“As we advanced the Russian artillery ploughed the earth around us . . . the whole front was a girdle of flashes. It seemed as if we were driving into a ring of flame. Four times our valiant Rosinante shuddered under a direct hit, and we thanked the fates for the strength of our good Krupp steel.”

Fourth Panzer Army on July 6 was making steady progress toward its goal of Oboyan, directly on the road to Kursk. To cover the hard- fighting army, the Luftwaffe flew seventeen hundred missions in support of the advancing panzers. The effect in this area was pronounced and added to much of Fourth Panzer Army’s success, but it cost other forces dearly in thin air coverage where it was needed desperately. Support air operations against Russian forces fighting XLVIII Panzer and II S.S. Panzer corps were drastically insufficient, for the German pilots found themselves fighting for their lives against increasing swarms of wildly flown Soviet fighters.

Wehrmacht pressure, despite intense Russian defensive fighting, was mounting, and the Germans were moving slowly but inexorably toward their goals. At Oboyan, fifty miles south of Kursk, a Soviet commander watching the German tanks rolling across country said later:

I suppose that neither I nor any of our other officers had ever seen so many enemy tanks at once. Hoth had staked everything on a knight’s move. Against every one of our companies of ten tanks were thirty or forty German tanks. Hoth well knew that if he could break through to Kursk, no losses would be too great and no sacrifice would be in vain. . . .

The situation improved slowly but steadily for the Wehrmacht, as the panzers battered down Russian resistance and broke open a hole through the leading ranks of 67th Rifle Guards Division, streaming out toward Oboyan and a crossing of the Psel. Hausser’s S.S. panzers ripped through the 52d Guards Rifle Division, setting their aim for a steady tank march to Prokhorovka, Another powerful force was rumbling toward Rzhavets after fording the Donets, but Hoth’s expectations for a rapid advance of this force began to fade when Soviet resistance on that front stiffened unexpectedly.

Nevertheless, Hoth was prepared to make the most of the advantages gained. Re needed room for his panzers to move swiftly and decisively, so he turned his attention to the breakthrough that would gain him the open country in the area southeast of Oboyan. There he could use the slashing wedge of the panzerkeil, as he had wished to do all along, and hurl a powerful blow at the Russian left and rear. If successful, if carried out with great speed and determination, he could crack wide open the Russian defensive positions — and Kursk would no longer be an impossibly distant target. Hoth knew he had to move quickly, for Model’s forces to the north were mired in fanatical Russian resistance on the central front, and he could expect no help to his offensive from that quarter.

Hoth could not have selected a better time and place for his enormous gamble. In a slashing tank battle south of Oboyan, the panzers had been bloodied severely, but they had also taken a grisly toll of Russian armor. It was after this struggle that Vatutin ordered a huge force of his tanks be dug in arid protected as hardpoint artillery to make up for losses already taken at the hands of the advancing Germans. But as Hoth viewed the situation, his Fourth Panzer Army, despite its own serious losses, still mounted the tremendous punch of six hundred Tigers, Panthers, Mark IV’s, and self-propelled guns. The Russians, on the other hand, were low on armor that could be sent in large numbers into the battlefield, and mobility was swinging to the side of Hoth.

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The Russians were acutely aware that they must commit their armored reserves to the battle, even if this maneuver meant speeding up Zhukov’s timetable of holding back his biggest punch until the last possible moment, If they did not do so, Hoth had every chance of breaking through to Prokhorovka, turning his armed forces sharply and cutting beyond Oboyan toward Kursk,

If he could be stopped here and now, then his advance would be a march into a terrible valley of death, from which German hopes for continuing the offensive would never emerge. Vatutin, therefore, sent his troops a stern order: “The Germans must not break through to Oboyan under any circumstances.”

He backed up his own command with a powerful reinforcement of two regiments of assault guns where the fighting was going poorly for the Russians, but the move was made in a case of too little arriving too late, and the panzers decimated the stunned, newly arrived Russians.

The danger to Oboyan, and to Kursk itself, was considered so grave that Vatutin’s headquarters was “honored” with the presence of Nikita Khrushchev, carrying with him all the political weight of Moscow.

“The next two or three days will be terrible,” stated Khrushchev. “Either we hold or the Germans take Kursk. They are putting everything on one card. It’s a matter of life or death for them. We must take care to see that they break their necks.”

He did not need to add: or else.

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On the morning of July 7 the panzers began to make good the promise Hoth saw in the growing battles, Advance forces stormed into the village of Dubrova, sending the Russian defenders reeling back to Syrtzevo on the Pena River, which was considered by both combatants to be the last bastion of defense before the Germans could rip straight into Oboyan. As the Russians withdrew steadily to Gremutshy and Ssyrzew, they came within range of heavy German artillery and were cut to pieces, fleeing in a disorderly stream. Heartened by the sudden success, the panzers drove at full speed to the northwest, hoping to carve a deep and lethal chunk out of the Russian defense lines, giving them the freedom of maneuver that would allow them to strike in any direction where resistance seemed the weakest. It was not to be.

The fleeing Russian forces, meeting reinforcements racing to the near debacle, stopped in their tracks and wheeled about to dig in, resuming the fight with a ferocity that caught the advancing Germans wholly unaware, The tremendous fire rippling out from the newly dug-in Russians first stopped the panzers in their tracks, then forced them to fight for survival as thousands of shouting Russians rose from their battlements to counterattack behind lines of T-34 and KV- I tanks.

To the right of the suddenly entangled panzers a regiment of Gross Deutschland promised a sudden blaze of success, when they reported they had stormed the town of Werchopenje, which meant a truly significant piercing of the Russian lines. At once the German command rushed a special battle group into the breach to take swift advantage of the startling success.

When the special group caught up with the regiment, the Germans discovered they were the victims of poor map-reading and were still far from Werchopenje. For thin fighting task force, July 7 ended with the two enemies battling fiercely for individual hills, then subsiding into mutual exhaustion for the rest of the night.

The long battlefront was no longer a single cohesive fighting line, but had broken up into separate combat areas, measured by seesawing defeats and victories on both sides. During the night of July 7, 3d Panzer was engaged in taking advantage of its successes during the day, gouging out pockets of Russian resistance from their positions along the Pena. XLVIII Panzer found darkness a blessing in that Russian artillery and tank fire fell off unexpectedly, and the advance forces began crossing the Pena with a strange lack of resistance from the defenders.

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There were still other marks of success for the armored wedges being thrust so deeply into the Russian. lines. Well to the right of XLVIII Panzer, three S.S. divisions bad backed long, deep gains into the Russian defense zones, But the S.F. never had the chance to profit substantially from these gains. They were never able to bring together the three deep penetrations, so that all day on July 8 and well into the ninth, the three SS. forces moving northward found Russian resistance to the sides of their penetration taking a grim, mounting toil of German armor and men. The tip of the wedge of each 5.5. force was still as strong as ever, but the flanks were being shot to bloody pieces.

Starting at dawn on July 8, individual skirmishes continued to rage back and forth. The special battle group of Gross Deutschland that had hoped the day before to expand the “German occupation of Werchopenje” was hammering its way through stiffening Russian resistance. The panzers chopped their way forward from one hill to the next, the Russians yielding ground slowly, exacting a grisly toll of their enemy, seemingly willing to give up some ground in order to bleed the panzers of their number and their momentum. The Germans fought with an amazing spirit and drive, taking advantage of every break in the fighting, exploiting every weakness, meeting head on the worst of Soviet firepower when there was no other way to advance.

One powerful assault team of the special battle group raced past Werchopenje, bypassing the embattled town to the east, so that the village might be brought under concerted fire from several sides. The Russians held not only Werchopenje but more important, a steep hill (shown on German combat maps as Height 243.0) directly north of the town.

Russian tankers mounted the hill and trained their guns on the advancing Germans below. Nothing the panzers did, from the ground with their own heavy tanks and guns nor fierce air attacks, succeeded in dislodging the Russian tank crews who smashed every panzer assault on the vital height. As the German drive faltered and began to break down under steady losses, Russian tanks seemed to appear from all sides and drove headlong at the German armored wedges, preventing the panzerkeil formations from linking together for mutual strength and protection

Early on the morning of July 8, forty Russian T-34s charged a group of Tigers of XLVIII Panzer, but with little success. Actually, they suffered heavy lassos, and the surviving T-34s were compelled to flee to the safety of the defensive lines on the other side of the Pena.

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In the afternoon seven more futile attacks were mounted by the T-34s against the Tigers — and this time with twenty-one of the Russian tanks destroyed. Still the Russians kept up counterattacking, the T-34s making swift, hit-and-run sorties while artillery units continued their barrage and the Red Air Force gained in strength and effectiveness with every passing day.

On the front where the Germans had gained speed and ground, their drive began to come apart at the seams.

“Neither Height 243.0 nor the western outskirts of Werchopenje were taken on that day,” wrote Mellinthin, “and it could no longer be doubted that the back of the German attack had been broken and its momentum was gone.”

The Germans would replace individual failure on the battlefield with renewed victory. Each side gained and lost the initiative on numerous occasions, but time was beginning to weigh heavily on the side of the Russians.

No matter how many men they lost, there seemed always to be fresh reserves. No matter how many tanks were destroyed in battle, the next morning brought waves of tanks from a seemingly inexhaustible supply. No matter how fiercely the Luftwaffe fought in the air, the day following brought waves of new Russian fighters and ground- attack planes. No matter how many supplies were destroyed, how much artillery was wiped out or captured - there was always more.

By July 9, after five days of fierce fighting for the Germans on the Voronezh front, they had made substantial gains in some areas, yet their forces were being shredded. There were virtually no replacements for German armor, even if great forces had not yet been committed to the battle. What the German panzer leaders recognized, totally aside from the consideration of numbers, was that qualitatively the battle was swinging to the enemy.

The Ferdinand self-propelled guns on Model’s front to the north had proven to be lumbering monsters incapable of defense against infantrymen, and now, in the south, the Panther medium tanks for which the panzers had held out such tremendous hope had also proved to be minor disasters in their own right. The tank design was superb; no question of that, But it still needed a long period of shaking out to get rid of the bugs in its system. Both the Ferdinands and the Panthers were sent into battle without sufficient ammunition for the task at hand. They were also set ablaze by hits that would not faze a Tiger, and the oil and gasoline fuel systems were so poorly protected that a small fire could immediately blossom into an inferno.

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And what of the Porsche Tigers? They suffered much the same fate as did the Ferdinands, and they came under the same scathing indictment of Guderian as had the lumbering self-propelled guns. Without secondary armament (unlike the Henschel Tigers) the Porsche Tigers fell to the same doom as the Ferdinands. The moment they were removed from heavy infantry support, the Russian tank- destroying teams swarmed against the Tigers, rendering them hulks almost at will.

The German troops had been in the field and on the move for five days. They had gone into battle with their rations on their backs — set for five days — and there had been no replenishment of their supplies. They were exhausted and in desperate need of rest. Ammunition was running low for troops, machine gunners, tanks, artillery, mortars. And Russian artillery fire, if anything, was getting stronger, as were the Russian air attacks, making it extremely difficult for the German combat field services to replenish tank fuel, ammunition, and other supplies and to repair the tanks where they were most needed — directly in the field of battle,

There wasn’t really that much to add up for the panzers on the morning of July . Hoth’s forces, fighting since July , had managed to pound their way (XLVIII Panzer Corps) to within sixteen miles of Oboyan, but the leading tip of the armored wedges was still fifty- five miles from Kursk and, even more important, still at least ninety miles from the Ninth Army under Model, At this point no one held out any real hopes for Model’s battered and bleeding forces to regain any meaningful strength against the armies commanded by Rokossovsky.

Painful lessons had been administered to the pride of the Wehrmacht. The Russian soldier was proving to be something vastly different from the subhuman portrait painted so vividly by the propagandists of the Reich. He had emerged from his ground to defeat the great Ferdinand self-propelled guns that could not be stopped by the best of Russian firepower. The dreaded Tiger tanks, especially those without machine guns, also fell swiftly to the fiery blows of the tank-destroying teams swarming across the battlefield. The Luftwaffe, which held itself on some high pedestal, found itself unable to stop the Russian in the air and proved impotent in its attempts to prevent Russian aircraft from raking German forces on the ground.

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The Panther had been regarded by military experts as the finest tank of its type in the world when it was rushed into Operation Citadel, but the Russians found they burned splendidly. The Russians discovered among many other critical lessons, another simple but extraordinarily important one.

The 88-mm. gun of the Tiger was a weapon superior to the 76.2- mm, gun of either the T-34 or the KV-I. Especially vulnerable to the can-opener characteristics of the Tiger, however, was the T-34, which lacked the massive armor of the KV heavy tank. The lesson observed so sharply by the Russians was that the 88-mm. gun of the Tiger was superior only when Russian and German tanks were standing well off from one another. When it came to getting in close and fighting it out in the orchards, riding up and down the gullies, swarming through and around the copses, then it was a battle of armor at point- blank range.

And at this in-tight range, the T-34 proved it could smash open a Tiger just as easily as the Tiger could hole a T-34.

This turned the weight of battle inexorably to the side of the Russians, who had many more T-34 tanks than the Germans did Tigers (the panzers still relied heavily on their older Mark IV tanks).

As the sun rose higher on July , the only real German progress was to be found with Gross Deutschland division, which drove a powerful battle force through a Russian village that straddled the main defense line of the defenders. That afternoon, and well into the night, the Germans did everything possible to exploit the breakthrough, sending a strong reinforcing battle group, including forty tanks, after the lead force.

The Germans poured their reinforcements through the gap in the Russian line and then struck out with renewed fury to the west, working their way behind the Russians so that they might chew away the foundations of defenses that had stopped the bulk of armored wedges. That night (July 9) the Russians surprised their enemy when they slipped away from Rakowo, where they had blocked a further advance of panzers.

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Impelled by the necessity to capitalize swiftly on the penetration already achieved, Hoth ordered his commanders to send assault guns and shock troops into the breach, clean it out of Russian diehards, and bring up a tank force that had the experience, supplies, and firepower to rip deeply into the strategic area between Kruglik and Novoselovka. If they could break through they would be shattering the very core of the Soviet defensive alignment.

For the next two days the truly critical fighting of the Voronezh front took place between these Russian towns as 3d Panzer and Gross Deutschland fought savagely around the clock. In the hilly slopes of the Pena the German infantrymen pounded and battered their way from one small village to another, inflicting heavy casualties against the Russian defenders, but taking severe losses themselves. Nazi rifle teams rushed from house to house, dropping to their knees, then rising to plunge on in the face of defending fire from windows, doors, and barns, From room to room, up artillery-shattered stairways, the fight carried on. Russians and Germans met in bitter, hand-to-hand clashes, their struggles often reduced to clubbing at each other with reversed weapons when ammunition ran out

Progress was made, but it was terribly costly and maddeningly slow, for by the evening of July 11, when a mangled Russian force slipped into woodlands near Berezovka for survival, the Germans could measure their furious fighting and brutal casualties as having earned them a salient about fifteen miles across and only nine miles deep. This was the total extent of the gouge they had managed to make in the Russian lines.

Yet for Hoth it must do. He had no choice but to exploit what this salient could give him, and the advantage was immediate to those involved. The tank forces finally had the room to reassemble and bring themselves back into shape, while doing two things: remaining in the front lines and keeping out of reach of the persistently deadly Russian artillery. It also permitted Hoth to gamble. The men of Gross Deutschland were weary to the point of utter exhaustion. Without some rest and refitting they would be useless for continued combat. The German troops dug in, and Hoth ordered 3d Panzer to take over the lines being released by Gross Deutschland.

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It would be a brief respite, perhaps measured only in hours, for Gross Deutschland was to reassemble on a road leading to the north. The men would bivouac alongside the road and sleep, and then they would be kept ready for a move far to the north. There, Model’s offensive against Rokossovsky was a bloody mess, and unless pressure could be applied on the central front — which was Gross Deutschland’s assignment — there could be no hope of victory for Operation Citadel.

The replacement of Gross Deutschland by 3d Panzer Division went without incident; that is, until the last groups pulled away from their positions. The night sky lit up with brilliant stabbing flashes, and there was no German unable to recognize the beginning of a mighty Soviet artillery barrage.

The 3d Panzer was still not settled in its positions when the shells began to rain down in its midst, The troops did their best to dig in deeply and securely, but inevitably there were more casualties, which the Wehrmacht could ill afford. The barrage cut off suddenly, but there was no rest for the weary infantrymen. Advance scouts reported the sounds and movement that promised a Russian counterattack. It came that same night, with sufficient power and speed to hurl 3d Panzer from the positions in which it was barely settled.

The dawn would bring with it the greatest tank battle of all time.

To be concluded in Part Five . . .                                            

. . .  This article is still in progress   . . . . . .

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: “The Tigers Are Burning”

                              ... This article is still in progress   . . . . . .