Inferno - Max Hastings [248]
But others held fast, and Model’s armour suffered massive attrition, especially from Russian minefields. In the south, by 9 July almost half of Fourth Panzer Army’s 916 fighting vehicles were disabled or wrecked. Across the vast battlefield, a jumble of armour and men milled, surged, clashed, recoiled. Flame and smoke filled the horizon. Commanders heard a confusion of German and Russian voices competing in urgency on their radio nets: “Forward!,” “Orlov, take them from the flank!,” “Schneller!,” “Tkachenko, break through into the rear!,” “Vorwarts!” The correspondent Vasily Grossman noted that everything on the battlefield including food became black with dust. At night, exhausted men were unnerved by the sudden descent of silence: the cacophony of the day seemed more acceptable because it was more familiar.
On 12 July Zhukov launched his counterthrust, Operation Kutuzov, against the northern Orel salient. A German tank officer wrote: “We had been warned to expect resistance from PaK [antitank guns] and some tanks in static positions … In fact we found ourselves taking on a seemingly inexhaustible mass of enemy armour—never have I had such an overwhelming impression of Russian power and mass as on that day. The clouds of dust made it difficult to get support from the Luftwaffe and soon many of the T-34s had broken through our screen and were scurrying like rats across the battlefield.” In the mêlée of armour, some tanks of the rival armies collided, halting in a tangle of tortured steel; there were many exchanges of fire at point-blank range. Across hundreds of miles of dusty plain and blackened wreckage, the largest armoured forces the world had ever seen lunged at each other, twisting and swerving. Turret traverse was often a lethal race, in which survival was determined by whether a Russian or German tank gun fired the first round. By nightfall on 12 July, rain was falling; the two armies embarked on the usual struggle against the clock, exploiting darkness to recover disabled tanks, evacuate wounded and bring forward fuel and ammunition.
The important reality was that German losses were unsustainable: Manstein’s assault had exhausted its momentum. Even where the Russians were not advancing, they held their ground. That same day 2,000 miles away, the six U.S. and British divisions that had landed in Sicily began to sweep across the island. Hitler’s nerve broke. On 13 July, he told his generals he must divert two SS panzer divisions, his most powerful formations, to strengthen the defence of Italy. He aborted Citadel. Zhukov surveyed the battlefield with Rotmistrov. The tank general wrote: “It was an awesome scene, with battered and burned-out tanks, wrecked guns, armoured personnel carriers and trucks, heaps of artillery rounds and pieces of track lying everywhere. Not a single blade of grass was left standing on the darkened soil.” The Germans kept attacking for a few days more, in hopes of salvaging something that Berlin might claim as a victory, but they were soon obliged to desist. Manstein’s reputation for invincibility was among the casualties of Kursk, though he never accepted responsibility for failure.
Behind the front, partisans staged fierce attacks on German communications, executing 430 rail demolitions on 20–21 July alone. Hapless train crews, Russians conscripted by the occupiers, were summarily shot when they fell into guerrilla hands. By mid-1943 the Russians claimed to deploy 250,000 partisans in Ukrainian and other eastern wildernesses beyond German control. Their guerrilla activity made far more impact than that of any western European resistance movement, aided by Moscow’s indifference to Wehrmacht reprisals against the civilian population. “The Germans sent tanks, aviation and artillery against this partisan region,” wrote a Russian correspondent when he visited a liberated