On the first day, in fighting of “unimaginable toughness,” Model’s troops ground forward almost five miles, but at high cost. Buoyed by the effect of the dense defenses on the German attacker, the Soviet commander of the Central Front, Rokossovsky, the next day prematurely threw his considerable reserves into a counterattack. This foray ended with a rude shock, as the burning hulks of Soviet T-34s, in their first encounter with the Tiger tank, were left strewn about. Once the kings of the battlefield, T-34 crews watched in amazement as their shells bounced off the thickly armored Tiger, itself largely invulnerable to any but a close shot from the side or rear but able to knock out a T-34 over a mile away. Rokossovsky now ordered his tanks to bury themselves in defensive positions so that only the turrets were visible, an order that he admitted was dictated by their complete inferiority to the Tigers. Amazingly, the Ninth Army had only twenty-six Tigers when the battle began, with eighteen knocked out of action by mines in the first two days. Nevertheless, the Ninth Army made steady, if laborious, progress and, by the seventh, had advanced over ten miles and reached the main Soviet defenses at Ponyri, a key town on the Orel-Kursk railway, as well as the decisive heights of Olkovatka, which commanded the terrain all the way to Kursk.73
Here, however, the enemy had massed such extensive defensives that the Germans later referred to it as a “second Verdun” and the “Stalingrad of the Kursk salient.” In bitter house-to-house fighting on both the seventh and the eighth, German and Soviet forces traded control of Ponyri, with the Germans, their strength exhausted, finally securing most of it by the evening of the eighth. Supported by Ferdinand tank destroyers, German troops that day also stormed the heights at Olkovatka. Dismayed at finding so formidable an obstacle miles behind the front, however, Model was forced to suspend operations for a day while he regrouped his forces. Even these successes, he gloomily predicted, would not open the way to Kursk, terming the offensive a “rolling battle of attrition.” On the tenth, he resumed the attack, supported by air units from Army Group South, but Rokossovsky, who had also regrouped his forces, threw his last reserves into the battle. Once again, Model was forced to suspend the offensive in order to reform his units, but he also took the opportunity to rethink his options. Aware that he was not likely to prevail with the forces available if he clung to his present direction of attack, he resolved to continue the assault on the twelfth with his reserve units, among them the Fifth, Eighth, and Twelfth Panzer Divisions, but with the main effort now planned for the right flank, which was to move south around the fortified heights. Amazingly, this was to be the first time in the operation that his tank units were to be used as a combined force; just as astonishing was the fact that, to date, the Ninth Army had suffered only 63 total losses of tanks, assault guns, and tank destroyers (for all of Citadel, the Ninth Army lost 77 battle tanks, compared with 526 Soviet tanks destroyed).74
At the culmination point of his attack, however, as he was introducing his last reserves, the Soviet Bryansk Front and the left wing of West Front launched, as Model had feared, a powerful offensive aimed at Orel. Although the initial probing assaults on the eleventh had been contained, the next day powerful Soviet forces broke through on a wide front in quick, deep penetrations that the Second Panzer Army was unable to check. If Orel fell, not only would Model’s main supply line be broken, but his army would also be threatened with encirclement. With the Second Panzer Army unable to close the gaps on its own, Kluge at Army Group Center thus had no choice on the twelfth but to order numerous armored and infantry divisions of the Ninth Army to break off the attack and hurry to the aid of the neighboring army. With that, Model realized, any continuation of the attack became pointless; for the Ninth Army, the Battle of Kursk had ended.75
To the south, Manstein’s initial blow achieved considerably better results than Model’s. Not only did his leading units, Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf, possess more tanks overall (1,377 to 988), but they also had far larger numbers of the Tigers (102 to 26) and Panthers (200 to 0). Just as significant, Manstein, in contrast to Model, deployed his tanks at the tip of the spear in the classic blitzkrieg manner. Although slowed by the onerous Soviet minefields, the Germans found their major problem in the first few days to be the mechanical failure of the new tanks. During the march to the assembly areas on the night of 4–5 July, forty-five of the Panthers, almost a quarter of the total force, had broken down, some bursting into flames because of faulty fuel pumps, seeming confirmation of Guderian’s protests against the premature use of a weapon that had not been fully tested. Very quickly, however, the Panther and the Tiger began to assert their superiority over the Soviet T-34s. By the second day, not only had Jakovlevo, an important transportation center fifteen miles from the start line, fallen, but the Soviet leadership had also begun to show signs of great anxiety. Reports of the initial tank battles indicated that, overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness, the Soviet crews were now succumbing to the same panic that had afflicted the Germans when first encountering the T-34s.76
On 6 July, just the second day of the battle, the Soviets made two key decisions. First, at a surprisingly early point, they decided to throw their strategic reserve, originally intended for use as part of the counteroffensive after the Germans had been halted, into action at Kursk. Second, General Vatutin, the commander of the Voronezh Front, ordered his tanks buried to the turret in order to form a compact antitank defense. Although bitterly criticized by Zhukov, who wanted instead to launch an energetic counterattack that, under the circumstances, would have been disastrous for the Soviets, Vatutin’s order, although made out of desperation, was clearly correct. German tanks now had to creep extremely close to the buried enemy tanks in order to destroy them, which negated their great advantage of range. The well-camouflaged Russians typically let the Tigers and Panthers pass by before opening fire from the side or the rear, a tactic that was effective but required enormous courage, for it amounted to a virtual death sentence for the Soviet tank crews. Nonetheless, Vatutin’s order to bury his tanks, along with the transfer on 7 July of considerable portions of Manstein’s air support to the north to support Model, contributed to a noticeable slowing of the tempo of the German advance.77
Still, the superiority of the new German tanks was striking. In one extraordinary incident on 8 July, a single German Tiger tank, in a workshop and not fully repaired, engaged a force of some fifty to sixty Soviet tanks, destroying twenty-two T-34s before the remainder fled in panic. By 11 July, Army Group South had already destroyed some seven hundred tanks and assault guns of the Voronezh Front while suffering only 116 total losses. The Psel River, the last natural obstacle before Kursk, was reached on the ninth, while, on the eleventh, Army Detachment Kempf, on Manstein’s right flank, finally broke through stiff Soviet defenses on the Donets, driving to within ten miles of the southern edge of Prokhorovka, and effectively trapping large parts of the Soviet Sixty-ninth Army. That same day, units of the Second SS Panzer Corps seized Hill 252.2, a key height just one and a half miles southeast of the city. Believing that the last defenses had been breached and the way to Kursk was now open, Manstein’s headquarters radiated a mood of euphoria. The Soviet command, however, planned a surprise of its own for the next day, a battle of annihilation. The stage was set for one of the most famous—and mythical—battles of World War II.78