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

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 . . there is nothing more frightening than a tank battle against superior force. Numbers — they don’t mean much, we were used to it. But better machines, that’s terrible. You race the engine, but she responds too slowly. The Russian tanks are so agile, at close range they will climb a slope or cross a piece of swamp faster than you can traverse the turret. And through the noise and the vibration you keep hearing the clang of shot against armor. When they hit one of our panzers there is so often a deep long explosion, a roar as the fuel bums, a roar too loud, thank God, to let us hear the cries of the crew....

"Since this morning our troops have been fighting stubborn battles against the large advancing forces of enemy infantry and tanks in the Orel, Kursk, and Belgorod sectors. The enemy forces are supported by large numbers of aircraft, All the attacks were repelled with heavy losses to the enemy, and only in some places did small German units succeed in penetrating slightly into our defense lines. Preliminary reports show that our troops . . . have crippled or destroyed 586 enemy tanks . . 203 enemy planes have been shot down. The fighting is continuing."

The reaction to the communiqué was electric. No one doubted that the greatest battle of the war was raging to the south of Moscow, and on everyone’s tongue was the magic number. Five hundred and eighty-six German tanks destroyed That one number revealed more than everything else put together, and the populace went to sleep that night fairly itching to receive further word on the morrow.

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On the second day of the battle, July 6, the Soviet government admitted to a withdrawal on a small scale, but did not attempt to disguise the fact that severe German pressure had necessitated the move. No matter to the millions watching with bated breath, for again it would be the numbers that told everything, and the numbers, though somewhat less than the day before, were still staggering. The Russian armies, announced the government, had destroyed 433 tanks and shot down 111 planes.

The third day, July 7, the tally was announced as 520 tanks and another 111 aircraft.

The first indication of the hardness of Russian steel came on July 8, the fourth day of battle, when Moscow stated that its forces had counterattacked in several areas of the front. The German losses for the day’s action were put at 304 tanks and 161 aircraft.

By this time there could be no doubt, even if the figures were exaggerated, that the Wehrmacht was taking a bloody and possibly fatal battering at the hands of the dug-in Russians. The losses in tanks especially were staggering, and they could only reflect German losses in men, vehicles, weapons, and other war materiel Either the Germans had an inexhaustible supply of its war goods, or they must break before too much longer.

Tension in Moscow had yielded to excitement and the promise of each continuing day. And then, on July 9, there came from the battlefield the first detailed report of the massive fighting in the Kursk salient.

It was the title of the report that swept Moscow and all Russia by storm, An appropriate title: The Tigers Are Burning.

It was but the prelude to the battle.

Unknown to one another, both the Germans and the Russians were preparing for an all-out assault on July 12, approximately one week into the fighting on the Voronezh front.

Hoth needed desperately to break out into the open country to the southeast of Oboyan, near Prokhorovka, where he would have the room in which to maneuver large forces of his armor for a shattering blow against the enemy and open the way for his panzers to streak toward Kursk.

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The Russians felt the time was essential for a counterblow against Hoth and had made provisions for such a stroke with the armor under Vatutin’s command. Vatutin had planned to use the armor commanded by General Mikhail F. Katukov (First Tank Army), but this force was now strongly dug in as a defensive fortification against continuing German attacks. Zhukov released to Vatutin’s control, then, almost the entire bulk of the uncommitted Russian mobile reserve —  the Fifth Armored Army (also known as Fifth Guards Tank Army), led by Rotmistrov, an experienced and brilliant tank general. In addition, Zhukov moved General Zhadov’s Fifth Guards Army from the steppe front  to Vatutin’s control.

All told, Zhukov was about to launch a series of counteroffensives all along the Kursk front. Four armies would strike on the morning of July 12. There would be a hammer blow against the Orel bulge with Sokolovsky in command of that force; forty-eight hours later, Popov would launch another sledgehammer on the adjoining front.

But the deciding fight would be between the tank forces under Rotmistrov and the armor of II S.S. Panzer Corps. Under Hoth’s command the Germans (who scraped all armor together from the combined forces of the panzers struggling to reach Oboyan) would clash head on with Rotmistrov.

The two main antagonists of the battle of July 12, Rotmistrov and Hoth, were no strangers to one another, for they had clashed violently once before at Stalingrad in 1942, when the Germans made a desperate attempt to break through to their forces trapped by the Russians. Rotmistrov had emerged the superior of Hoth from that encounter, and he went into the new struggle with confidence, He knew that while Hoth masterminded the battle shaping up on the twelfth, as Vatutin was the top commander on the front of the Russian forces, it was Hausser, commanding the II S.S. Panzer Corps, whom he would meet in direct struggle.

If Rotmistrov planned correctly,  the battle would be fought in the countryside adjacent to Prokhorovka. If Hausser acted as Rotmistrov thought he would, then the German commander would bring his panzers in a powerful roiling armada of steel along a comparatively narrow strip of land that lay between the Psel River and a railway embankment. It was a bitter countryside for such a monstrous clash,  for the surface sloped everywhere and was slashed and ribboned by ravines and gullies and strewn with orchards and copses. The soil dried easily and quickly, a fact noted carefully by Rotmistrov. It would throw huge dust clouds into the air and might well isolate the battlefield from heavy air support, once the tanks were engaged.

Rotmistrov intended to take full advantage of every edge he held over the enemy. He knew that the German armor had been engaged for day after day in battles sure to leave the surviving tanks in need of maintenance and repair and that a certain percentage of these machines must break down in the field because of mechanical failure. For his part, Rotmistrov’s armor was in excellent shape, his crews were fresh and eager for the battle, their ammunition complement was full, and they were supplied with whatever they might need — all factors of vital importance in any armored clash,

Rotmistrov had always been possessed of the need to see and experience firsthand what was happening with his forces so that he might personally direct the events of the struggle. On a hill that overlooked Prokhorovka —  and the area that would become the battlefield — Rotmistrov set up his control post, He could see most of his forces with a long sweeping glance — 850 pieces of armor in all, mostly T-34 tanks, but also some KV-1 heavy tanks, and two brigades of the new SU-85, a massive self-propelled gun with an 85-mm. weapon (mounted on a T-3.4 chassis) that had been rushed into production as an authoritative answer to the Tiger and new Panther tanks.

Shortly after daybreak, wave after wave of Russian bombers and ground-attack planes, protected by heavy fighter escort, pounded the German lines, paying particular attention to enemy armor. The success of the Russian air strike was somewhat in doubt, as German armor appeared to proceed with only minor disruptions within its ranks.

A separate armored clash would be under way that same day between XLVIII Panzer Corps and the Russian Sixth Guards Army and First Tank Army; this battle, which was destined to last for several days, would take a heavy toll of both sides.

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The exact moment of the encounter between the two tank forces —  850 pieces of armor on the side of the Russians and some 700 pieces in use by the Germans, including more than 100 of the powerful Tiger heavy tanks —  took place in a manner wholly unexpected by either combatant and helped decide the final outcome.

As Rotmistrov’s force began to roll, lookouts reported the German armored column, almost as large as the Soviet, thundering toward the Russian lines. The Soviets could hardly believe their eyes. They had planned to surprise the enemy with their massive tank attack, and here came a force approximately equal to their own, pounding over the earth beneath a gigantic dust cloud.

The tanks were buttoned up on both sides, and men rode into battle in stifling heat and choking dust, their clumsy vehicles lurching and slamming about in the rough countryside. Planes of both sides swept earthward to attack enemy armor, but air support was quickly thrown off the battle by the dust clouds and boiling smoke that made pilot recognition of friend or foe almost impossible. As a result, the air armada turned to claw at one another in a series of dogfights and skirmishes that went on for most of the day.

Then came the critical moment, The panzers rolled inexorably along their predetermined course, and the Russians, enjoying the advantage of having their tanks located on higher ground, wasted no time in exploiting the favorable situation. Rotmistrov ordered his armor to attack at full speed, and the T-34s charged recklessly down from the slopes.

Deliberately avoiding any kind of head-on clash, the T-34s managed to slip beneath the deadly 88-mm, guns of the German tanks before the enemy could wheel to meet them. With the Nazis boasting superiority in having thicker armor and bigger guns that fired higher velocity shells, their strategy lay in touching off a tank-to-tank slugging match. The Russians wiped out these advantages in a wild charge, taking the German tank armada in the flank and racing in a diagonal line at point-blank range straight through the lines of the panzers.

Never before had there been a charge of armor on such a vast scale, nor to this date has it ever been duplicated. It was the single most extraordinary running assault of tanks, and the bold, tactical stroke of the Soviet tank fleet inexorably dictated the manner in which the battle must be fought.

The entire world seemed to tremble from the continuous din erupting from the battlefield. It was a hellish crescendo of firing guns,  exploding shells and bombs, exploding and blazing tanks, crashing airplanes, screaming engines —  all mixed together in a mass thunder that went on unabated for eight hours.

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Where the Tigers and the Panthers could traverse their turrets and put to good use their long-barreled high-velocity guns, they carried out a savage execution of their quarry. At close quarters the 88-mm. gun was a devastating weapon, and it usually required only one round to tear up even the sloping armored protection of the T-34. But there was little opportunity for the German tanks to stand off and cut their enemy to pieces. The T-34s were faster, they were being handled with remarkable spirit and skill, and they seemed to be everywhere, Once again the Germans were being taught that the lesser gun of the T-34, at ranges of a hundred yards and less, lost nothing in its ability to rip open even the thick armor covering the Tiger or the Panther.

In an astonishingly short interval, more than fifteen hundred tanks and self-propelled guns were engaged in a wild, confused mass of blazing guns and thick clouds of dust and smoke. The Russian “cavalry charge” had broken the back of the carefully laid German plans to handle their opponents in a set pattern. The T-34 attack was executed so swiftly that there was no opportunity for the panzers to wheel about and meet the assault. Before the Germans could even react, the leading elements of the Russian tanks had charged through the entire first echelon of the panzers.

A German tank commander wrote of that incredible moment:

We had been warned to expect resistance from the pakfronts and some tanks in static positions, also the possibility of a few independent brigades of the slower KV type. In fact, we found ourselves taking on a seemingly inexhaustible mass of enemy armor —  never have I received such an overwhelming impression of Russian strength and numbers as on that day. The clouds of dust made it difficult to get help from the Luftwaffe, and soon many of the T-34s had broken past our screen and were streaming like rats all over the old battlefield.

The Germans never had the opportunity to stand fast in carefully arrayed ranks and fight. Armored units milled about in a vast confusion of roaring guns and livid streaks of flame, the sudden bursts of white fire marking the death knell of a tank or self-propelled gun. Again and again the Germans tried to break off combat so as to reform their ranks, but the “rats” streaming all over the battlefield made that maneuver impossible.

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The field of battle seemed too small for the huge number of fighting machines, and within the first hour the sloping hills were spotted with blazing, smoking hulks, many of them torn open, their turrets blown away to land fifty or a hundred feet from the vehicles. Those crews who survived a burning or exploding tank found any moves across open ground to be suicide; they would have to run a gauntlet of high-velocity shells, strafing planes (which could hardly tell enemy from friend), and the blazing machine guns of the tanks themselves.

Finally the battle resolved into groups of tanks maneuvering to concentrate their firepower against similar enemy groups, the forces all the while taking advantage of the cover of gullies and trees.

Rotmistrov must have been both overwhelmed and frustrated by what he saw from his vantage point on his hilltop. In the thickening dust destroyed tanks burned like torches — hundreds of them — and the dust was itself mixed with the ever-increasing plumes of black and greasy smoke from the shattered vehicles. There was no way from such a distance to determine who was attacking and who was being struck.

One fascinating example of individual fighting involved the 2d Battalion of the 181st Brigade, XVIII Tank Corps, which made its attack against the enemy along the left bank of the Psel. Immediately the battalion clashed with a powerful group of Tigers. The German tanks lurched to a halt, their guns swinging around to take the Russian tanks at the greatest range possible. Had they been permitted to do so, the Russians would have been cut to pieces. The heavy KV tanks used by 2d Battalion could handle the Tiger at close range, but at any considerable distance German steel could resist the 76,2-mm, shells of the Russians.

Captain P. A. Skripkin, the battalion commander, signaled for his armor to follow him in a headlong dash at the Tigers, and he rolled his own KV at full speed directly into the center of the massed German tanks. Skripkin took the Germans by surprise, and before the Tigers could fire, the KV had slammed a shell at close range into one German heavy tank, holing the armor and setting off a violent explosion within that killed the crew.

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Skripkin turned the KV sharply, racing at another Tiger, pumping three rounds into his second target to set it ablaze. By now the Germans had brought about their guns, and several Tigers combined their fire against this astonishing Russian. One 88-mm. shell ripped through the side of the KV tank; another shell exploded partway through and seriously wounded Skripkin.

The driver-mechanic, Alexander Nikolayev, and the radio operator dragged Skripkin from the burning KV and hauled him into a deep shell hole. The Russians were prepared to sit out the battle hiding in this manner, but they had been seen by the crew of a Tiger that now rolled toward them to finish off the survivors. Nikolayev dashed from the crater back into the blazing KV tank, restarted the engine, and lurched forward under full throttle.

What the Germans thought of a Russian heavy tank, flames billowing from its body, as it rushed toward them is anyone’s guess. The lead Tiger came to a stop, slamming a shell at the KV, It missed, and the Tiger jerked into motion to move aside from the blazing steel projectile approaching it. Too late! Nikolayev’s flaming tank rammed the Tiger at full speed, and both tanks were enveloped in a titanic explosion.

It was the type of fighting the Germans were to find everywhere on the battlefield. Nikolayev’s reckless and heroic act was the sort of action that was multiplied in incident after incident, and it tipped the scales of victory away from the panzers.

The night that fell across the battlefield was never without light, a fearsome puncturing of darkness by swirling fire and blazing sparks from the shattered hulks of tanks and planes that had been destroyed during the day. It was a battle that strategists might call without decision. The Wehrmacht had lost at least 350 and perhaps 400 tanks; by any accounting at least half their number had been destroyed, and the surviving armor was in sad mechanical shape and desperately short of supplies and maintenance. There had been another savage loss — more than ten thousand men in skilled tank crews and supporting infantry, as well as dozens of aircraft and their crews.

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There are judgments of that tank battle that insist the Russians did not win, but merely achieved a stalemate. This appears to be a myopic evaluation of what transpired, for the Germans had gone into battle with the type of tank force they believed could never be defeated. One hundred Tigers and a lesser number of Panthers represented what the purist would consider the finest armor of the entire war, but it had been unable to break its Russian opponents. The Soviets were severely outnumbered in heavy tanks, yet Rotmistrov’s men in their few KV-Is, and the fast-moving T-34s, had certainly met the enemy on equal ground and dished out destruction as violently and effectively as they had received.

There are sharply opposed accounts of the night following the massive tank struggle. Some insist the Russians remained on the field of battle to claim their damaged tanks and save their surviving crews. Others say that Rotmistrov had failed to destroy the panzers that were his objective and he withdrew from the field of combat in order to regroup. Strong arguments may be made for either case, but in the long run it availed the Germans not at all, The panzers had lost at least half their number on this day, and Hoth could count barely 350 tanks at his disposal, whereas Rotmistrov still had at least 500.

If Hausser, indeed, was left the hideous, torn earth of the battlefield as a prize, it was useless to him, and soon there would be no panzers at all in the area. The battle of July 12, no matter what individual struggles with losses to the Russians might come in the future, had smashed the ability of the Germans to dictate when and where the field of combat would be,

Hausser was removed from his command by an enraged Hitler, and the panzers soon retired to lick their wounds and face the problem of massive Russian attacks all along the many fronts of the Kursk salient. The ability to attack and advance was wrested from the Germans, who were never again to regain the upper hand.

July 12, on that narrow strip of land between a river and a railway embankment, sounded the death knell for the panzers. On that same day Russian armies were striking massive blows along adjacent fronts. Three days later, the Red Army had pounded out advances of fifteen to thirty miles.

Twelve days after the greatest single tank battle ever fought, on July 24, the Russians recaptured every foot of ground taken by the Wehrmacht since Operation Citadel opened on July 5. In the Orel-Kursk and Belgorod areas the Germans had hurled seventeen tank, two motorized, and eighteen infantry divisions at the Russians, and for their pains they had lost an estimated 70,000 men killed, and 2,900 tanks, 195 mobile guns, 844 field guns, 1,392 planes, and more than 5,000 motor vehicles destroyed.

Yet the battles that had been fought to date were only the initial phase of the great decimation 0f German military forces. The Soviets would consider the Battle of Kursk not to be ended until fifty days had followed the opening shots on July 5. Those fifty days would go into the history books of the war as the huge summer offensive of 1943 by the Red Army.

The most critical phase of those fifty days — when the Wehrmacht and its panzers, in their attempts to take Kursk and reopen the road to Moscow, posed a huge threat to the Russians — ended on July 24. From that point on the Russians would be forging new gains and wrecking the ability of the Germans to initiate any more meaningful offensives. It would be a grievous error, however, to pass off the remaining period of the summer offensive as one during which the Russians stampeded their enemy. Badly hurt as they were, the Nazis remained a powerful force in terms of weaponry, manpower, and determination.

That Operation Citadel had chewed up the fighting heart of German armor, was a fact no German leader could, or would, deny, no matter in what form that admission might be couched.

There was another side of the coin that requires telling, however, and the battle for Kharkov in August 1943 is especially illuminating. The massive gains gouged out by Russian armies, the victories that were flashed to all the world, obscure the details of fighting in which the Wehrmacht, at times, bested its enemy, and exacted the bloodiest toil from the Russians who sustained their offensive on the basis of the Zhukov creed that no casualties are ever too great if the objective is accomplished.

Even the most critical German commanders regard the huge Russian counteroffensive in the area of Belgorod as exceptionally well managed by Soviet generals. They are less generous in their judgment of orders issued from Moscow and make it clear that such orders were motivated by political rather than military considerations.

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On the first day of the massive Soviet thrust — in what the Germans consider to be the Belgorod counteroffensive beginning on August 5 — massed Red tanks crowded the area around Bogodukhov, northwest of Kharkov, and Graivoron, Then, reported a German panzer leader in briefings after the war with American officers in Neustadt, the Russian tanks “flowed like lava into the broad plain east of the Borskla, where they were halted by German counter operations from the Poltava-Akhtirka area.”

It is especially interesting to note the German mood in its interpretation of the situation involving Kharkov. A statement provided during the Neustadt interrogation of panzer leaders tells us that

Kharkov constituted a deep German salient to the east, which prevented the enemy from making use of this important traffic and supply center. All previous Russian attempts to take it had failed. Neither tank assaults nor infantry mass attacks had succeeded in bringing about the fall of this large city. Boastful reports made by the Russian radio, and erroneous ones by German pilots, announcing the entry of Russian troops into Kharkov at a time when the German front stood unwavering, did not alter the facts. When the Russian command perceived its mistake, Marshal Stalin ordered the immediate capture of Kharkov.

It was an order from Moscow that would cost the Russians dearly, although in the opening phase of the huge offensive Stavka was convinced the rehabilitated Russian Fifth Tank Army would have little difficulty in ridding Kharkov of its enemy occupation forces, Stavka failed to recognize the full strength of the Germans in the area and did not anticipate the speed with which the Wehrmacht army would react to the threat of the Soviet drive.

Five divisions of the German XI Infantry Corps effectively sealed off Kharkov in a long arc the moment the Germans saw signs of the armored pressure being brought against them. To the defenders, the Soviet plan was almost dictated, without room for variation, by the strength of the Wehrmacht and the local terrain, The Germans were thus able to gamble that the Russian’s, even with their willingness to absorb terrible losses, would not carry out a frontal assault on the projecting Kharkov bastion, but would throw their strength against the narrowest part of the defending arc west of the city. If they succeeded in breaking through at this point, they would be able to envelop the defenses and seal off the city.

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Presuming the Russian plan of battle must follow this logic, the Nazis set up thick antitank defenses. Along the northern edge of the bottleneck the German troops shoved and rolled their deadly 88-mm. flak guns into position, aimed where the tanks must come, and then backed up this initial defense line with more batteries of 88s on the high ground overlooking the anticipated battlefield.

Notwithstanding these weapons, the Germans were not at all sanguine about their ability to hold Kharkov, for they were aware the Russians would attack with extremely heavy armored forces. On the day before the anticipated Russian assault, the defensive alignment was augmented by the arrival of the ad S.S. Panzer Division (Das Reich) in the city. These strong armored forces were rushed to the most endangered sector.

Ninety-six Panthers, thirty-two Tigers, and twenty-five heavy self-propelled guns rolled into position the night of August 4-5  —  barely in time to meet the Red tanks rumbling forward in a mass armored blow.

Russian maneuvers up to this point had been largely confined to assembling their armor in the villages and flood plains of the valley before advancing in battle formation from their assembly point. The Kharkov defenders countered by launching heavy air attacks.

It was an air strike the like of which had never before been witnessed on the Russian front. So heavy had been German losses in supplies that the Stuka dive bombers lacked the bombs normally assigned for strikes against armor. All that was available was a supply of four-thousand-pound bombs that had been intended for use against Russian battleships. There was no choice but to use the two-ton monsters, and the Stukas took off with their massive loads and headed for the Russian assembly area. Fortunately for the Wehrmacht a strong and effective fighter escort went along on the raid, otherwise the German bomber force would have been shattered.

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Russian fighters rose in a cloud to defend the assembly area but were overwhelmed by aggressive Nazi pilots in Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs. Rather than having to run the gauntlet of Russian fighters, while they were severely overloaded, the Stukas came on in wedge formation, eased into their dives, and screamed earthward against the enemy armor.

For miles in every direction the earth shook and heaved as the massive bombs exploded with earthquake force in the target area. Each time a four-thousand-pounder struck, the shock wave boomed outward like an enormous crack of thunder. Left relatively free from attacks by Russian fighters, the Stuka pilots with “majestic calm,” plunged earthward, executing their bomb drops with careful precision. Within minutes of the first wave of air strikes — and more were on the way —  the villages occupied by the Russian tanks blazed from one end to the other. Mixed with the upward-shooting flames of homes and farms could be seen the more intense, whiter flame of blazing fuel and ammunition as Russian tanks exploded and burned,

By day’s end, after several intense air strikes, Stalin’s order to attack went unfulfilled. The setting sun cast a garish glow upon a scene that resembled hell. All across the valley arose dark, curling mushrooms of smoke from wrecked tanks, It was, for the Germans, an excellent combat performance by the Luftwaffe, and a great stroke of fortune. Without risking a single tank or soldier they had bloodied the enemy and bought the time to further reorganize the defense System

The next morning, August 6, showed how well the Russians had learned their lesson from the Stukas. There was no mass grouping of tanks as dawn broke, but scattered groups of armor appeared, crossing the valley in many different areas and then disappearing into the sprawling cornfields that lay between the two enemy hordes. It would be only a temporary cover for the Red tanks, for the cornfields ended at the east-west main highway that lay several hundred yards before the main German line of resistance.

As the morning wore on, the Russian crews kept working their way steadily to the hollows and depressions at the southern edge of the cornfields. The Germans watched as best they could, but the enemy tanks were hidden from sight. Then, as the Germans expected, the signal was flashed to the Russians to move out at full speed. The mass scramble of T-34s became a widespread bludgeon, Russian drivers gunning their engines, the clanking and whine of treads fading before the machine gun fire of the T-34s and the crunching thud of their big guns.

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The Panthers were ready and waiting, and the air seemed to split with the screaming crack of the flat-trajectory 88s in the German tanks. The panzer crews had arranged their Panthers to catch the oncoming T-34s in a withering flanking fire, and within moments the fields were spotted with blazing T-34s, turrets blown away, sides holed, fuel and oil tanks blazing from the deadly close fire of the Panthers. The first wave of T-34s stumbled into the howling 88s, and the attack failed. It did not falter; it failed through sheer destruction of the Russian tanks.

But there were more Red tanks; there were always more, it seemed, and the Fifth Guards Army, its leaders lashed by Stavka to take Kharkov at all costs, broke from their concealment a second, and third, and then a fourth wave of T-34s. Many more were hit, and the number of burning and wrecked tanks increased, But the T-34s through sheer weight of numbers and dogged persistence punched out of the protecting hollows into the teeth of the Panthers and gouged their way into the most forward defensive positions of the Germans.

What had happened to German armor one month earlier when they stormed the pakfronts of Russian defense lines was reborn before the gates of Kharkov, only this time the Soviets found themselves on the receiving end. The T-34s cracked the first German line, gathered speed to storm the next bastion, and rolled directly into a deadly nest of antitank and 88-mm. flak guns and, totally unexpected, a powerful force of Hornets (83-mm. tank destroyers) and Wasps (self-propelled 105-mm. light field howitzers).

The ripping crossfire, with well over a hundred of the deadly 88s blazing away at one time, supported by still more firepower, tore to shreds the Russian attempt to maintain tank formation and split the advancing armor into widely separated groups. Now the 88s and especially the Hornets, jockeying for the most favorable position, took the T-34s in their flank and began a systematic butchering of the enemy.

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Still the Russians came on, disregarding appalling losses, ignoring the odds turning steadily in favor of the Germans. Still the T-34s ground over the earth, firing steadily, taking their enemy head on, in the flanks. More tanks were brought up from the rear, and in the face of that savaging defensive fire, the Russians managed to concentrate new groups of tanks to force a penetration through sheer weight of numbers and guns. The T-34s were massing against the second defense line when suddenly they were struck violently from another quarter, as German reserves of powerful Tiger tanks and self-propelled assault guns arrived.

When the fighting ended, and the Russians retreated from the field of battle, they left behind them 184 destroyed I-34S.

One Russian force did not yield its position. A battalion of motorized infantry had pounded into a heavy wooded area west of Lyubotin, set up defense positions, and resisted very heavy assaults by the Germans. Cut off and isolated now from their main force, the Russians were promised relief in a radio message, and they dug in deeper to fight it out through the night.

August 7 opened with a variation in the Russian assault tactics. There was no mass frontal attack this time The Germans, their lines secure, their casualties replaced, watched an incredible armored attack of several hundred tanks roiling simultaneously in a single huge wedge that shook dust into the air from the vibrating earth. The wedge appeared unstoppable, but as it moved toward the German lines, the defending crews made the most of their rare opportunity. Tank commanders sighted their guns, effective at much greater range than the T-34 weapons, and the command to fire flashed through the lines. At a range of two thousand yards, the 88-mm. guns of the waiting Tigers and Hornets began to slam rounds into the I-.4s that could not yet return, with any effectiveness, the withering rain of shells. As the great armored wedge moved across open terrain along the railroad, the Tigers and Hornets kept picking off their targets and an increasing number of T-34s fell away from their formations, badly holed and burning.

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By late afternoon, stopped several times by this deadly long-range fire, the Russians were finally ready for their main blow, and once again the T-34s burst from the protecting hollows of the cornfields and dashed into the teeth of the German defenses, What the Russians had faced the day before was far worse now as the massed firepower of every available Tiger, Hornet, Panther, self-propelled gun, and the antitank and flak guns opened up with rapid fire. The ground covered by the Russian armor seemed to come alive as thousands of high-velocity shells burst with loud cracking roars, the chaos increasing with the thickening smoke and piercing blasts of exploding tanks.

One hundred and fifty-four Russian tanks were either burning, exploded, or shattered by the time the assault ended, but the Russians had left themselves in an almost indefensible position. Large rifle units, seriously weakened by the loss of protecting armor, lay naked to the deadly fire of the German 88s, and a bloody slaughter took place as the explosive shells decimated the fleeing infantry.

Another fierce battle raged in the nearby woods where the encircled Red battalion had refused all offers of surrender and fought like madmen against overwhelming odds. Late in the day the Germans intercepted a radio message from the battalion that informed Soviet headquarters that they had lost the struggle. There was intermittent firing for a while to counter the withering point-blank storm from the big German guns, and then silence. The Russians, to the last man, including radio operators, had died fighting.

To the complete surprise of the Germans, July 8 passed without another attack. The entire day, beneath scorching summer heat mixing with the smoldering iron corpses on the battlefield was spent by the Russians dragging damaged tanks from the field to restock their shattered armored ranks.

The day was almost ended — it was shortly before midnight — when the alarm sounded through the German defenses, Sleepy panzer crews and dug-in German infantry could hardly believe their ears. From the darkness, carrying easily through the almost complete silence of the night, came the sounds of massed engines and turning treads.

Just before the invisible enemy reached the foot of the elevated terrain leading up to the German defense line, the night vanished in a mass of  rippling  eye-searing flame. Under this light, from hundreds of T-34s firing as rapidly as the loaders could slam shells into their weapons, they could see an unprecedented mass attack of everything that could be made to move by the Russians.

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During the first few moments of firing, as the German guns answered the attack, both sides lost several tanks to sudden violent explosions, and the spattering illumination from flaming fuel garishly lit up the battlefield. The “tank torches” kept increasing in number, for now the fight was taking place at close quarters, and more armor was ripped apart and set aflame.

Nothing the Germans had ever encountered before could match this moment, The antitank gunners almost wept in frustration, for in the shifting glow of burning tanks they could not distinguish between friend and foe, and their deadly effect was thus minimized. Not so with the commanders of the Tigers and Panthers. Buttoned up, they shouted orders to their men to charge into the midst of the Russian tanks, firing steadily. Both sides began to take increasing losses at this gun-barrel range, and the German tank commanders, aware they were fighting within their own defense system, began to ram whatever Russian armor survived the 88s before them.

The Germans held their front lines long enough for reserve armor to be brought into the wild contest, and as more Tigers and Panthers rushed into the fight, the night sky waxed steadily brighter — not only from the burning tanks but from an almost ceaseless flash of heavy guns and the growing number of flares sent hissing like flying snakes into the sky. Then isolated farm buildings began to burn, and there was still more light, and the Germans discovered that at a distance of one to two hundred yards they could identify the Russian tanks by their silhouettes.

What had been a great hammering thunder from all sides increased to an even greater pitch as rapid-fire orders went out to the German tank crews, and an all-encompassing din rattled the earth from one horizon to the other, The sudden bright flashes began to appear well beyond the high plateau on which the great night battle of armor was fought. Russian tanks that had penetrated in darkness and confusion to a point far behind the German lines were running wild, tearing up and destroying anything that appeared before their guns.

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By next morning the armored clash was ended. Once again the Red armored column had suffered heavy losses. More than eighty T-34s were left on the battlefield as burned-out hulks, Only one pocket of savage fighting remained. Behind the German lines, in dense woods, a motorized Russian force with a few tanks and antitank guns was holed up, and beating off vastly superior enemy forces. Nothing could be done to dislodge the determined Russians — nothing, that is, until flame-throwing tanks moved up and burned the entire woods pocket to the ground, exposing the Russians to overwhelming firepower. Only a few dazed, stunned prisoners were taken.

In three days of mass armored fighting the Russians had suffered a battering that cost them 420 tanks and losses in men and materiel so great that, according to German intelligence, the Russian Fifth Tank Army “ceased to be a combat factor for the foreseeable future. Kharkov remained in German hands until the high command ordered the troops stationed there to retire.”

Yet only the final results matter, and in the fifty days that followed the opening of Operation Citadel on July 5, 1943, more than a hundred German divisions were mangled in the raging conflict they would all remember forever as the Battle of Kursk.

Isolated setbacks, even unexpected terrible losses, could not change the ominous meaning in the report received in Moscow on July 9, which spoke so eloquently for the fighting in the Kursk salient, and all the way to Berlin: “The Tigers Are Burning.”

♦ The End ♦                

                              ... 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”