From then on, the Germans fought a bitter and costly retreat and the Red Army soon advanced into what Soviet propaganda called the “lair of the fascist beast.” In the spring of 1945 Stalin’s soldiers would take Berlin and end the Second World War in Europe. No chanceĪn immensely bloody but inconclusive local engagement turned into a strategic defeat of the invaders. As the Führer’s soldiers moved back, they were attacked by the Red Army throughout the rest of the summer of 1943. The Panzers didn’t manage to break through the staggered Soviet defences.Įventually Hitler withdrew his forces to save what was left of his tanks. This tactical superiority, however, couldn’t be exploited in the war of attrition the Germans faced. Clearly, the Wehrmacht was still the superior fighting force. This discrepancy is all the more striking if we remember that attacking forces tend to take greater losses than entrenched defenders. Some 70,000 Red Army and 57,000 Wehrmacht soldiers were dead or wounded, while 1,600 Soviet and 300 German tanks were destroyed. The final tally of the battle was gruesome.
#Tank battles kursk archive#
Picture: German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)/Wikimedia Commons German troops during a lull in the fighting on the southern side of the Kursk battlefield. Despite nearly a fortnight of fierce fighting, however, no breakthrough was achieved. Aircraft pelted the Soviet defenders with bombs and machine-gun fire. They were supported by just under a million men and 10,000 pieces of artillery, creating an inferno of shrieking metal, howling motors, thundering explosions and the cries of wounded men. On 5 July, after many delays, the Germans finally attacked – 2,730 Panzer advanced, including the fearsome new Panther and Tiger tanks. Soviet T-34 tanks stood concealed, ready to lead the counter-strike. Infantry lay in hiding, nervously smoking and downing their “frontline 100 grams” of vodka in anticipation of what was to come. Longer-range artillery covered the approaches. Large numbers of anti-tank guns were strategically positioned to shoot the German Panzer (tanks) to pieces. Anticipating the German attack, the Soviets fortified themselves in a complex set of trenches and minefields. Our train passed the site of the recent battle of Kursk.” After this introduction, Chukhrai goes on to spend four pages of his memoirs describing a battle he had not seen himself. Burned out turrets and spilled tracks were everywhere. “The gun barrels of gutted tanks protruded from the marshes.
#Tank battles kursk windows#
Through the windows of our rail cars we saw the traces of a grandiose battle. “Our 3rd airborne brigade,” wrote the later film director, Grigorii Chukhrai, “was transferred to Belarus, to the city of Slutsk.
It was such an iconic part of the mythology of this war, that even those who had not fought there aimed to write themselves into its history. Picture: RIA Novosti archive, image #4408/Wikimedia Commons Russian anti-tank riflemen on the Kursk battlefield, July 1943. Nevertheless, Kursk became a major moment in the official Soviet war narrative, which took the Red Army from Moscow to Stalingrad, then on to Kursk and eventually to Berlin. Here, the Soviets were far superior to the Germans. More important were overall economic factors, in particular the ability of both sides to produce the means of destruction, to field men and war machines in large quantities.
No laughing matter: The Death of Stalin and Putin's anxietiesĪs David Stahel of UNSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy, a leading operational historian of the Wehrmacht in the East, put it in an interview a few years ago: “Ultimately, whether a hundred extra German tanks went this way or that, does that really determine the outcome of the battle? I think not.” Recent research is more circumspect, stressing the surprisingly good performance of the Germans but also the overall strategic advantage of the Soviets, which nullified such tactical superiority. Historians once viewed the battle as a turning point – a Soviet victory which ended the Wehrmacht’s ability to wage offensive war in the East. Its climax, the Battle of Prokhorovka (12 July), is routinely described as “one of the largest tank battles in military history.” This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Kursk (5-16 July 1943). German tanks deploy during the Battle of Kursk, July 1943. “My tunic was soaked,” wrote Malinovskii. The crews in the Soviet T-34s sweat through their uniforms. Together with our artillery we burned and destroyed twenty-one German tanks.”ĭinner was brought up to the line, but he was too exhausted to eat.
In July 1943, during a moment of respite amid the heavy fighting going on all around him, Soviet tank man Lev Nikolaevich Malinovskii wrote from the Kursk battlefield to his brother: “The fighting today lasted five hours.
0 kommentar(er)
