In addition to armour, the Red Army attempted to employ as many combat multipliers as possible to neutralize the German combined arms team. Rather than spending the lull period resting, Rokossovsky and Vatutin drove their troops hard to create three fortified lines of defence and protect them with tens of thousands of mines. Infantry underwent special training to prepare them to withstand an attack by panzers and to fight tanks in close-quarters combat. Elite Guards rifle units were placed in the expected German attack sectors, ensuring that there were solid units holding the key terrain. There were three additional measures taken that greatly reduced the ability of the German combined arms tactics to work at Kursk. First, each front was provided with a large anti-tank reserve to augment its battalion, regiment and division-level anti-tank strongpoints. Each of the seven front-level anti-tank brigades had 40 76.2mm ZIS-3 anti-tank guns, which could quickly redeploy to a sector threatened by German armour. Second, the Stavka expected the German Panzers to breach at least the first line of defence, so a new doctrinal feature was the creation of mobile obstacle detachments (podvishnyi otriad zagrazhdenii or POZ). The POZ were truck-mounted sapper teams that could create new minefields in front of approaching enemy armour. Finally, the Stavka authorized the fronts to use artillery corps to support their defensive operations, which enabled an unprecedented level of fire support. Unlike the old Blitzkrieg days of 1941–42, everywhere the German panzers turned, they would be confronted by mines, anti-tank guns and punishing artillery barrages.
Operation Zitadelle: The Northern Front 5–10 July 1943
Generaloberst Walter Model, commander of AOK 9, was not sanguine about Zitadelle’s chances for success, since he knew from aerial reconnaissance about the extent of enemy defences being prepared by Rokossovsky’s Central Front. Indeed, Model presented this information to Hitler and tried to personally dissuade him from launching the offensive. Instead, Model argued that the Germans should remain on the defensive and create a strong mobile reserve that would allow them to smash any Soviet offensives. Yet Hitler would not be diverted from this battle and Model accepted his role, but planned his part of the operation with particular attention to preserving his own armour. At best, Model would have 800 tanks and assault guns to commit to the offensive and he knew that losses in a breakthrough attack would be heavy. Instead of von Manstein’s armour-heavy approach to Zitadelle, Model intended to rely more upon his infantry divisions, artillery and air support to crack the Soviet defences and only commit his armour when he saw an opening that could be exploited. Furthermore, Model also knew that the Soviet Bryansk and Western Fronts were planning to attack the Orel Salient as they had done in February–March, so he wanted to keep as much of his armour intact as possible to deal with this contingency. To Model, retaining Orel was more important than taking Kursk.
Opposite Model’s AOK 9, Rokossovsky had placed General-leytenant Nikolai P. Pukhov’s heavily-reinforced 13th Army in the Ponyri sector where he expected the Germans to attack. Pukhov’s army held a 22km-wide sector and had four rifle divisions holding the first line of defence, two more holding the second line and six in the third line. The Soviet defences were built around entrenched rifle battalion strongpoints, enclosed by mines and protected by anti-tank guns. Each Soviet position incorporated all-around defences and was intended to hold out if surrounded – this type of reinforced hedgehog tactic was intended to function as a ‘wave breaker’ type defence. For infantry support, Pukhov had 178 tanks and 49 self-propelled guns, although most were kept back in the second or third lines of defence. The 13th Army’s best armoured units were the 129th Tank Brigade with 49 tanks (incl. 10 KV-1 and 21 T-34) and the 27th and 30th Guards Tank Regiments (GTR) with a total of 44 KV-1s heavy tanks. In general support, Rodin’s 2TA (consisting of the 3rd and 16th Tank Corps and 11th Guards Tank Brigade) was in reserve 25km south of the forward edge of the battle area. Rodin had a total of 305 T-34s and 142 light tanks. Rokossovsky also kept the 9th and 19th Tank Corps, which had a total of 232 T-34s and 148 other tanks, under front control.
During the night of 4–5 July, Model’s army began its final preparations for the offensive by sending sapper teams forward to begin clearing lanes through the first layer of Soviet minefields. One team was ambushed and a prisoner revealed under interrogation that Zitadelle would begin at dawn. Zhukov, who was present in Rokossovsky’s command post, pressured him into unleashing an artillery bombardment to disrupt the German offensive. However, the unplanned Soviet artillery barrages had limited effect on German front-line units and the German artillery preparation began at 0425 hours and continued until 0545 hours. Model launched supporting attacks with three infantry divisions from XXIII Armeekorps on his left flank and three infantry divisions from XXXXVI Panzerkorps on his right flank; despite support from three Sturmgeschütz-Abteilungen, these efforts only advanced a few kilometres before being stopped by Soviet resistance and failed to achieve their objectives.
Model’s main effort was made in the centre, with General der Panzertruppen Josef Harpe’s XXXXI Panzerkorps and General der Panzertruppen Joachim Lemelsen’s XXXXVII Panzerkorps. Harpe attacked along the Orel-Kursk rail line near Maloarkhangel’sk station, close to the boundary between Pukhov’s 29th and 15th Rifle Corps. Oberstleutnant Baron Ernst von Jungenfeld’s schwere Panzerjäger Regiment 656 was split up, providing a battalion of Ferdinands each in direct support of an infantry regiment from the 86.Infanterie-Division, while Sturmpanzer-Abteilung 216 followed in general support. Each battalion of Ferdinands was preceded by a Panzerkompanie (Fkl) with BIV demolition vehicles to clear a path through the enemy mines.[19] The Germans had not put a great deal of effort into developing armoured mine clearing tanks, unlike the British who fielded the Matilda flail tank (Scorpion) in October 1942 or the Red Army, which first used PT-34 mine roller tanks in the summer of 1942. Instead, the Germans opted for an ad hoc solution using vehicles intended to demolish bunkers, not mines, and the results were mediocre. Nor had the AOK 9 conducted realistic breaching drills with BIVs, tanks and infantry prior to Zitadelle – a major omission. As the BIV vehicles approached the Soviet defences around 0600 hours, they were met by a deluge of artillery fire that destroyed seven BIVs. Instead of clearing three lanes through the mines, the German pioniers only managed to clear a single narrow lane. The defending Soviet 410th Rifle Regiment, which had ample artillery and anti-tank support, kept this cleared lane under very heavy fire and prevented the pioniers from expanding it. Amazingly, the Germans did not use smoke to provide concealment for the breaching teams. All the while, the Ferdinands and StuG IIIs from Sturmgeschütz-Abteilung 177 provided fire support to the pioniers, but could not suppress the enemy defences.
With the main German attack on the verge of collapse, the Ferdinands were ordered to move through the cleared lane and overrun the enemy defences. The Ferdinand was designed as a long-range tank destroyer, not an assault vehicle. Its 200mm thick frontal armour was virtually impregnable to 76.2mm gunfire, but its tracks had no special immunity to mines and the 70-ton vehicle was very slow. Inside their buttoned-up Ferdinands, the German crewmen only had a vague idea where the cleared lane was through the smoke from burning steppe grass and explosions, which caused many of them to roll over mines. Some suffered track damage and were immobilized, but one Ferdinand struck five mines and kept rolling. However, the shock of mine explosions damaged the batteries in many Ferdinands, for which no replacements were available in AOK 9. On the first day of the offensive, the Ferdinands had 30 batteries destroyed by mine damage, sidelining these vehicles for many days.{83} Eventually, a few Ferdinands and StuG IIIs made it through the lane and began to reduce the Soviet defences at point-blank range. The Soviet 15th Rifle Corps commander committed his armoured support, consisting of 34 KV-1 heavy tanks, 21 T-34s, 18 light tanks and 16 Su-122s.
19
Funklenk or Fkl were radio-controlled demolition vehicles. A team usually consisted of a Pz III control tank and several associated BIVs. The vehicles were driven into the edge of a minefield by a human driver and then detonated by radio command, intending to detonate nearby mines with blast over-pressure. The Germans estimated that at least four BIVs were needed to clear a 100-metre deep lane through a minefield and that this would take two hours to complete. However, a critical flaw was that the Panzerkompanie (Fkl) had no means of marking cleared lanes.