Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1943-1945: Red Steamroller

Rumyantsev was designed as a relatively simple, brute-force plan. Vatutin deployed the 5th and 6th Guards Armies (5 GA, 6 GA) northwest of Belgorod and intended to use them to blast a hole through two German infantry divisions of the LII Armeekorps. Once a breakthrough was achieved, Vatutin would commit 1 TA and 5 GTA as front-level mobile groups to exploit and envelop Kharkov from the west. Each combined arms army would also have an independent tank corps to act as army-level mobile groups, which would open a new chapter in the Red Army’s operational use of tanks. The intermediate operational objective was Hoth’s headquarters, near the rail junction at Bogodukhov, 56km northwest of Kharkov. Three other armies from the Voronezh Front would mount supporting attacks to widen the breach, while Konev’s Steppe Front would use the infantry of 53rd and 69th Armies to mount a direct assault on Belgorod. Zhukov believed that Hoth’s PzAOK 4 would be encircled and destroyed in or near Kharkov. Rumyantsev was not a hastily-thrown together operation like the counter-attack at Prokhorovka, but a carefully planned effort that tried to assemble everything that the Red Army had learned so far about combined arms warfare.

At 0500 hours on 3 August, the Voronezh Front began a 170-minute artillery preparation in its designated attack sectors. The density of the barrage was much larger than the Germans were accustomed to and the LII Armeekorps’ forward positions were devastated. While the barrage was in progress, Soviet sappers moved forward and began clearing lanes through the German mines. Vatutin provided his two main assault armies, the 5 GA and 6 GA, with a special sapper brigade for obstacle removal. At 0750 hours, Vatutin’s ground assault began. The 5 GA hit the boundary between the German 167. and 332. Infanterie-Divisionen with two corps-size shock groups, the 32nd and 33rd Guards Rifle Corps. Each of these shock groups had three rifle divisions, a tank brigade and self-propelled guns for close support and engineer battalions to clear mines – all indications that the Red Army was learning how to conduct offensives more efficiently. The correlation of forces in the assault sector was over-whelming and 5 GA rapidly broke through the LII Armeekorps first line of defence and smashed the 167.Infanterie-Division. Only three hours after the ground attack began, Vatutin committed the lead elements of 1 TA and 5 GTA into battle to hasten the German collapse in this sector. Each tank army was led by a reinforced tank brigade, which acted as an advance guard well ahead of the main body. In Katukov’s 1 TA, it was Polkovnik Nikolai V. Morgunov’s 200th Tank Brigade, from 6 TC, that was out in front. By nightfall, Vatutin’s armour had achieved a penetration of 14km into Hoth’s lines. In general, the supporting attacks also went well, although Zhukov brow-beat commanders into committing their tactical armoured reserves too quickly, before breakthroughs had been achieved.

There was little that Hoth, in his headquarters at Bogodukhov, could initially do to contain Rumyantsev. Both 1 TA and 5 GTA advanced southward, side-by-side, with nearly 1,000 tanks. Hoth positioned Schmidt’s 19.Panzer-Division and its attached Panthers to create a Stützpunkt at Tomarovka on the west side of the Soviet breakthrough, but there was a growing gap in the LII Armeekorps sector that could not be closed. Assault guns from Sturmgeschütz-Abteilung 911 and Crisolli’s 6.Panzer-Division tried to close the gap, but this proved impossible. A mobile delay with armoured forces is fought as a series of meeting engagements in reverse. Typically, the Germans would deploy a platoon of Pz IV medium tanks in concealed positions with their main guns slewed over the back deck; when the lead Soviet tanks appeared they would destroy the first few tanks and then race back to the next terrain feature to repeat the process. These ambush tactics usually resulted in tankers running up their ‘kill tallies’ without the risk of heavy losses. Mobile delay could be nerve-wracking, however, when crews were tired and inattentive; sometimes the pursuing Soviet tanks could approach from an unexpected direction.