There is no doubt that the Red Army, despite suffering very high losses in men and materiel, won a convincing victory at Kursk. The battle of Kursk was the largest of these battles. However, in order to achieve complete victory over the Wehrmacht vast battles still had to be fought. The German Army had been worn down during the years 1941–43 when the Red Army had been the only force capable of fighting the bulk of the Wehrmacht. The Red Army’s vast superiority in men and materiel meant that ultimate victory was now impossible for Germany. It is important to note that by the summer of 1943 the war on the Eastern Front had long since been lost by Germany. The battles of Kursk and Prokhorovka have been known as a catastrophic defeat for the Germans.
The bitterness of the fighting is shown by the fact that the Red Army lost a total of at least 6,064 tanks. During the fighting the two sides deployed more than four million troops, 69,000 guns and launchers, 13,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, and almost 12,000 aircraft.
The battle consisted of the German offensive Operation Citadel, 5-16 July 1943, (a pincer attack on the Kursk salient), and two Soviet counteroffensives aimed at Orel, 12 July–18 August 1943 and Kharkov, 3–23 August 1943. However, the overall battle of Kursk (of which on 12 July 1943 Prokhorovka was part) stretched for 50 days and can be regarded as the greatest series of armoured clashes in history. It involved up to 3500 Soviet and 750 German tanks. This was part of the border battles fought at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It’s now generally accepted that it was the fighting around Brody and Dubno between the 26th and 29th July 1941, rather than Prokhorovka that was the greatest ‘single’ tank battle. Was it the greatest tank battle(s) of the war? Ben Wheatley, many congratulations on your new book The Panzers of Prokhorovka.
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