As part of the preparations for its planned summer offensive, the Soviet High Command had succeeded in creating, and hiding from German intelligence, a large strategic reserve (the Steppe Front) whose strongest element was the Fifth Guards Tank Army under General Pavel Rotmistrov. Sensing that the Germans had passed the culmination point of their offensive, the Soviets now proposed a three-pronged counterattack for 12 July that intended, not merely to stop, but to encircle and destroy German forces. In the north, the Bryansk Front was to strike toward Orel, while, in the south, the Seventh Guards Army was to drive into the flank of Army Detachment Kempf. The Fifth Guards Tank Army, an elite unit with almost one thousand tanks and assault guns, was to play the key role. Striking directly at the Second SS Panzer Corps at Prokhorovka, its task was to annihilate the German force as the first step in a grand counteroffensive that, gathering momentum like an avalanche, would sweep away everything in its path. The Battle of Prokhorovka, according to Soviet and Western historians, thus was the turning point in the Kursk offensive, a legendary battle in which over fifteen hundred tanks slugged it out at close range, with some four hundred German tanks destroyed, a decisive defeat that, according to Marshal Konev, marked “the swan song of the German tank troops.”79
The reality, however, was considerably different. The Germans, for example, could not possibly have lost 400 tanks on 12 July because on that day the entire Second SS Panzer Corps had only 211 battle tanks, 58 assault guns, and 43 tank destroyers; the units directly involved in the battle, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich, possessed a total of only 186 armored vehicles (117 tanks, 37 assault guns, and 32 tank destroyers). Nor did all of Rotmistrov’s considerable force go into action on the twelfth; of his roughly 950 armored vehicles, fewer than 700 seem actually to have been engaged at Prokhorovka, with perhaps only 500 in the first attack wave. Finally, despite Konev’s claim of vast German losses, it was, in fact, the Soviets who suffered a catastrophe. Ironically, the immense discrepancy between German and Soviet losses seems to have occasioned the legend in the first place. Confronted by an angry Stalin, who demanded to know what he had done with his “magnificent tank army,” Rotmistrov, in league with Vatutin and his political commissar, Nikita Khrushchev, protected themselves from his wrath by concocting the story of equally massive German losses to balance the Soviet disaster. Since the attack at Prokhorovka had been Stalin’s idea in the first place, the mythical outcome of the battle suited the dictator’s purposes as well. Spread through the memoirs of various Soviet generals, the legend took on a new life when it was adopted uncritically by Western historians.80
In fact, as Karl-Heinz Frieser has shown, what actually transpired at Prokhorovka can be readily reconstructed from German war diaries. Having on the eleventh seized Hill 252.2, along with a hastily constructed antitank ditch in front of the heights to the southwest built as part of the Soviet defenses, the men of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, exhausted from seven days of hard fighting, collapsed into deep sleep. Eager to catch the Germans by surprise, Rotmistrov, under orders from Vasilevsky, rushed to attack without proper reconnaissance, preparation, coordination of combined units, or basic intelligence gathering. Amazingly, the Soviets seemed unaware of the existence of the antitank ditch that they themselves had dug. Under the mistaken impression that the enemy possessed far larger numbers of Tigers than he did in actuality (the silhouette of the new model Pz IVs resembled that of the Tiger, leading to the error), Soviet tank crews, perhaps inspired as well by liberal doses of vodka, launched their attack at 7:30 A.M. on 12 July at high speed in order to close the distance and nullify German advantages as quickly as possible.81
What followed was an inferno of smoke and fire in which both sides lost control and the battle deteriorated into a chaos of close-quarter combat. The battle-weary Germans, taken completely by surprise by this seeming kamikaze-type attack and overwhelmed by the tempo of the Soviet onslaught, were swept off the crest of Hill 252.2 and down the back slope. As the first wave of Soviet T-34s raced down the hill, however, they failed to notice the roughly fourteen-foot-deep antitank ditch and plunged headlong into it. When those following spotted the danger, they veered wildly in all directions, crashing into each other and bursting into flame as German tanks went into action. By the middle of the day, when the Soviet attack was largely spent, the area in front of the antitank ditch resembled a tank graveyard, with perhaps 100 burning Soviet wrecks, while the Germans claimed another 190 abandoned Russian tanks as the spoils of war. Although the reported numbers seemed so high that the commander of the Second SS Panzer Corps, Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser, came to the battlefield to see the scene for himself, the most recent Russian figures indicate that, on the twelfth, the Soviet Twenty-ninth Tank Corps alone lost 172 tanks, 118 as total losses.82
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.83
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.84