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

The long-awaited Panther tanks arrived by rail near Borisovka, beginning on 1 July, and the last trainload did not arrive until 4 July, the day before Zitadelle was to begin. All the technical problems aside, Hoth had made little effort to ensure that the two Panther-Abteilungen had proper command and control or were integrated into PzAOK 4’s tactical plans. The 10.Panzer-Brigade was established in Berlin on 27 June under Oberst Karl Decker to command the Panthers, but the headquarters did not even begin moving to the Eastern Front until 3 July.[22] This mistake was another indicator that the efficiency of the German Panzertruppen was slipping by 1943. Realizing that someone had dropped the ball, Major Meinrad von Lauchert, who had been involved with training Panther crews at Grafenwöhr, formed the provisional Panzer-Regiment 39 to control the Panthers arriving at the Borisovka railhead. The Panthers were put under the operational control of Großdeutschland, which gave von Lauchert a radio command vehicle and enough resources to operate a small tactical command post. However, this ad hoc solution all occurred in the last evening before Zitadelle began, which meant that coordination and the tactical orders process were curtailed. One-third of the Panther crews had no combat experience and now they were being asked to go into battle attached to an unfamiliar unit and with vague tactical orders. Making matters significantly worse, there was no opportunity at the railhead to bore-sight the main guns (which after a long, bumpy train ride would definitely be out of alignment with the gunner’s sights) or to set radios to correct frequencies. As soon as they left the railhead, Panthers began breaking down on the 35km road march to the assembly area near Tomarovka and by the time they reached it, only 166 out of 204 Panthers were still running.⁸⁷ Two Panthers were completely burnt-out by engine fires.[23]

While the Panthers were moving up to the front, Hoth’s PzAOK 4 was already making its initial moves in Zitadelle. At 1450 hours on 4 July, Stukas from Luftflotte 4 conducted a massive airstrike against positions in the 6 GA’s forward security zone, followed by an artillery bombardment from XXXXVIII Panzerkorps. Hard on the heels of the artillery barrage, infantrymen from both corps began an aggressive counter-reconnaissance probe to overrun Soviet units in their forward security sector. Most of the action involved battalion-size probes to eliminate Soviet artillery observation posts and to begin clearing the outer minefields. No tanks were involved in this effort, but assault guns and reconnaissance vehicles moved forward. In contrast to von Knobelsdorff’s broad daylight approach, Hausser’s II.SS-Panzerkorps did not begin its own counter-reconnaissance effort until after dusk. Hoth’s troops succeeded in capturing a few villages and hilltops, but were shocked by the difficulty of clearing paths through the minefields and the heavy casualties. Nor were all the Soviet outpost positions or mines eliminated in the security zone.⁸⁸

Unlike the northern front of Operation Zitadelle, the operations of von Manstein’s southern pincer have been covered in great detail in a large body of literature and I do not intend to belabour this well-known side of the Battle of Kursk with a blow-by-blow description. In particular, this task has already been well accomplished by George M. Nipe’s Blood, Steel and Myth (2011) and Valeriy Zamulin’s Demolishing the Myth, which both provide great day-to-day detail on the fighting on the southern side of the Kursk salient. Instead, I intend to focus the remainder of my discussion of Zitadelle on the main implications for armoured warfare on the Eastern Front on three particular topics: (1) how von Manstein’s armour penetrated the Soviet obstacle belts, (2) the poor performance of the Panther tank in its initial combat debut and (3) Rotmistrov’s botched counter-attack at Prokhorovka. I also intend to avoid the simplistic pitfall of earlier analyses, which tend to base their assessment of Zitadelle upon numbers of operational tanks on either side and little else.