Summary: The Battle of Kursk - Part II:
60 Years Ago: Prochorowka
Dieter Brand
In the second part of his article the author describes in detail the events of 12 July 1943, when German and Soviet units engaged in a battle that came to be known as the "biggest tank battle in history”.
Particularly Soviet historians were eager to present this battle as a big defeat of the Wehrmacht, although the German losses of tanks and assault guns barely amounted to one sixth of the losses suffered by the Soviets.
More recent Russian accounts concede that Prochorowka was by no means the glamorous victory over the Wehrmacht, it had been made out to be. In particular the 5th Guards Tank Army was unable to fulfill its task, which was to attrite and bleed out the enemy by means of defense in depth, heavy air strikes, and counterattacks with operational and strategic reserves. As a result, it was forced into conducting a defensive operation. Prochorowka was not an exceptional battle marking a decisive turning point in the war, but rather one of many battles constituting the "Battle of the Kursk Salient”.
Likewise the German forces were unable to gain the objective of their operation, i.e. the exploitation of the Prochorowka area for a turn northward into the area of ad hoc operations. This was due on the one hand to the concentrated employment of the 5th Guards Tank Army and other forces that took the Germans by surprise, and on the other to the decision of the German leadership to discontinue the operation, because of the Orel Offensive and the landing of Allied Forces in Sicily.
The criticism of some authors, namely that the Wehrmacht should never have engaged in a war of attrition, is unfounded. The attrition rate of 6:1 in favor of the Wehrmacht speaks for itself. Due to superior German weapon systems, the Soviets pursued two extremes of employing their tank units. On the one hand they buried battle tanks for the purpose of anti tank defense and on the other they carried out their attacks with maximum speed in order to make up for the inferior range of their tank guns. That, however, led to problems in their command and control procedures.
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