A Writer at War (36 page)

The Battle of Kursk,
July 1943

Stalingrad citizens return to the ruined city.

Details of German preparations, and the increasing delays affecting the operation, were passed to the Soviet Union in a veiled version from Ultra intercepts. Information also came from many other sources, including air reconnaissance and partisan intelligence networks inside the occupied territory. As a result, the
Stavka
was able to concentrate over a million men to the defence of the area (giving them a superiority of more than two to one) and invest in the most effective defence lines ever undertaken on the Eastern Front. In addition, a half-million-strong reserve, to be know as the ‘Steppe Front’, was assembled and deployed in the rear, ready to counter-attack.

Hitler, on the other hand, was convinced that the newly improved Mark VI Tiger tanks would prove invincible. The battle of Kursk was to become famous as the greatest clash of armoured forces in the history of the world, but this tends to divert attention from the importance played by other arms. Soviet sappers laid vast minefields, the Red Army artillery, especially the hundreds of batteries of anti-tank guns, played a major
role, as did the Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft, concentrating their cannon and armour-piercing bomblets on German tanks.

Grossman, who reached the front just before the start of the battle, started by interviewing intelligence officers at the headquarters of the Central Front commanded by Marshal Rokossovsky. Notes he jotted down afterwards reflected on the Germans’ obstinacy at attacking such massively well-defended sectors as the north flank of the Kursk salient. This line of attack south from Orel, the lesser of the two assaults, was referred to by the Red Army as the ‘Orel axis’.

A gigantic burden had fastened the Germans to the Orel axis, although pilots kept telling them how strong our defence was. (There’s no freedom of will. Mass dominates over brain.)

Underestimation of the enemy, of the enemy’s strength. This is typical of Germans. It’s due to their successes over the past few years.

Danger of preconceived ideas, due to the controversial character of facts. Concentration of enemy Luftwaffe groups plays an important role in deciphering.
³
Reports on the arrival of generals and field marshals.

A [German] sapper was captured during the night of 4 July. He revealed that the attack was beginning and that the order had gone out to clear mines. Thanks to this we were able to lay on a two-hour artillery counter-preparation bombardment at dawn on 5 July.

Usually, operations staff are somewhat conceited and despise reconnaissance [intelligence] men.

We entered the village of Kuban
⁴
in dust and smoke, amid the flow of thousands of vehicles. How can one possibly find one’s friends in this terrible mess? Suddenly I saw a car with luxurious new tyres standing in a shed. I said prophetically: ‘This car with incredible tyres belongs either to the Front Commander Rokossovsky, or to the TASS correspondent Major Lipavsky.’ We entered the house. A soldier was eating borscht at the table. ‘Who’s billeted in this house?’ The soldier replied: ‘Major Lipavsky, TASS correspondent.’ Everyone looked at me. I had that feeling probably experienced by Newton when he discovered the law of gravity.

Knorring and Grossman in their jeep just before the Battle of Kursk, July 1943.

Grossman went to Ponyri to interview anti-tank gunners who had done as much as anyone to break the back of the German onslaught. Ponyri station was about a hundred kilometres north of Kursk. It was here on 6 July, the second day of the battle, that Rokossovsky launched the first desperate counter-attack with the 2nd Tank Army. In less than a week his Central Front had fought the German Ninth Army’s thrust to a standstill.

Visit to Ponyri. Shevernozhuk’s regiment. Stories about 45mm cannons firing at [Tiger] tanks.
⁵
Shells hit them, but bounced off
like peas. There have been cases when artillerists went insane after seeing this.

After his visits to the northern sector, he went to the more important southern sector, where the attack also on 5 July was mounted by General Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army. This formation mustered the elite of Nazi forces, including the Panzergrenadier Division
Grossdeutschland
and the II SS Panzer Corps, with the three SS divisions:
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Totenkopf
and
Das Reich
. Using the Tigers as their battering ram, Hoth’s forces broke through into the third line of defence, but then were hit by the counter-attack of Katukov’s 1st Tank Army. The crucial point came after a week of fighting when a large tank force of II SS Panzer broke through to the rail junction of Prokhorovka. General Vatutin, the commander of the Voronezh Front manning that sector, immediately contacted Marshal Zhukov. Zhukov agreed to an immediate counter-offensive with five armies, of whom two came from the Steppe Front reserve. The attack on 12 July was led by the 5th Guards Tank Army, which had played the chief role in the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad the previous November.

The Tiger’s more powerful 88mm gun forced the Soviet tankists into almost suicidal charges across open country in order to close with the enemy before they themselves were knocked out. Some even ended up ramming their German adversaries. At Prokhorovka, a battle involving over 1,200 tanks, Soviet armoured forces suffered a casualty rate of over 50 per cent, but it was enough to smash the last great effort of the Wehrmacht’s panzer arm. The battlefield was covered with burned-out tanks in all directions. Observers compared the sight to an elephant graveyard. Within another six days, the surviving German forces had to carry out a fighting withdrawal. The Anglo-American invasion of Sicily prompted Hitler to withdraw key formations from the battle, to bring them westwards to address the new threat to Southern Europe. Hitler may well have wanted an excuse by this stage to extricate himself from a disastrous battle, in which the Wehrmacht had been decisively outfought. The Red Army had proved once again the dramatic improvement in the professionalism of its commanders, the morale of its soldiers and the effective application of force.
⁶

Grossman had been with an anti-tank gun brigade which guarded the key sector in the battle. As Ortenberg wrote later: ‘
The brigade had to
confront
the Germans who were trying to break through towards Belgorod along the Belgorod–Kursk highway, from south to north. Vasily Grossman saw the battlefield with his own eyes. He saw the destroyed materiel of the enemy and our damaged or burning tanks and self-propelled guns. He had watched our troops retreat and advance.’

Belgorod Axis. Anti-tank Brigade. The commander [was] Nikifor Dmitrievich Chevola. ‘I don’t like working at headquarters,’ [he said]. ‘I was praying to be spared from it. I will run away to fight if there’s a battle.’ Chevola’s four brothers: Aleksandr, an artillerist – killed; Mikhail, commander of a heavy artillery regiment; Vasily, who was a philosophy teacher, is now carrying out political work; Pavel is commander of a machine-gun battalion. His sister Matryona was a teacher before the war. She joined the army, and was demobilised after receiving a serious wound. His niece is learning to be a pilot.

‘The Luftwaffe was bombing us. We were there amid the fire and smoke, yet my men became wild. They kept firing, paying no attention to all this. I was wounded seven times myself. [German] tanks wedged in, and the infantry wavered.

‘Constant thunder, the ground was trembling, there was fire all around, we were shouting. As for radio communications, the Germans tried to trick us. They howled over the radio: “I am Nekrasov, I am Nekrasov.” I shouted back: “Bullshit! you aren’t, get lost.” They jammed our voices with howling. Messers were flying over our heads, Senior Sergeant Urbisupov shot down a Messer with his sub-machine gun as it dived at him. The Messers strafe trenches, first along them and then across them, so as to cover all the curves.

‘We had no sleep for five nights. The quieter it is, the more tense it feels. We feel better when there’s fighting, then one begins to feel sleepy. We ate when we could and never had much time for it. Food would become black at once from the dust, particularly fat. When we were taken out of fighting to have a rest, we went into a barn and fell asleep at once.’

Nikolai Efimovich Plysyuk, commander of the 1st Regiment: ‘There isn’t any infantry in front of our artillery. There’s just us and Death. There was only one Willys [jeep] left on the last day of fighting. I would have awarded it a Gold Star, because on its own it saved the whole regiment. And the men dragged one
cannon six kilometres with their hands. They were all wounded, all bandaged up.’

Gun-layer Trofim Karpovich Teplenko: ‘[It was] my first battle. [It was] twilight. We loaded tracer shells, I hit him with the first shell. A tank is no threat to artillery. It’s sub-machine-gunners and infantry who interfere with our work and cause us trouble. Of course, it’s fun when one hits a [Tiger]. My first shell hit the front of it, under the turret . . . and the tank stopped at once. After that I hit it with three shells, one after another. The infantry in front of me were shouting ‘
Ura!
’ and were throwing up their helmets and
pilotkas
, jumping out of their trenches.

‘This was a face-to-face battle. It was like a duel, anti-tank gun against tank. Sergeant Smirnov’s head and leg were torn off. We brought the head back, and also the legs, and put them all into a little ditch, and covered them over. After the battle, the corps commander was standing by the road in the dust. He shook hands with the anti-tank men and gave them cigarettes . . . An anti-tank gun after a battle is like a human being who’s alive but who’s suffered. The rubber is torn on the wheels, and its parts have been damaged by shell fragments.’

Teplenko’s account of the 45mm anti-tank gun taking on German Tigers effortlessly appears somewhat optimistic when one reads excerpts which Grossman copied from the brigade war diary.

A gun-layer fired point-blank at a Tiger with a 45mm [anti-tank] gun. The shells bounced off it. The gun-layer lost his head and threw himself at the Tiger.

A lieutenant, wounded in the leg and with a hand torn off, was commanding the battery attacked by tanks. After the enemy attack had been halted, he shot himself, because he didn’t want to live as a cripple.
⁷

Galin, Bukovsky, and Grossman at Kursk.

Grossman was with Chevola’s anti-tank brigade near Ponyri station during at least part of that epic battle.

This battle lasted three days and three nights
. . . Black smoke was hanging in the air, people’s faces were completely black. Everyone’s voice became hoarse, because in this rattling and clatter one could hear words only if they were shouted. People snatched moments to eat, and pieces of white pork fat immediately became black from dust and smoke. No one thought of sleep, but if someone did snatch a minute to rest, that was usually during the day, when the thunder of battle was particularly loud, and the ground trembled, as if during an earthquake. At night, the quietness was frightening, the nerves were strained and quietness scared away the sleep. And during the day one felt better in chaos, which had become habitual.