Hitler's Panzers (41 page)

The German attack went in at 6:30 AM, July 12. The Soviets jumped off at about the same time. Rotmistrov left a colorful firsthand account of a close-quarters death grapple: tanks engaging at gun-barrel length, hulls exploding, turrets being flung randomly around the battlefield, and tanks burning like torches. He told of the difficulty of determining who was defending and who was attacking. His description set the tone for the reconstruction of a fight costing the Germans as many as 400 tanks, including dozens of Tigers, epitomizing the coming of age of Soviet armor and marking the beginning of the road to Berlin’s Reichstag. Prokhorovka is commonly described as the greatest armored battle in history, the most important victory of the war, the graveyard of Hitler’s panzers.

Prokhorovka’s reality was a good bit less spectacular. Rotmistrov’s attack went in as he described it, wave after wave at high speed. But initially it faced not a similar mass, but two companies, most of whose crews had been in an exhausted sleep as late as 5:30. It seemed a long-standing panzermann’s nightmare come true: a steel avalanche impossible to stop by courage or skill. The Tigers opened fire at 1,800 yards, their optical sights enhancing the skill of their gunners. As the range closed, the Panzer IVs joined in. A good crew could deliver four or five rounds a minute, and the SS were very good. More and more Soviet tanks slewed aside, burst into flame, and exploded, strewing chunks of armor plate and whole turrets across the killing zone. Then, unexpectedly, the leading T-34s drove headlong into one of their own well- camouflaged antitank ditches. Fifteen feet deep, it upended tanks like they were children’s toys. Across a three-mile sector the charge eroded into a maelstrom of small-scale combats. The Germans gave ground and counterattacked, and by the time the seesaw fighting ended in mutual exhaustion around mid-afternoon, who held the initiative in that sector was a matter of opinion and optimism.

The men who fought there interpreted Prokhorovka in mythic terms. Division Das Reich reported a panzer grenadier lieutenant carrying an incendiary grenade that was touched off by a Russian bullet. Divesting himself of trousers and underwear, the officer led his company on to its objective naked from the waist down and gave a new meaning to the concept of risking all for the Führer. A far more familiar Soviet account has two tankers restarting a disabled and burning T-34 to ram a Tiger and send both vehicles up in flames. The commander of the allegedly demolished Tiger reported that he had in fact dodged away at the last minute. The only Leibstandarte Tiger reported as a total loss for July 12 fell to gunfire. The legend nevertheless survives.

The best comparison of material losses, based on official records, lists well over 300 Soviet armored vehicles as having been destroyed, with most of their crews blown up or incinerated. The tank corps listed more dead and missing than wounded: 3,600 out of a strength of around 7,000. Stalin, famous for describing a million deaths as a statistic, was sufficiently enraged at these figures that he initially proposed to court-martial Rotmistrov. German casualties amounted to 522. Their recorded total loss of tanks in the sector was only three—another reflection of the effectiveness of German maintenance and the survivability of even the older models of tanks.

On the left, Totenkopf fought what amounted to a separate battle, holding its ground and then counterattacking successfully enough to lead Rotmistrov to shift some of his by now scarce reserves to stabilize the line. To Hausser’s right, III Panzer Corps spent the day fighting the sound of the guns—and initially fighting panzer style for the only time in the entire Kursk operation. On his own initiative the CO of the 11th Panzer Regiment pushed a tank battalion and one of panzer grenadiers in half-tracks forward through unsuspecting Soviet positions during the night of July 11. With a captured T-34 in the lead, the Germans reached and crossed the Donets by morning—a little over 10 miles from Prokhorovka.

Two years earlier, perhaps even in the high summer of 1942, this might have been the beginning of something. In 1943 it was a dead end. The Russians had always known how to fight. They had learned how to move. And a series of counterattacks made what might once have become a spearhead into a long salient. Rotmistrov’s reinforcements confirmed the result. Breith’s corps spent the day fighting in three directions simultaneously. Its commander described an advance to Prokhorovka as out of the question.

Things in the Prokhorovka sector might well have been far worse, perhaps disastrous, for the Germans had Grossdeutschland and 3rd Panzer not been able to shift left and move south in time to blunt 1st Tank Army’s thrust. Third Panzer Division was down to fewer than 40 tanks and Grossdeutschland was not much better off when, by evening, mutual exhaustion put an end to the fighting. No real hope remained for immediate coordination with the SS. Two divisions had nevertheless averted what was intended as a major breakthrough, and done so smoothly enough to treat the matter as near-routine in their reports.

On July 10 the British and Americans landed in Sicily. It was a long way from Kursk and a long way from Germany. It was also the “second front” not only Hitler but generations of German generals had feared. Almost by reflex the Führer determined it was necessary to reinforce the west with enough armor to cancel the invasion and underwrite Mus solini’s tottering regime. On July 13 he summoned Manstein and Kluge to his Rastenburg headquarters and informed them of his decision to suspend Operation Citadel. Kluge, with his own sector exploding, insisted he needed 9th Army to restore the situation. Manstein, citing the destruction of as many as 1,800 Soviet tanks, insisted his army group could finish off the Russians in the salient if given Hitler’s authorization to commit its three reserve panzer divisions.

Hitler compromised and temporized. Ninth Army was committed in the north. Model was also given command as well of 2nd Panzer Army; Schmidt’s open and sulfurous criticism of the way the war was being run had recently led to his dismissal and an official recommendation that he be confined to a psychiatric hospital.

Army Group South was given a few days to continue its offensive. Breith’s corps did succeed in establishing contact with the SS, but only on July 15, by which time most of the Russian forces in the sector escaped. Manstein remained convinced he could draw Soviet reserves into the kind of mobile battle which maximized the panzers’ advantages and his own talents. In theory perhaps—but all along Manstein’s front Soviet resistance showed no signs of weakening, much less collapsing. On July 17 Hitler ordered the SS Panzers off the line, effectively shutting down Citadel once and for all.

Manstein insisted that this decision threw away a victory. That case might be made in an operational context. But any gains on that level would almost certainly have been promptly swept away by the long-prepared, comprehensive Soviet counteroffensives that decisively shifted the balance of the Russo-German War. For Hitler’s panzers the shining times were over. The next 18 months would see their role, and their nature, change essentially. But before considering that new order of things, it seems appropriate to cast up Citadel’s accounts.

The balance of losses clearly favored the Germans. Far from the hundreds of armored vehicles described in Soviet sources, the total number of write-offs for Model and Manstein combined was around 250. Red Army losses in contrast were so large that they were released only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even now they remain difficult to calculate. The best low figure is around 1,600; the best maximum somewhere short of 2,000. The Germans suffered around 55,000 casualties, including 9,000 dead. Official Soviet losses are given at 177,000, with strong evidence indicating an actual figure of over 300,000.

The discrepancy between Soviet estimates of German armor losses and the actual figures can be ascribed to varying combinations of propaganda, adrenaline, and inexperience. The Soviet Union needed heroes from its ranks—needed them badly. The stress of combat encouraged tank crews to overestimate the effects of their gunnery, in much the same way American heavy bomber crews consistently exaggerated the number of fighters shot down. Inexperience led as well to underestimating the high survivability of German tanks, and their high reparability even after taking several hits.

On the German side, statistics invite comparison to air war in other contexts. As with fighter pilots, a relatively small number of crews scored a disproportionate number of kills. Promotion, decoration, and recognition increasingly accompanied high scores. Some old-timers have said they could not be bothered to notice their number of kills. But contemporary evidence strongly suggests that successful panzer crews kept as careful track as their fighter-pilot contemporaries—and that official records were kept with corresponding care whenever possible.

The statistics speak strongly against conventional arguments that Kursk broke the back of the German panzers. Instead the battle highlighted a shift in technical effectiveness that enhanced the tactical advantages the panzers still retained. The Tigers proved masters of the field wherever they went—at Prokhorovka alone, 15 of them accounted for eight times their number of T-34s. The crews of the often-denigrated Ferdinand described themselves as on the whole “very satisfied” with their vehicles. And the Panther’s failures were generally understood as a mixture of teething troubles, inexperienced crews and commanders, and the fortunes of war. German soldiers were better trained; German combined-arms offensive tactics coped effectively with one of military history’s most sophisticated defensive systems against superior numerical odds. And at seventh and last, the Germans held the field when the fighting ceased.

Why then can Kursk still be considered decisive? Karl-Heinz Frieser, whose research has done much to strip away the veils of legend, stresses the symbolic value of stopping in its tracks the greatest armored attack the Wehrmacht ever mounted—on level terms, without the advantage of weather or soft spots. Whatever remained of the myth of German invincibility—for both sides—faded into the sun and dust and blood of the Kursk salient.

Kursk, however, was more than a psychological experience. The Red Army not only held its ground; the distinguishing features of its developing excellence were the hallmarks of its success: density, redundancy, management, movement. The Soviets concentrated and massed their forces alike on defense and offense. They planned and deployed in integrated layers, on scales the Germans could not hope to match except locally and under special circumstances. Instead of trying to outdo its enemy in flexibility and initiative, the Red Army was learning to master control—arguably a better practical response to the increasing scale and pace of mobile warfare than the German “mission approach, ” whose emphasis on individual initiative easily led to cross purposes against a competent enemy. Finally Soviet formations from regiments to field armies were learning to move—not to maneuver tactically, German-style, but to get from place to place expeditiously and in order, arriving ready to fight. Rotmistrov’s Guardsmen offer the best examples, but Citadel as a whole provides no significant examples of Red Army units victimized by quicker German reaction time. Rotmistrov’s narrative of events may be part propaganda device, part personal gasconade. But it’s not bragging when it’s backed up. At Kursk the Red Army earned and paid for the right to tell its war stories to anyone willing to listen.

DAS DEUTSCHE REICH und der Zweite Weltkrieg
trenchantly describes the twelve months from the end of Kursk to the Red Army’ s summer offensive of 1944 as “the forgotten year.” That period featured continuous fighting from Leningrad to the Black Sea, on scales surpassing those of 1941-42 and with losses far larger, especially on the Soviet side. The story of the panzers becomes correspondingly difficult to reconstruct as the divisions bloodied at Kursk were scattered to bolster resistance in a dozen sectors.

The German retreat from Leningrad and the successful, albeit temporary, stabilization of the northern front in the Baltic states owed little yet much to the army’s panzers. They were stretched too thin elsewhere to provide major assistance to the hard-pressed Landser. But the Red Army in the north was still learning its craft. Three Tigers by themselves played a vital role in holding a reestablished defense line around Narva, Estonia. A panzer division that arrived with only three dozen tanks was the spearhead of a counterattack that plugged a critical gap between two German armies. And the buccaneering assault gunners kept appearing where they were most needed, shifting from sector to sector and division to division to shore up infantrymen as outgunned as they were outnumbered. By October one battalion recorded a thousand official kills.

Part of the panzer gap was filled by the Waffen SS. By the end of 1942 the army had essentially decided the small units of foreigners it had managed to raise were more trouble than they were worth. Heinrich Himmler, always on the lookout to enhance the scope of his ramshackle empire within an empire, took them in. In early 1943 he activated III (Germanic) Panzer Corps, to include the Vikings and a new division eventually designated the 11th SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier Division (Northland).

Had Hitler not intervened its honorific might have been “Varan gian,” a reference to the Scandinavian guard troops of the medieval Byzantine empire and a reflection of Himmler’s desire to base the division on Aryan volunteers. In fact Northland absorbed most of the remaining foreign legions—including, for a while, a 50-man British detachment—and made up its strength with “ethnic Germans” from outside the expanded state and “Reich Germans” from territories annexed during the war. Northland saw its first action and made its first bones in the no-quarter partisan fighting in Yugoslavia. In November the division and III SS Panzer Corps were sent to the Leningrad sector. When it proved impossible to withdraw Viking from the fighting in the south, the corps was fleshed out by the ostensibly Dutch SS Volunteer PanzerGrenadier Brigade Nederland. Despite having only a single tank battalion plus some assault guns, it played an important role in the successful defense of Narva over the winter of 1943-44.