The Northern Face: Model, Ponyri and the Olkhovatka Heights

At 05:30 on 5 July 1943 the German Ninth Army began its attack on the northern face of the Kursk salient. Its commander, Generaloberst Walter Model, sent his infantry in first, backed by assault guns, Tiger tanks and the new 65-tonne Ferdinand tank destroyers, and kept most of his panzer divisions back to exploit a breakthrough that never came. Against him stood the Soviet 13th Army, dug into belt after belt of trenches and minefields across the Orel–Kursk railway. For a week the fighting centered on two places: the railway village of Ponyri, where the station, the school and the tractor station changed hands again and again, and the ridge of the Olkhovatka heights, the last high ground before Kursk. This chapter follows the northern battle day by day, from Model’s decisions to the Ferdinands in the minefields and the Soviet counteroffensive of 12 July that ended the attack.

Why it mattered

Operation Citadel was a pincer. Army Group South was to drive north from the Belgorod area, and Army Group Center was to drive south from the Orel bulge; the two arms were to meet east of Kursk and cut off the Soviet armies in the salient (Chapter 1). The northern arm was the job of one army, Model’s Ninth. It had roughly 100 km to cover to reach the meeting point, and it had to do it through the deepest and most heavily mined defenses the Red Army had yet built (Chapter 2). The Soviet command expected the main German blow in the north, and it had put more of its strength there than anywhere else.

The northern battle is less famous than the southern one. It has no Prokhorovka, and it produced no great tank battle of the kind that later legends describe. Model’s attack was an infantry and artillery battle on a narrow front, with tanks, assault guns and tank destroyers fighting in support, and it was over in a week. But it decided Citadel just as much as the fighting in the south. Within six days the Ninth Army had been stopped short of its first real objective, the Olkhovatka heights, at a cost it could not afford. Without the northern arm the southern arm had nowhere to go: even if Army Group South had broken through, there was no one coming to meet it.

The north is also where the Soviet system of defense in depth was tested in its purest form. The 13th Army fought the battle it had prepared for since April, on the ground it had chosen, with the minefields, anti-tank strongpoints and artillery concentrations described in Chapter 2. The battle showed both the strength of that system and its limits: the Germans could still break into it, at great cost, and the Soviet counterattacks that tried to throw them out failed as badly as German attempts to break through. The best modern accounts of the northern face rest on the German war diaries and loss reports and on Soviet unit records opened since the 1990s; they are cited below by author, chiefly David Glantz and Jonathan House, Karl-Heinz Frieser in the German official history, Roman Töppel, Lloyd Clark, and Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson. Where they differ, the differences are given.

Model and the Ninth Army

Walter Model was 52 in the summer of 1943. Born in Genthin, near Magdeburg, on 24 January 1891, the son of a music teacher, he had served as an infantry and staff officer in the First World War and risen through the small interwar army as a staff specialist in technical and training questions. In 1941 he commanded the 3rd Panzer Division in the invasion of the Soviet Union, and in January 1942, in the crisis of the Soviet winter counteroffensive, Hitler gave him the Ninth Army at Rzhev. He held the Rzhev salient through a year of repeated Soviet offensives and in March 1943 evacuated it in Operation Büffel, a withdrawal that the army carried out with a scorched-earth policy, destroying villages and forcibly removing much of the civilian population (Glantz and House; Töppel). Model was known as a hard, energetic and abrasive commander who went to the front constantly and interfered in the details of his subordinates’ work, and as one of the few generals Hitler trusted with defensive crises.

He was not an enthusiast for Citadel. On 27 April 1943 he met Hitler to review the intelligence picture, which showed the Red Army building very strong positions at the shoulders of the salient and withdrawing its mobile forces from the area west of Kursk, where the Germans had hoped to trap them (Clark; Glantz and House). At the conference in Munich on 4 May he presented aerial photographs of the Soviet defenses and argued that the Ninth Army could not break them with the forces it had. His objections were one reason, among several, for the series of postponements that pushed the attack from May into July (Frieser; Töppel). They also bought the Soviet engineers two more months to dig and mine. A staff officer of the Ninth Army, Maj. Jan Möschen, later said that Model nonetheless expected a breakthrough on the second day (Clark).

On 1 July the Ninth Army counted 335,000 men, 223,000 of them combat troops, and 988 tanks and assault guns (Frieser). It was the largest army the Germans had in the East, and it had been reinforced for Citadel with some of the heaviest weapons in the German arsenal. But its armor was spread across six panzer and panzergrenadier divisions that were mostly understrength, and its infantry divisions, which had been fighting since 1941, were short of riflemen. Its front ran in a long arc around the southern side of the Orel bulge. Model could not attack everywhere, and he chose to put his main weight on a sector of about 40 km between Maloarkhangelsk, a small town and railway junction on the Orel–Kursk line in the east, and the area just west of the railway (Glantz and House).

His order of battle, from east to west, put five corps in line. The XXIII Army Corps (Gen. Johannes Friessner), with the 78th Sturm (Assault) Division and the 216th and 383rd Infantry Divisions, was to attack toward Maloarkhangelsk and cover the eastern flank. The XLI Panzer Corps (Gen. Josef Harpe), with the 86th and 292nd Infantry Divisions and the 18th Panzer Division, and with the Ferdinand regiment attached, was to attack along the railway toward Ponyri. The XLVII Panzer Corps (Gen. Joachim Lemelsen), the main striking force, with the 6th Infantry Division and the 2nd, 9th and 20th Panzer Divisions and the Tigers of schwere Panzer-Abteilung 505, was to attack due south toward Olkhovatka. The XLVI Panzer Corps (Gen. Hans Zorn), despite its name an infantry corps of four divisions, was to cover the western flank, and the XX Army Corps held the rest of the bulge on the defensive. The 4th and 12th Panzer Divisions and the 10th Panzergrenadier Division were held in army reserve (Glantz and House; Zetterling and Frankson).

The decision to lead with infantry

Model’s most important decision was how to use his tanks. Rather than send the panzer divisions in first, as Army Group South was doing, he chose to make his initial attacks with infantry divisions reinforced by assault guns, heavy tanks and Ferdinands and supported by massed artillery and the Luftwaffe (Glantz and House; Clark). On 5 July only one panzer division, the 20th, was committed in the first wave, alongside nine infantry divisions (Glantz and House). The 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions were to follow on the second day, and the reserve was to be committed only once the Soviet defenses had been broken.

The logic was clear. Model knew from his aerial photographs that the first Soviet belt was a maze of trenches, minefields and anti-tank guns, and he did not want to burn up his panzer divisions in it. Infantry with heavy support would break in; the panzers would then pass through the gap with their strength intact for the deeper fight. The weakness of the plan was equally clear, and historians have argued about it since. An infantry attack against a defense of this depth was slow, and every hour gave the Soviet command time to bring up reserves and close the gap. The heavy weapons that were supposed to make the infantry attack work, the Ferdinands and Tigers, were few and new. And by holding the panzers back Model gave up the one advantage the Germans had always relied on in the East, the speed and shock of concentrated armor. Critics have seen the plan as a compromise that combined the disadvantages of both methods; others see it as a sober reading of what the Ninth Army could actually do against the Central Front’s fortifications, and Töppel in particular stresses how pessimistic Model was about the whole operation (Frieser; Töppel). Whatever his expectations, the record of the first days shows the method failing on its own terms: the infantry broke into the first belt but not through the second.

Rokossovsky, Pukhov and the 13th Army

The Central Front held the northern and western sides of the salient, a line of about 306 km, with five armies in the first line, the 2nd Tank Army and two separate tank corps in reserve, and the 16th Air Army in support (Glantz and House). Its commander, Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky, was one of the outstanding Soviet commanders of the war. Arrested in the purges in 1937 and released in 1940, he had commanded the Don Front at Stalingrad, and he had studied the German plan as closely as anyone: Soviet intelligence, from the British and from its own sources, had told the Stavka by the spring that the Germans would attack both shoulders of the salient. Rokossovsky judged that the blow in the north would come along the Orel–Kursk railway and the roads beside it, toward Olkhovatka and Ponyri, where the ground was most open and led most directly to Kursk. He was right.

He gave that sector, only about 32 km wide, to the 13th Army under Lt. Gen. Nikolai Pukhov, and he made it the strongest army on the front. Pukhov had four rifle corps with twelve rifle divisions: the 15th Rifle Corps and the 29th Rifle Corps in the first line, the 17th Guards Rifle Corps behind them around Olkhovatka, and the 18th Guards Rifle Corps, built from three Guards airborne divisions fighting as infantry, in reserve. In the 29th Rifle Corps, on the railway, the 15th and 81st Rifle Divisions held the forward positions and the 307th Rifle Division held Ponyri in the second echelon. The army was reinforced with the 4th Artillery Penetration Corps, tank regiments, anti-tank brigades and engineer units, which gave it far more guns and mortars per kilometer of front than any other army on the salient (Glantz and House). To the east the 48th Army covered the sector around Maloarkhangelsk, and to the west the 70th Army held the ground from the 13th Army’s boundary to the Svapa river. The 2nd Tank Army under Lt. Gen. A. G. Rodin, with the 3rd and 16th Tank Corps, and the 19th Tank Corps waited behind the 13th Army to counterattack.

The defenses themselves are described in Chapter 2: three army defensive belts and three more front belts behind them, each with two or three lines of trenches, anti-tank strongpoints built around groups of guns and anti-tank rifles, and minefields laid to channel tanks into the fields of fire of the guns. In the 13th Army’s sector the first belt was 5 to 6 km deep and the second ran along the ridge north of Olkhovatka, through Ponyri and on toward Maloarkhangelsk. The ridge mattered. The ground of the northern face is open, rolling farmland cut by shallow valleys and the ravines the Russians call balki, and the heights around Olkhovatka and Teploye, rising to about 274 m above sea level, were the highest ground between the German lines and Kursk. From them, the Soviet artillery could see much of the German assembly area; whoever held them could look down toward Kursk.

5 July: the counter-preparation and the first assault

The Soviet command knew the date and very nearly the hour. On the night of 4–5 July a German sapper of the 6th Infantry Division, captured while clearing lanes through a minefield in front of the 13th Army, told his interrogators that the attack would begin early on 5 July; Soviet accounts give his name as Bruno Fermello (Glantz and House). Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who was at Rokossovsky’s headquarters as the representative of the Stavka, approved a counter-preparation: a heavy artillery bombardment of the German assembly areas and gun positions before the Germans could fire their own. The Central Front’s guns opened fire at about 02:20 (Glantz and House). The bombardment caused confusion and delayed some German units, but it did not disrupt the German schedule or cause heavy losses; much of it fell on positions the German troops had not yet occupied (Clark).

The German artillery then fired its own preparation, which Clark puts at 80 minutes on the northern face, and Luftwaffe bombers and Stukas struck the Soviet forward positions. At 05:30 the infantry went forward (Glantz and House). The main effort fell on the boundary between the 15th and 81st Rifle Divisions, where the XLVII and XLI Panzer Corps came together. Prisoners had told the Germans that this boundary was a weak point, and the Tigers of schwere Panzer-Abteilung 505 were moved to it (Clark). The 20th Panzer Division and the 6th Infantry Division, with two companies of Tigers attached, advanced toward the villages of Butyrki and Bobrik. On the left, the 292nd and 86th Infantry Divisions, with the Ferdinands, attacked the 81st Rifle Division astride the railway toward Ponyri. On the eastern flank the 78th Sturm Division and the 216th Infantry Division attacked toward Maloarkhangelsk; on the western flank the 7th and 31st Infantry Divisions of the XLVI Panzer Corps attacked toward the 70th Army.

The fighting was hard everywhere, and the minefields did their work. Engineers had to clear lanes for the tanks under fire, and when they could not, the tanks and assault guns ran onto the mines. In one fight on the boundary, according to Clark, about 90 T-34s counterattacked the Tigers in a three-hour fight in which the Soviet tank units lost 42 tanks and the Germans two Tigers destroyed and five more immobilized with track damage. The 676th Rifle Regiment of the 15th Rifle Division held its positions around Butyrki long enough for the rest of the 29th Rifle Corps to man the second belt behind it (Clark). By evening the XLVII Panzer Corps had pushed about 6 to 8 km into the first belt on a narrow front before it stalled, and the XLI Panzer Corps had reached the approaches to Ponyri, the anchor of the second belt (Clark; Frieser). On the flanks the attacks gained little: the 48th Army held at Maloarkhangelsk, and the XLVI Panzer Corps made only small gains against the 70th Army.

The cost of the first day, by the Ninth Army’s own reports, was 1,287 men killed and missing and 5,921 wounded, a total of 7,208 (Frieser). It was the heaviest single day of the battle for the Ninth Army, and it fell mainly on the infantry divisions that Model had chosen to lead the attack. The Luftwaffe had better luck: on the northern face its fighters shot down large numbers of Soviet aircraft that came up piecemeal to attack the German columns, a story told in Chapter 5.

For the Soviet side the day was a qualified success. The 15th and 81st Rifle Divisions had been badly hurt and pushed out of their forward positions, and in places the Germans had reached the second belt. But nowhere had they broken through, and the attack had moved far more slowly than German doctrine expected. That evening Rokossovsky ordered a counterattack for the morning of 6 July to throw the Germans back to their start line, using the 17th and 18th Guards Rifle Corps, the 2nd Tank Army and the 19th Tank Corps (Glantz and House).

The Ferdinands of Regiment 656

The most famous weapon on the northern face was the Ferdinand, a heavy tank destroyer built on the hull of Ferdinand Porsche’s failed design for the Tiger tank. When Henschel’s design was chosen for the Tiger in 1942, about 90 of Porsche’s hulls had already been built. Rather than scrap them, the army had them converted at the Nibelungenwerk at St. Valentin in Austria between March and May 1943 into tank destroyers mounting the long 8.8 cm Pak 43/2 L/71 gun in a heavy fixed casemate at the rear of the hull. Ninety-one were built (Jentz; Wikipedia, “Elefant”). In 1944 the surviving vehicles were rebuilt and renamed Elefant.

On paper the Ferdinand was formidable. Its frontal armor was 200 mm thick, made up of the original 100 mm plate with another 100 mm bolted on, and no Soviet tank or anti-tank gun of 1943 could penetrate it from the front at normal ranges. Its gun could destroy any Soviet tank at more than 2,000 m. But it weighed about 65 tonnes. It was driven by Porsche’s petrol-electric system, in which two Maybach engines turned generators that powered electric motors at the rear, a design that was complicated, thirsty and prone to overheating and breakdowns. Its gun could traverse only 28 degrees. It had no hull machine gun, and its crew of six had poor vision to the sides and rear (Jentz; Anderson; Wikipedia, “Elefant”).

All the Ferdinands went to Model. They were organized as schwere Panzerjäger-Regiment 656 under Oberstleutnant Ernst von Jungenfeld, with two battalions, schwere Panzerjäger-Abteilung 653 (Maj. Heinrich Steinwachs) and 654 (Maj. Karl-Heinz Noak), of about 45 Ferdinands each; 89 took part in the battle. The regiment also included Sturmpanzer-Abteilung 216, with the new Sturmpanzer IV assault howitzers, the “Brummbär,” and two companies of radio-controlled demolition vehicles intended to blow lanes through minefields (Münch; Zaloga). It was attached to the XLI Panzer Corps for the attack along the railway toward Ponyri, where the ground was open and the long gun’s range could count.

On 5 July the Ferdinands did what they were built to do and suffered for it. They broke into the 81st Rifle Division’s positions, destroyed Soviet tanks and anti-tank guns at long range, and helped the infantry of the 86th and 292nd Infantry Divisions reach the approaches to Ponyri. But they drove into minefields that had been laid in depth, and the mines stopped them. Of the 653rd battalion’s 45 Ferdinands sent into battle, all but 12 had been immobilized by mine damage before 17:00 (Münch, cited by Clark). Most of them were not destroyed: a mine would break a track or wreck the suspension, and the vehicle would stop where it stood. Many were repaired over the following days and returned to the fight. The problem was getting to them. A 65-tonne vehicle sitting in a minefield, often under Soviet artillery fire, could not be towed out by an ordinary recovery vehicle; it took up to five of the army’s 18-tonne half-tracks coupled together, and the regiment did not have enough of them (Wikipedia, “Elefant,” citing Jentz and Münch).

Over the next week the Ferdinands fought in the battle for Ponyri and Hill 253.5, usually in small groups supporting infantry attacks. They were effective at long range against Soviet tanks and guns, and they were very hard to kill: German accounts and the Soviet investigations after the battle agree that few were destroyed by direct gunfire through their armor. But they were disabled in large numbers by mines, by artillery fire that smashed their tracks and running gear, and by mechanical failure, and when the front moved, those that could not be moved were blown up or burned by their own crews. The regiment’s permanent losses during Citadel were about 19 or 20 Ferdinands, and the total roughly doubled during the retreat from the Orel bulge in July and August, when damaged vehicles had to be abandoned (Jentz; Zaloga). The 653rd battalion claimed 320 Soviet tanks destroyed at Kursk for the loss of 13 of its own; like most kill claims of the war, the figure is not reliable (Wikipedia, “Elefant”).

In their words

“…they literally had to go quail-shooting with cannon.”

6 July: the 2nd Tank Army’s counterattack

Rokossovsky’s counterattack of 6 July was meant to be a combined blow by two Guards rifle corps and three tank corps against the German penetration. It did not happen that way. The 2nd Tank Army had to move up during the short summer night over roads crowded with traffic, and its corps arrived at different times. Because of poor coordination, only the 16th Tank Corps, with about 200 tanks, attacked at dawn (Glantz and House). It struck the XLVII Panzer Corps and ran into the Tigers of schwere Panzer-Abteilung 505. The Tigers’ 88 mm guns outranged the T-34s and the light T-70s, and the result was a slaughter. According to Glantz and House, the corps lost 69 tanks, 46 of them from the 107th Tank Brigade alone and 23 from the 164th Tank Brigade, and the survivors withdrew behind the 17th Guards Rifle Corps.

The Germans then counterattacked themselves. Lemelsen’s corps, now reinforced by the 2nd Panzer Division and with the Tigers in the lead, attacked south toward the Olkhovatka heights. Clark says only 24 Tigers were serviceable that day. The attack ran into the second Soviet belt, manned by the 17th Guards Rifle Corps, and failed with heavy German losses (Clark; Glantz and House). Late in the afternoon, at about 18:30, the 19th Tank Corps finally came into action beside the 17th Guards Rifle Corps (Glantz and House). Farther east, Ponyri, held by the 307th Rifle Division, was attacked on 6 July by the 292nd and 86th Infantry Divisions with elements of the 78th Sturm Division and the 9th Panzer Division, and held (Clark).

The lesson of 6 July was the same one that Soviet tank commanders on the southern face learned in the same days: Soviet tanks attacking German heavy armor in the open, without close artillery and infantry support, would be shot to pieces at long range. Rokossovsky drew the conclusion at once. He stopped the counterattacks and ordered most of his remaining tanks dug in, hull-down in prepared pits behind the infantry, where they could fight as armored pillboxes from cover at short range, where the T-34’s gun could hurt a German tank (Beevor; Glantz and House). Over the next five days the German attacks on the heights ran into a defense of infantry, anti-tank guns, dug-in tanks and massed artillery, not into Soviet tank formations maneuvering in the open. Both sides had now learned what the other could do. The battle for the second belt would be fought on Soviet terms.

Ponyri: “the Stalingrad of the Kursk salient”

Ponyri was a large railway village, really two villages, Pervye (First) and Vtorye (Second) Ponyri, strung out on either side of a station on the Orel–Kursk line, in the second Soviet belt. It had a station with its yard and buildings, a water tower, a school, a machine-tractor station (the depot that supplied the collective farms with tractors and machinery), and, on its outskirts, a low rise marked on the maps as Hill 253.5. Around it lay open fields with the “1st of May” state farm and smaller settlements. For the Germans it was the key to the railway and the road south, and the eastern anchor of the second Soviet belt; if it fell, the 13th Army’s line on the Olkhovatka heights would be turned from the east. For the Soviets it was a strongpoint, prepared since the spring, with every stone building fortified and the approaches mined (Glantz and House).

It was held by the 307th Rifle Division of the 29th Rifle Corps, under Maj. Gen. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Enshin, who had taken command only days before the battle began (Wikipedia, “307th Rifle Division”). The division was supported by the 129th Tank Brigade and a regiment of SU-122 self-propelled guns, the 1454th, and by the heavy artillery of the 13th Army and the 4th Artillery Penetration Corps (Wikipedia, “307th Rifle Division,” citing Glantz). Against it, over the following week, the XLI Panzer Corps threw the 292nd and 86th Infantry Divisions, the 9th and 18th Panzer Divisions, the Ferdinands and Sturmpanzer IVs of Regiment 656 and, at the end, the 10th Panzergrenadier Division from the army reserve.

The battle for Ponyri was fought from 6 to 12 July, and its course is difficult to reconstruct in detail, because both sides attacked and counterattacked several times a day and both claimed the same buildings at different hours. The outline is clear. On 6 July the German attacks reached the northern edge of the village and were thrown back. On 7 July the Germans attacked again with infantry, Ferdinands and tanks of the 9th and 18th Panzer Divisions, and after intense house-to-house fighting captured about half of the village, including the northern part and, in Soviet accounts, the school and the area around the station (Clark; Zetterling and Frankson). A Soviet counterattack early on 8 July forced them out of part of what they had taken; the 129th Tank Brigade and the SU-122s were among the units that supported the Soviet counterattacks. For the next four days the fighting surged back and forth around the station, the school, the water tower, the tractor station and Hill 253.5. Both sides counterattacked repeatedly (Zetterling and Frankson; Clark).

Rokossovsky fed reinforcements into the fight as the 307th Rifle Division was ground down. The 3rd and 4th Guards Airborne Divisions of the 18th Guards Rifle Corps, former paratroopers fighting as infantry, came into the line around Ponyri, and the front’s anti-tank and artillery reserves were concentrated there and on the heights to the west (Glantz and House). Model in his turn committed the 10th Panzergrenadier Division to the Ponyri sector at the end. In the fighting of 9–11 July the Germans finally took Hill 253.5, which gave them observation over the station and the ground to the south, and held it until the general withdrawal. They never secured the whole of the village, and they never got past it. The 307th Rifle Division’s 1023rd Rifle Regiment denied the Germans the highest ground (Wikipedia, “307th Rifle Division,” citing Cross). The division was relieved and withdrawn to front reserve on 11 July (Wikipedia, “Mikhail Yenshin”).

Soviet writers called Ponyri “the Stalingrad of the Kursk salient,” and the name has stuck. The comparison is about the character of the fighting, not its scale: Ponyri was a small place fought over for a week, not a city fought over for months. But like Stalingrad it was a battle in which a German attack built for movement was drawn into a fight for buildings, yard by yard, where tanks and long-range guns counted for less than infantry, grenades and the artillery of both sides firing into the same streets. The village was destroyed. When Soviet photographers came back in August, they recorded families standing at the ashes of their houses in Pervye Ponyri. The memorial complex there now gathers mass graves holding the remains of more than 2,600 Soviet soldiers (Russian Wikipedia, “Ponyri”).

The Olkhovatka heights: Teploye and Hill 274, 7–11 July

While the XLI Panzer Corps fought for Ponyri, Model’s main effort, Lemelsen’s XLVII Panzer Corps, attacked the heights to the west. The ridge runs roughly from Ponyri west through Olkhovatka to Teploye and Molotychi, with the villages of Samodurovka and Kashara in the valleys in front of it. Its highest points, Hill 274 near Olkhovatka and Hill 272 near Teploye, gave a clear view over much of the front (Clark). Over the four days from 7 to 10 July, Model concentrated the Ninth Army’s effort on Ponyri and Olkhovatka, which both sides regarded as the vital positions of the northern face (Glantz and House). Rokossovsky in turn moved forces from other sectors of his front to reinforce them, including rifle divisions of the 70th Army, anti-tank brigades and artillery (Glantz and House).

On 7 July the 2nd and 20th Panzer Divisions, with the Tigers of the 505th, attacked toward Samodurovka, Kashara and Teploye against the 17th Guards Rifle Corps and the 70th Army’s left wing. On 8 July Model committed the 4th Panzer Division from his reserve against Teploye. The fighting over the next three days was some of the most intense of the whole Kursk battle. The German tanks and infantry pushed into Samodurovka and the outskirts of Teploye and reached the forward slopes of the heights, but they could not take the crest. The Soviet defenders, the 70th Army’s 140th and 175th Rifle Divisions, the 17th Guards Rifle Corps, the dug-in tanks of the 2nd Tank Army and the 19th Tank Corps, and the anti-tank brigades, held the ridge line (Glantz and House; Töppel).

The best-known Soviet unit in this fight was the 3rd Anti-Tank (Destroyer) Brigade under Col. V. N. Rukosuev, a formation of anti-tank artillery, anti-tank rifles and sappers that was moved to the Teploye sector and took the full weight of the German armored attacks on 7 and 8 July. Soviet accounts, beginning with Rokossovsky’s memoir, describe its batteries fighting at close range until most of their guns and crews were destroyed; they single out a battery commanded by Capt. G. I. Igishev, credited with destroying many German tanks near Samodurovka before he and most of his gunners were killed (Rokossovsky, A Soldier’s Duty; Glantz and House). The claims of tanks destroyed have not been checked against German records, and German tank losses on these days included many vehicles damaged and later repaired. But there is no doubt that the brigade held, and that its stand was one of the reasons the German attack on Teploye failed.

By 10 July the Ninth Army had made its last strong attempt on the heights. It failed. The XLVII Panzer Corps had been fighting for six days, and its panzer divisions were worn down; the infantry divisions that had led the attack had lost a large part of their riflemen. Every German attack that reached the slopes of the ridge was met by fire from three directions and by counterattacks of infantry and dug-in tanks. On 11 July the Ninth Army’s attacks slackened, and Model began to regroup for a new attempt on 12 July (Frieser; Töppel).

One small episode of these days shows how close and confused the fighting was. On the night of 9 July a group of scouts of the 24th Reconnaissance Battalion of the 3rd Tank Corps, under Capt. Dmitry Zakrevsky, slipped into the German rear and drove back a German Panzer III, a command tank of the 18th Panzer Division’s reconnaissance battalion, with its documents still aboard. TASS photographed the scouts with their prize; the details of the raid come from the TASS captions (waralbum.ru). It was the kind of feat the Soviet press liked to show, and the photographs should be read with that in mind, but a captured command tank with its papers was a real intelligence gain in a battle where both sides were feeding in reserves by the hour.

Why the Ninth Army failed

The Ninth Army’s attack failed for reasons that were visible by the evening of 6 July and that the following days only confirmed. The first was the defense itself. In the 13th Army’s sector the Central Front had built a defense that was deeper, denser and better covered by artillery than anything the Germans had attacked before. Each belt had to be broken separately, by infantry and engineers working forward under fire, and each time they broke into one, the Soviet command had time to man the next and bring up reserves. Model’s infantry-first method made this worse, because it slowed the attack to the pace of the infantry; but it is not clear that a massed panzer attack would have done better against the minefields and anti-tank strongpoints, and the experience of the 653rd battalion’s Ferdinands on the first day suggests that it would not.

The second reason was the narrowness of the attack. The XLVII Panzer Corps attacked on a front of only a few kilometers, and the attacks on the flanks, toward Maloarkhangelsk and against the 70th Army, made little ground. The German spearheads were therefore always under fire from their flanks as well as from the front, and Rokossovsky could concentrate his reserves against a narrow penetration that he could see. The third was attrition. The Ninth Army had no fresh infantry to replace the losses of the first days, and its panzer divisions, committed one after the other on 6, 7 and 8 July, each lost a large part of their strength without achieving a breakthrough. The army’s armored strength fell steadily through the week, while the Soviet side, drawing on the reserves of the front and the Stavka, could replace its losses (Frieser; Zetterling and Frankson).

The fourth reason was the heights. The Olkhovatka ridge was the natural backbone of the second belt, and it was held by fresh troops with the tanks of the 2nd Tank Army dug in among them. To take it, the Germans had to attack uphill, across open slopes covered by artillery and anti-tank guns on the crest and on the flanks, with no cover but the villages in the valleys. They never did. Ponyri, the eastern anchor of the same line, was taken only in part, and its defenders could still fire into the flank of any attack on the ridge. In the accounts of Glantz and House and of Frieser alike, the northern battle ends in the same place: in front of the Soviet second belt, in a battle of attrition that the Ninth Army could not win.

Finally there was the threat to the rear. The Orel bulge itself was vulnerable. The Ninth Army’s rear and its supply lines ran through it, and Model knew that the Soviet Western and Bryansk Fronts had been massing forces opposite the 2nd Panzer Army on the northern and eastern sides of the bulge. Part of his caution in committing his reserves came from the fear of a Soviet attack there. On 12 July that attack came.

12 July: Kutuzov pulls the Ninth Army away

Operation Kutuzov, the Soviet offensive against the Orel bulge, had been planned since the spring as the second half of the Kursk plan: once the German attack had been worn down on the defenses of the salient, the fronts north and east of Orel would strike the German forces that had made it. It began on 12 July, the same day as the tank battle at Prokhorovka on the southern face (Chapter 6). After a heavy artillery bombardment, the 11th Guards Army of the Western Front, under Lt. Gen. Ivan (Hovhannes) Bagramyan, supported by the 1st and 5th Tank Corps, broke into the 2nd Panzer Army’s line north of Orel and advanced about 23 km on the first day. The Bryansk Front’s 61st, 3rd and 63rd Armies attacked from the east toward Orel and made slower progress (Frieser).

The 2nd Panzer Army was weak, and the Soviet attack threatened to cut through the bulge to the Bryansk–Orel railway and the roads on which the Ninth Army depended. By the end of the second day Army Group Center had given Model command of the 2nd Panzer Army as well as the Ninth, so that he controlled all German forces in the Orel area (Frieser). He at once began to pull his panzer divisions out of the Kursk attack and send them north and east to stop the breakthrough; within days nearly all of the Ninth Army’s armor had gone (Frieser). The divisions still in reserve, among them the 12th Panzer Division and the 36th Infantry Division, were among the first to go, and others followed as the danger grew. The attack on Kursk from the north was over. On 13 July Hitler met Kluge and Manstein at his headquarters in East Prussia and decided to break off Citadel (Chapter 7).

On 15 July the Central Front joined the counteroffensive. At first it followed the Ninth Army’s withdrawal hesitantly, and then it pressed harder (Frieser; Bergström). Within about a week the Germans were back on the lines from which they had attacked on 5 July, and the Soviet armies kept going. Orel was liberated on 5 August, the same day as Belgorod, and Moscow fired its first artillery salute of the war to celebrate. By 18 August the Germans had withdrawn from the whole Orel bulge to the Hagen position east of Bryansk. The cost of Kutuzov was very high on both sides: Frieser gives 86,454 German killed, wounded and missing, and Glantz and House, from Krivosheev, 112,529 Soviet killed, missing and captured and 317,361 wounded and sick, with 2,586 Soviet tanks and assault guns destroyed or damaged. Army Group Center lost 343 armored vehicles destroyed across Citadel and Kutuzov (Frieser). The withdrawal from the Orel bulge was carried out, like Büffel in March, with the systematic destruction of villages and the forced removal of civilians and livestock, the subject of Chapter 8.

Timeline

The northern face, day by day

1. 27 Apr 1943Model meets Hitler and warns of the strength of the Soviet defenses at the shoulders of the salient.
2. 4 MayMunich conference: Model presents aerial photographs of the Soviet positions; Citadel is postponed again.
3. 1 JulThe Ninth Army counts 335,000 men and 988 tanks and assault guns; Hitler fixes the attack for 5 July.
4. 4–5 Jul, nightA German sapper of the 6th Infantry Division, captured in the minefields, reveals the attack time.
5. 5 Jul, about 02:20The Central Front’s counter-preparation bombardment opens on the German assembly areas.
6. 5 Jul, 05:30After its own artillery preparation the Ninth Army attacks with nine infantry divisions and the 20th Panzer Division on a front of about 40 km.
7. 5 Jul, before 17:00All but 12 of the 653rd battalion’s 45 Ferdinands are immobilized, mostly by mines.
8. 5 Jul, eveningThe XLVII Panzer Corps is 6–8 km into the first belt; the XLI Panzer Corps reaches the approaches to Ponyri. German losses: 1,287 killed and missing, 5,921 wounded.
9. 6 Jul, dawnOnly the 16th Tank Corps of the 2nd Tank Army counterattacks; the Tigers of the 505th knock out 69 of its tanks.
10. 6 JulThe XLVII Panzer Corps, with the 2nd Panzer Division and about 24 Tigers, attacks toward Olkhovatka and fails; the 307th Rifle Division holds Ponyri.
11. 6 Jul, about 18:30The 19th Tank Corps enters the fight; Rokossovsky orders his remaining tanks dug in.
12. 7 JulThe Germans take about half of Ponyri; the 2nd and 20th Panzer Divisions attack Samodurovka, Kashara and Teploye; the 3rd Anti-Tank Brigade’s stand.
13. 8 JulSoviet counterattack at Ponyri; Model commits the 4th Panzer Division against Teploye.
14. 9 Jul, nightCapt. Zakrevsky’s scouts capture a Panzer III command tank of the 18th Panzer Division.
15. 9–11 JulThe Germans take Hill 253.5 at Ponyri but not the whole village; the 10th Panzergrenadier Division is committed.
16. 10 JulThe last strong German attack on the Teploye–Olkhovatka heights fails.
17. 11 JulGerman attacks slacken; the 307th Rifle Division is relieved; the Soviet Western and Bryansk Fronts probe the Orel bulge.
18. 12 JulOperation Kutuzov: the 11th Guards Army breaks into the 2nd Panzer Army north of Orel and advances about 23 km.
19. 13 JulModel takes command of the 2nd Panzer Army as well and begins pulling his armor north; Hitler decides to halt Citadel.
20. 15 JulThe Central Front joins the counteroffensive.
21. 5 AugOrel is liberated.

The cost

The casualty figures for the northern face are better established than for most of the Kursk battle, because both sides’ records have been published. On the German side, the Ninth Army’s loss reports give 1,287 killed and missing and 5,921 wounded for 5 July alone (Frieser). For the whole attack, from 5 July to its end on 11–12 July, the German medical and loss returns analyzed by Frieser, Töppel and Zetterling and Frankson put the Ninth Army’s casualties at roughly 20,000 to 23,000 killed, wounded and missing; the exact figure depends on the cut-off date and on which attached units are counted. The rate of loss was highest at the start, when the infantry divisions went into the minefields, and fell as the attack lost momentum. German tank and assault-gun losses were mostly repairable damage. Frieser counts 252 German tanks and assault guns written off on both faces of the salient during the whole of Citadel; many more were knocked out and repaired, some of them more than once, and the permanent losses in the north rose sharply only when damaged vehicles had to be abandoned in the retreat from the Orel bulge.

On the Soviet side, G. F. Krivosheev’s statistical study of Soviet losses gives the Central Front, with a strength of 738,000, losses in the defensive battle of 5–11 July of 15,336 irrecoverable (killed, missing and captured) and 18,561 sanitary (wounded and sick), a total of 33,897. That was well under half of the Voronezh Front’s losses on the southern face in its defensive battle of 5–23 July, which Krivosheev puts at 73,892 (Krivosheev). The Central Front’s tank losses in the defensive battle were heavy, especially in the 2nd Tank Army’s counterattack of 6 July, but they were far smaller than those of the Voronezh Front. Krivosheev gives 1,614 Soviet tanks and self-propelled guns lost in the whole Kursk defensive operation, on both faces.

The comparison is telling. The Central Front lost more men than the Ninth Army, as Soviet fronts usually did against German attacks, but the ratio, roughly one and a half to one, was much better for the defenders than on the southern face, where the Voronezh Front’s losses were far heavier both absolutely and in proportion to those of the German forces attacking it. It is a measure of how well the Central Front had prepared, and of how badly the Ninth Army’s attack went. And for all these losses the Germans gained a strip of ground at most about 10–12 km deep and perhaps 15 km wide, all of which they gave up within two weeks.

By the numbers

What the northern battle cost, 5–11 July 1943

Killed, missing and wounded, from each side’s own records. German figures for 5 July from the Ninth Army’s reports and an approximate range for the whole attack; Soviet figures for the whole defensive battle of the Central Front

Central Front, 5–11 July: total (Krivosheev)33,897

Central Front: wounded and sick18,561

Central Front: killed, missing and captured15,336

Ninth Army, 5–11/12 July: total (estimates range from about 20,000 to 23,000; low end shown)c. 20,000–23,000

Ninth Army, 5 July only: total7,208

Ninth Army, 5 July: wounded5,921

Ninth Army, 5 July: killed and missing1,287

By the numbers

How far the attacks got

Approximate greatest depth of the German advance, in kilometers

Distance from the Ninth Army’s start line to the planned link-up east of Kurskc. 100 km

Fourth Panzer Army, southern face, by 12 Julyc. 35 km

Ninth Army, northern face, greatest depth by 11 Julyc. 10–12 km

Ninth Army, 5 July (XLVII Panzer Corps)c. 6–8 km

How Americans came to see the northern face

Americans in July 1943 knew of the battle only through brief Soviet communiqués, reprinted in the newspapers, which reported fierce German attacks in the Orel–Kursk and Belgorod directions and large numbers of German tanks destroyed, and through Moscow correspondents who were not allowed near the front. The landing in Sicily on 10 July filled the front pages. What reached the United States about the northern face in particular was little more than the names of Ponyri and Olkhovatka and claims of German losses that were much exaggerated.

After the war, Americans learned about Kursk mostly from the German side. Guderian’s Panzer Leader, Manstein’s Lost Victories and the studies German generals wrote for the U.S. Army’s Historical Division in the late 1940s told the story of Citadel as a German operation undone by Hitler’s delays, Soviet numbers and bad luck, and the northern face appeared in them mainly as the place where the Ferdinands failed. Model, who took his own life in the Ruhr pocket on 21 April 1945, wrote no memoir, and the Soviet accounts of Rokossovsky and Pukhov were little read in the West. Only from the 1980s, with the work of David Glantz and others at the U.S. Army’s Soviet Army Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, and then with the opening of Soviet archives after 1991, did American readers get a picture of the northern face that gave the Soviet defense its due.

There is also a direct American link to the Ferdinands. One of the two survivors of the type is in the United States. It is an Elefant, one of the rebuilt Ferdinands, captured by American troops at Anzio in Italy in 1944 and shipped to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for evaluation. It became part of the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum collection and was restored in the late 2000s; in 2017 it was lent to the Tank Museum at Bovington in England for an exhibition on the Tiger family (Wikipedia, “Elefant,” citing the Tank Museum). The other survivor, a Ferdinand captured by the Red Army at Kursk, is in the armor museum at Kubinka near Moscow.

Lend-Lease played a smaller part on the northern face than it would later in the war. The Central Front’s tank units were equipped mainly with Soviet T-34s and T-70s, though some separate tank regiments used American M3 medium tanks and British tanks, and American trucks were already moving Soviet supplies and artillery in large numbers. The broader story of Lend-Lease at Kursk, with its real numbers and the debate over its importance, is told in Chapter 9.

Questions readers ask

How far did Model’s Ninth Army get?

At most about 10 to 12 km, on a front of roughly 15 km, between 5 and 11 July. It broke into the 13th Army’s first defensive belt on the first day and reached the second belt at Ponyri and in front of the Olkhovatka heights, but it never took the heights and held only part of Ponyri. By late July it was back on its start line.

Why did Model attack with infantry instead of tanks?

He wanted to break into the Soviet defenses with infantry, engineers, artillery and heavy tanks and tank destroyers, and save his panzer divisions for the breakthrough and the advance to Kursk. Given the depth of the Soviet minefields and anti-tank defenses, he feared that a panzer-led attack would destroy his armor in the first belt. The result was an attack that was slow and costly in infantry and gave the Soviet command time to reinforce; historians still debate whether any other method would have done better.

Were the Ferdinands a failure?

As tank killers, no: their gun and armor made them very dangerous at long range, and few were destroyed by direct fire. As weapons for breaking a deep defense, yes. Their weight, mechanical unreliability and vulnerability to mines meant that many were immobilized on the first day, and the impossibility of recovering them under fire turned breakdowns into permanent losses. The lack of a machine gun was a real weakness but less important than later accounts suggest.

Was Ponyri really “the Stalingrad of the Kursk salient”?

The phrase is Soviet, and it describes the kind of fighting rather than its size. Ponyri was a village fought over house by house for about a week, by divisions rather than armies. Like Stalingrad, it drew an attack built for movement into a battle for buildings, and the attackers never took the whole of it.

How it connects

The northern battle grew out of the decisions described in Chapter 1, including Model’s own objections to Citadel, and it was fought against the defenses described in Chapter 2. On the southern face, in the same days, Army Group South’s panzer corps made much deeper gains against the Voronezh Front (Chapter 4), culminating at Prokhorovka on 12 July (Chapter 6). The air battle over both faces is the subject of Chapter 5. Operation Kutuzov, which ended the Ninth Army’s attack, and the liberation of Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov are told in Chapter 7; the German occupation and withdrawal from the Orel region in Chapter 8; and the cost and memory of the whole battle in Chapter 9.

Walking the ground today

The battlefield of the northern face lies mostly in the Ponyri district of Kursk region and the southern edge of Oryol region, about 50 to 80 km north of Kursk along the railway to Orel. Ponyri is now a small settlement and district center. Its Kursk Battle historical and memorial museum holds a diorama of the fighting, and the memorial complex nearby gathers the mass graves of more than 2,600 Soviet soldiers, with an eternal flame and monuments to the sappers, signalers, tank crews and paratroopers who fought there; a separate monument to the sappers killed in the battle stands about 4 km northeast of the village (Russian Wikipedia, “Ponyri”). On the ridge near Teploye and Olkhovatka, the Teplovskiye Heights memorial marks the high ground that the Ninth Army never took. Travel to the region is not currently possible for most Americans: the U.S. State Department advises against all travel to Russia, and parts of Kursk region near the Ukrainian border saw heavy fighting from August 2024.

Sources

• David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), especially the chapters on the Central Front’s defense, 5–12 July, and When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (rev. ed., 2015).
• Karl-Heinz Frieser, “The Battle of the Kursk Salient,” in Karl-Heinz Frieser et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. 8, The Eastern Front 1943–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2017; German ed. 2007), pp. 83–208, especially pp. 108 and 112 (Ninth Army strength and losses on 5 July) and pp. 175–188 (Operation Kutuzov).
• Roman Töppel, Kursk 1943: The Greatest Battle of the Second World War (Warwick: Helion, 2018; German ed. 2017).
• Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), on the northern face, 5–8 July.
• Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson, Kursk 1943: A Statistical Analysis (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
• G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill, 1997), tables for the Kursk defensive operation and the Orel offensive operation.
• Karlheinz Münch, The Combat History of schwere Panzerjäger Abteilung 653 (Winnipeg: Fedorowicz, 1997); Thomas L. Jentz and Hilary L. Doyle, Panzer Tracts and Jentz, Panzerkampfwagen VI P (Sd.Kfz. 181) (1997); Thomas Anderson, Ferdinand and Elefant Tank Destroyer (Osprey); Steven J. Zaloga, Osprey studies of the Elefant and of Kursk 1943.
• Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (London: Michael Joseph, 1952), on Citadel and the Porsche Tigers; K. K. Rokossovsky, A Soldier’s Duty (Moscow: Progress, 1985); N. P. Pukhov, Gody ispytaniy (Moscow, 1959). Memoirs are used as recollection, not as records.
• Antony Beevor, The Second World War (2012), on Rokossovsky’s decision to dig in his tanks; Christer Bergström, Kursk: The Air Battle, July 1943 (2007), on the air war and the Orel offensive.
• Wikipedia: “Battle of Kursk” (citing Frieser, Clark, Glantz and House, Münch and Zetterling and Frankson); “Elefant” (citing Jentz, Anderson, Töppel, Münch and the Tank Museum); “Operation Kutuzov” (citing Frieser, Bergström, Glantz and House and Krivosheev); “307th Rifle Division” (citing Glantz, After Stalingrad, and Robin Cross, Citadel: The Battle of Kursk); “Mikhail Yenshin” and “Nikolai Pukhov” (both citing D. A. Tsapayev et al., Velikaya Otechestvennaya: Komdivy, 2014, and the Russian Ministry of Defence encyclopedia); “9th Army (Wehrmacht)”; Russian Wikipedia, “Поныри” (Ponyri), for the memorial complex.
• Further reading: Valeriy Zamulin, Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943 (Helion, 2011), for the southern face and the methods of the Soviet defense; Dennis Showalter, Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk (Random House, 2013); Robin Cross, Citadel: The Battle of Kursk (1993); Mark Healy, Zitadelle: The German Offensive Against the Kursk Salient (2008).

Photographs: Soviet war and press photographs by Pavel Troshkin, Yefim Kopyt and Khanin Zingerman (TASS) and others, via waralbum.ru and the Russian Ministry of Defence archives (public domain in Russia or CC BY 4.0); a Bryansk Front order from the Ministry of Defence’s Kursk anniversary archive; and a modern photograph by a Wikimedia Commons contributor (CC BY-SA 4.0); all via Wikimedia Commons. Soviet wartime photographs were sometimes posed or arranged for the camera, and their captions reflect the framing of the Soviet press; dates and units that the captions do not record are noted as uncertain. Unit insignia drawn for this collection are illustrations in the period style, not official emblems.