Ostkrieg (69 page)

In all, the magnitude of the Soviet debacle at Prokhorovka was breathtaking: one Russian tally, admittedly incomplete, put the total losses at 235, while the chief of staff of the Fifth Guards Tank Army reported the loss between 12 and 16 July of 334 tanks, virtually all on 12–13 July.
A preliminary count by the Second SS Panzer Corps on the evening of the twelfth showed 244 enemy tanks put out of action, with another 249 counted the next day, for an astounding total of 493 losses. Rotmistrov himself admitted that 420 tanks had been put out of action, although 112 of those had been reparable. Even if we settle on the smallest figure, 235, it dwarfs the German losses, which were not the 400 of legend but only 3. Far from being decimated, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich actually gained tank strength. On 11 July, the two units reported a total of 186 operational armored vehicles, while, on the thirteenth, after the Battle of Prokhorovka, the number was 190. For all of Citadel, in fact, the Second SS Panzer Corps suffered only 33 total losses of tanks and assault guns, while it lost no Panthers for the simple reason that it had none. Nor did the Russians destroy 70 Tigers; on 12 July, the corps had only 15 operational Tigers, of which only 5 fought at Prokhorovka. The losses of men were equally lopsided, the Soviets suffering fifteen hundred dead and missing to the Germans' ninety-seven. At the end of the day, the Germans controlled the battlefield, which accounted for their astonishingly low total losses since they were able to tow disabled tanks to repair shops. They had not only repulsed the fanatic Soviet attack but also regained all their lost ground. Despite the immense sacrifice of men and tanks and the fanatic spirit of the Russians that shook even many SS troopers, the Soviet attack at Prokhorovka had been a complete disaster. The mood was clearly triumphant at Army Group South headquarters as Manstein prepared to resume the offensive the next day.
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The climax to Manstein's efforts, however, never materialized. His victory at Prokhorovka took place against a backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating situation elsewhere. The Soviet breakthrough at Orel threatened not only the encirclement of the Ninth Army but also, if left unchecked, the destruction of Army Group Center. More importantly, Hitler's worst fear, and the key reason he had delayed the Citadel offensive, had now come true: on 10 July, Anglo-American forces had invaded Sicily, and the two-front war had become a reality. Both Hitler and the OKW had worried from the start about throwing away the valuable German tank reserves for limited gains at Kursk, with the Führer, fearful of a front near the German border, determined to take immediate action in case of a threat in the Mediterranean. By the twelfth, it had become apparent that neither Sicily nor Italy could be held without significant German aid, triggering his reflexive decision to transfer strong panzer forces to Southern Europe. For the first time since the invasion of the Soviet Union, strategic concerns in the west superseded the war in the east. On the thirteenth, Hitler called Manstein and Kluge to his headquarters to
inform them of his decision to break off Citadel and transfer the Second SS Panzer Corps to Sicily. Kluge, having already halted his portion of the attack, received the news with relief. Manstein, believing his forces to be on the edge of victory, protested vigorously that to give up the battle at the decisive moment was like “throwing victory away.” The enemy in front of him was defeated, had already lost some 1,800 tanks, and had squandered a great part of its operational reserve, he stressed, yet he still had his trump card: the Twenty-fourth Panzer Corps, with 181 armored vehicles in the SS Panzergrenadier Division Viking and the Seventeenth and Twenty-third Panzer Divisions, had not yet gone into action.
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Hitler not only rejected Manstein's demand to continue the attack but effectively gutted his forces, not only ordering the transfer of tank units to Italy but also dispatching a further third of his air units to Army Group Center. Manstein, in view of the massive enemy tank losses, believed it still possible to pull a partial success out of the Kursk operation and, thus, proposed a plan (Operation Roland) that would allow him to destroy some Soviet forces while putting space between him and the enemy. Instead of continuing his attack north, the field marshal now aimed at turning his units abruptly to the west along the Psel River in a one-armed pincer movement in order to encircle Soviet troops in the southwest corner of the Kursk salient. Hitler halfheartedly approved Manstein's plan, but with the proviso that he use only forces presently engaged and not deploy his reserves. Although the OKH conspired to limit the impact of Hitler's order, Zeitzler hoping that Manstein could achieve a partial operational victory, the Führer intervened again on the sixteenth, ordering the Fourth Panzer Army to break off the battle the next day and reassemble to the west near Belgorod. Although Manstein, with his eyes firmly glued on his own situation, rightly claimed that he had been forced prematurely to give up yet another victory, Hitler, viewing the overall state of affairs, was also correct in his worries about the Soviet breakthrough at Orel. In addition, an expected enemy offensive on the southern flank of Army Group South threatened the loss of the vital Donets industrial area, while the opening of the Mediterranean front meant that limited German resources would have to be split even further. Ironically, in the event, only the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was actually sent to Italy; the withdrawal of the panzer corps, as Karl-Heinz Frieser has noted, was, thus, too late to be of help in Sicily but too early for any successful conclusion of the Kursk operation.
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For the first time, a German summer offensive had failed in its tracks and the attacking units been almost immediately forced onto the defensive, a situation, Goebbels noted laconically, to which the Germans “were
not accustomed.” Material and manpower deficiencies, the delay in launching the attack, the absence of the element of surprise, the decision to attack the enemy's strongest positions rather than seek the mobile operations that played to the Germans' tactical strength, and, not least, the realization of their nightmare of a two-front war all contributed to the result. Still, Citadel can hardly be seen as any sort of turning point. Far from being the swan song of the German tank corps or the graveyard of the German army, as it is sometimes described, it resulted in astonishingly light German losses. For the entire operation, the Wehrmacht lost only 252 armored vehicles, as opposed to 1,956 for the Soviets, an astonishing 8-to-1 kill ratio; of those 252, only 10 were Tigers. Similarly, German aircraft losses totaled 159 to 1,961 for the Red Air Force, a 12-to-1 ratio. For the Luftwaffe, the invasion of Sicily meant the opening of a third front, which, combined with the costly defensive battles over Germany and occupied Western Europe, proved insurmountable. In July and August, for example, it lost 702 aircraft on the eastern front but 3,504 in the west and on the home front. In manpower terms, the Germans lost 54,182 casualties (11,023 dead and missing; 43,159 wounded) to 319,000 for the Red Army, a 6-to-1 ratio, amazing for an inferior force attacking into the heart of well-prepared and formidable defenses. If personnel losses are broadened to include dead, wounded, prisoners, and the sick, the Red Army lost, according to figures from Boris Sokolov, 1.68 million men as against 203,000 for the Wehrmacht, an 8.25-to-1 ratio. Nor were the materiel losses unsustainable. In July, German industry produced 817 new armored vehicles, three times more than lost at Kursk, with an increasing proportion the new Tigers and Panthers that enjoyed a considerable technical superiority over the T-34. While German casualties were costly, especially among the infantry, they were balanced by 89,480 replacements.
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The reasons for these enormous discrepancies in losses are not hard to find. Certainly, the introduction of the Panther and Tiger tanks, as well as the improved Pz IVs, produced a genuine “tank shock,” a devastating qualitative advantage the Germans would enjoy for at least the next year. While the German tanks could penetrate the T-34's armor at some considerable range, the Soviets were more likely merely to cause temporary damage that could be repaired. For all its undeniable improvement, the Red Army still lagged behind the Wehrmacht in training of tank crews, tactical efficiency, emphasis on Auftragstaktik, coordination of combined arms, and communication. The interaction of these factors could be quite lethal. Since in the Red Army, for example, only company commanders typically had a radio in their tanks, the German tactic of targeting that tank for initial destruction had cascading consequences. Soviet
crews, trained only in rigid
Befehlstaktik
(command tactics) and, thus, lacking flexibility in decisionmaking and action, were left without direction as combat descended into chaos. As masses of Soviet tanks often simply maneuvered in a directionless manner, they became easy targets. In addition, too many Soviet commanders continued to throw their troops into battle with little concern for casualties and with inadequate preparation and planning, expecting the sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm the enemy. This was often the result, but at a horrendous cost borne by average Soviet soldiers. Still, Citadel had only two modest goals—to shorten the front to conserve forces and to weaken the Red Army sufficiently to forestall its summer offensive—yet had failed utterly at both. Even if it had been successful, it would have remained a largely meaningless tactical triumph, for the Germans could no more prevail in a material war now than they could in the war of attrition between 1914 and 1918. As in the Great War, they now also faced the grim reality of a two-front war.
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If further proof were needed of this iron law of attrition, the Soviets supplied it on 12 July 1943. With the German offensive still in progress, the Red Army launched its long-awaited counterstroke against Orel, to be followed by offensives on the Donets-Mius and at Belgorod-Kharkov. More than a million fresh troops surged into battle, supported by 3,200 tanks and 4,000 aircraft, two to three times the number of the Stalingrad counteroffensive. Moreover, the numerical and material superiority of the Red Army was now so great that it could launch simultaneous offensives up and down the front, supported by partisan operations in the German rear. Smashing into the Second Panzer Army, which, until it received reinforcements (the Fifth and Eighth Panzer Divisions, with 234 armored vehicles), had no actual tanks of its own (and barely 100,000 troops), Operation Kutuzov spotlighted the German dilemma. Having pressed all available forces into the attack at Kursk, not only were other sectors thinly held (at the point of attack, the Russians had ten- to fifteen-to-one advantages in men and tanks), but the OKH also had no operational reserve and, thus, was forced to plug the holes opened by the enemy attack by pulling troops from other areas of the front. This, in turn, simply opened new holes, with the result that the panzer divisions found themselves being sent hither and yon as fire brigades to stamp out any conflagration that erupted. In this case, since the majority of units dispatched to aid the beleaguered Second Panzer Army came from the Ninth Army, Model on the thirteenth was given operational control of both. Regarded as a master of defense, the field marshal immediately halted the Kursk offensive and sent a number of units to the north to plug the dangerous gaps blasted open by the Soviets.
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The worst was in the northwest. Having punctured German defenses at Ulianovo, Soviet units, if left unchecked, threatened to cave in the entire Orel salient, trapping considerable German forces. Despite their initial success, however, the Soviets proved unable to translate their break-in into an operational breakthrough. The Germans had constructed an extensive defense in depth in the salient, with the result that, in many areas, Soviet attacks breached a thinly held position only to lurch forward into a strongpoint, where their offensive momentum was shattered. The decisive role here was played by the German panzer units; within the first two weeks, the Soviet attackers had lost well over half their tanks. These local triumphs allowed the Germans to slow, if not stop, the enemy advance, a circumstance that forced Hitler to relent on his customary stand-firm orders. Model, on his own initiative, took steps to conduct an elastic defense, justifying his actions by claiming that they corresponded to the spirit of the Führer's orders. Confronted with a series of faits accomplis, Hitler on 22 July validated Model's actions. At the same time, work had begun on the Hagen position, a line of field fortifications at the base of the Orel salient designed to stabilize the situation and, by shortening the front, free troops both to form a reserve and to be transferred to Italy, which had assumed an “absolute priority” for the Führer.
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On 1 August, then, Model's elastic defense gave way to a skillful withdrawal executed under extraordinarily adverse circumstances, not least because German troops had been ordered to destroy infrastructure as they pulled back. The Russians not only kept up steady pressure on Model's forces but also increased their activities elsewhere. Soviet partisans had already been active in the Orel area, in the last two weeks of July blowing up numerous rail lines in support of the offensive, but, on 3 August, over 100,000 partisans launched an extensive, coordinated operation aimed at nothing less than crippling supply into all of Army Group Center. The damage done to the rail network was so extensive that, from the fourth to the sixth, rail traffic was effectively halted. To restore order, already scarce German units had to be sent to the rear to fight the partisans. Then, on the seventh, the Soviets launched an attack to the north of the Orel salient against the Fourth Army that, although generally unsuccessful, forced Model to transfer units to his neighbor. Nonetheless, by 16 August, Model had completed his retreat to the Hagen position, where all Soviet attempts to break through were repulsed at such heavy cost that the Stavka had no choice but to end its assaults. Soviet casualties had been staggering. In little more than a month of fighting, the Red Army lost, according to official figures, almost 430,000 men (112,259 dead and missing) and nearly 2,600 armored vehicles, numbers that are
almost certainly too low. German losses totaled a little over 86,000 casualties (25,515 dead and missing) and perhaps 343 armored vehicles. Even taking the official figures, the Soviets' losses ran at a ratio five to one and eight to one, respectively, against which their failure to achieve a decisive operational breakthrough, let alone the destruction of German forces in the Orel salient, must have been a bitter disappointment. For the Germans, the withdrawal to the Hagen position meant the freeing up of some nineteen divisions (eleven infantry, five panzer, and three panzergrenadier) for use elsewhere on the front.
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