The Panzers of Prokhorovka: The Myth of Hitler’s Greatest Armoured Defeat

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Of note, most of the Soviet sorties flown that day were flown against the XXXXVIII Panzer Corps to the west and the III Panzer Corps to the south. To its northwest, the panzergrenadiers of Totenkopf had achieved a bridgehead across the Psel and tanks had been brought across, but they had yet to take Hill 226. He organised a task force under the command of his deputy, Major General Kuzma Trufanov, which consisted of the 26th Guards Tank Brigade from the 2nd Guards Tank Corps, the 11th and 12th Guards Mechanised Brigades from the 5th Guards Mechanised Corps, and the 53rd Guards Tank Regiment of the 5th Guards Tank Army. To the south of Leibstandarte, Das Reich had also met stiff resistance and lagged behind some 4 kilometres (2. Three belts made up of extensive minefields, anti-tank ditches, and anti-tank gun emplacements were created; behind those were an additional three belts, which were mostly unoccupied and less fortified.

The Panzers of Prokhorovka by Ben Wheatley | Waterstones

On the southern side, the German 4th Panzer Army, with Army Detachment Kempf on its eastern flank, attacked the Soviet defences of the Voronezh Front. Prokhorovka was the centerpiece of Citadel, the last German strategic offensive on the Eastern Front. The 8th Air Corps was to concentrate its effort to supporting the advance of the II SS-Panzer Corps, with the XXXXVIII Panzer Corps to the west assigned limited air resources.The Soviet 10th Tank Division of the 15th Mechanized Corps alone had 63 KVs and 38 T-34s, according to Glantz’s book The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front. He does this producing a very data intensive analysis of the losses of German tanks, using previously unpublished photographs of the battlefield, and access to German military archives, which show that the losses to the German armoured capability of II SS Panzer Corps were not as catastrophic as always claimed. The Soviet high command, Stavka, had learned of the German intentions and so used the delay to prepare a series of defensive belts along the routes of the planned German offensive.

The Panzers of Prokhorovka by Ben Wheatley | Waterstones The Panzers of Prokhorovka by Ben Wheatley | Waterstones

It was classified secret until its declassification in 1964, and was later edited and translated to English by Orenstein and Glantz. Expanding the battle beyond Prokhorovka, the total number of tanks fielded by the 2nd SS Panzer Corps and the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army at and near the battle amounted to 1,299, according to a statistical analysis published in 2000 by Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson. Bordkanone BK 3,7 cannon in gun pods, that were commanded by Staffelkapitän Hans-Ulrich Rudel, attacked the Soviet formations. To give the prospective reader a feel for the structure of the book, the appendices full of tank loss data start at page 184 of 320. A remarkable new history of the largest tank battle of the Second World War and key moment in the 1943 Kursk campaign.Victory, on 12 July 1943, at Prokhorovka over Hitler's vaunted SS troops has traditionally been described as a turning point in the Second World War. A thousand coffee table books and countless hours of popular history programs have described the Battle of Prokhorovka, part of the Third Reich’s 1943 Operation Citadel, as the largest tank battle in history.

Full article: Citadel, Prokhorovka and Kharkov: The Armoured

The 4th Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf were under Army Group South, commanded by von Manstein. The German historian Dieter Brand argues that even though the German commanders expected a major Soviet armoured deployment at Prokhorovka, the frontline German troops were indeed largely taken by surprise when the Soviets counterattacked on the morning of 12 July.The remainder of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps, supported by the remnants of the 2nd Tank Corps, was to attack Das Reich.