It was the campaign that Belov had been preparing for. The bombardment of 5 July was audible from his own base, although some distance to the south. ‘In the area of Belgorod and along the Kursk–Orel part of our front – to the south of us, there are fierce tank battles going on,’ he wrote on 8 July. ‘The sound of distant artillery cannonades can be heard here.’ So could the music of Katyushas, which gladdened every Soviet who listened. ‘The forces are very concentrated,’ Belov noted the next day, ‘every valley is bursting with artillery and infantry. The nights are just an endless roar. Our aviation is working near the limit of the first defence lines. There’s a mass of tanks.’89 The young officer’s optimism was justified. Red Army units on the Central Front, under Rokossovsky’s command, withstood the German onslaught from the north with a resilience that their enemy could never have anticipated. On the first day, Model’s panzers advanced just four miles. They would make little headway in the week to come, although the defence effort cost the Soviets more than 15,000 lives.90 To the south, however, along the Voronezh Front, a smaller number of Soviet divisions under Vatutin were facing one of the deadliest struggles of the war.
The fighting would involve the 1st guards tank army, including Slesarev and his friends, the 5th guards tank army under Rotmistrov, and the gunners and riflemen of the 5th guards army, the one in which Lev Lvovich, the mild-mannered geologist-turned-lieutenant, was serving. On 5 July, when the onslaught began, the 5th guards army was more than 200 miles behind the front. Rotmistrov’s tank army was at a base not far beyond. Two days later, both would receive the order to cover the distance, on the march and under German bombardment, within three days. The scorching summer heat, the flies and the great clouds of dust were exhausting enough, yet after all that, the men would still need to be fit to fight successive eight-hour battles amid yet more shelling and machine-gun fire.91 Meanwhile, Slesarev and his comrades were already in the direct path of an onslaught whose ferocity exceeded even Soviet fears. Recovering from the unexpected setback of their first day under fire, Hoth’s men, spearheaded by more than 500 tanks, pushed forward towards Oboyan. As Soviet infantry units shattered under the intolerable pressure of bombardment, the 1st tank army was almost the only barrier that held – or tried to hold – on 7 July.92 Slesarev had no time to write home. He was lucky to have survived, but the courage and tenacity of men like him forced Hoth to change his plans. Instead of driving straight for Oboyan, the Germans shifted their objective to a piece of relatively high ground near the small steppe town of Prokhorovka.
The fiercest tank battle in history took place in open fields near settlements with names like ‘October’ and ‘Komsomol’. To have lost here, to have allowed the Germans to push through to Kursk, would almost certainly have meant losing the entire defensive campaign. Six hundred German tanks were poised for this great strike. Concealed in scrub, orchards, and the rank grassland of a wet July, 850 Soviet tanks prepared to halt them. At dawn, as the first light filtered through the mist, the future battlefield was silent, ‘as if there were no war’.93 The first blackbirds began to call across the valley. ‘I watched my friend spreading fat on a chunk of bread,’ a veteran remembered. ‘He was doing it slowly, taking his time. I kept telling him to get a move on because the Germans were coming.’ But he smiled. “Don’t rush me,” he said, with a prescience his friend would later find uncanny. “I’m going to enjoy this. It’s the last meal I’ll eat in this world.”’94 He had finished eating just before 6.30 a. m., when the calm was shattered by the first of hundreds of Junkers swooping to dive-bomb the Soviet lines.95 But it was not to be a repeat of the summer of 1941. This time, there were hundreds of Soviet planes to answer with equal determination. The tank battle began with an aerial dogfight that would fill the air with smoke and burning metal well before the great machines began their duel.
Prokhorovka was destined to be remembered for those tanks. The German and Soviet machines advanced to meet through a fog of smoke and driving rain. By mid-morning, the rolling fields were strewn with lumps of twisted metal and the charred bodies of men. Survivors talk about the summer heat, but in fact the weather that day was cool. What the veterans are probably remembering is the inferno of burning metal, burning fuel and rubber, burning air. Faced with the superior Panther and Tiger tanks, Soviet crews refused to yield. If they could do no more, they rammed their enemy, locking metal on to metal. This was the way that Gusev and his crew would die. ‘The lieutenant’s tank was moving forward,’ friends from his regiment would tell his parents, ‘maintaining fire from every kind of gun. But an enemy shell set fire to the machine. The firing from the burning tank did not cease. The mechanic, selecting the machine’s highest gear, contrived to drive it at one of the enemy’s advancing tanks. The fire from Lt Gusev’s tank continued. They were firing, so they must still be alive. Our tank and Lt Gusev’s tank drove forward at full throttle straight towards the enemy tank. The Tiger wanted to turn round and get out, but it succeeded only in turning sideways. Our burning tank rammed into the Tiger and both tanks exploded. The crew of heroes perished.’96
Tank crews were not the only men who died. Brigades of riflemen and artillery, including Lev Lvovich’s unit, were also sent to hold the tanks. When all else failed, infantrymen would hurl grenades and flaming bottles at the monsters in the spirit of the old war films. They also tackled German infantry, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat. They found the footsoldiers less awe-inspiring than élite tank men and SS. Some of them (and probably some Russians, too) were drunk, their courage stoked with quantities of schnapps,97 but that did not make the fighting less deadly. ‘The sky thunders, the earth thunders, and you think your heart will explode and the skin on your back is about to burst,’ a woman combatant told Alexiyevich. ‘I hadn’t thought that the earth could crack. Everything cracked, everything roared. The whole world seemed to be swaying.’ But this was just the setting for what followed. Hand-to-hand fighting, she remembered, ‘isn’t for human beings… Men strike, thrust their bayonets into stomachs, eyes, strangle one another. Howling, shouts, groans. It’s something terrible even for war.’98 What kept Lev Lvovich going was not his abstract sense of duty but the concrete, the specific hourly goals. Orders would come, he said, ‘to aim for this bank or trench, to focus on this oak tree, aim three fingers’ width towards the left… That sort of thing helps very much.’ It also helped that he was too proud to allow his men to understand that he, too, was afraid.