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The record · Battle of Kursk, 1943
Schwere Panzerjäger-Regiment 656
The regiment of the new 65-tonne Ferdinand tank destroyers attacked along the Orel–Kursk railway toward Ponyri on 5 July 1943. It appears here because its heavy vehicles were stopped less by Soviet guns than by mines, broken ground and the near impossibility of recovering them.
Illustration A neutral marker made for this site, not a unit emblem.
Porsche’s hulls
The Ferdinand was built from a tank that lost a competition. In 1942 the army chose Henschel’s design for the Tiger over Ferdinand Porsche’s, but about 90 of Porsche’s hulls had already been built. Rather than scrap them, the army had them converted between March and May 1943 at the Nibelungenwerk at St. Valentin in Austria into tank destroyers, with the long 8.8 cm Pak 43/2 L/71 gun in a fixed armored casemate at the rear. Ninety-one were built (Jentz).
On paper it was formidable. Its frontal armor was 200 mm thick, the original 100 mm plate with another 100 mm bolted on, and no Soviet tank or antitank gun of 1943 could penetrate it from the front at normal ranges; its gun could destroy any Soviet tank at more than 2,000 meters. 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, a design that was thirsty and prone to overheating and breakdown. Its gun could traverse only 28 degrees, it had no hull machine gun, and its crew of six saw poorly to the sides and rear (Jentz; Anderson; Chapter 3).
The regiment
All the Ferdinands went to Generaloberst Walter Model’s Ninth Army on the northern face of the salient. Schwere Panzerjäger-Regiment 656 was formed in the spring of 1943 under Oberstleutnant Ernst von Jungenfeld to command them, in two heavy tank-destroyer battalions of about 45 vehicles each: schwere Panzerjäger-Abteilung 653 under Maj. Heinrich Steinwachs and 654 under Maj. Karl-Heinz Noak. The regiment also took in Sturmpanzer-Abteilung 216, with the new Sturmpanzer IV assault howitzers, and two companies of radio-controlled demolition vehicles meant to blow lanes through minefields. The crews were experienced antitank and assault-gun men; the vehicle was new, and many of its faults were still being found when the battle began (Münch; Zaloga).
Model chose to break into the Soviet defenses with infantry divisions backed by heavy weapons, and to hold most of his panzer divisions back for the breakthrough. The Ferdinands were central to that plan. The regiment was attached to Gen. Josef Harpe’s XLI Panzer Corps to support the 86th and 292nd Infantry Divisions along the railway toward Ponyri, where the ground was open and the long gun’s range could count (Glantz and House; Chapter 3).
5 July: into the minefields
At 05:30 on 5 July the Ninth Army attacked. Along the railway the Ferdinands broke into the positions of the Soviet 81st Rifle Division, destroyed tanks and antitank guns at long range, and helped the German infantry reach the approaches to Ponyri. Then they drove into minefields laid in depth across the likely tank routes. 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 next days. The problem was reaching them. A 65-tonne vehicle sitting in a minefield, often under artillery fire, could not be towed by one of the army’s standard 18-tonne half-tracks; it took as many as five coupled together, working in the open, and the regiment did not have enough of them (Jentz; Münch).
Ponyri, 6–12 July
For the next week the Ferdinands fought in small groups with the infantry and the 9th and 18th Panzer Divisions in the battle for Ponyri and Hill 253.5, held by Maj. Gen. M. A. Enshin’s 307th Rifle Division. They were effective at long range and very hard to kill: German accounts and Soviet investigations after the battle agree that few were destroyed by gunfire through their armor. But mines, artillery fire that smashed tracks and running gear, and mechanical failure disabled them in large numbers, and when the front moved, vehicles that could not be moved were blown up or burned by their own crews. The Germans took about half of Ponyri and Hill 253.5, never the whole village (Chapter 3).
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. On 12 July the Soviet Operation Kutuzov struck the Orel bulge behind the Ninth Army, and from the next day Model began pulling his armor out of the attack.
On the Soviet side the answer was depth and movement. Engineers of mobile obstacle detachments laid new mines in the path of the German axis, often at night, and the guns of the strongpoints fired at tracks, sides and rear rather than the front armor. A Bryansk Front order of 17 July set the lessons down in writing for fighting Tigers and Ferdinands (Glantz and House; Chapter 2).
What the record shows
The best-known story about the Ferdinands is that they failed because they had no machine gun, so that Red Army infantry climbed onto them and destroyed them with grenades and fire bottles. The lack of a machine gun was real; crews complained of it, and one was added when the vehicles were rebuilt. But the battle records show that mines, artillery damage, breakdowns and the impossibility of recovery under fire caused far more losses than close assault. A report of the 654th battalion stated that Soviet infantry could not effectively attack the Ferdinand at close range, and a Soviet commission that examined Ferdinands abandoned at Ponyri concluded that several had been set on fire by their own crews (Töppel and Jentz, as cited in Chapter 3).
…they literally had to go quail-shooting with cannon.
The Ferdinand’s armor kept its crews alive; it could not keep the vehicle moving. On a battlefield built by engineers, that was the decisive weakness. The surviving vehicles were withdrawn in the autumn and rebuilt as the Elefant, with a hull machine gun and a commander’s cupola, and fought in Italy and Poland in 1944. One Ferdinand captured near Ponyri survives at the Kubinka armor museum near Moscow. An Elefant captured by American troops at Anzio in 1944 went to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, and in 2017 was lent to the Tank Museum at Bovington in England.
Timeline
- Ninety-one Porsche Tiger hulls are converted into Ferdinand tank destroyers at St. Valentin, Austria.
- Schwere Panzerjäger-Regiment 656 is formed under Oberstleutnant Ernst von Jungenfeld.
- The Ninth Army attacks; the Ferdinands advance with the XLI Panzer Corps along the railway toward Ponyri.
- All but 12 of the 653rd battalion’s 45 Ferdinands are immobilized, mostly by mines.
- Infantry, Ferdinands and tanks take about half of Ponyri.
- The Germans take Hill 253.5 but not the whole village.
- Operation Kutuzov strikes the Orel bulge; Model begins pulling his armor north.
- A Bryansk Front order sets down the lessons of fighting Tigers and Ferdinands.
- Damaged Ferdinands abandoned in the retreat roughly double the regiment’s losses.
- The survivors are withdrawn and rebuilt as the Elefant.
Read the full story
- Chapter 3: The Northern Face: Model, Ponyri and the Olkhovatka Heights
- Chapter 2: The Soviet Fortress: Minefields, Strongpoints and the Waiting Armies
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
Schwere Panzerjäger-Regiment 656 by the numbers
The 653rd battalion, 5 July 1943
Ferdinands sent in and still mobile by 17:00. Most of the immobilized vehicles were stopped by mine damage, not destroyed.
Source: Karlheinz Münch, The Combat History of schwere Panzerjäger Abteilung 653 (1997), cited by Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks (2011).
From factory to write-off
Ferdinands built, committed and permanently lost. Loss figures are approximate and differ by a few vehicles between sources.
Source: Thomas L. Jentz, Panzerkampfwagen VI P (1997); Steven J. Zaloga, Osprey studies of the Elefant and of Kursk 1943; Chapter 3 of this collection.
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Karlheinz Münch, The Combat History of schwere Panzerjäger Abteilung 653 (Winnipeg: Fedorowicz, 1997).
- Thomas L. Jentz and Hilary L. Doyle, Panzer Tracts; Thomas L. 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.
- David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (1999); Karl-Heinz Frieser et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. VIII (2017); Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 (2011); Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson, Kursk 1943: A Statistical Analysis (2000).
- Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (London, 1952), used as recollection.
- Wikipedia, “Elefant” (citing Jentz, Anderson, Töppel, Münch and the Tank Museum), as used in Chapter 3 of this collection.