The 1943 battle of Kursk has been called “the most overhyped battle in history”. I’ve read many, many books and articles about the events of World War 2, I’ve generally avoided reading much about Kursk, because reasons. As I wrote nearly a decade back:

Советские бойцы и командиры осматривают немецкие САУ «Фердинанд», подбитые на Орловском участке фронта (“Soviet fighters and commanders examine German self-propelled guns Ferdinand, shot down on the Orel front”).
Photo by Pavel Troshkin, July 1943 via Wikimedia Commons.

Although I’ve read much about World War II, I haven’t read much about arguably the most critical part of the entire war: the gargantuan battles pitting the Soviet Red Army against Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Some of that is just sheer pig-headedness: I used to work for the biggest wargame store in Toronto, back when wargames meant cardboard counters, vast paper hexagonal maps, and charts and tables galore. The hardest of the hard-core gamers seemed to be either Napoleonic grognards (down to the secret stash of sabres and shakos in the gaming room) or even more dedicated junkies of the “Great Patriotic War”/”Operation Barbarossa”. Some of the latter were genuinely crazy, right down to the barely contained hints that “Hitler was just misunderstood”.

Battle of Kursk – 4 July-1 August 1943
Map drawn by Frank Martini for the Department of History at the United States Military Academy (http://www.dean.usma.edu/history/web03/atlases/ww2%20europe/ww2%20europe%20pages/ww2%20europe%20map%2027.htm), via Wikimedia Commons.

On the assumption that certain forms of craziness are contagious, I avoided most of the latter as much as I could, consistent with my duty to sell them the latest and greatest game involving their particular passion.

One day, perhaps in a fit of weakness, I allowed myself to get lectured by one of the fanatics about the details of the Battle of Kursk. The fan who felt the need to bend my ear was eager to impart information about some “famous battle” that turned out to have been a serious tactical miscalculation by a Soviet officer. The story, as he told it, had a very large formation of Soviet tanks “taking a shortcut” through a major minefield, resulting in many disabled/destroyed tanks and wounded or dead men. In the telling, this kind of thing could not be admitted as having happened without some enemy contact, so it was propagandized as being a major tank battle involving significant formations of German panzer troops and/or SS units (of whom, of course, the glorious defenders of the Motherland took a greater toll than they suffered themselves).

The twitchy-eyed Panzertruppe fanboys helped keep my interest firmly directed away from much of the WW2 Eastern Front aside from the initial 1941 German invasion. A post at Blazing Cat Fur included a link to a BBC article discussing furious Russian reaction to an article recently published in Die Welt, but also indicates that there was actually some factual basis for the lecture I endured all those years ago:

The wider Battle of Kursk – from 5 July to 23 August 1943 – was indeed a turning-point in World War Two. Soviet forces thwarted a huge Nazi counter-attack, after Adolf Hitler’s troops had suffered a colossal defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43.

But recently a British historian, Ben Wheatley, analysed German Luftwaffe aerial photos of the Prokhorovka battlefield, taken on 14-16 July, when the area was still in German hands. The photos were found in the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

T-34/85 at musée des blindés de Saumur (via Wikipedia)

Wheatley’s assessment, backed by detailed study of battle reports and historical archives, is that on 12 July the Germans lost just five Panzer IV tanks at Prokhorovka, but decimated “kamikaze” Soviet tank formations, turning more than 200 Soviet tanks into smouldering wrecks.

He writes that dozens of Soviet T-34 tanks tumbled into an anti-tank ditch 4.5m (15ft) deep, dug by Soviet infantry, and when the Red Army realised its mistake other T-34s started queuing up to cross a bridge. German tanks were easily able to pick them off at the bridge.

Wheatley and a German military historian, Karl-Heinz Frieser, were cited in a feature in the German daily Die Welt, which hit a Russian raw nerve.

The writer, Sven Felix Kellerhoff, argued that the evidence of Soviet humiliation at Prokhorovka was so convincing that Russia ought to tear down its memorial there, which celebrates the heroism of Soviet tank crews on 12 July.

[…]

War photographer Anatoly Yegorov was in the thick of the fighting at Kursk. His nephew Mikhail Yegorov spoke to the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, recalling what Anatoly told him about his work there.

“Most of those photos were not published. ‘Do you know why no panoramic photos of the Prokhorovka battlefield were ever shown in our country?’ my uncle asked me. ‘Because for every burning Tiger there were 10 of our smashed up T-34s! How could you publish such photos in the papers?'”

BCF also linked to this artice from a few years ago at The National Interest:

Kursk is the Santa Claus and Easter Bunny of World War II battles, whose popular history was constructed from German and Soviet propaganda, and based on early accounts lacking vital information buried in Russian archives until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Kursk was indeed an epic battle, that pitted 3 million German and Soviet soldiers and 8,000 tanks, all crammed into a small portion of southern Russia.

[…]

Top commanders such as Erich Von Manstein wanted to attack in May, before the Soviets had time to dig in and reinforce the salient. 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. 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. 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). Yet as usual, the Germans were outnumbered. They faced 1.9 million Soviet soldiers, 5,000 tanks, 25,000 guns and mortars and more than 3,000 aircraft.

Citadel was a prophetic name for the German offensive. 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.

Kursk was not an imaginative battle. The Germans attacked an obvious target, the Soviets fortified the obvious target, and the German offensive on July 4, 1943 was a traditional pincer move against the north and south base of the salient to cut off the defenders inside. 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. 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.

The article then goes on to address many of the myths and legends that have grown up around the battle, including:

• The Tigers didn’t burn. Soviet tanks did
• Kursk was not a turning point of the war
• Prokhorovka was not the Greatest Tank Battle in History
• The Red Army was still not as good as the German Army
• It was the Soviet counteroffensive that bled the Germans
• Soviet tanks didn’t ram German tanks at Kursk
• Kursk was an Anglo-American victory as well as a Soviet one