By 10–11 July, the German southern offensive was visibly approaching the culmination point due to personnel and equipment losses, and the lack of reserve forces to sustain further advances. It was clear that XXXXVIII Panzerkorps was unlikely to make it on the direct route to Oboyan. Nor was Breith’s attack going well and his losses were very heavy. Originally intended as a supporting flank for II. SS-Panzerkorps, Breith’s floundering advance was now a distraction that served to drain Luftwaffe support away from the main Prokhorovka axis. Although Hausser’s II.SS-Panzerkorps was still capable of advancing, Hoth wanted Hausser to transfer one of his divisions to re-energize Breith’s stalled offensive – a clear violation of the dictum that one should not reinforce failure. If anything, Breith and Knobelsdorff should have been provided Kampfgruppen to Hausser to sustain the one sector that was achieving significant success. Hausser ignored this order, just as he had ignored von Manstein’s order not to abandon Kharkov five months before.
At 0500 hours on 11 July, Hausser resumed his advance toward Prokhorovka, with Kampfgruppe Peiper of LSSAH, but rainy weather deprived him of effective Luftwaffe close air support. Vatutin had rushed the 9th Guards Airborne Division to defend the final line of defence at Prokhorovka, supported by several tank and anti-tank units from 2 TC. SS-Hauptsturmführer’s Heinz Kling’s four Tigers led the attack, which quickly bumped into mines and an anti-tank ditch 5km southwest of Prokhorovka, covered by anti-tank guns and artillery. As the pioniers attempted to clear a path through the obstacles, platoon-size groups of T-34s from Popov’s 2 TC suddenly appeared from cover and launched local counter-attacks. Twelve Churchill tanks from the 15th Separate Heavy Tank Regiment also joined the attack, striking the flank of the LSSAH formation.{108} A battery of 122mm howitzers engaged the German column with direct fire. Kling’s Tigers provided fire support but were hit repeatedly; both Kling and his deputy were badly wounded, leaving Untersturmführer Michael Wittmann in command. Although the Tigers knocked out a large number of enemy tanks and anti-tank guns, it took the pioniers more than two hours to breach the obstacle. Once through, Peiper’s Panzergrenadiers cleared the Soviet trench lines in close-quarter fighting around 1300 hours, but the rest of the day was spent repelling Soviet counter-attacks so the LSSAH vanguard stopped its advance 500 metres from the outskirts of Prokhorovka.{109} Nor had Totenkopf’s bridgehead over the Psel panned out, because the pioniers had not been able to complete a large pontoon bridge across the river until the afternoon of 11 July. By the time that Totenkopf’s armour began crossing into the bridgehead it was already under heavy attack by Soviet artillery and tanks. Indeed, the idea of pushing a mechanized division across a couple of pontoon bridges under constant artillery fire was rather reckless. At this point in the battle, Hoth intended to complete the link-up of the III. Panzerkorps and II.SS-Panzerkorps and then seize Prokhorovka station, but he knew that considerable mopping up remained. With Model’s northern pincer already aborted, the most reasonable assessment for the southern pincer was to continue chewing up Soviet armoured reserves, rather than to extend its vulnerable flanks further. Hoth and Hausser both had indications that Vatutin had additional armoured reserves, but German intelligence failed to note the approach of Rotmistrov’s 5 GTA.[29]
Hausser’s II. SS-Panzerkorps had advanced into a narrow 4-km wide salient, with LSSAH at the tip near Prokhorovka station and Totenkopf holding the left flank on the Psel river valley. The terrain here was constrictive, due to the Psel River and numerous ravines and gulleys, which made it difficult to deploy large armoured units. With the 6 GA near collapse, Vatutin committed the infantry of the 69th Army to strengthen the front’s third and final line of defence. Although Soviet losses had been heavy, particularly in terms of infantry and anti-tank, Vatutin and Marshal Vasilevsky (who was on site) believed that the commitment of the Steppe Front reserves would dramatically swing the battle in favour of the Red Army. Vatutin, with Vasilevsky’s concurrence, had decided on 10 July to mount a major counter-attack against Hausser’s II.SS-Panzerkorps, not only with Rotmistrov’s 5 GTA, but also with Katukov’s 1 TA and elements of the fresh 5th Guards Army. Although there was supposed to be plenty of infantry support, Vatutin conceived this counter-attack as a tank-heavy operation, with more than 800 tanks employed against a single objective. However, the devil was in the details and Vatutin’s impatience to stop Hausser led to a very abbreviated planning process that undermined a combined arms approach. Very little effort was given to planning artillery fire support or close air support and Rotmistrov’s tankers would go into battle with only 1.5 basic loads of ammunition and 1.5 loads of fuel.{110} In other words, Rotmistrov’s carefully-assembled tank army was going to be thrown into the same kind of half-baked, ill-planned effort that had ruined so many Soviet armoured attacks in 1941–42. Vatutin and Vasilevsky were professionals, among the best in the Red Army, and they knew better than to conduct operations like this, but the problem was that when it came to key decisions they often were reduced to rubber stamps. It was Nikita Khrushchev, who inserted himself into the decision loop as senior commissar for the Voronezh Front and photos show him – not Vatutin – reporting to Stalin on the status of the 5 GTA, who realized that Hausser’s continued advance threatened to break through Vatutin’s third line of defence and reach open country, which was unacceptable. Stalin had been told by Zhukov and Vasilevsky months prior that the Voronezh Front could stop the German armour and Khrushchev intended to achieve that objective at any cost. Lacking any understanding of the complexities of modern warfare, Khrushchev pushed to use the 5 GTA as soon as possible and left it to the military professionals to smooth over the details.
Late in the process, Vatutin decided to assign both the 2nd Tank Corps and the 2nd Guards Tank Corps to 5 TA, although both units were still in contact with the enemy and this only added to the staff burden of integrating two new formations.{111} Rotmistrov was only able to issue his attack order at 1800 hours on 11 July, which gave very little time for corps and below units to develop and issue their own tactical instructions. Five hours later, Rotmistrov’s tanks began moving into their assault positions, located less than 2,000 meters behind the front line. Rotmistrov developed his tactical plan without any substantive information about the enemy’s dispositions, the terrain or mines. The RVGK provided substantial artillery to support Rotmistrov’s attack, including 203mm howitzers and two regiments of BM-13 multiple rocket launchers, but poor communications and lack of observation posts ruined the artillery’s contribution to the effort. Around 0830 hours, the Soviet artillery fired a largely ineffective 15-minute artillery preparation against LSSAH positions southwest of Prokhorovka. Soviet air support was negligible but Hausser immediately requested close air support. One of the first German air strikes struck the stationary 36th Heavy Tank Regiment (equipped with Churchills) and wounded its commander, Podpolkovnik Ivan S. Mitroshenko.{112} As is well known, the mythical clash of two great tank armies in ‘the greatest tank battle in history’ did not occur west of Prokhorovka that morning. Nor were the numbers of tanks involved particularly unusual by East Front standards. Rotmistrov’s main effort was the simultaneous attack of the 18th and 29th Tank Corps, which committed six tank brigades with 339 tanks against LSSAH. The 2 TC and 2 GTC committed six depleted tank brigades with a total of 190 tanks against Das Reich, while the 5th Guards Mechanized Corps contributed two mechanized brigades with 66 tanks and the 1446 SAP added 20 self-propelled guns. Altogether, Rotmistrov attacked with 612 tanks and 30 SPGs.{113}
29
Both George Nipe and Valeriy Zamulin claim that Hoth was aware of 5 GTA’s approach or at least that the Soviets were planning a major counterstroke. Perhaps, but the Lage Ost situation maps for 11 July 1943 do not indicate it and the general alarm noted in German accounts of Prokhorovka suggest genuine surprise that the Soviets were mounting such a large-scale armoured attack.