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Special Units · Battle of Kursk, 1943
The Soviet 13th Army at Ponyri
Given the narrowest sector and the heaviest reinforcement on the Central Front, Lt. Gen. Nikolai Pukhov’s 13th Army took the main blow of Model’s Ninth Army along the Orel–Kursk railway from 5 to 11 July 1943 and held its second belt.
- Red Army · Central Front
- Ponyri and the Olkhovatka heights
- 5–12 July 1943
The army Rokossovsky chose
The 13th Army was one of the Red Army’s veteran field armies. It had fought in Belorussia in 1941, on the Bryansk and Voronezh Fronts in 1942 and in the winter offensives of early 1943, and in March 1943 it came under Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Central Front on the northern face of the Kursk salient. Its commander, Nikolai Pukhov, had led it since January 1942 and would lead it to the end of the war (Chapter 3).
Rokossovsky judged that Model would strike down the Orel–Kursk railway and the open ground beside it toward Olkhovatka and Ponyri, the most direct route to Kursk. He gave that sector, only about 32 km wide, to Pukhov and made the 13th Army the strongest army on the front. It had four rifle corps with twelve rifle divisions. The 15th and 29th Rifle Corps held the first line; in the 29th, astride the railway, the 15th and 81st Rifle Divisions held the forward positions and the 307th Rifle Division held Ponyri in the second echelon. The 17th Guards Rifle Corps stood behind them around Olkhovatka, and the 18th Guards Rifle Corps, built from three Guards airborne divisions fighting as infantry, waited in reserve. The 4th Artillery Penetration Corps, tank regiments, anti-tank brigades and engineer units, among them the 1st Guards Special-Purpose Engineer Brigade, gave the army more guns and mortars per kilometer than any other army on the salient (Glantz and House).
Since April the army had dug itself into three defensive belts. The first was 5 to 6 km deep. The second ran along the ridge north of Olkhovatka, through Ponyri and on toward Maloarkhangelsk. The ridge mattered: the heights around Olkhovatka and Teploye, rising to about 274 m, were the highest ground between the German lines and Kursk. Eight mobile obstacle detachments of sappers stood ready to lay new minefields once the German axis was clear (Chapter 2).
5 July: the first shock
The 13th Army knew the hour. During the night of 4–5 July a German sapper of the 6th Infantry Division, captured while clearing lanes through its minefields, told interrogators that the attack would begin early on the 5th. With Zhukov’s consent the Central Front’s guns opened a counter-preparation at about 02:20. It delayed some German units but did not wreck the attack (Chapter 3).
At 05:30, after its own artillery preparation, the Ninth Army went forward with nine infantry divisions and one panzer division. The main effort struck the boundary between the 15th and 81st Rifle Divisions, where the XLVII and XLI Panzer Corps met. The Tigers of schwere Panzer-Abteilung 505 led toward Butyrki and Bobrik; on the railway, the 292nd and 86th Infantry Divisions attacked the 81st Rifle Division with the Ferdinands of Regiment 656. The 676th Rifle Regiment of the 15th Rifle Division held around Butyrki long enough for the rest of the 29th Rifle Corps to man the second belt. By evening the XLVII Panzer Corps was 6 to 8 km into the first belt on a narrow front and the XLI Panzer Corps had reached the approaches to Ponyri (Clark; Frieser).
The minefields did their work. All but 12 of the 653rd Heavy Panzerjäger Battalion’s 45 Ferdinands were immobilized before 17:00, most by mines. The first day cost the Ninth Army, by its own reports, 1,287 killed and missing and 5,921 wounded, its heaviest single day of the battle, falling mainly on the infantry divisions Model had chosen to lead (Frieser).
Ponyri, 6–12 July
Ponyri was a railway village, really two, Pervye and Vtorye Ponyri, strung out on either side of a station, with a yard, a water tower, a school, a machine-tractor station and, on its outskirts, a low rise marked as Hill 253.5. It was the eastern anchor of the second belt, prepared since the spring with every stone building fortified. The 307th Rifle Division held it under Maj. Gen. Mikhail Enshin, who had taken command only days before, supported by the 129th Tank Brigade, the 1454th Self-Propelled Artillery Regiment with SU-122s and the heavy guns of the army and the artillery corps; Glantz counts some 380 guns in support, the largest such concentration behind one Soviet rifle division in the war in the East (Glantz and House; Chapter 2).
Against it 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. On 6 July the Germans reached the northern edge of the village and were thrown back. On 7 July they took about half of it after house-to-house fighting; a counterattack early on 8 July pushed them out of part of what they had taken. For four more days the fighting surged around the station, the school, the water tower, the tractor station and Hill 253.5. Rokossovsky fed in the 3rd and 4th Guards Airborne Divisions of the 18th Guards Rifle Corps. Between 9 and 11 July the Germans took Hill 253.5, but the 307th’s 1023rd Rifle Regiment kept them off the highest ground, and they never held the whole village. The 307th was relieved on 11 July (Zetterling and Frankson; Clark; Chapter 3).
Soviet writers called Ponyri “the Stalingrad of the Kursk salient.” The comparison is to the kind of fighting, not its scale: a small place fought over for a week by divisions, where an attack built for movement was drawn into a fight for buildings. The village was destroyed. Its memorial complex now gathers mass graves holding more than 2,600 Soviet soldiers.
The Olkhovatka heights
West of Ponyri, Model’s main effort went for the ridge. Rokossovsky’s counterattack of 6 July went badly: only the 2nd Tank Army’s 16th Tank Corps attacked at dawn, ran into the Tigers and lost 69 tanks, and the survivors withdrew behind the 17th Guards Rifle Corps. Rokossovsky stopped the counterattacks and dug his remaining tanks in, hull-down behind the infantry. From 7 to 10 July the 2nd and 20th Panzer Divisions, the Tigers and then the 4th Panzer Division attacked toward Samodurovka, Kashara and Teploye against the 17th Guards Rifle Corps, the 70th Army’s left wing, the dug-in tanks and the anti-tank brigades. They reached the forward slopes but never the crest. The last strong German attempt, on 10 July, failed (Glantz and House; Töppel).
What it cost, and what came after
Krivosheev’s tables give the Central Front, of which the 13th Army bore the largest share, 33,897 losses in the defensive battle of 5–11 July: 15,336 killed, missing and captured and 18,561 wounded and sick. German returns put the Ninth Army’s casualties for the whole attack at roughly 20,000 to 23,000. The ratio, about one and a half to one, was far better for the defenders than on the southern face. For it the Germans gained a strip at most 10 to 12 km deep and perhaps 15 km wide, all of which they gave up within two weeks (Chapter 3).
On 12 July the Western and Bryansk Fronts opened Operation Kutuzov against the Orel bulge, and Model began pulling his armor out of the Kursk attack. The Central Front joined the counteroffensive on 15 July; Orel was liberated on 5 August. The 13th Army’s divisions went on to the Desna and the Dnieper in September, and Pukhov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union on 16 October 1943 for those crossings.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. Soviet field armies did not wear shoulder patches; the red star stands for the Red Army as a whole.
Timeline
- Nikolai Pukhov takes command of the 13th Army.
- The 13th Army joins Rokossovsky’s Central Front on the northern face.
- The army builds three defensive belts across the Orel–Kursk railway.
- On a captured German sapper’s word, the Central Front opens its counter-preparation.
- The Ninth Army attacks; the 15th and 81st Rifle Divisions take the first shock.
- The 16th Tank Corps loses 69 tanks to the Tigers; Rokossovsky orders his tanks dug in. Ponyri holds.
- The Germans take half of Ponyri; a Soviet counterattack regains part of it.
- The Germans take Hill 253.5 but not the village; the 307th Rifle Division is relieved on 11 July.
- The last strong German attack on the Olkhovatka heights fails.
- Operation Kutuzov opens; the Central Front joins the counteroffensive on 15 July.
- Pukhov is made a Hero of the Soviet Union for the Desna and Dnieper crossings.
People of the unit
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
- Chapter 7: Citadel Called Off: Kutuzov, Rumyantsev and the Liberation of Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov
- Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory of Kursk
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
The 13th Army at Ponyri by the numbers
Casualties on the northern face, 5–11 July 1943
People; Soviet figures are for the Central Front as a whole, of which the 13th Army bore the largest share; the German range is from Ninth Army returns
Source: G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses (1997); Karl-Heinz Frieser, in Germany and the Second World War, vol. 8 (2017), pp. 108, 112.
The ground: distances on the northern face
Kilometers; the German figures are maxima
Source: David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (1999); Chapter 3 of this collection.
Armor lost in the first two days
Vehicles; Ferdinands immobilized on 5 July and Soviet tanks lost in the 16th Tank Corps counterattack of 6 July
Source: Karlheinz Münch, The Combat History of German Heavy Anti-Tank Unit 653 (1997); Glantz and House (1999).
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), chapters on the Central Front’s defense, 5–12 July.
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, “The Battle of the Kursk Salient,” in Germany and the Second World War, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2017), pp. 108 and 112 for the Ninth Army on 5 July.
- Roman Töppel, Kursk 1943 (Helion, 2018); Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks (2011); Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson, Kursk 1943: A Statistical Analysis (2000).
- G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill, 1997).
- K. K. Rokossovsky, A Soldier’s Duty (1985); N. P. Pukhov, Gody ispytaniy (1959): recollection, not records. Karlheinz Münch, The Combat History of German Heavy Anti-Tank Unit 653 (1997).
- Wikipedia, “307th Rifle Division” (citing Glantz and Cross), “Mikhail Yenshin” and “Nikolai Pukhov” (citing Tsapayev et al., Velikaya Otechestvennaya: Komdivy, 2014); Russian Wikipedia, “Поныри.”