During the night of 6 July, the Russians reinforced V Guards Tank Corps with three brigades in preparation for a major counterattack against the Waffen-SS. Small, probing attacks were launched in the dawn light by individual tanks, supported by squads of tank-riding infantry. At 06:00 hours the Leibstandarte and Das Reich panzer kampfgruppen were ordered forward. In the morning gloom Soviet tank brigades attacked the Waffen-SS panzers from three sides. They surged forward in waves, to be hit by a wall of fire from the German panzers. The main assault wave was made up of dozens of T-34s. They were picked off one-by-one by the panzers, but still kept attacking. The Leibstandarte's Tiger company was in the thick of the action, alone accounting for more than 30 T-34s.

In spite of their terrible losses, the Soviet tanks were soon among the German formations. Panzergrenadiers picked off those tanks that came close and shot any tank-riding infantry on their hulls. The battle raged all day. More than 90 tanks and 60 artillery pieces were lost and 600 Russians were captured in the battle, which decimated XXXI Tank Corps and III Mechanized Corps. Their actions, however, successfully blocked the German advance into the heart of the Soviet third defence line.

Tank dogfights

The tank dogfight between the Waffen-SS and Russian T-34 crews continued overnight and into the morning of 8 July. Whole battalions and brigades of T-34s would suddenly appear from forests and villages to charge the panzer kampfgruppen, which were at the tip of a 19.2km- (12-mile-) deep breach in Soviet lines gouged out by II SS Panzer Corps.

The Leibstandarte and Das Reich panzer kampfgruppen moved around the exposed steppe, destroying dozens of Soviet tanks with their long-range weapons. To increase the firepower available, the Leibstandarte's assault gun battalion was moved up to the spearhead of the division.

The panzers and assault guns could not be everywhere, though, and individual Russians tanks easily penetrated the thinly stretched defences of the Das Reich's and Leibstandarte's panzergrenadier regiments. Anti-tank guns and hand grenades drove off most of the Russian attacks. Four T-34s managed to sneak through the German defences, and get within a few hundred metres of the Leibstandarte's divisional headquarters, before they were knocked out by tank-hunting teams armed with hollow-charge mines. Hausser was determined to press forward the attack, and so just before midday the Leibstandarte and Das Reich armoured kampfgruppen were ordered to wheel northwestwards. Their objective was to seize the crossings over the River Psel and breach the Russian third line, thus opening a clear route northwards.The panzers, led by the Leibstandarte's Tigers, destroyed 22 T-34s as they moved across the open steppe towards the river. As the assault groups approached the Psel valley, they ran into an anti-tank brigade hidden among the villages and woods along the valley. A network of mines and bunkers forced the panzer commanders to rein in their tanks. A small squad of Das Reich's panzergrenadiers did score a major success when they moved through a minefield and captured a Soviet divisional command post and a general. The Soviet defence did not crack, though, and the German drive north had been blocked.

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