Meanwhile, the Leibstandarte Division—now in the corps’ center—had slogged its way forward in a northeasterly direction with the intention of capturing Prokhorovka on 10 July. Heavy rain and stiffening Soviet resistance checked the advance, as they did on the following day. On 12 July Hausser mobilized his three divisions so that both Totenkopf and Das Reich were directed to support Leibstandarte’s attack on Prokhorovka. On the Soviet side, the concern at the gains made by the SS panzers led to the deployment of their main strategic reserves, which included the powerful Fifth Guards Tank Army. On 12 July the Soviet tank force arrived at Prokhorovka just as the Germans were launching their assault. The result was a devastating collision of armor. Although the forces involved were considerably less than originally believed (Soviet sources vastly inflating German numbers), the battle for Prokhorovka was one of the great tank encounters of World War II.12
The SS troops were shocked by the force of the Soviet onslaught but recovered with remarkable swiftness. Johannes Bräuer, a driver in Jochen Peiper’s half-track battalion, described the opening of the attack:
I had been around since the beginning of the war in Soviet Russia, from Zhitomir to Rostov, but never had I experienced anything like the hell of Prokhorovka. It all happened with such a small space of time that one hardly knew what to make of it. In a flash we were wedged in by T-34s, firing in all directions, ramming each other because so many were exploding and burning. We had limpet mines but no Panzerfäuste [shoulder-fired rocket launchers], and T-34s kept coming over the ridge, racing down the slope through our readiness position and tumbling over and over in the anti-tank ditch.13
Many German witnesses to the battle remarked on the clumsy and often desperate tank handling of their opponents. This was a consequence of the brief and inadequate training given to Soviet tank crews and the absence of a proper radio communication system, compounded by their orders to close with the enemy as swiftly as possible to minimize the long-range superiority of German tank gunnery. But as the Red Army T-34s raced wildly toward German lines, they were destroyed en masse. Leibstandarte bore the brunt of the fighting against the Fifth Guards Tank Army, whose vastly superior numbers enabled them to eventually work their way around the SS positions and close with the Germans. But even here, they were no match for their quick-witted opponents. Rudolf von Ribbentrop—commander of Leibstandarte’s 7th Panzer Company—described his unit’s reaction to close combat with Soviet armor:
As we waited to see if further enemy tanks were going to appear, I looked all around as was my habit. What I saw left me speechless. From beyond the shallow rise about 150 to 200 meters in front of me appeared fifteen, then thirty, then forty tanks. Finally, there were too many to count. The T-34s were rolling towards us at high speed, carrying mounted infantry. Soon the first shell was on the way and with the impact a T-34 began to burn. It was only fifty to seventy meters from us. The avalanche of enemy tanks rolled straight towards us: tank after tank!
We had only one slim chance: we must remain constantly in motion. A stationary tank would be immediately recognized by the foe as an enemy and fired upon, because all the tanks were rolling at high speed across the terrain. At the repaired bridge over the anti-tank ditch our tanks and anti-tank guns fired at the onrushing enemy. I had managed to roll into cover behind a knocked-out T-34. From there we took part in the battle against the enemy tanks. Burning T-34s drove into and over one another. It was a total inferno of fire and smoke. The entire slope was soon littered with burning enemy tanks.14
The ferocious combat in very a confined area gave the battle for Prokhorovka its infernal quality, encouraging subsequent writers to develop the mythology of “the greatest tank battle in history.” Soviet losses were certainly massive, possibly as many as 650 armored vehicles across the whole front; postbattle accounts record Hausser coming forward and using chalk marks to list the destroyed tanks (93) littering the battlefield in front of Leibstandarte’s position. Recent research suggests that German losses were surprisingly light, perhaps as few as 70 tanks among all three divisions of the SS Panzer Corps.15
Yet despite the disparity in tank casualties, the fighting on 12 July had brought the German attack in the South to a halt. The three panzer corps had simply run out of steam, while continuing enemy resistance made significant further progress almost impossible. What reserves the Germans possessed were held back to cover the impending Red Army offensive due in the southern Ukraine. The situation in the north of the Kursk salient was woeful; not only had Model’s advance been held, but Soviet counterattacks were also forcing his troops back with worryingly high losses.
If the tactical and operational aspects of the battle were a cause of concern for the Wehrmacht, then the wider strategic picture was even worse. On 10 July the Allies had launched their offensive against Italy, with successful amphibious and airborne landings in Sicily by U.S. and British forces. Hitler decided he needed to buttress his wavering ally and chose the SS Panzer Corps for this task, despite the fact that it was hotly engaged in a full-scale battle hundreds of miles away from Italy.
On 12 July Hitler told his generals that he was going to call off the offensive. Manstein protested that his forces were close to a breakthrough and asked for a continuation. Hitler briefly wavered, but on the following day he confirmed his original decision and the Wehrmacht went over to the defensive. On 16 July the German formations began to withdraw to their start lines, and on the seventeenth the SS Panzer Corps was ordered to disengage from the front in preparation for a transfer to Italy.
Although Hitler was to bitterly criticize his subordinates for the failure to achieve victory at Kursk, the performance of the SS Panzer Corps in achieving the deepest penetration of any German formation earned his fulsome praise. The SS troops certainly enjoyed the advantages of good weapons and equipment, but their greatest strength was the quality of their leaders at all levels and the amazing esprit de corps of the men.
THE BATTLE OF Kursk was the first major German offensive that failed to achieve a breakthrough, a consequence of inadequate resources and unimaginative strategy. Whereas in the past the Wehrmacht had gained success through a policy of concentration of force at an enemy weak point while using the cover of surprise, at Kursk it was the opposite, with a concentration of force at an enemy strongpoint without the slightest element of surprise.
Kursk was not the turning point in the war that some have claimed, but instead served to confirm the already obvious material weaknesses of the Wehrmacht in the East. The one significant direct outcome of the battle was the passing of the strategic initiative to the Soviet Union. After the failure at Kursk, the Wehrmacht was forced on to the defensive, fighting a vast, continuous rearguard action that would end only with Germany’s surrender in May 1945.
Hitler’s order to send the SS Panzer Corps to Italy was contested by his army commanders, who correctly argued that it should remain on the Eastern Front. To a plea made by Field Marshal Kluge, Hitler replied, “It is a very difficult decision, but I have no choice. Down there, I can only accomplish something with elite formations that are politically close to Fascism. I must have units down there which come under a political banner.”16
Hitler’s concerns over the political reliability of his Italian ally proved well founded: on 25 July Mussolini was dismissed from office by the Italian Fascist Grand Council and placed under arrest, while secret negotiations were instigated with the Allies to end Italy’s participation in
the war. But Hitler was wrong to doubt the Wehrmacht; when the Italian government announced an armistice on 8 September, German Army and Luftwaffe units swiftly and ruthlessly took control of the country with minimal assistance from those under the “political banner.”
Hitler’s plans were anyway thwarted by the Soviet summer offensive. The first (subsidiary) blow came in the southern Ukraine against Isjum and along the River Mius position in mid-July. Totenkopf and Das Reich were immediately sent to shore up the wavering front line, to be joined by Wiking, which had previously been held in reserve. From 30 July to the end of August, the SS formations managed to slow the Soviet offensive. Meanwhile, only Leibstandarte was transferred to Italy, entraining from 27 July onward.
Having helped stabilize the line in the southern Ukraine, the SS divisions were rushed back to the Belgorod area in an attempt to hold the main Soviet offensive directed from the Kursk salient southwest toward the River Dnieper. The Waffen-SS divisions had now become the Wehrmacht’s fire brigade, moved from one crisis sector to the next. In a reprise of the struggle around Kharkov earlier in the year, the SS units fought desperately to prevent the Red Army from crossing the Dnieper. Despite Hitler’s order that Kharkov (once again) be held at all costs, the beleaguered German commander of the city, General Kempf, ordered a withdrawal on 22 August. Das Reich and Totenkopf—and the army’s Grossdeutschland Division—helped supervise a retreat during September to the Dnieper Line, the barrier protecting German-held western Ukraine.
While the SS divisions were battling on the Eastern Front, Leibstandarte was assigned priority rail transport to Innsbruck in Austria, before crossing over the Alps into Italy. As it left the Ukraine the division had handed over its armored vehicles and other heavy weapons to Das Reich and Totenkopf, helping those divisions make good the losses suffered at Kharkov and Kursk. While in Italy, Leibstandarte was rearmed with heavy equipment that included a Panther-tank battalion and sufficient Tiger tanks to begin construction of a new Tiger-tank battalion that would operate at corps level to support both Leibstandarte and the new Hitlerjugend Division.
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