(Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from the book, The Tigers Are Burning, by Martin Caidin © 1974.)

w Part 3 (of 5) w

The massive confrontation of Kursk moved ponderously into action along two separate and distinct battlefields on the morning of July 5. To the north there was the central front under Rokossovsky; to the south the Voronezh front under Vatutin. Although each front cannot be separated from the Battle of Kursk, it is clear that the bitter fighting of each was a major offensive distinct from the other, and the two would be joined as a single entity only when and if the Germans managed to close the pincers they nee led so desperately to pinch off Kursk.

Shortly after 5:30 on the morning of July 5, the Germans moved from their defensive positions toward the Russian lines to begin Operation Citadel. Along the sector of the Thirteenth Army, the Germans advanced with the full strength of three tank divisions and five infantry divisions as the first line of attack. Spearheading the drive was a mass of German tanks with motorized infantry in close support.

As the tanks and troops advanced slowly into a withering storm of Russian defensive fire, the Germans fanned out along the assault line. They spread their forces (the 9th, 18th, and 20th tank divisions and the 6th, 78th, 86th, 216th, and 292d infantry divisions) to hit not only the Russian Thirteenth Army but also the adjoining flanks of the Forty-Eighth and Seventieth armies.

The Germans concentrated their forces along a front of twenty- eight miles, and as Zhukov and his command staff were to learn at a later time, the thunder and fury of the attack was intended essentially as a diversion to draw Russian attention away from what was to be the main thrust of the Wehrmacht  —  a powerful drive by Ninth Army against Vatutin’s Voronezh front to the south. Little matter at the moment, of course, to Rokossovsky, for advancing against his Sector was a magnificent and powerful adversary certainly possessed of the strength to break through his lines.

Within thirty minutes or so the Russians were fully aware of the armored wedges the Germans were trying to drive through the defense lines, At the head of the striking forces were two powerful groups, made up of the most experienced panzer and motorized infantry on the front. Each group counted approximately forty to fifty tanks with tight infantry support.

The sun rose on a scene of shattering devastation as the Russians met their attackers with a howling blast of fire. Heavy artillery was firing point-blank at the German spearheads, and the Russians were also laying down a savage curtain of fire from mortars, lesser artillery, the pakfronts of 762-mm. guns, and tremendous barrages of Katyusha rockets, Overhead, Russian fighters and antitank planes flew almost to treetop level after the German armored chides and the more exposed infantry. The dense curtain of fire almost at once set grass and cornfields ablaze, destroyed farm groups and small villages. The flame and smoke, billowing across the battlefield before a westerly breeze, was quickly mixed with the dense pails of black, greasy smoke from blazing tanks. It seemed, that the earth itself was burning as shell bursts by the thousands erupted in every direction adding to the din and the debris floating through the air.

Whatever the Germans had expected, they found more than they had bargained for in the Russian defenses. The pakfronts were bad enough, but the Russians had infested every group of antitank guns with covering defenses. The Germans knew what to expect in the way of Russian minefields, and they discovered the earth sowed with thousands of the lethal charges within the ground. But as the engineers and sappers aided the tanks through the fields, the Germans were unaware that the easiest way through the minefields, where the number was somewhat less than in other areas, was precisely where the Russians wanted the German tanks to move.

The sappers cleared the way, and the tanks followed along channels that were being kept under constant aim by Russian gunners. When a tank moved into the field of fire of a pakfront, the Russians cut loose with a furious blast of fire from as many as ten guns blazing away together. Not even the thick armor of the Tiger could withstand the 76.2-mm. high-velocity antitank weapon of the Russian at point- blank range. And when a tank was caught in one of the channels, it might come under the fire of several pakfronts. Wherever possible, the Russians had zeroed in their heavy artillery, and a tank had no chance against such a heavy weight of fire and explosives.

Before the tanks had advanced a mile from their starting positions, a large number of the armored vehicles had fallen victim to powerful mine charges and were disabled. A tank with a tread blown away, or stopped because of damage, can almost always be made to fight again, especially if it is removed   quickly from the type of devastating firepower the Russians were mounting. But the Germans now were to be haunted by the orders they had received before Citadel rolled forward from the German lines:  

  . . .  in no circumstances will tanks be stopped to render assistance to those which have been disabled. . . . Tank commanders are to press on to their objectives as long as they retain mobility. Where a tank is rendered immobile but the gun is in working order . . . the crew will continue to give fire support from a static position. 

In the Kursk salient that order amounted virtually to a death sentence for the crews of damaged tanks, The Russian guns were mounted in such heavy concentration that any disabled tank not removed from, the field of fire by another tank was an immediate target for heavy and destructive fire.

The tanks, of course, were expected to take out the gun positions opposing their advance. This proved impossible because of the number and location of the pakfronts, as well as the special measures taken by the Russians to protect their vital gun positions. Each pakfront, in addition to the small arms of its crews, had been so situated that it lay within the crossfire coverage of machine gun and mortar positions. Where tanks were stopped by the pakfront guns, the German infantry was ordered to move ahead and eliminate the heavy weapons, No one had reckoned on these nests of machine guns and mortars protecting the pakfronts. The Russians had issued strict orders to the men behind these machine guns and mortars that they were to fire only against Nazi infantrymen attacking the pakfronts to which they had been assigned as cover. The result was chaos for the attackers. The pakfronts were tearing up the tanks, and the supporting infantry was being cut to pieces by the Russians firing rapid-fire weapons from all sides, from positions extremely well dug in and protected against return fire.

As the battle raged, with mounting German losses that were shredding the assault, the Russians unleashed another nasty surprise, one that befitted well the character of the Russian soldier. , causing no small consternation among the enemy, stunned to find Soviet soldiers behind them in the thick of battle.

Fully expecting to be confronted by the threat of thickly sowed minefields, the Germans were ready with countermeasures. Heavy tanks pushed ahead of them rollers that pressed down heavily against the ground to set off the pressure detonators in the mines, They also put into use one of the odder contraptions of the war —  a small unmanned tank controlled remotely by radio or wire that hustled across the minefields until its explosive charge was set off by the controller, The diminutive iron beetles, strangely named Goliath, scurried ahead of the tanks, but their effect, finally, in the face of devastating Russian firepower and the brilliantly established defenses, went for naught.

Steadily, inexorably, the Nazi assault began to come apart at the seams. The Russian technique of using very heavy mortar and machine gun fire against German infantry, while the pakfronts attended to the tanks — all of this effort being supported by waves of low-flying attack planes — paid off handsomely. German infantrymen found themselves cut off from their tanks, the tanks themselves were being shredded by the withering crossfire from the Russians, and the offensive bled itself white, Under a ripping, harassing fire, the Germans retreated to their starting point.

At 7:30 that morning, the Wehrmacht, having regrouped and taken stock of the Russian defenses that had proved so much heavier than anticipated, rolled again from prepared positions. This time the Germans threw themselves at the left flank of Thirteenth Army, preceding the new assault wave with an intensive artillery bombardment that was to last for an hour, The panzers and supporting units were on the move behind the artillery bombardment, gaining momentum, when the bombardment ended at 8: 30. Now the main assault force ground steadily toward the Russian defense lines, this time with far greater strength than the opening bid several hours earlier.

In the lead were the powerful Tigers, and to lend enormous punch to the wedges that were to crack open the Russian line, was a special force of the huge Ferdinand self-propelled guns of some seventy tons weight, protected by 200-mm. armor plating. The Tigers and Ferdinands smashed headlong against the 15th and 81st rifle divisions of the Soviet Thirteenth Army, but they proved to he only the tip of the massive arrowhead set in motion by the Wehrmacht. Behind the heavy German armor came several hundred Mark IV medium tanks, in concert with armored personnel carriers packed with shock troops. It was a German force with all the steel and cutting edge of the original blitzkrieg of which the Russians had such grim memories.

Once the Russians had a proper appreciation of the scale of the German offensive, they brought in everything that could move to counter the enemy thrust. Sixteenth Air Army concentrated all its aircraft on this one sector of fighting, keeping several hundred fighters, ground-attack planes, and bombers at any one time over the battle field. General Horst Grossman (6th Infantry Division) remarked: “The Russians used aircraft in numbers such as we had never yet seen in the east.”

Yet the Germans still had ultimate confidence that their powerful wedges would penetrate the Russian defense lines, especially the ninety Ferdinands of XLVIII Panzer Corps. Even at point-blank range, the Russian 76.2-mm. shells bounced harmlessly from their massive armor, and they seemed to roll with impunity over explosive mines that were stopping tanks dead in their tracks. The outcome of battles between the Ferdinands and the Russian defenses, meanwhile, was bolstering German hopes. The T-34 tanks proved helpless against the huge Ferdinands, At the close range of the savage fighting, the fiat- trajectory, high-velocity guns of the Ferdinands split the Russian tanks wide open, one after the other. Even the Soviet pakfronts could not handle the German monster.

Acting in concert, the huge armored wedge of Ferdinands and Tigers became an ax that crashed through the Russian defense line. Nothing Russian guns could do availed, and the German infantry poured after the bludgeon that was proving so effective.

Then they were in the midst of the deep defense zone, and the interlocking system of pakfronts and covering machine gun and mortar nests began to take a fearful toll of the German troops, Little by little the infantry became separated from the armor, while the Russian gun commanders, accepting the inevitable, shifted their fire from the lumbering Ferdinands to the medium tanks and began to wreak havoc within their ranks.

The Ferdinands continued ahead, invincible, devastating, until they were in the midst of the Russian infantry concealed within slit trenches and underground bunkers. Russian infantry, hardened, fanatic, hateful, who saw the Ferdinands separated from the lighter tanks — and now without any protection against men on the ground, moving in from the sides and rear.

It was the Russian soldier in the thick of battle who sealed the doom of the mighty Ferdinands. The tank-destroying squads emerged from their trenches and ran wildly to the huge self-propelled guns. Russian infantrymen shouted their cries of attack and clambered aboard the Ferdinands as they thundered over the ground. There the Russians secured footholds and brought the nozzles of flamethrowers to the ventilation slits of the German monsters. One long blast of flame and the Ferdinand was done, its crew choked to death through flame inhalation or burned alive. Those who managed to throw open their hatches in a frenzied attempt to escape were cut to ribbons by the massed guns pointed at them.

Guderian had warned about the danger of sending such weapons — the Porsche Tigers and the Ferdinands — into battle without secondary armament. He passed his judgment of the Ferdinands against the Thirteenth Army by saying:

“They were incapable of close-range fighting since they lacked sufficient high-explosive as well as armor-piercing ammunition for their guns and this defect was aggravated by the fact that they possessed no machine guns. Once the Ferdinands had broken into the enemy’s infantry zone they literally had to go quail-shooting with cannon. They did not manage to neutralize, let alone destroy, the enemy rifles and machine guns, so that our own infantry was unable to follow up behind them. By the time they reached the Russian artillery they were on their own. Despite showing extreme bravery and suffering unheard-of casualties, the infantry of Weidling’s division did not manage to exploit the tanks’ success.”

The Russians missed no opportunity to seal whatever breaches the Germans had managed to carve in the central front’s defense zones. Engineer units during the first day of fighting swarmed into the thick of fighting and almost under the guns of the Germans fighting fiercely to advance, spread six thousand new mines in the sector of Thirteenth Army. The effectiveness of the minefields was so beyond expectations that the Russians were able to count more than a hundred German tanks and self-propelled guns either destroyed or heavily damaged during the first day’s fighting. Another significant effect was wrought by the minefields, which had brought the tanks under fire of the pakfronts as well as inflicting their own deadly destruction upon German armor. As the day wore on, the tank commanders became decidedly chary of wandering away from the cleared lanes through the mines, and thus imposed upon themselves severe restrictions of maneuver, increasing even more their vulnerability to the pakfronts, heavier artillery, and the tank-destruction squads emerging from their slit trenches on the battlefield.

Late in the day, obviously willing to accept whatever losses were necessary to maintain pressure against the Russian lines, the Wehrmacht committed to battle the bulk of the armor under Model’s command. Because the slow advance had been turning into a “go for broke” move, Model called for maximum air support to counter the Russian aircraft over the battlefield by pulling them away from the German armored forces, and also to help punch holes in the Russian defenses. It was the kind of aerial support effort for this day, July 5, and the day following, that brought even Zhukov to admit that “on both days German planes spread havoc”

German success was measured in slow, grinding movement paid for by terrible casualties in men and fearsome losses in weapons and equipment. The Wehrmacht made five separate major attacks against the Soviet defense system, and the gains the Nazis sought eluded them until the latter part of the day, when they threw in almost all the weight of their armor. At that, Model could only be less than satisfied. The Russian 15th and 18th divisions had yielded their first defense line, but simply moved back to the second and even more heavily armed zone, barely three to five miles from their first positions. Driving toward the Russian town of Gnilets, the Germans threw back two Russian divisions but found their gains limited to no more than three miles.

Another massive assault was made against three divisions, where the Thirteenth and Forty-Eighth armies linked together, in a furious Wehrmacht push to break through to Maloarkhangelsk. The Germans gained initial success, storming under a massive weight of aircraft and armor into the Russian defense zone. But the Russians immediately counterattacked and swarmed against the weary invaders. Before night fell the Germans had been hurled from their briefly held positions in the Russian defense zone and could count no ground won.

All that night the Nazis toiled desperately to get their house in order. Losses had been so severe it was imperative that any damaged tanks, self-propelled guns and other weapons be reclaimed from the battlefield for repair and return to service. Easier said than done. This was a new breed of Russian soldier the Germans were facing, and he took to the darkness with a ferocity unrecorded in the war on the eastern front.

To regroup, the Germans had to operate within the areas they had occupied during the day, but darkness proved that such occupation was not without its special hazards. Many of the forward tank elements were now separated from the main body of the German forces. Small groups of Tiger tanks that had managed to maul their way far into the Russian defense zone were stranded without the infantry they needed so urgently to protect them against Russian sappers on the prowl for just such prey.

The only way the Germans could take advantage of their slight gains during daylight on July 5 was to move up infantry under cover of darkness, and the entire night was spent in just such activity, but not without heavy casualties. The contested ground had become a lethal no-man’s-land, filled with Russian patrols on the hunt for Germans trying to reach their dangerously isolated tanks. Machine guns, grenades, and rifles sounded the night through, and in many of the slit trenches the two enemy forces came together in flare-lit glare and shadows, to battle violently to the death.

The German sappers had been told that the minefields must be cleared at any cost for the tank Forces to move up through the defense zone wrested from the Russians. Here, too, the individual Russian soldier was proving his mettle, for the battlefield was strewn with Russian snipers who emerged from their warrens long enough to gun down mine-clearing crews, then disappear, reemerging elsewhere along the trenches known so well to them.

The dawn arrived with the first defensive zone solidly in German hands, but at a terrible price in casualties suffered during the long, battle-filled night. A price the Germans were surely to figure was too high for what awaited them in daylight.

The long and meticulous Russian preparations for the battle were now paying their special dividend. Rokossovsky and his staff had to assume they would be thrown back from the separate defense lines. Every gun in zone two had been provided with exact aiming points for zone one in the event the latter was invested by the enemy.

In addition, the Russians found a way to make up for the guns they had lost in the areas occupied by the Germans, During the night they brought up hundreds of tanks and parked many of these hulls down, protected by heaping mounds of soil so that only the turrets showed, to serve as impromptu artillery and antitank weapons.

The German attack, renewed on the morning of July 6, thus ran into a withering Russian fire just as heavy as it had been the day before. And they found the Russian soldiers just as fierce in battle as they had been on the first day of the offensive. Where the Germans overwhelmed Russian defenses, the Red soldiers often fought to the last man. Zhukov personally singled out as representative of the courage of the Russian trooper “a battery commanded by Captain G. I. Igishov [that] took the brunt of the attack and destroyed nineteen tanks during the day. All the men of the battery died heroically in the battle, but did not let the Fascists pass.”

By the end of the second day of the offensive on the central front, the Germans had managed a total advance of only six miles, The six- mile advance had been achieved along a front of only twenty miles in width, and for this Model’s forces had lost at least ten thousand men killed, with another fifteen thousand missing and wounded.

The major advance had taken its toll of German troops, but the Wehrmacht discovered that storming an area successfully did not terminate the pile-up of casualties. The countryside into which the Wehrmacht had advanced was almost made to order for the defenders, and as the German soldiers set out to clear the copses and woods, the towns and settlements, the rolling hills, they found themselves exposed to steady fire from diehards who seemed to spring up everywhere.

On the night of July 6 the German position, despite the progress already made, was far from enviable. Twenty-five thousand men who could not be replaced were missing from the ranks commanded by Model. At least two hundred tanks and self-propelled guns had been destroyed by the withering, heavy crossfire of the Russian defenses, and these, too, lacked replacement. The Wehrmacht had expended vast stocks of ammunition, and Ninth Army was so low on supplies that Model sent a personal message to Zeitzler at OKH (army high command) for the immediate dispatch of 100,000 rounds of ammunition for the tanks and other heavy weapons.

To the consternation of the German commanders, the Russians continued to sow mines in every direction, but especially behind the armored wedges the Germans had rammed into the Russian defensive systems. This meant that the supporting forces, moving up behind the panzerkeil wedges, had to commit themselves to the tedious and time-consuming job of clearing a path through the mines just when they were most desperately needed at the first line of fighting.

Model could find little joy in the tip of the spearhead he had managed to pound into the Russian defenses. The greatest advance of the panzers was now stopped dead by a wide range of low hills to the north of Olkhovatka.

Model received reports from his reconnaissance aircraft that the Russians were now bringing heavy armored reinforcements into the battle from the east. Then he received confirmation that powerful Russian columns were moving westward, south of Maloarkhangelsk, toward Olkhovatka and Ponyri.

“Failing to achieve a decisive success in the center and on the left flank of 13th Army,” states Rokossovsky, “the enemy switched his main effort to the village and railway station of Ponyri which, in the circumstances, was of considerable operational-tactical significance. Holding Ponyri, our troops could strike flank blows at the enemy advancing to Maloarkhangelsk and Olkhovatka and also keep in their hands the Orel-Kursk railway.”

On July 7, at dawn, Model hurled his forces against Ponyri. It was in this vicinity during the next four days, along a staggered line running from Maloarkhangelsk to Nikolskoye, and especially in the area of hills between Ponyri and Molotychi, that the Germans were destined to batter themselves raw.

The attack, made with the fury of men who know they must win, at this place, or see their long-range battle plans shattered, turned the countryside into flaming carnage. Rokossovsky kept to his device of burying his tanks hull down to contest the advance of the Nazi heavy and medium tanks. Orders went out from him that any Russian tank in the open must avoid combat with heavier German armor and concentrate upon infantry and light armor as targets.

Within hours heavy smoke hung everywhere, shadowing the bright sun, as fields burned in all directions. Whatever had been the fury of the tank battles so far, they were eclipsed now as the two enemy forces maneuvered and dug in, hammering constantly at one another. The massive exchanges of steel projectiles and fire yielded now to hand-to-hand confrontation between German and Russian. The Russian troops were entrenched on both sides of commanding heights. The land below had been cut and sliced into a maze of trenches, bunkers, and foxholes, bristling with weapons of every description.

To force their way through the terrible crossfire of the Russians, the Germans resorted to human-wave attacks, one row after the other hurtling forward into the deep roar of heavy Russian guns, the scream of rockets, and the constant background din of rifles. The best troops the Wehrmacht had in the area charged into the valley depressions first from the west, and then from the east, but no matter their direction of charge, they were met with an overwhelming defensive fire that never seemed to slacken.

The casualties suffered by the Germans were enough to have broken the back of any army, and it is a tribute — acknowledged by both sides — that these men fought with uncommon courage and dedication. One regiment in its first hour of battle lost every officer killed or wounded. Battalions were decimated until they were at only company strength; still they fought on desperately until their numbers were reduced to platoon strength.

In such a vast struggle the sacrifices and successes of most men are swallowed without recognition or even knowledge of their deeds by the terrible casualties suffered, and those who do survive and whose exploits become known are, of course, representative of the far greater number who fell where they fought.

The 2d Battery of the 540th Light Artillery Regiment of the Supreme Command Reserve of the Russian army provides a closer look at the sort of fighting and bravery that marked the savage grueling conflict. The 2d Battery took up a direct fire position north of Ponyri. One of the gun crews was commanded by S. K. Sedov; He and his men were to distinguish themselves by extraordinary performance in a sea swelling with uncommon valor.

Sedov and his men, watching the advance of heavy Wehrmacht armor, held their fire until the Germans were barely more than six hundred feet from their position. They opened fire with a direct hit against the lead tank, piercing the armor and wreathing the vehicle in flames. A second tank exploded and immediately afterward, as the Germans responded with steady, accurate fire of their own, several more tanks were hit.

For hours the battle raged between Sedov’s gun battery and the tanks blocked by the stubborn Russian resistance. Crewmen manning the antitank guns were hit one after the other and fell where they were. Others moved in to take their places until there remained only the men clustered about their weapons. On Sedov’s own gun, the paint was burned away from the barrel. Wounded soldiers had their hurts bound by friends and returned to the fight. The struggle became one of attrition, and it was Sedov and his men who held out the longest. Before the Germans pulled back slowly, this one gun position was officially credited with the destruction of eight tanks and approximately a hundred officers and men from the attacking force killed.

Human wave after human wave rumbled into the mouths of the Russian guns. At one point the Germans moved into a hollow near Ponyri more than 150 tanks and an unspecified but large number of armored personnel carriers for a flanking attack on the Russian lines. Spotted by fighters flying reconnaissance, the German force was quickly brought under heavy artillery bombardment and a devastating air strike by 120 Stormoviks and twin-engined bombers. The Germans retreated in disorder with heavy casualties.

By afternoon of July 7 Model was desperate and called for heavy air support. This time the German raiders went after Russian troops rather than the heavily entrenched tanks and artillery. Nazi soldiers rallied behind the heavy, sustained bombing strikes and rushed forward. Once again their ranks were slashed badly, but still they came on, and two battalions of troops supported by fifty tanks pounded their way into the northwestern outskirts of Ponyri. Just when Model had his first real grasp of success with a vital Russian center in his hands, the Russians mounted a furious counterattack, overrunning the German forces in the town and destroying both battalions.

Darkness fell slowly across a battlefield through which the sun had long been no more than a dim and shadowy disk seen through a smoke ridden world. Model knew he dared not relax his pressure, and he rushed into the fighting an additional two infantry regiments and sixty tanks.

The fresh replacements ripped wide holes in the defenses of the 307th Division, which fell back slowly beneath the pressure of the German assault. During the night, when both sides ended their movement on the front, the Russians whipped together the disorganized 307th Division and with the first light of dawn hurled a counterattack against the enemy, dislodging the Germans from their bitterly won ground and assuring the continued safety of Ponyri.

Heavy tank battles that began on July 7 near Olkhovatka continued through the entire day and well into July 8. What was left of the German force in this area — some three hundred tanks with heavy support from submachine gunners — threw themselves against the 3d Tank- Destroyer Brigade northwest of Olkhovatka, The battery, already mentioned for its outstanding performance under fire by Zhukov, was commanded by Captain G. 1. Igishov. The Germans finally pulled back after a bitter exchange, unaware that the only force still opposing them was made up of one gun and three desperately tired, wounded Russians

July 8 produced another manifestation of desperation wherever the Germans were on the attack, The village of Teploye, along the western end of the combat line, became the scene of a furious assault launched by the last armored reserve available to Model. The tanks of this final reserve — 4th Panzer Division — teamed with armor of the 2d and 20th panzers, along with a powerful striking force of motorized infantry, to carry out an attack that “must succeed” from sheer weight of firepower and arms against an already weakened and weary defense

Rokossovsky had laid down a grueling reception for this offensive thrust, The village of Teploye and the heights behind the small community swarmed with a massive Russian defense composed of a division of artillery, two divisions of riflemen, two brigades of tanks, and a brigade of assault guns. Three times the Germans battered their way through the Soviets to the uppermost heights of the battlefield, and three times the Russians counterattacked to hurl them off the bloody ground. There was no fourth time for the Germans; their attack had been broken.

July 9 was the last day on which Model’s forces made even the slightest headway against the savagely fighting Russians. By July 10 the losses in tanks were so severe, and losses among the German soldiers were mounting so rapidly, that the Wehrmacht assaults almost visibly began to break down in the field of battle. There were no advances registered that day anywhere along the central front.

The battle there was considered, in its defensive phase, to be ended. The Germans had blunted themselves against a Russian force the like of which they had never before encountered, and the machinery for a massive counterattack was already starting to grind its gears.

But the truly great battles, as the Germans had intended all along, were to the south, along the Voronezh front.

To be continued in Part Four . . .             

The Tigers Are Burning

            (in 5 Parts)

1. Kursk: The Fatal Tiger Flaw

2. Kursk: The Incredible T-34

3. Kursk: The Central Front

4. Kursk: The Voronezh Front

5. Kursk: Burning Tigers