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a village only to take heavy losses from pre-registered artillery fire that ‘Having driven Ivan out, we should have withdrawn ourselves and let him bomb the place out of existence. Then we could have moved the armour forward relatively safely.’32 This is what Schütte did successfully at a hamlet the following day, though losing several tanks to mines because there was ‘no time for laborious mine-clearing’. Schütte recalled this period before the Soviet counter-attack as being characterized by a desolate battlefield, with ‘miles of devastated corn, dozens of destroyed tanks and dead bodies swelling obscenely in the summer heat’. On one occasion his company commander looked up in a small copse to see the face of what he thought was an enemy sniper. He fired a full clip of his pistol into what turned out to be ‘a bodiless head, which had been blown off by an artillery blast and tossed up into the tree, where it had lodged’.33

After a week of continual fighting, Hoth could boast only a rectangular salient 9 miles deep by 15 across in the Voronezh Front’s line, and no immediate prospect of breaking through to Kursk itself. As Alan Clark noted of the Waffen-SS: ‘These men were face to face with the Untermensch and finding to their dismay that he was as well-armed, as cunning, and as brave as themselves.’34 On 9 July the Soviets went on to the counter-offensive, having drawn in the Germans across their defences in a way most expensive to the Wehrmacht, with a barrage so long and heavy that Schütte said it felt like ‘a continual earthquake’. Meanwhile, in the northern part of the salient, Model’s Ninth Army managed only to penetrate the 6 miles to Ponyri, and had ground to a halt by the night of 11 July, with the Soviets counter-attacking the next day. A major problem overtook the vast Ferdinand assault gun, which XLVII Panzer Corps had hoped would be a battle-winning weapon. Although they had very thick armour-plating, these monsters had no machine guns, and were therefore defenceless against Russian soldiers who would bravely run up to them, board them with flame-throwers and incinerate everyone inside through the engine’s ventilation shafts. Guderian had spotted that using Ferdinands to fight infantry was akin, in his words, to ‘going quail-shooting with cannons’, but the requisite changes had not been made.35 In the first two days of fighting at Kursk, forty of the seventy Ferdinands were destroyed, and, because they failed to silence Russian machine-gun emplacements, Lieutenant-General Helmuth Weidling’s infantry could not support those that did break through. It was a classic example of a foreseeable design defect leading to disaster, and the assault guns had to be refitted with machine guns before being sent to Italy to oppose the Anzio landings.

The Russian assault against the Orel salient to the north of the Kursk bulge, Operation Kutuzov, led by General Marian Popov’s Bryansk Front and General Vasily Sokolovsky’s West Front, which Zhukov had held off until the most opportune moment, forced Kluge to withdraw four divisions from the spearhead of the Ninth Panzer Army, thereby effectively condemning its chances of breaking through. Zhukov was thus in the enviable position one week into Zitadelle of having blocked Model in the north and slowed Hoth in the south, and so was able to send an elite part of his uncommitted mobile reserve, the 793 tanks of General Pavel Rotmistrov’s Fifth Guards Tank Army, into action against XLVIII Panzer Corps and SS-General Paul Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps, which were working their laborious way across the Donets river to the rail junction at Prokhorovka, hoping to outflank Vatutin and find a way to Kursk north-eastwards. The crossing of the Donets by Lieutenant-General Werner Kempf’s detachment with two Panzer corps has been described as ‘the only element of surprise in the entire operation’.36 ‘Success at Prokhorovka’, writes an historian of Zitadelle, ‘would ensure the encirclement and destruction of the two main Soviet groupings in the southern half of the salient and open a new road to