![]() The Germans could blame their defeats at Moscow and Stalingrad on the Russian winter, overstretched supply lines and incompetent Rumanian and Italian allies. Kursk was not a turning point of the war: It was the German infantry, which as in most armies took the most casualties and received the least glory, that was roughly handled at Kursk.Ģ. Given that the German offensive ran into perhaps the most extensive fortified zone in history, and then fought against the numerically superior Soviet tank force, Panzer losses were remarkably light. The Soviets may have lost 300 tanks destroyed and another 300 damaged, a 15:1 ratio in Germany's favor.Īs for Tigers at Kursk, the Germans deployed 146. The Germans probably lost 45 tanks at Prokhovoka, most of which were subsequently recovered and repaired. ![]() The Soviets lost at least 1,600 tanks, a 5:1 ratio in Germany's favor. Many German tanks damaged by mines or Soviet weapons, or that broke down, were subsequently recovered. Loss estimates for Kursk are fuzzy, but historians David Glantz and Jonathan House estimate the Germans lost 323 tanks destroyed, or about 10 percent of the tanks committed to the offensive (and a fraction of the 12,000 tanks and self-propelled guns the Third Reich built in 1943). There were lots of flaming tanks at Kursk. So let's explode some of the hype about Kursk:ġ. The battle over the history of Kursk was not. Thus the Germans found their pincer operation squeezed on either side by a Soviet pincers, in yet another masterful example of the Soviet gift for timing multiple offensives to keep the Germans off balance.Īs they would do for the next 22 months, the Germans retreated. Then the Red Army launched a counteroffensive that punctured the weakly held German lines at Orel, north of Kursk, and Belgorod to the south. It waited until the Germans had concentrated their forces at Kursk, and exhausted themselves against the Russian defenses. Stavka, the Soviet high command, used essentially the same trick that had worked at Stalingrad. Two days later Hitler informed his generals that he was canceling the offensive and transferring the SS Panzer divisions to Italy, to repel any Allied landings on the Italian peninsula. On July 10, Anglo-American troops landed on the beaches of Sicily. But the southern pincer, led by the II SS Panzer Corps, managed to advance 20 miles to the town of Prokhorovka, until its advance was checked by the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army. Despite support by 89 Elefants (a Porsche version of the Tiger that the German army rejected), the northern pincer quickly bogged down after advancing just a few miles. The Germans attacked an obvious target, the Soviets fortified the obvious target, and the German offensive on Jwas a traditional pincer move against the north and south base of the salient to cut off the defenders inside. ![]() The Soviets used the extra time to build an incredibly dense defense system of multiple layers of fortifications, including trenches, bunkers, tank traps and machine gun nests 25 miles deep, as well as minefields that averaged more than 3,000 mines per kilometer. They faced 1.9 million Soviet soldiers, 5,000 tanks, 25,000 guns and mortars and more than 3,000 aircraft.Ĭitadel was a prophetic name for the German offensive. Yet as usual, the Germans were outnumbered. ![]() It would be the last time the Germans could concentrate such an attack force (by comparison, at the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans had 400,000 men and 600 tanks). While the big cats lumbered off the railroad cars near the front lines, the Germans managed to amass nearly 800,000 men, 3,000 tanks, 10,000 guns and mortars, and 2,000 aircraft. But a nervous and indecisive Hitler decided to postpone Operation Citadel until July, to allow time to deploy his vaunted new Panther, Tiger and Elefant tanks. Top commanders such as Erich Von Manstein wanted to attack in May, before the Soviets had time to dig in and reinforce the salient. ![]() In effect, Kursk was the first Battle of the Bulge, but on a much larger scale than the Americans faced in December 1944. An obvious target was the Kursk salient, so obvious in fact that any Russian general with a map could guess the German target ( in addition, Moscow was tipped off by the "Lucy"). Now the Germans could only muster enough troops to concentrate on a narrow sector. In 1941, Germany had been strong enough to attack on a thousand-mile-front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. ![]()
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