Model recognized that heavy losses and depleted supplies would soon force the culmination of his offensive, but he wanted to make one more try against both Ol’khovatka and Ponyri on 8 July. This time, Generalleutnant Dietrich von Saucken’s fresh 4.Panzer-Division would spearhead Lemelsen’s advance. At first light, Saucken’s division was forced to retake Samodurovka, which the Soviets had reoccupied during the night. After that was accomplished, Saucken advanced toward Teploye, hoping this sector was not as heavily defended as the Ol’khovatka sector. It was. Teploye was held by the 140th Siberian Rifle Division, backed by the 3rd Anti-Tank Brigade and Polkovnik Fedor P. Vasetskaya’s 79th Tank Brigade from 19 TC. Major Sauvant’s last three Tigers led the advance to Teploye and they managed to overrun one Soviet rifle battalion and occupy part of the town before running into a wall of fire. Vasetskaya’s T-34s were dug into hull-down firing positions, which made them difficult for the German tankers to hit. Another long-range gunnery duel developed, with at least three Pz IVs and four T-34s destroyed. Saucken called in Stukas, which pounded the Soviet hill-top positions, but could not get them to budge. The 4.Panzer-Division’s attack faltered and ended without any success. Likewise, a renewed effort by Kampfgruppe Burmeister to push toward Ol’khovatka was stopped by mines, anti-tank fire, artillery and dug-in T-34s. Model had reached his high water mark and further advance was now impossible. There would be no victory parade through Kursk for AOK 9.
Harpe continued to grapple with Enshin’s forces at Ponyri from 8–10 July and managed to capture half of the town at great cost. Four Ferdinands were destroyed in close-quarter fighting inside the town, which was the wrong place for them to be employed. Ponyri became an extended and pointless battle of attrition that exhausted Harpe’s corps and played to Rokossovsky’s objective of weakening AOK 9 as a precursor to the inevitable Soviet counter-offensive. Model recognized this as well and on 10 July he ordered his forces to suspend the offensive. He did not ask permission from the OKH or Hitler, he simply suspended his role in Zitadelle. When the OKH recommended that he shift his axis of attack, he ignored them. In six days of attacking, the northern German pincer had advanced barely 15km and captured no significant objectives and destroyed no major Soviet formations. Model’s AOK 9 had suffered 22,201 casualties, including 4,691 dead or missing, which was the highest one-week loss for any single German army since Barbarossa two years earlier. Four of Model’s infantry divisions were combat ineffective, but he did achieve his objective of conserving a viable armour reserve. The six Panzer-Divisionen fighting on the northern front lost only 29 tanks destroyed, including three of Sauvant’s Tigers. The 3./s.Pz.Abt. 505 arrived in the final days of the battle, which meant that Sauvant’s battalion still had 26 operational Tigers when Model called off the offensive. In addition, 19 Ferdinands and 17 assault guns were lost. Many vehicles suffered damage from mines and artillery fire, but could be repaired in a matter of days. Altogether, Model’s AOK 9 lost 71 AFVs destroyed and 308 AFV damaged, but Model was left with at least 500 operational AFVs to counter the coming storm.
Rokossovsky’s defence had held firmly, yielding very little ground, but had failed to inflict crippling losses on Model’s armour. Post-war Soviet historians created tales of a four-day tank battle between Ponyri and Ol’khovatka, which they claimed destroyed hundreds of German tanks, but this was mostly fabricated to conceal Soviet frustrations. Instead of a great clash of armour, most of the tank combat in the northern front had been battalion, regiment and brigade-size actions. Rokossovsky’s Central Front suffered 33,897 casualties and, like Model’s AOK 9, the front-line infantry units got the worst of it. Soviet armour losses in the north are not exactly known, but were in the range of 200 tanks destroyed and 100–200 damaged. Rodin’s 2TA lost 46 per cent of its armour, but was soon restored to combat effectiveness. The main point to be gleaned from Model’s failed offensive was that neither side was able to seriously reduce the other’s armoured reserves, which had considerable consequences for the events to follow.{85}
Operation Zitadelle: The Southern Front, 5–16 July 1943
Von Manstein had wanted to attack the Kursk Salient as an immediate follow up to his successful Backhand Blow counter-offensive, but was stymied first by the rainy spring weather, and then by Hitler’s repeated delays of Zitadelle to await the arrival of the Panther medium tank and more Tigers. Although the point has often been made that an earlier German attack might have succeeded, this punditry disregards the weather, the logistic situation and the emaciated state of Hoth’s 4.Panzerarmee. The simple fact is that the Red Army used the April–June lull better than the Wehrmacht did, fortifying the Kursk salient and forming a large mobile reserve for follow-on operations. Soviet intelligence about the Zitadelle plan was excellent, in part due to information forward from the Allied ULTRA signals intercept programme.[21] In contrast, the Germans knew about the Soviet defensive preparations in the Kursk salient due to regular photo reconnaissance, but they were unaware of the vast numbers of RVGK reserves that were being concentrated further to the rear. Von Manstein’s hubris about slicing through the Soviet defences with his armoured battering ram was based on ignorance of the enemy’s actual strength.
In planning Zitadelle, von Manstein displayed a certain inattention to details that would plague the operation from the start. Unlike Model, he failed to appreciate the depth of Soviet minefields and asked for no special engineering resources; Hoth’s 4.Panzerarmee (PzAOK 4) received no Goliath or BIV demolition vehicles or other mine-clearing equipment. Von Manstein’s operational plan was very basic, envisioning that Hoth’s 4.Panzerarmee, consisting of General der Panzertruppe Otto von Knobelsdorff’s XXXXVIII Panzerkorps (3., 11.Panzer-Divisionen and the Großdeutschland) and Hausser’s II. SS-Panzerkorps (LSSAH, Das Reich and Totenkopf) would form the main effort, while Armee-Abteilung Kempf would conduct a supporting attack with General der Panzertruppe Hermann Breith’s III Panzerkorps (6., 7. and 19.Panzer-Divisionen) and Generaloberst Erhard Raus’ XI Armeekorps (two infantry divisions and Sturmgeschütz-Abteilung 905). Von Manstein believed that this mass of armour and troops, with over 1,500 AFVs and supported by Luftflotte 4, could blast its way through any defensive lines. Up front though, von Manstein violated the principle of unity of command by putting two Panzerkorps under Hoth and one under Kempf, when doctrine recommended that all three should have been under a single army commander. Consequently, Breith’s III Panzerkorps contributed little to its primary mission of protecting the right flank of II. SS-Panzerkorps and essentially fought an isolated and operationally pointless battle. Nor did von Manstein ensure that his subordinates had conducted detailed tactical planning prior to execution, which became immediately obvious in both the III. and XXXXVIII Panzerkorps sectors. Finally, von Manstein’s broad front implementation of Zitadelle left him with no operational-level reserves, other than General der Panzertruppe Walther Nehring’s distant and under-resourced XXIV Panzerkorps. After the war, von Manstein would claim that Nehring’s corps could have made a great impact upon the outcome of Zitadelle, but this formation had a total of only 171 tanks among its three mechanized divisions. Furthermore, Nehring’s XXIV Panzerkorps was the only mobile reserve belonging to the 1. Panzerarmee and stripping this resource would seriously weaken Heeresgruppe Süd’s right flank.
21
TUNNY, a sub-set of ULTRA, was involved in intercepting copies of German operational orders. Both the April warning order for