One Final Note

The German offensive at Kursk in the south went from the 4th through the 17th of July 1943. It involved 17 different German divisions. They then withdrew for the next seven days. This is more than 250 division-days of combat from the German perspective. The fight by the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler Division was but one of those division days. Granted it was an important one, but it was not the bloodiest fight done by a German division. That “honor” is held by the 106th Infantry Division and 320th Infantry Division in their fights on the 5th of July. The 5th of July was the bloodiest day of fighting for the Germans. The LSSAH suffered an estimated 383 casualties on the 12th of July. The LSSAH suffered an estimated 645 casualties of the 5th of July. The 5th of July was the bloodiest day of battle for the LSSAH and the Das Reich SS (340 casualties). Totenkopf SS’s bloodiest day was the 11th of July (479 casualties). These casualty figures include DNBI (Disease and non-battle injuries, 9 to 20 a day depending on unit). On the 5th of July it is estimated that the 106th Infantry Division lost 1,183 men while the 320th Infantry Division went through a rather crippling 1,668 men! There are some books on Kursk that don’t even address their operations!

Also, while the exchange rate at Prokhorovka was lop-sided in favor of the Germans, the exchange ratio across the entire battlefield was no where near as one-sided. According to our count (based upon going through each division and corps unit records for each day), the Germans lost 1,536 tanks damaged and destroyed from 4 to 18 July, while the Soviets lost 2,471 tanks damaged and destroyed from 4 to 18 July. This is around a 1-to-1.61 exchange ratio in armor. This is more in line with the exchange rates of personnel, which were around 1-to-3.69 (see pages 1208-1210 or pages 560-562 in my smaller book).

This has been discussed before on this blog:

TDI Friday Read: Tank Combat at Kursk

Prokhorovka was an extreme case with an extreme result. Not every armor battle at Kursk was so badly handled, with the operations of the First Tank Army under Katukov being much better handled, and the operations of the II Guards Tank Corps under the unheralded Colonel Burdeinyii being particularly successful (and annoying).

In the end the armor operations under direct command of Generals Vatutin and Chistyakov (Sixth Guards Army) tended to sometimes be disastrous. This includes Vatutin’s counterattack on the 6th of July with the II Guards and V Guards Tank Corps. This attack, reinforced with the threat to shoot the V Guard Tank Corps commander if not obeyed, gutted that corps in one day, with 110 tanks lost. There was also a series of poorly conducted armor attacks on the 8th of July that were also a disaster. Finally, in the Voronezh Front’s third round of mass armor attacks, it included Prokhorovka. You don’t see the same type of attacks conducted by the units of the First Tank Army, even though they were facing a force similar in size to the SS Panzer Corps. There is a command failure, that is higher than Rotmistrov (V Guards Tanks Army commander) and that clearly includes Chistaykov (Sixth Army commander) and Vatutin (Voronezh Front commander). The Stavka representative in the south during the fighting was Marshal Aleksander Vasilevskii. The political commissar of the Voronezh Front was Nikita Khrushchev. He kind of became much more famous later.

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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9 Comments

  1. “This is around a 1-to-1.61 exchange ratio in armor. ”
    Do you know any other large WW2 operations involving a clash between a smaller force attacking a well entrenched enemy (more than twice the size) and still suffering lower material losses? I don’t. Is there an Allied equivalent? It depends on who attacks and who defends.

    • There is also nothing out of line with the ratios. AGS (5.7-20.7) and
      Voronezh Front (5.7-23.7):
      – [(KIASov + WIASov + MIASov)/(KIAGer + WIAGer + MIAGer)] ~ 1:3 or
      – [bloodyCasSov/bloodyCasGer] ~ 1:2.35
      – [AFVCombat/Cas] ~ 1:2.02
      – [IrrCasSov/IrrCasGer] ~ 1:7.2
      – [AFVirrSov/AFVirrGer] ~ 1:7.5
      which is equally relevant for military studies when assessing kill probabilities.

    • I think it is a bit misleading to call that ratio exchange ratio, as it includes vehicles that were repairable and that were indeed repaired during the operation.
      As a significant number of tanks will breakdown, get stuck in the terrain or receive slight damage, a large part of the losses will be proportional to the total number of tankhours* generated by a force.
      Perhaps the most effective way to bring the number of such “losses” down is to get the tanks destroyed by effective enemy weapons before such mishaps occur.

      *) A tankhour would be one hour spent by one tank in operation.

      • Yes, I find it to be more meaningful when observing AFV engagements, or else we would just reduce it to the wastage of operational readiness. One thing that would speak for the inclusion of temporary losses is that it could potentially distort the overall picture. Afterall, if a tank received any sorts of damage then there is a high chance that it was most likely “in the sights” of an AT or tank crew (if the crews had less capable weapon systems, then the result was not necessarily a product of incompetence). Driving and repairing are also an integral part of the life at the front, but even more problems arrive when going into the details.
        I have the theory that it might be intentional though. It may be the goal to question or diminish the exchange rate (this is done by many authors), to demonstrate that the difference was indeed not that pronounced, as there is always the danger of being accused of advocating Nazism. This is just from my experience.
        I see no other reason why TDI would avoid the topic of looking at actual kill rates (and this was not only confined to tanks, KIA differential for 1943 for the entire front was ~ 1:6, in irrecoverable losses of AFVs by gunfire ~1:5). This is very illuminating, especially when looking at engagements from 44-45, there is some continuity. Soviet (daily) losses did not lower, they remained high in relation to enemy strength, with an ever increasing weapon lethality, as nations underwent a natural arms race. I am also not sure if the casualties sustained by the listed individual units were unusual, at least they do not seem to deviate too much, i.e. they represent a snapshot of an attack during WW2 (41-45).

        So what do these values ultimately tell us? Two things:
        1.) German Panzers during Kursk were subject to continous commitment. The Panzerdivisions were overloaded with additional tasks such as flank protection and mopping up operations, influencing the advance rates, which in return allowed the Soviets for a greater flexibility in their defense, to react and adjust. With an insufficient number of IDs, a greater strain occured, thus capturing and holding ground became more difficult with every further day into the offensive (the forces subordinated to AGC were also too weak to achieve any decisive breakthrough).
        2.) The difference in (per capita) killing power in combat was (and remained) substantial. Which is not surprising, as it is tied to development levels.

    • Not an expert on the particular engagement, but Operation Compass comes to mind. Not Kursk, but a large engagement for the time frame, and the Italians were dug in.

      It’s true the Italians were out maneuvered, but arguably that is what the Germans should have done at Kursk rather than run over successions of massive minefields going head on into prepared defenses.

      • “Not an expert on the particular engagement, but Operation Compass comes to mind. Not Kursk, but a large engagement for the time frame, and the Italians were dug in”

        Will look into it then, did not know there was an armoured clash.

        “It’s true the Italians were out maneuvered, but arguably that is what the Germans should have done at Kursk rather than run over successions of massive minefields going head on into prepared defenses.”

        The minefields were the reason for German failure?

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