1500 tanks on either side were in action simultaneously and the field near Prokhorovka proved too small for such a force. In the first minutes of the battle two avalanches of tanks surged onto one another in clouds of dust and smoke. “In the morning of July 12th I and a group of officers were at an observation point, from which the battlefield could be seen very clearly. Armoured Forces Marshal Pavel Rotmistrov, who commanded one of the tank armies, recalled. In the large-scale campaign in which four million soldiers took part and which lasted seven weeks the crucial time fell on July 12th, the day of the biggest in history tank battle, which occurred near Prokhorovka village in the Belgorod Region. It took the Nazis the first few battles to feel the strength of the Soviet defenses. The Battle of Kursk Bulge started on July 5th 1943.
General Guderian, the best German armor expert and commander, said:Īs interesting as these designs were, the practical result was just a reduced production of the Panzer 4, our only efficient tank then, to a very modest level. While Russian tank production increased to unbelievable levels, the German obsession for complex new super weapons, like the advanced but then immature Panther and Tiger tanks, largely reduced German tank production. The situation was bad not only on the war front. In the winter and spring of 1943, after their terrible defeat in Stalingrad, clearly outnumbered and losing the initiative in the eastern front, Hitler and the German High Command were asking themselves what to do next, in the summer of 1943. KURSK - the greatest tank battle of World War 2.
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