Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1943-1945: Red Steamroller

In the 1960s, Kursk was not well known in the West. Initially, popular memoirs by Guderian and Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin depicted Zitadelle as a decisive defeat, but this view was challenged by von Manstein’s memoirs that complained about Hitler ‘throwing away a victory’ in his decision to cancel Zitadelle. Paul Carell echoed von Manstein’s claims in his well-known books written in 1964–70 and he helped to shape the early historiography of Kursk with his contention that von Manstein had indeed been on the cusp of a great victory when Hitler pulled the rug out from under his feet.[31] Carell’s histories also helped to create a heroic mythology around the Waffen-SS troops involved in Zitadelle, which retains great credibility even today. The Soviet version of Kursk began appearing with the multi-volume History of the Great Patriotic War in 1958 and Rotmistrov’s inaccurate memoirs in the 1960s. This white-washed version of Kursk was designed to conceal the Red Army’s disproportionate losses in the battle and Nikita Khrushchev’s (by then First Secretary of the CPSU) role in the disastrous commitment of Rotmistrov’s 5 GTA. Soviet accounts created a highly mythic account of Prokhorovka as ‘the greatest tank battle in history’ and Grigoryi A. Koltunov claimed that, ‘in one day the Germans lost more than 350 tanks and over 10,000 officers and men.’[32] Soviet historians regarded Kursk as determining the outcome of the war in the East, stating that, ‘the Germans had been bled white’ and had permanently lost the initiative.¹²⁵ This version of the battle was melded with Carell’s and influenced popular as well as academic histories written about Kursk until the mid-1990s. Even seasoned authors such as Albert Seaton, John Erickson and David Glantz accepted embellished accounts of Kursk as historical fact. In 1995, Glantz’s landmark one-volume account of the Eastern Front, When Titans Clashed, still claimed that the Germans lost 320 tanks and assault guns at Prokhorovka.¹²⁶ At that point, two things happened which reduced most previous historiography on Kursk to pulp: the records of II.SS-Panzerkorps became available, and the Soviet-era archives were partly opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Books written based upon this new information by Zetterling, Nipe, Glantz and Zamulin have given a much more realistic interpretation of Kursk, but still suffer from biases. Zetterling took a materialistic approach and provided a great statistical analysis of the battle based upon better – but not perfect – numbers. He used Totalausfalle numbers of tanks to show that the German armour was not crippled at Kursk and still retained the ability to advance, particularly if Hitler had allowed Nehring’s XXIV Panzerkorps to reinforce Hoth. However, Zetterling’s numbers are somewhat disingenuous, in that he suggests that tanks that were not completely destroyed were still useful to the Germans since they could be repaired, but in fact tanks which had been repeatedly hit by anti-tank fire and mines were increasingly ‘degraded’ to the point that they had only marginal combat value. He also fails to put the heavy German personnel losses in perspective: by 13 July von Manstein’s Panzer-Divisionen had lost a large number of tactical leaders, including three Panzer-Regiment commanders and multiple battalion and company commanders; the loss of these leaders negatively impacted unit morale and motivation. The Tiger tank units were particularly hard hit; for example, the s. Pz.Abt. 503 had suffered about 40 per cent personnel casualties and the Waffen-SS separate Tiger tank companies had lost multiple commanders. Personnel losses tend to hit armoured units particularly hard, since experienced leaders, gunners and drivers cannot be easily replaced by rear-echelon personnel or partly-trained replacements. What Zetterling missed was that while the Germans were able keep their Totalausfalle numbers low in relation to Soviet losses, the repaired tanks and remaining crews did not have anything near the same efficiency as the tanks and crews at the start of the offensive.