Citadel Called Off: Kutuzov, Rumyantsev and the Liberation of Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov

On 13 July 1943, the day after the tank battle at Prokhorovka, Hitler called his two army group commanders on the Eastern Front to his headquarters in East Prussia and told them that Operation Citadel would end. The reasons he gave began with Sicily, where American and British armies had landed three days earlier, but the more pressing reason was already visible on the maps: on 12 July the Red Army had attacked the Orel bulge, the German-held salient north of Kursk from which the northern half of Citadel had been launched. Within six weeks Soviet troops had taken Orel and Belgorod, Moscow had fired its first victory salute, and Kharkov, which had changed hands three times since 1941, was in Soviet hands for the last time. This chapter follows the end of the German offensive and the two Soviet counteroffensives that turned a defensive victory into a strategic one, with their real costs, which were very high.

Why it mattered

The popular picture of Kursk ends at Prokhorovka, with two tank armies locked together in the fields beside the railway on 12 July (Chapter 6). For the Soviet High Command, the Stavka, that was the middle of the battle, not its end. The plan adopted in the spring of 1943 had always had two halves: first absorb and wear down the German offensive in the deep defenses of the salient (Chapter 2), then strike back, north against the Orel bulge and south against Belgorod and Kharkov, with fronts that had been held back for the purpose (Glantz and House). Soviet historiography therefore divides the Battle of Kursk into a defensive phase, from 5 to 23 July, and an offensive phase made up of two operations: Kutuzov, named for the field marshal of 1812, against Orel, and Polkovodets Rumyantsev (“Commander Rumyantsev”), named for the 18th-century field marshal Pyotr Rumyantsev, against Belgorod and Kharkov.

The counteroffensives mattered for three reasons. First, they did what the defensive battle alone could not: they took ground, and they took it in summer. Every earlier Soviet summer in the war had belonged to the Germans. In July and August 1943, for the first time, a German summer offensive was stopped and immediately followed by Soviet offensives that the Germans could not throw back (Glantz and House; Frieser). Second, they were the decisive reason Citadel was called off. The northern half of the German offensive was already stalled when the Orel attack began, and the Orel attack turned it into a crisis that drew Model’s panzer divisions away from Ponyri and Olkhovatka within days (Chapter 3). Third, they opened the road west. By the end of August the front had moved more than 100 km (about 60 miles) from the lines of 4 July in places, and the race to the Dnieper had begun.

They also cost far more than the defensive battle. By the Russian General Staff figures compiled under G. F. Krivosheev, the two offensives cost the Red Army 685,456 men killed, missing, wounded and sick, almost four times the 177,847 of the defensive phase. Operation Kutuzov alone, with 429,890 casualties, was the bloodiest of the three Soviet operations at Kursk (Krivosheev). Any honest account of the Soviet victory has to keep both facts in view: the Red Army won, and it paid for its victory at a rate the Germans could not have survived but the Soviet Union, at enormous cost, could.

10 July: Sicily and the view from Rastenburg

In the early hours of 10 July 1943, the sixth day of Citadel, the U.S. Seventh Army under Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. and the British Eighth Army under Gen. Bernard Montgomery began landing on the southern and southeastern coasts of Sicily, after airborne drops during the night of 9–10 July. Operation Husky was the largest amphibious assault of the war to that date. The Italian coastal divisions largely collapsed; the German formations on the island, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the 15th Panzergrenadier Division, counterattacked the American beaches at Gela on 10 and 11 July and were driven off with the help of naval gunfire (Garland and Smyth, U.S. Army official history). By 13 July it was clear in Berlin that the Allies were firmly ashore and that the Italian army, and perhaps the Italian state, was failing.

For Hitler the Mediterranean was not a sideshow. He feared that an Italian collapse would expose southern Germany, the Balkans and the Romanian oilfields, and he had been planning since May for the possibility that Italy would leave the war. Forces that might have been a strategic reserve for the East, divisions refitting in France among them, were already being earmarked for Italy (Frieser; Dunn). The landing in Sicily therefore arrived in the middle of Citadel as one more reason, and a respectable one, for ending an offensive that was going badly. It is the American connection to this chapter, and it is often overstated.

The best way to measure Sicily’s weight is to ask what actually moved. Of the German formations in the Kursk battle, only one went to Italy: the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, which was pulled out of the line in mid-July and entrained for Italy at the end of July and the beginning of August, after Mussolini had been deposed on 25 July. It left most of its tanks behind for Das Reich and Totenkopf (Nipe; Töppel). Das Reich and Totenkopf themselves did not go west at all. They were sent south to the Mius River and the Donets, where new Soviet offensives had begun on 17 July, and then back north to fight against Rumyantsev in August. On the northern face, nothing went to Italy; Model’s divisions were swallowed by the defense of Orel.

The conference of 13 July

Manstein and Kluge flew to the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia (today Kętrzyn, Poland), on 13 July. The main account of the meeting is Manstein’s, written in his memoir Verlorene Siege (1955; English Lost Victories, 1958), and it should be read as the recollection of a commander arguing his case. In Manstein’s account Hitler opened with Sicily. The situation there, he said, had become serious; the Italians were not fighting; the island would probably be lost, and the Allies might land next in southern Italy or the Balkans. New armies would have to be formed in Italy and the western Balkans, the forces would have to come from the Eastern Front, and Citadel would therefore have to be stopped (Manstein).

Kluge, by Manstein’s account, then said that Model’s 9th Army could make no further progress and had already lost about 20,000 men, and that its mobile forces were needed to stop the Soviet break-ins against the 2nd Panzer Army on the Orel bulge. For him the question was already settled. Manstein disagreed. In the south, he argued, the battle had reached its climax. The Soviets had committed almost all of their operational reserves; the II SS Panzer Corps and the III Panzer Corps were close to destroying the forces south of Prokhorovka; to break off now would be to throw away the victory. He proposed at least to finish off the Soviet armor in front of his panzer corps, and he hoped to bring the XXIV Panzer Corps, held in reserve behind his southern wing, into the battle (Manstein).

Hitler compromised. Citadel as an operation to cut off the Kursk salient was cancelled; Army Group Center would go over to the defense; but Army Group South was permitted to continue local attacks with the aim of destroying the Soviet reserves in front of it. Hitler refused to release the XXIV Panzer Corps, which he wanted to keep in the Donbas against the Soviet attacks he expected there (Glantz and House; Frieser). The result was Operation Roland, launched the next morning.

Two points about the historians’ debate deserve to be stated plainly. First, it is a debate about weight, not about facts: nobody disputes that Sicily was on Hitler’s mind on 13 July, or that the Orel attack had begun the day before. Second, the order of events matters. The Soviet attack on Orel began before the conference; the decision to take the II SS Panzer Corps out of the line was made on 17 July, the day the Southwestern and Southern Fronts attacked on the Donets and the Mius; and Leibstandarte’s departure for Italy came only after the fall of Mussolini. Each step followed a new crisis, in the East as often as in Italy (Töppel; Glantz and House).

Operation Roland, 14–17 July

Roland was a modest operation with a modest aim. Between the II SS Panzer Corps, standing south and southwest of Prokhorovka, and the III Panzer Corps, which had fought its way north from the Northern Donets toward Rzhavets, lay a pocket of Soviet troops of the 69th Army, with the 48th Rifle Corps and elements of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps and the 5th Guards Mechanized Corps. Manstein’s plan was for Das Reich to attack east and south from the Belenikhino area while the III Panzer Corps, with the 7th Panzer Division, attacked northwest, so that the two corps would meet and trap the Soviet forces between the Lipovyi Donets and the Northern Donets. Afterward, in the plan, the two corps would turn together against Prokhorovka (Glantz and House; Nipe).

The attack began at 04:00 on 14 July after a short bombardment. Das Reich’s Der Führer regiment took high ground southwest of Pravorot and around Belenikhino, and the division’s tanks beat off Soviet counterattacks. On 15 July the 7th Panzer Division made contact with Das Reich near Shakhovo, but the trap closed on very little: the Soviet command had seen the danger and pulled most of its troops out to the east, leaving behind a considerable number of antitank guns and other heavy weapons (Glantz and House; Zamulin). Totenkopf, on the western flank north of the Psel, began to pull back under orders issued late on 15 July.

By then the operation had lost its purpose. On 16 July the 4th Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf began preparing to withdraw. On 17 July the Soviet Southwestern Front attacked across the Northern Donets near Izium and the Southern Front across the Mius, in offensives designed in part to draw German reserves away from Kursk, and that afternoon the OKH ordered the II SS Panzer Corps out of the line (Glantz and House). During the night of 17–18 July and over the following days the Germans fell back toward the lines from which they had started on 5 July, under pressure from the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts. By 23 July they were back on those lines, and the Soviet defensive phase of the Battle of Kursk, by the Soviet definition, was over.

Roland is sometimes presented as proof that Manstein could have won if he had been allowed to go on. The record does not support that. The operation achieved a local success, the elimination of the small Soviet bulge between the two panzer corps, at the cost of more losses to divisions that had been fighting continuously for ten days. It did not destroy the Soviet reserves, which had been withdrawn rather than encircled, and the units it was meant to hit were not the Steppe Front’s uncommitted armies but troops already battered in the defensive fighting. Two weeks later, when the Soviets attacked toward Belgorod, it was the German line that proved hollow.

Operation Kutuzov: the blow at the Orel bulge

The Orel bulge was the mirror image of the Kursk salient: a German-held projection eastward into the Soviet line, about 150 km across at its base, with the city of Orel near its eastern tip and the railways from Bryansk and Karachev feeding it from the west. It had been held since the autumn of 1941, and by 1943 the Germans had fortified its edges with a main defensive zone 5–7 km deep of trenches, minefields and strongpoints, though thinly manned, since most of the mobile divisions had gone south into the 9th Army’s attack (Glantz and House). On the north and east faces stood the 2nd Panzer Army, which despite its name had very few tanks: it was an army of infantry corps, the LV, LIII and XXXV Army Corps, holding a long front with a handful of reserves.

The Soviet plan, worked out in the spring, was to attack the bulge from three sides. The left wing of the Western Front, under Col. Gen. Vasily Sokolovsky, would strike south from the area of Kozelsk toward Khotynets, behind Orel, with Lt. Gen. Ivan Bagramyan’s 11th Guards Army as the spearhead and the 50th Army beside it. The Bryansk Front, under Col. Gen. Markian Popov, would attack west toward Orel itself with the 61st, 3rd and 63rd Armies. The Central Front, once it had worn down Model’s attack, would join from the south toward Kromy. Marshal Zhukov coordinated the opening of the operation for the Stavka (Glantz and House; Glantz and Orenstein, Soviet General Staff study). On paper the converging attacks offered the chance of cutting off both German armies in the bulge.

The attack opened on the morning of 12 July, the same day as the Soviet counterattack at Prokhorovka, after a heavy artillery and air preparation. On the Western Front’s sector the 11th Guards Army, with six rifle divisions in its first echelon against two German infantry regiments in a 16 km sector near Ulyanovo, broke the German main line on the first day and pushed deep into the bulge over the next two, with the 1st and 5th Tank Corps exploiting (Glantz and House). The Bryansk Front’s attack went far less well: its three armies advanced only 8 to 15 km against well-prepared positions east of Orel, and the German LIII Army Corps counterattacked the next day (Glantz and House).

The Germans reacted quickly. On 13 July, the day of the Wolfsschanze conference, Army Group Center put Model in command of the 2nd Panzer Army as well as the 9th, so that a single commander controlled every German division in the Orel area (Glantz and House). The 2nd Panzer Army’s own commander, Col. Gen. Rudolf Schmidt, had been relieved shortly before; his brother Hans-Thilo Schmidt had been arrested by the Gestapo that spring as the spy who had sold French intelligence the secrets of the Enigma cipher machine, and the investigation brought the general’s own critical remarks about the regime to light. Model began at once to pull panzer and motorized divisions out of the 9th Army’s battle on the northern face of the Kursk salient and throw them north and east against the Soviet break-ins. The 5th Panzer Division, already in reserve behind the 2nd Panzer Army, was followed by the 12th, 18th and 20th Panzer Divisions, among others, sent against the 11th Guards Army in the days that followed, and on 15 July, when the Central Front went over to the attack, the 9th Army was already giving up the ground it had won since 5 July. By 18 July it was back on its starting line (Glantz and House; Töppel).

The Stavka fed its reserves into the battle. The 3rd Guards Tank Army under Lt. Gen. Pavel Rybalko, with more than 700 tanks, was committed from 19–20 July in the Bryansk Front’s sector east of Orel; the 4th Tank Army under Lt. Gen. Vasily Badanov came in on the Western Front’s side toward Bolkhov from 26 July; the 11th Army and the 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps were added to the northern attack (Glantz and House). None of these reserves produced the deep encirclement the planners had hoped for. They were committed against a defense that had had time to organize, and in the cramped, wooded, gully-cut country of the bulge they lost tanks heavily. The 3rd Guards Tank Army, after its costly frontal attacks east of Orel, was shifted south to the Central Front’s sector before the end of July.

In the air, the Soviet 1st, 15th and 16th Air Armies faced the Luftwaffe’s 1st Air Division (1. Flieger-Division) of Luftflotte 6, which had supported Model’s offensive and now switched to defense. The Luftwaffe was still strong enough in the first days of Kutuzov to hurt the Soviet attacks badly, flying more than a thousand sorties on the first day in the southern sector of the bulge and claiming heavy losses among the Il-2 shturmoviks on 13 July; German bombers and Stuka antitank aircraft were credited by the Germans with helping to stop the Soviet armor near Khotynets (Bergström). By August, as German air units were drawn away to the south and to the defense of the Reich, the Soviet air armies had the upper hand. The air war over Kursk as a whole is the subject of Chapter 5.

Model’s elastic defense and the road to the Hagen line

Walter Model’s defense of the Orel bulge in July and August 1943 is one of the reasons for his wartime reputation as the Wehrmacht’s master of defense. He had two armies, a shrinking number of tanks and a front that was being pressed from three sides. He did not try to hold every village. He shifted divisions rapidly from quiet sectors to threatened ones, counterattacked Soviet penetrations at their bases before they could be exploited, and gave up ground by stages, falling back from one prepared or improvised line to the next while his engineers and construction troops dug the positions behind him (Glantz and House; Töppel). Even the Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division, which had fought on the southern face in Citadel, was rushed north to the Karachev–Bolkhov area in late July before being sent back south in August.

Model’s defense was also made possible by a decision taken above him. Hitler had forbidden retreat from the bulge, and earlier in the year had discouraged the building of fortified lines in the rear, on the theory that commanders who had a line behind them would fall back to it. Kluge and Model nevertheless had work begun on a position across the base of the bulge east of Bryansk, the Hagen line (Hagenstellung). On 26 July, the day after Mussolini was deposed in Rome, Hitler finally agreed that the bulge would be evacuated: he needed divisions for Italy and for the threatened southern front, and holding the long perimeter of the bulge was consuming them (Frieser; Glantz and House).

The withdrawal, code-named Herbstreise (“Autumn Journey”), began on the night of 31 July–1 August and was carried out in stages over about two and a half weeks. It was a fighting retreat, under constant Soviet pressure, and it was carried out with the systematic destruction that German orders called for: bridges, rail lines, factories, stocks of food and whole villages were destroyed, livestock was driven off, and large numbers of civilians were moved west with the retreating troops, many for forced labor. That side of the retreat, and the policy behind it, is the subject of Chapter 8. By 17–18 August the German armies were in the Hagen line, and Operation Kutuzov, by the Soviet definition, ended on 18 August (Glantz and House).

Bolkhov, the old town at the northern edge of the bulge where the 61st Army and the 4th Tank Army had been fighting for two weeks, was taken on 29 July. Karachev, on the main rail line from Bryansk to Orel, was taken on 15 August; Dmitrovsk-Orlovsky, south of Orel, on 12 August. Bryansk itself, behind the Hagen line, held out until the Bryansk Front’s offensive of September, and was liberated on 17 September 1943 (Glantz and House).

Soviet commanders were not satisfied with the result. The converging attacks had been meant to encircle the German armies in the bulge; instead they pushed them out of it. Rokossovsky later wrote that it would have been better to concentrate the effort in two heavy blows meeting at Bryansk, at the base of the bulge, rather than to attack all around its perimeter, and Zhukov held a similar view (Rokossovsky, A Soldier’s Duty; Zhukov, memoirs). The criticism is fair. The Stavka had not yet learned, or did not yet have the strength, to combine a deep breakthrough at the base of a salient with the mobile forces needed to close it, as it would at Korsun in early 1944 and in Belarus that summer. In the Orel bulge it fought its way forward kilometer by kilometer against an enemy who could see what was coming.

Orel and Belgorod, 5 August: the first salute

Orel was reached at the start of August. Troops of the Bryansk Front’s 3rd and 63rd Armies broke into the eastern part of the city on the night of 3–4 August, and after a day and a night of street fighting against the German rear guards the city was cleared in the early hours of 5 August (Glantz and House). The Germans had demolished the bridges and much of the railway installations, and the city had been badly damaged in the fighting and the demolitions. Of a prewar population of more than 110,000, Soviet sources record only some tens of thousands still in the city when it was liberated.

On the same day, some 260 km to the south, troops of the Steppe Front took Belgorod, the city on the Northern Donets where Army Detachment Kempf had begun its attack a month earlier. That evening Stalin issued an order of the day addressed to the commanders of the Bryansk, Central, Western, Voronezh and Steppe Fronts announcing the liberation of the two cities, naming the commanders and divisions that had taken them and ordering, for the first time in the war, a salute of artillery in Moscow to mark a victory.

In their words

“Today, 5 August, at 24:00, the capital of our Motherland, Moscow, will salute our valiant troops who liberated Orel and Belgorod with twelve artillery salvos from 120 guns.”

The salute was fired at midnight from the guns of the Moscow air defenses, and it began a practice that ran to the end of the war: each major liberation was marked by an order of the day, read on the radio by the announcer Yuri Levitan, and a salute whose size, in guns and salvos, signaled the importance Stalin attached to the victory. Kharkov, on 23 August, was given 20 salvos from 224 guns, the highest category; by May 1945 Moscow had fired more than 350 such salutes. In Russia today Orel and Belgorod are both known as the “City of the First Salute,” the date is marked there every year, and in 2007 both cities, with Kursk, received the Russian honorary title “City of Military Glory.”

Honorary names · 5 August 1943

The “Orel” and “Belgorod” divisions

The order of 5 August introduced another practice that lasted to the end of the war: the award of a city’s name to the units that liberated it. The 5th, 129th and 380th Rifle Divisions, which had fought into Orel, became “Orel” (Orlovskaya) divisions, and the 89th Guards and 305th Rifle Divisions, which had taken Belgorod, became “Belgorod” (Belgorodskaya) divisions. The 89th Guards would add “Kharkov” to its name after 23 August. Honorary titles of this kind became one of the main ways the Red Army recorded its victories, and by 1945 hundreds of divisions, brigades and regiments carried them; the Soviet postwar histories of these units, written under censorship, remain the main source for their wartime records.

The Rail War behind the German lines

While the fronts attacked, the Soviet partisan movement launched the largest coordinated sabotage operation of the war against the German railways. The plan, known as “Rail War” (Relsovaya voina), was ordered by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement in Moscow, headed by Panteleimon Ponomarenko, the Communist Party chief of Belarus, and approved by the Stavka in July 1943. Its idea was simple: instead of attacking the railways piecemeal, partisan brigades across the whole occupied territory would cut the rails themselves, at thousands of points, on the same night and in the nights that followed, so that the German repair organization would be overwhelmed and the supply of the armies at Orel and Kharkov would be crippled at the moment of the Soviet offensives (Glantz and House; Slepyan).

The first mass attacks came on the night of 3 August 1943, the day Rumyantsev began, though in the Orel and Bryansk regions partisans had already begun attacking the rail lines in late July in support of Kutuzov. By Soviet accounts some 167 partisan brigades and detachments with about 100,000 members took part in the first phase, in Belarus, the Smolensk, Orel, Kalinin and Leningrad regions and parts of Ukraine. Soviet figures claim that about 42,000 rails were blown on the first night and some 215,000 by mid-September, when the first phase ended; a second phase, code-named Concert, followed from 19 September (Slepyan; Soviet partisan-movement histories). These are claims, compiled from partisan reports that had every incentive to count generously, and German records give lower figures, but the German side’s own reports describe thousands of demolitions in the first nights and lines in Army Group Center’s rear closed for days at a time.

The effect is harder to measure than the effort. The Rail War certainly added to the strain on German logistics at the moment of the Soviet offensives, tied down security troops and repair crews, and helped slow the movement of German reserves along the lines behind Army Group Center. It did not stop that movement. German railway troops repaired cut rails quickly, often by cutting out the damaged section and closing the gap with a shorter rail, and stocks of rail, unlike locomotives, were plentiful (Glantz and House; Starinov). One of the Soviet Union’s leading experts in demolitions argued at the time that the whole method was wrong.

Polkovodets Rumyantsev: the breakthrough at Belgorod, 3–5 August

The southern counteroffensive came later than the northern one because the forces that were to make it had been fighting Citadel. The Voronezh Front, under Gen. Nikolai Vatutin, had absorbed the main German attack and lost heavily; the Steppe Front, under Col. Gen. Ivan Konev, had given up two of its armies, the 5th Guards Army and the 5th Guards Tank Army, to the battle around Prokhorovka. Stalin wanted the attack to start as soon as possible. Zhukov, who coordinated the southern fronts for the Stavka, argued for time to refill the tank armies and bring up ammunition, and won a little more than a week. The plan was approved at the end of July, and the attack was set for 3 August (Glantz and House; Zhukov).

The concept was a single heavy blow on a narrow front. The 5th Guards Army (Lt. Gen. Aleksei Zhadov) and the 6th Guards Army (Lt. Gen. Ivan Chistyakov) of the Voronezh Front and the 53rd Army (Lt. Gen. Ivan Managarov) of the Steppe Front would attack on a sector of about 30 km northwest of Belgorod, between Tomarovka and Belgorod, against the junction of the 4th Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf. Two tank armies, the 1st Tank Army (Lt. Gen. Mikhail Katukov) and the 5th Guards Tank Army (Lt. Gen. Pavel Rotmistrov), would pass through the gap on the first day, the 1st Tank Army driving deep to the southwest to form the outer front of the operation and the 5th Guards Tank Army turning south toward Kharkov. Farther west, the 27th and 40th Armies would make a secondary attack toward Akhtyrka; to the east, the 69th and 7th Guards Armies of the Steppe Front would take Belgorod and push down the Donets toward Kharkov, with the Southwestern Front’s 57th Army joining from the southeast (Glantz and House).

The two fronts together had 1,144,000 men, about 2,400 tanks and self-propelled guns and more than 13,000 guns and mortars (Krivosheev; Glantz and House). Against them the Germans had, after the departure of the II SS Panzer Corps and the losses of Citadel, a front held mainly by infantry divisions, with the depleted 6th, 7th, 11th and 19th Panzer Divisions in or near the sector; the SS divisions Das Reich and Totenkopf were on the Mius, some 300 km away, where they had been sent to restore the front after the Soviet attack of 17 July (Glantz and House; Nipe). German intelligence expected a Soviet attack, but not so soon, and not so strong.

The attack began at 05:00 on 3 August with a bombardment of nearly three hours. By midday the rifle divisions had broken through the German forward positions, and in the afternoon both tank armies were committed to complete the breakthrough, an unusual and costly use of tank armies that the Soviets justified by the need to get through the German defenses before reserves arrived. By the end of the first day the 1st Tank Army had advanced some 25 km. The German line between Tomarovka and Belgorod had been torn open, and the two German armies were being pushed apart (Glantz and House; Frieser).

Belgorod fell on 5 August. Erhard Raus’s XI Corps, holding the city and the line of the Donets east of it, was threatened with encirclement from the northwest as the Voronezh Front’s tank armies drove past it, and it withdrew south toward Kharkov in phased steps. Troops of the Steppe Front’s 69th and 7th Guards Armies entered the city that morning (Glantz and House; Raus). To the west, at Borisovka on 7 August, the Soviet advance caught part of the 4th Panzer Army’s left wing, including remnants of the 19th Panzer Division and the 255th and 332nd Infantry Divisions; the 19th Panzer Division’s commander, Generalleutnant Gustav Schmidt, was killed as his division tried to break out. Grayvoron fell the same day, and the 1st Tank Army reached Bogodukhov, some 80 to 100 km from its start line (Glantz and House).

Bogodukhov and Akhtyrka: the panzer counterblows

Manstein’s answer was to bring back the armor he had lost on 17 July. Das Reich and Totenkopf, which had helped restore the Mius front in a counterattack between 30 July and 2 August, were put back on the trains and sent north; the SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking came up from the 1st Panzer Army; and the three divisions were placed under Gen. Hermann Breith’s III Panzer Corps south of Bogodukhov. Grossdeutschland, returned from Army Group Center, and other armored units assembled around Akhtyrka, on the western flank of the Soviet penetration (Glantz and House; Nipe). The Germans could not close the gap that Rumyantsev had torn, but they could try to cut off and destroy the spearheads that had come through it.

The fighting south of Bogodukhov, from about 11 to 17 August, was a series of tank battles across open farmland and river valleys, on the Merla and Merchik rivers and around the Kharkov–Poltava railway, between the 1st Tank Army, later supported by the 5th Guards Tank Army and the 6th Guards Army, and the three SS divisions of the III Panzer Corps. The German divisions were understrength but well led, and the Soviet tank armies, after more than a week of continuous attack, were tired, strung out and short of fuel and ammunition. They lost heavily: the two tank armies, which had begun the operation with about 1,112 tanks, had lost more than 800 of them by about 20 August, destroyed or damaged, many of them in these battles (Frieser; Glantz and House). The Soviet drive toward Poltava and the Vorskla was stopped.

The second counterblow came from Akhtyrka. On 18 August a German force led by Grossdeutschland, with Tiger tanks and the support of other armored units, attacked southeast from Akhtyrka against the flank of the Soviet 27th Army, while Totenkopf attacked northwest to meet it. On 20 August the two forces met, cutting off parts of the 27th Army and two Soviet tank corps. Many of the encircled troops broke out, with heavy losses, and the Voronezh Front brought up the 47th Army and other reserves to restore the line (Glantz and House). These were the last German successes of the summer in the south. They cost the Red Army thousands of men and hundreds of tanks; they did not save Kharkov.

The Waffen-SS divisions that fought at Bogodukhov and Akhtyrka had a record that went far beyond the battlefield. Totenkopf had been formed from concentration-camp guard units and had murdered British prisoners at Le Paradis in May 1940; soldiers of the SS divisions that retook Kharkov in March 1943 were accused of killing wounded and captured Soviet soldiers there, accusations taken up at the Kharkov trial of December 1943 and by later historians (Westemeier; Shepherd). Their tactical skill in August 1943 is part of the military history of the battle; their crimes are part of the same history, and they are set out in Chapter 8.

Kharkov, 23 August

Kharkov, the fourth-largest city of the Soviet Union before the war and the industrial center of eastern Ukraine, had been taken by the Germans in October 1941, retaken by the Red Army on 16 February 1943 and lost again to Manstein’s counteroffensive in March (Chapter 1). In August 1943 the Steppe Front approached it from the north and east: the 53rd Army and the 69th Army from the north, the 7th Guards Army across the Donets from the east, and the 57th Army, transferred from the Southwestern Front, from the southeast. The 5th Guards Tank Army, after its losses at Bogodukhov, was turned against the western approaches to cut the railways leading west (Glantz and House).

Hitler ordered the city held. On 12 August, according to the German records, Kempf had asked permission to give it up; Hitler insisted that it be held under all circumstances, and Kempf warned that holding it could become another Stalingrad. Manstein relieved Kempf in mid-August and gave his command, soon renamed the 8th Army, to Gen. Otto Wöhler (Glantz and House; Frieser). The fighting on the outskirts, at Korotich and in the northern suburbs, was costly for both sides. On 22 August the 5th Guards Tank Army cut the railway from Kharkov to Poltava, and the defenders’ last good line of supply was gone. Manstein, on his own authority, approved the evacuation of the city, and the withdrawal began on 22 August (Glantz and House; Raus).

During the night of 22–23 August, as German demolition teams set fires and blew up ammunition dumps, factories and bridges, Soviet troops of the 89th Guards and 107th Rifle Divisions and the 183rd Rifle Division entered the city. At about 02:00 on 23 August troops of the 183rd reached Dzerzhinsky Square, the great square at the city’s center that the Germans had renamed “Leibstandarte SS Square” after March, and raised a red banner over the square. By late morning the city and its outskirts were clear (Glantz and House). That night Moscow fired its salute of 20 salvos from 224 guns. Kharkov was never again occupied by German forces.

What the Red Army found in Kharkov was a city of ruins. The center had been burned and blown up, the great tractor factory and the locomotive works were wrecked, and the population, which had been more than 800,000 before the war, had fallen, by Soviet estimates, to perhaps a fifth of that in August 1943: many had been evacuated east in 1941, many had died of hunger in the winter of 1941–42, tens of thousands had been deported to Germany for forced labor, and thousands had been murdered, including the Jews of Kharkov, shot at Drobitsky Yar in December 1941 and January 1942 (USHMM; Yad Vashem). In December 1943 the city was the site of the first Soviet public trial of Germans for crimes committed in the occupied territories; that trial is part of Chapter 8.

Lend-Lease wheels

The counteroffensives of July and August 1943 were the first large Soviet operations in which American trucks made a visible difference. In the defensive battle the Red Army had fought in place, from prepared positions supplied by rail; in Kutuzov and Rumyantsev it had to move armies forward 100 km or more beyond its railheads, across ground where the Germans had destroyed the railways and bridges as they left. Everything that kept the advance going beyond the railheads, ammunition, fuel, food and the infantry that followed the tank armies, moved by road, and an increasing share of the vehicles on those roads had come from the United States (Glantz and House; van Tuyll).

The numbers should be stated carefully, because they are often inflated in one direction or dismissed in the other. Over the whole war the United States shipped the Soviet Union more than 400,000 trucks and jeeps, including about 150,000 Studebaker US6 2½-ton trucks, the Red Army’s favorite, which also became the standard carrier for the BM-13 Katyusha rocket launcher. Many of them were assembled by Americans: the U.S. Army’s Persian Gulf Command and General Motors ran truck-assembly plants in Iran, at Andimeshk and Khorramshahr, from which vehicles were driven north to the Soviet border. By 1945 Lend-Lease vehicles made up roughly a third of the Red Army’s motor transport by common estimates (van Tuyll; Weeks). In the summer of 1943 the share was smaller, since much of the flow came later, but it was already large in the tank and mechanized units that led the advances, and it was growing. Lend-Lease also supplied much of the Red Army’s food concentrate, canned meat, field telephone wire and radios, and, mostly from 1944, locomotives, rail cars and rail.

The cost

The figures for Soviet losses come from the Russian General Staff study edited by G. F. Krivosheev, first published in 1993 and in English in 1997, which compiled the strength and loss reports of the fronts. It divides losses into “irrecoverable” (killed in action, died of wounds, missing and captured) and “sanitary” (wounded and sick evacuated to hospitals). For the defensive phase, 5–23 July, it gives 177,847 losses for the Central and Voronezh Fronts and the units of the Steppe Front sent to them: 70,330 irrecoverable and 107,517 sanitary. For Operation Kutuzov, 12 July–18 August, it gives 429,890: 112,529 irrecoverable and 317,361 sanitary, out of 1,287,600 men committed. For Rumyantsev, 3–23 August, it gives 255,566: 71,611 irrecoverable and 183,955 sanitary, out of 1,144,000 (Krivosheev). Together the three operations come to 863,303 men, of whom 254,470 were dead, missing or captured.

The equipment losses were in proportion. Krivosheev gives 1,614 tanks and self-propelled guns lost in the defensive phase, 2,586 in Kutuzov and 1,864 in Rumyantsev, 6,064 in all. These figures count vehicles knocked out of action, and many were repaired: the Red Army’s tank recovery and repair services returned large numbers of damaged tanks to the line, which is one reason the tank armies could keep attacking after losses that would have finished a German panzer corps (Krivosheev; Glantz and House).

German losses were much smaller, but they fell on a much smaller army. Karl-Heinz Frieser, in the German official history, gives 54,182 German casualties for Citadel itself, 5–16 July, and 86,454 for the defense of the Orel bulge, of whom 14,215 were killed and 11,300 missing. For Rumyantsev the records are less complete; Frieser estimates German losses of at least 10,000 killed and missing and some 20,000 wounded (Frieser). German tank losses were several times lower than Soviet ones, but the German divisions that ended the summer in the Hagen line and around Kharkov were shadows of the divisions that had begun it, and the Germans could not replace their losses at anything like the Soviet rate. The ratio of losses that the Soviet figures reveal, roughly four or five Soviet casualties for every German one in the counteroffensives, reflects the costs of attacking prepared defenses in summer against an experienced enemy, the Red Army’s habit of repeated frontal attacks, and the pressure from Stalin to take cities by set dates.

By the numbers

Casualties in the three phases of the Battle of Kursk

Killed, missing, wounded and sick; Soviet figures in gold, German in gray. The periods are not identical: the German Citadel figure covers 5–16 July, the Soviet defensive phase 5–23 July

Soviet, Operation Kutuzov, 12 Jul–18 Aug (112,529 irrecoverable, 317,361 sanitary)429,890

Soviet, Operation Rumyantsev, 3–23 Aug (71,611 irrecoverable, 183,955 sanitary)255,566

Soviet, defensive phase, 5–23 Jul (70,330 irrecoverable, 107,517 sanitary)177,847

German, defense of the Orel bulge, 12 Jul–18 Aug86,454

German, Operation Citadel, 5–16 Jul54,182

German, Belgorod–Kharkov, 3–23 Aug (minimum estimate)c. 30,000

Timeline

From the end of Citadel to the liberation of Kharkov

1. 10 Jul 1943U.S. Seventh Army and British Eighth Army land in Sicily (Operation Husky).
2. 12 JulOperation Kutuzov begins: the Western Front’s 11th Guards Army and the Bryansk Front attack the Orel bulge; the Soviet counterattack at Prokhorovka.
3. 13 JulHitler meets Manstein and Kluge at the Wolfsschanze and ends Citadel, allowing Army Group South limited further attacks; Model takes command of the 2nd Panzer Army as well as the 9th.
4. 14 Jul, 04:00Operation Roland begins: Das Reich and the III Panzer Corps attack to trap Soviet forces south of Prokhorovka.
5. 15 JulThe Central Front joins the Orel offensive; Das Reich and the 7th Panzer Division make contact; the Soviet troops have largely escaped.
6. 17 JulSoviet Southwestern and Southern Fronts attack on the Donets and the Mius; Roland ends; the II SS Panzer Corps is ordered out of the line.
7. 18 JulThe 9th Army is back on its start line of 5 July on the northern face.
8. 19–20 JulThe 3rd Guards Tank Army is committed east of Orel.
9. 23 JulThe German armies of the southern face are back on their start lines; the Soviet defensive phase ends.
10. 25 JulMussolini is deposed in Rome.
11. 26 JulHitler approves the evacuation of the Orel bulge.
12. 29 JulBolkhov liberated.
13. 31 Jul–1 Aug, nightOperation Herbstreise: the German withdrawal toward the Hagen line begins.
14. 3 Aug, 05:00Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev begins northwest of Belgorod; the partisans’ Rail War opens with mass attacks on the German railways that night.
15. 5 AugOrel and Belgorod liberated; at midnight Moscow fires its first victory salute, 12 salvos from 120 guns.
16. 7 AugGerman forces caught at Borisovka; the 1st Tank Army reaches Bogodukhov; Grayvoron taken.
17. 11–17 AugTank battles south of Bogodukhov between the 1st Tank and 5th Guards Tank Armies and the III Panzer Corps (Das Reich, Totenkopf, Wiking).
18. 15 AugKarachev liberated.
19. 18 AugGerman counterattack from Akhtyrka; Operation Kutuzov ends at the Hagen line.
20. 20 AugGrossdeutschland and Totenkopf meet behind the Soviet 27th Army.
21. 22 AugThe 5th Guards Tank Army cuts the Kharkov–Poltava railway; Manstein approves the evacuation of Kharkov.
22. 23 AugKharkov liberated; Moscow fires 20 salvos from 224 guns.

The initiative passes: the race to the Dnieper

Kursk is often called the turning point of the war in the East, and the counteroffensives are why. Stalingrad had destroyed a German army and ended German hopes of victory in the Caucasus, but in its aftermath Manstein had been able to strike back and retake Kharkov in March 1943. After Kursk there was no such recovery. From August 1943 to the end of the war the Germans never again mounted a strategic offensive in the East; the initiative, the power to decide where and when the major battles would be fought, belonged to the Red Army (Glantz and House; Frieser). The German Army could still win local battles, as it did at Bogodukhov and Akhtyrka, but it could no longer change the course of the campaign.

The Stavka did not pause. Even before Kharkov fell, the Southwestern and Southern Fronts were attacking again in the Donbas, and on 7 August the Western Front had opened the Smolensk offensive north of the Orel bulge. At the end of August the Central Front broke into the area west of the salient, toward Sevsk and Glukhov, and in September the whole southern half of the front moved west. Hitler authorized Army Group South to withdraw behind the Dnieper on 15 September, and the German retreat became a race for the river crossings, conducted with the same scorched-earth orders that had been applied at Orel. Bryansk was liberated on 17 September, Poltava on 23 September and Smolensk on 25 September. Soviet troops reached the Dnieper on a broad front at the end of September and seized bridgeheads on the far bank, at Bukrin south of Kiev and at Lyutezh to its north; Kiev was liberated on 6 November 1943 (Glantz and House). That campaign, and the cost of the river crossings, belongs to the story told in Chapter 9.

The counteroffensives also changed how the Red Army fought. Kutuzov and Rumyantsev were the first operations in which Soviet tank armies of the new, all-armored type, created in early 1943, were used in strength in the offensive. Their losses were very high, and the lessons were studied: the need for stronger artillery support in the breakthrough, for self-propelled guns and engineers with the tank armies, for better supply of fuel and ammunition, and for keeping the tank armies out of the breakthrough battle itself whenever possible. Glantz and House trace the more economical deep operations of 1944, in Belarus above all, to the lessons of the summer of 1943 (Glantz and House).

In the United States, the summer battles in Russia were front-page news, though mostly as headlines from Moscow’s communiqués: the Associated Press and the New York Times reported the fall of Orel and Belgorod and the salutes in Moscow, and Americans read of them alongside the news from Sicily, which fell on 17 August. The deeper American understanding of Kursk came much later and through German eyes. After the war, German generals, Raus, Mellenthin and Manstein among them, wrote studies for the U.S. Army’s Historical Division and then memoirs that shaped how American officers understood the Eastern Front in the Cold War, with an emphasis on German skill and Soviet numbers. It was largely the work of an American Army officer and historian, David M. Glantz, founder of the Army’s Soviet Army Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, that brought the Soviet side of the counteroffensives, and their planning, into Western scholarship from the 1980s onward.

Questions readers ask

Did the Sicily landing end the Battle of Kursk?

Not by itself. Hitler cited Sicily first when he ended Citadel on 13 July, and the danger in Italy did shape his decision to take the II SS Panzer Corps out of the line and to send Leibstandarte to Italy. But the Soviet attack on the Orel bulge had begun the day before, the 9th Army’s offensive had already stalled, and the 4th Panzer Army had not broken through. Most historians judge that Citadel would have ended within days whatever had happened in Sicily. The best summary is that the American and British landing was a real but secondary factor.

Why are the Soviet losses in the counteroffensives so much higher than in the defensive battle?

Because attacking is costlier than defending, and the Red Army attacked prepared German positions in the Orel bulge and at Belgorod, often frontally, under pressure to take objectives by set dates. In the defensive phase the Soviets fought from deep, fortified positions of their own. In Kutuzov the Germans were the defenders, and Model’s elastic defense made the Soviets pay for every advance. Krivosheev’s figures, 429,890 for Kutuzov against 177,847 for the defensive phase, show the difference.

What was the first Moscow salute?

On the evening of 5 August 1943 Stalin’s order of the day announced the liberation of Orel and Belgorod and ordered Moscow to salute the troops at midnight with twelve artillery salvos from 120 guns. It was the first of more than 350 such salutes fired in Moscow during the war, each accompanying an order of the day for a major victory. Kharkov, on 23 August, received 20 salvos from 224 guns.

Was the Rail War a success?

Partly. It was the largest coordinated sabotage operation of the war, and in its first nights it overwhelmed German rail repairs across large parts of the occupied territory at the moment of the Soviet offensives. But cut rails were repaired quickly, the Soviet figures for the damage were inflated, and critics such as Ilya Starinov argued that the explosive would have done more harm to the Germans in mines against trains. Its effect on the outcome at Orel and Kharkov was real but limited.

How many times did Kharkov change hands?

Four times. The Germans took it on 24–25 October 1941; the Red Army retook it on 16 February 1943; the II SS Panzer Corps recaptured it in mid-March 1943; and the Steppe Front liberated it on 23 August 1943. German writers call the August battle the Fourth Battle of Kharkov.

How it connects

The counteroffensives were planned before Citadel began, as part of the Soviet decision in the spring of 1943 to defend first and attack second (Chapter 1 and Chapter 2). Kutuzov struck behind the 9th Army, whose attack on Ponyri and Olkhovatka is told in Chapter 3; Roland and the withdrawal followed the southern offensive of Chapter 4 and the battle at Prokhorovka in Chapter 6. The air war that accompanied both counteroffensives is in Chapter 5. What the retreating Germans left behind, the scorched earth, the deportations and the crimes uncovered in the liberated cities, is the subject of Chapter 8, and the overall cost of the battle and how it has been remembered are in Chapter 9. Readers can find common questions about the whole battle in the Battle of Kursk FAQ.

The ground today

Orel (Oryol) and Belgorod are regional capitals in Russia; both carry the title “City of the First Salute,” and both have memorials to the liberation of 5 August 1943. Belgorod’s museum-diorama of the Kursk battle on its southern face, and the Prokhorovka memorial field to the north of it, were for decades the main places of Russian commemoration of the battle; Orel has a memorial complex and museum dedicated to the battle on the Orel bulge. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, still has Dzerzhinsky Square under its present name, Freedom Square (Maidan Svobody), with the Gosprom (Derzhprom) building that overlooked the fighting in 1943, and memorials to the city’s liberation and to the victims at Drobitsky Yar.

None of these places can safely be visited by Americans today. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kharkiv has been repeatedly struck by Russian missiles, drones and glide bombs, and the Belgorod region on the Russian side of the border has been the scene of cross-border fighting and strikes. The U.S. State Department’s travel advisories place both Ukraine and Russia at Level 4, “Do Not Travel.” The ground over which the counteroffensives of 1943 were fought, from Belgorod to Kharkov, lies once again on a front line.

Sources

• David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), especially the chapters on the end of Citadel and on Operations Kutuzov and Rumyantsev, and When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (University Press of Kansas, 1995; revised edition 2015).
• David M. Glantz and Harold S. Orenstein, eds. and trans., The Battle for Kursk 1943: The Soviet General Staff Study (London: Frank Cass, 1999).
• Karl-Heinz Frieser, “Die Schlacht im Kursker Bogen” and “Die Rückzugsoperationen der Heeresgruppe Süd im Sommer 1943,” in Frieser et al., Die Ostfront 1943/44: Der Krieg im Osten und an den Nebenfronten, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 8 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2007); English edition, Germany and the Second World War, vol. VIII, The Eastern Front 1943–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Roman Töppel, Kursk 1943: The Greatest Battle of the Second World War (Warwick: Helion, 2018).
• G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill, 1997), the tables for the Kursk defensive operation and the Orel and Belgorod–Kharkov offensive operations.
• Valeriy Zamulin, Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943 (Solihull: Helion, 2011); George M. Nipe Jr., Blood, Steel, and Myth: The II.SS-Panzer-Korps and the Road to Prochorowka (2011) and Decision in the Ukraine: German Panzer Operations on the Eastern Front, Summer 1943 (1996).
• Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958; German original Verlorene Siege, 1955), chapter on Citadel, for the conference of 13 July (a commander’s recollection); Steven H. Newton, ed., Panzer Operations: The Eastern Front Memoir of General Raus, 1941–1945 (2003).
• Ivan Konev, Zapiski komanduyushchego frontom 1943–1945 (Notes of a Front Commander; Moscow, 1972); K. K. Rokossovsky, A Soldier’s Duty (Moscow: Progress, 1970); G. K. Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections (Moscow: Progress, 1985); Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (1951). Soviet memoirs were published under censorship and are treated here as recollection.
• Christer Bergström, Kursk: The Air Battle, July 1943 (Hinckley: Chevron/Ian Allan, 2007).
• Ilya Grigorevich Starinov, Over the Abyss: My Life in Soviet Special Operations, trans. Robert Suggs (New York: Ivy Books, 1995); Kenneth Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Ben Shepherd, War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Harvard University Press, 2004).
• Hubert P. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (Westport: Greenwood, 1989); Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004); T. H. Vail Motter, The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1952).
• Albert N. Garland and Howard McGaw Smyth, Sicily and the Surrender of Italy, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1965); Walter S. Dunn Jr., Kursk: Hitler’s Gamble, 1943 (Westport: Praeger, 1997).
• Jens Westemeier, Joachim Peiper: A Biography of Himmler’s SS Commander (2007), on the Waffen-SS record at Kharkov; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, entries on Kharkov and Drobitsky Yar.
• Order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of 5 August 1943 on the liberation of Orel and Belgorod, published by the Russian Ministry of Defence (kursk-75.mil.ru); Wikipedia, “Operation Kutuzov”, “Belgorod–Kharkov offensive operation” and “Operation Roland”, for cross-checking dates and figures against the works above.
• U.S. Department of State, travel advisories for Ukraine and Russia (Level 4, Do Not Travel).

Photographs: Soviet wartime photographs from the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents (RGAKFD), the State Catalogue of the Museum Fund of Russia and the Russian Ministry of Defence (public domain or CC BY 4.0); German propaganda-company photographs in the Bundesarchiv (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE); a partisan photograph from a Ukrainian archive (public domain); and an official Soviet document published by the Russian Ministry of Defence; all via Wikimedia Commons. Soviet and German wartime photographs reflect the purposes of their makers; some Soviet combat photographs were posed, and unit identifications not given in the original captions are noted as uncertain. Unit insignia drawn for this collection are illustrations in the period style, not official emblems.