The significant date is July 12, 1943. 75 years ago, one of the major tank battles of the Great Patriotic War took place: on the southern face of the Kursk Bulge, near Prokhorovka. In Soviet military historiography, this episode was presented as the victory of Soviet tankers in a head-on battle with the Germans, in which up to 1,500 tanks participated from both sides.
Studies of archival documents carried out by historians have shown that this is far from the case. Many facts and blunders of the high military command were simply hidden and presented in a distorted light. An attempt to objectively investigate this issue on the basis of archival Soviet and German documents, as well as the memoirs of the participants in this confrontation, was undertaken by historian Valery Zamulin in his book "The Prokhorov Massacre."
Using the materials of this book, I would like to briefly recall the tragic pages of those days of the war, when, due to ambitions or inept leadership of the troops, thousands of Soviet tankers were paying with their lives. The places of these battles are significant for me too, I was born on the Kursk Bulge in the post-war period, and my toys in childhood were mines and shells that we collected on the outskirts of the city.
It was already the mid-50s, and for some reason no one removed these "toys", there were too many of them in these places. Then they quickly disappeared, but the memories of them are firmly etched into the memory. In 1943, the Germans were rushing in the direction of the city, where the headquarters of the Voronezh Front was located. At Yakovlevo, the 1st Tank Army of Katukov stopped the Germans, they were forced to turn in the direction of Prokhorovka.
Having wedged 30-35 km into the Soviet defense and breaking through two defensive lines, the Germans approached Prokhorovka and were ready with tank wedges to break through the third defensive line and reach the operational space to cover Kursk from the east..
From the Headquarters, this direction was supervised by the Chief of the General Staff Vasilevsky. He turned to Stalin with a proposal to strengthen the Voronezh Front with the 5th Guards Tank Army under the command of Rotmistrov and the 5th Guards Army under the command of Zhadov, having transferred them from the reserve Steppe Front.
This proposal was accepted. Rotmistrov's tankers, having successfully completed a 230-kilometer march, were concentrated in the Prokhorovka area by July 9. The two armies, together with other formations, made up an almost 100 thousand grouping. Tank army Rotmistrov had 931 tanks, including 581 T-34 (62, 4%) and 314 T-70 (33, 7%). The presence of a large number of light T-70 tanks significantly reduced the combat capability of the army.
On the German side, at Prokhorovka, they were opposed by two German tank corps, which included three selected SS tank divisions Leibstandarte, Das Reich and Dead Head. The Germans had 294 tanks, including 38 Tigers and even 8 captured T-34s. These forces collided on July 12 in a tank battle, the ratio in tanks was 3: 1 in our favor.
After analyzing the current situation, Vasilevsky and the commander of the Voronezh Front, Vatutin, on July 9 decided to launch the main counterstrike near Prokhorovka with the forces of Rotmistrov's tank army and two auxiliary ones on the left and right flanks. It was planned to defeat the German grouping and throw it back to the positions at the beginning of the offensive.
The deployment of the tank army in battle formations was planned to be carried out south and southwest of Prokhorovka, where the terrain made it possible to concentrate such a mass of tanks and, in the process of a counterattack, to enter the operational space in the direction of Yakovlevo. At the time of the decision on the counterattack, the German groups were at a distance of about 15 kilometers from Prokhorovka, and this decision was justified.
In the next two days before the counterstrike, the operational situation changed sharply not in favor of the plans of the Soviet command. The terrain in the Prokhorovka area was characterized by the presence of deep ravines with lateral spurs, a swampy floodplain of the Psel River, a steep railroad embankment, a grader road to Prokhorovka, and a pre-dug anti-tank ditch.
The Germans successfully took advantage of all this and on July 10-11 conducted a number of tactical offensive operations that significantly improved their operational situation and jeopardized the plans of the Soviet command to launch a counterstrike.
The Battle of Prokhorovka began on 10 July with an offensive by the SS Panzer Division Leibshtnadart on a tactically important sector of the front near the Ivanovsky Vyselok farm. It was the crossroads of the grader road to Prokhorovka and the roads to Belenikhino and Storozhevoe, and there was a bend in the railway. The quick capture of this junction made it possible, covered by a railway embankment and a forest belt, to organize an offensive on Prokhorovka.
The Germans organized this operation very well. At night, the sappers made passes through the minefields, at dawn a sabotage group penetrated our stronghold, destroyed communication lines, damaged some of the equipment, captured the sleeping battalion commander and returned to their positions. In the morning, the German offensive began, the battalion did not open fire, seeing that the Germans were going for the mines. They did not know that the mines were no longer there, the tanks quickly rushed into the stronghold and completely destroyed it.
Building on their success, the Germans immediately captured Ivanovsky Vyselok, part of the bridgehead south of Prokhorovka, from which Rotmistrov's tank army was supposed to deploy, the crossroads of grader roads and cut the railroad. This was the first tactical success of the Germans in the Battle of Prokhorovka, which allowed them to advance by 3-3, 5 km and sharply complicated the application of our tank counterattack.
The breakthrough and advance of the Germans to Prokhorovka was halted and prevented from breaking through the third defensive line, but attempts to restore the previous position in a tactically important sector of the front by the end of the day, including using significant tank forces, did not lead to anything. Having suffered heavy losses, the Soviet troops went on the defensive.
On the night of July 10, defenses were hastily organized in new positions. The Soviet command did not succeed in organizing a dense and continuous line of defense, which the Germans did not fail to take advantage of the next day.
It was extremely important for the Soviet command to prevent the capture of the Oktyabrsky state farm and the consolidation of the Germans in the area of height 252.2, which is a key defense center in front of Prokhorovka. The capture of this height threatened the collapse of the defense in this sector of the front and facilitated the advance of the Germans to the east. Realizing the significance of this defense unit, the Germans launched an offensive exactly here.
Having gained a tactical advantage with access to the railway, the Germans took the second step - they organized an offensive to this height in the early morning of 11 July. Covering themselves with a railway and a forest belt, the Germans took the height along the Yakovlevo-Prokhorovka grader road with significant forces of infantry and tanks at noon. On the move they overcame the only tank-passable section about 1 km wide from the anti-tank ditch to the railway and rushed deep into our defenses.
Deeper 8 km, the Germans reached the southern outskirts of Prokhorovka and completely captured the bridgehead for the deployment of Rotmistrov's tank corps. Counterattacks only succeeded in preventing the expansion of the breakthrough, pushing the enemy out of the vicinity of Prokhorovka and preventing its surrender. It was not possible to restore the situation and regain the lost positions. By the end of the day, a "narrow throat" was cut deep into the Soviet defense, the tip of which rested against Prokhorovka, and the Germans began to strengthen it vigorously.
A few hours before the counterattack, the Soviet command faced a dilemma of what to do next. For a counterattack, a powerful armored fist was assembled and was waiting for the command, but the foothold from which the attack was to begin was captured by the enemy, there was no other suitable front on this sector of the front.
It was very dangerous to start an operation under the prevailing conditions and deploy tank corps in front of the enemy's front line, the probability of destroying tanks that did not manage to turn into battle formations was too high.
Despite the complication of the situation, Vasilevsky and Vatutin still decided to inflict a counterstrike. The decision to strengthen the front grouping by two armies and to launch a counterstrike against the advancing enemy forces was made at the suggestion of Vasilevsky. After failures to contain the enemy offensive, he apparently did not dare to go to Headquarters with a proposal to cancel the already planned operation.
The tank army had to solve two problems, hack the enemy's defenses and destroy his strike group. That is, the tank army was thrown not into a breakthrough, but to break through the enemy's defenses. Rotmistrov decided to crush the enemy with a massive tank attack in a narrow area, deciding to throw four tank brigades and a regiment of self-propelled guns there with insignificant intervals.
The preparation of the counterstrike was carried out in a short time, it was impossible to prepare such a complex operation with high quality in two days, and not everything was taken into account and worked out. Moreover, the enemy seriously complicated the task by capturing the bridgehead planned for deployment.
The counterattack was delivered by the forces of three tank corps with 538 tanks in service. In the first echelon, 368 tanks of two tank corps were supposed to go, while one had 35.5%, and the other 38.8% of light T-70 tanks. This tank with light armor and weak armament was not capable of fighting on an equal footing with any of the German tanks. The tankers were supposed to advance in a narrow strip between the Psel River and the railway, and in a collision with the enemy, this inevitably should have led to the mixing of the battle formations of the corps, which happened.
It was impossible to create a single striking fist of two corps in a narrow area. Moreover, at the end of this "corridor" there was a natural obstacle - a deep ravine, which narrowed the offensive zone by 2 km. Immediately after its passage, combat vehicles fell under enemy fire, which was located 300-500 meters from the ravine. There was no room for even one tank brigade, let alone a whole corps, to turn around in battle formation or gain speed for a dash.
The night before the counter-attack, the Germans broke through in the direction of Korocha, the beginning of the counter-attack had to be postponed from 3.00 to 8.30 and part of the means of the tank army, 161 tanks and two artillery regiments, Rotmistrov had to give to eliminate the breakthrough.
Before the attack of the tanks, the infantry tried to knock out the Germans and widen the narrow throat in front of Hill 252.2 for the passage of tanks, but all attempts were unsuccessful. The Germans, having seized the bridgehead, overnight seriously strengthened it with anti-tank weapons and were well prepared for the attacks of Soviet tankers. The high saturation of the German defense line with fire weapons and the skillful organization of the fire resistance system were one of the main reasons for the defeat of the Soviet tank corps.
Rotmistrov's tankers on the morning of July 12 were supposed to go head-on to the German defense line saturated with tanks, artillery, assault guns, tank destroyers and heavy mortars. In total, up to 305 guns and mortars of all types were concentrated on this section with a length of 6.5 km. With such a deadly defense, the tank corps, squeezed from both sides by the river and the railway, went on the attack, dooming themselves to inevitable defeat.
The Soviet command did not know the operational situation that had developed at night before the counter-strike, as well as how the enemy had consolidated on the lines reached. The ramified reconnaissance was not conducted and the command did not have a detailed picture of the state of the enemy in front of the front of the tank army at the time of the start of the counterattack.
The end follows …
