The Battle of Prokhorovka

At 8.30 a.m. on 12 July 1943 the commander of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army, Lieutenant General Pavel Rotmistrov, sent the agreed signal by radio: “Steel, steel, steel!” Several hundred tanks moved off from the area of Prokhorovka railway station, some 90 kilometres south-east of Kursk, against the positions of the II SS Panzer Corps. On a narrow strip of fields between the Psel river and a railway embankment a clash took place that Soviet, and later Russian, memory turned into the symbol of the whole Battle of Kursk – “the greatest tank battle in history”.

The Battle of Prokhorovka was indeed one of the largest tank engagements of the Second World War and an important moment in the fighting on the southern side of the salient. Research carried out since the 1990s on the basis of both sides’ archives – above all by the Russian historian Valeriy Zamulin and the German historian Karl-Heinz Frieser – has, however, produced a picture different from the established legend: there were fewer tanks than claimed, Soviet losses were very heavy, and German losses several times smaller. Nor did this single clash by itself decide the end of the German offensive.

The road to Prokhorovka

From 5 July the Fourth Panzer Army of Colonel General Hermann Hoth had been gnawing its way through the Soviet defence belts on the southern flank of the salient. On 9 July Hoth turned Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser’s SS corps away from the road to Oboyan and north-east towards Prokhorovka. The historians David Glantz and Jonathan House regarded this turn as an improvisation forced by resistance on the Oboyan road; Steven Newton and others have shown that Hoth had agreed it with Field Marshal Erich von Manstein as early as May. Hoth expected Soviet armoured reserves to arrive from the east and wanted to destroy them before the SS corps began forcing the Psel on its way to Kursk.

The reserves were indeed on their way. The Stavka gave the Voronezh Front of General of the Army Nikolai Vatutin two armies of the Steppe Front: the 5th Guards Army and the 5th Guards Tank Army, which in a few days covered more than 300 kilometres in heat and clouds of dust. On 10 and 11 July the SS divisions pressed on: Totenkopf seized a bridgehead across the Psel, and the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler took the Oktyabrsky state farm and Hill 252.2, standing on the evening of 11 July a mere 3 kilometres from Prokhorovka. In doing so it occupied part of the areas from which Rotmistrov had intended to launch his attack, and the Soviet plan had to be hastily changed during the night.

The Soviet command took the SS corps’ turn as a sign of weakness and decided to go over to a counter-attack on 12 July – the same day on which the Soviet offensive was to begin in the north, near Oryol. In addition, on the night of 11–12 July III Panzer Corps of Army Detachment Kempf forced the Donets at Rzhavets, some 18 kilometres south of Prokhorovka. Vatutin ordered Rotmistrov to detach a strong group under his deputy, Major General Kuzma Trufanov, against this threat. Even before the battle, therefore, the 5th Guards Tank Army had lost part of its reserves.

The forces

On the evening of 11 July the II SS Panzer Corps had, according to its own reports, 294 serviceable tanks and assault guns, including only 15 Tigers; the Leibstandarte, which bore the brunt of the attack, had 77 vehicles. The 5th Guards Tank Army had a total of some 790 tanks and several dozen self-propelled guns: roughly two-thirds were T-34s, the rest light T-70s and several dozen British Churchills supplied under Lend-Lease. Some 600 Soviet vehicles faced the SS corps, of which about 500 attacked in two echelons.

Rotmistrov knew that the German Tigers and the vehicles with the new long-barrelled guns outranged the T-34. He therefore ordered the tanks of the 18th and 29th Tank Corps to attack at full speed, so as to close with the enemy as quickly as possible and fire at short range into their flanks. Soviet intelligence, moreover, overestimated German strength: it reported hundreds of Tigers and Ferdinands, which were not present on the southern side of the salient at all – they fought only in the north, with the Ninth Army.

12 July

In the morning both sides were preparing to attack. The German plan provided for Totenkopf to outflank Prokhorovka from the north-west, along the Psel, while the Leibstandarte and Das Reich would attack only once the defence had been knocked off balance. After a short artillery preparation, at around 8.30 a.m., the brigades of the 18th and 29th Tank Corps rolled down the gentle slopes in front of Prokhorovka with paratroopers of the 9th Guards Airborne Division riding on their hulls. They struck the Leibstandarte, whose men, tired after a week of fighting, had not expected an attack so early.

On the slopes of Hill 252.2 and around the Oktyabrsky state farm the fighting soon broke up into dozens of chaotic close-range engagements. The rapid advance that was meant to cancel out the superiority of the German guns broke up the formations of the Soviet brigades and made them hard to control; the tanks fired on the move, with little accuracy. At the foot of the hill some of them drove into a deep anti-tank ditch dug earlier by the Russians themselves. Grenadiers of Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper’s battalion destroyed tanks with magnetic mines and grenades, and some half-tracks rammed Soviet vehicles. On the Leibstandarte’s left flank four Tigers under Michael Wittmann held off the 181st Tank Brigade for three hours. Individual Soviet units broke through as far as the Komsomolets state farm and the German artillery positions, but were destroyed by direct fire.

The Luftwaffe dominated the skies over the battlefield. The Soviet 2nd and 17th Air Armies flew more sorties that day, but mainly in other sectors – against XLVIII Panzer Corps in the west and against III Panzer Corps in the south. Over Prokhorovka German Henschel Hs 129 ground-attack aircraft with 30 mm cannon operated, along with a few experimental Ju 87Gs with 37 mm cannon, among them the aircraft of Hans-Ulrich Rudel. A report of the 5th Guards Tank Army complained that German aircraft had “literally hung over our formations throughout the battle”.

North of the Psel, Totenkopf took Hill 226.6 and reached the road from Kartashevka to Prokhorovka, but under constant counter-attacks it could not push further. In the south, Das Reich spent the whole day repelling attacks by the 2nd Guards Tank Corps and the 2nd Tank Corps. In the evening the Leibstandarte still held Hill 252.2, but had pulled back about a kilometre from the Oktyabrsky state farm. Neither side achieved its objective: the Russians had not destroyed the SS corps, and the Germans had not taken Prokhorovka.

The losses

For decades the figures for the losses at Prokhorovka were a matter of dispute. Each army counted them differently: the Germans counted as losses only vehicles that were beyond repair or abandoned, the Russians every tank that its crew could not repair themselves, even if it later returned to action. In addition, the battlefield remained in German hands until 17 July, which allowed the Germans to recover and repair most of their damaged tanks, while the Soviet wrecks stayed where they had been hit.

According to a report by the staff of the 5th Guards Tank Army dated 17 July, between 12 and 16 July the army irretrievably lost 334 tanks and self-propelled guns, and more than 200 others were under repair; its personnel losses amounted to 7,600 killed, wounded and missing. Zamulin, adding up the reports of the individual corps for 12 July alone, arrived at some 340 tanks and self-propelled guns destroyed or damaged and some 3,500 men, of whom 1,500 were killed or missing. The II SS Panzer Corps reported 842 killed, wounded and missing for 12 July. According to various estimates, between several dozen and about 80 of its tanks and assault guns were damaged or destroyed, but according to the corps’ own documents, on which Frieser and other researchers rely, it lost at most a handful irretrievably. By 16 July the corps had almost as many serviceable vehicles as on the evening of 11 July.

When the first reports reached Stalin, he was furious. That same evening of 12 July he berated Rotmistrov over the telephone and sent Georgy Zhukov to Vatutin’s headquarters as the representative of the Stavka. A special commission investigated the causes of the 5th Guards Tank Army’s defeat; according to accounts, Stalin considered court-martialling Rotmistrov but desisted after the intercession of the Chief of the General Staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky.

“The greatest tank battle in history”?

Prokhorovka’s fame stemmed largely from Rotmistrov’s own memoirs and from post-war Soviet historiography. Rotmistrov wrote that some 1,500 tanks clashed on the battlefield and that the Germans lost 350–400 vehicles, including 70 Tigers – although the entire SS corps had fifteen of them that day. In Soviet and Russian tradition Prokhorovka became “Russia’s third battlefield”, alongside Kulikovo and Borodino; after the fall of the USSR a church and a large museum complex were built there.

Comparing the archives of both sides yields smaller numbers. Around Prokhorovka itself, the 5th Guards Tank Army and the SS corps together had some 900 tanks, assault guns and self-propelled guns; even including the fighting with III Panzer Corps in the south, the figure does not exceed about 1,300. In June 1941, in the Battle of Dubno–Lutsk–Brody, at the start of Operation Barbarossa, far more tanks fought on both sides – according to various estimates, from over 2,000 to several thousand. Prokhorovka remains one of the largest tank battles of the war and, in terms of the number of vehicles fighting on a single day over a few square kilometres, perhaps the most concentrated. The title of “the greatest tank battle in history”, however, is the work of propaganda and later legend.

The claim that Prokhorovka decided the fate of Citadel is also doubtful. The German offensive on the northern side of the salient had already stalled on 10 July, and on 12 July the Bryansk and Western Fronts launched the Oryol offensive (Operation Kutuzov) in the rear of Walter Model’s Ninth Army. The Allies had been fighting in Sicily since 10 July. In the south, the SS corps emerged from the battle weakened, but still capable of fighting. Prokhorovka was the culmination of the Voronezh Front’s week-long defensive battle, which wore down the German divisions, rather than a single decisive blow. The Russians paid a very high price for it, but they achieved what mattered most: the German pincers did not close, and there was no breakthrough into open country.

After the battle

On 13 July the fighting at Prokhorovka continued; Totenkopf had to give up some of the ground it had taken. That same day Adolf Hitler summoned Manstein and Field Marshal Günther von Kluge to the Wolf’s Lair and announced that Citadel would be called off. Manstein argued that victory in the south was close and that at the very least the Soviet armoured reserves had to be destroyed. He was given a few days to do so. Operation Roland, conducted from 14 July, was intended to link Das Reich with III Panzer Corps and encircle part of the Soviet 69th Army, but Trufanov’s group withdrew from the threatened area. On 17 July, when the Red Army attacked on the Mius and the Donets, the SS corps was ordered to fall back towards Belgorod, and the Leibstandarte division was soon sent to Italy. Within a few days the Germans gave up the ground they had won with such difficulty.

Despite Stalin’s anger, Rotmistrov kept his command, and in February 1944 he was promoted to Marshal of Armoured Troops. In August 1943 his rebuilt army took part in the counter-offensive towards Belgorod and Kharkiv – the same cities that had been fought over in February and March in the Third Battle of Kharkov. The Red Army liberated Belgorod on 5 August and Kharkiv on 23 August.

Place in the war

Prokhorovka was neither a defeat nor a victory in any simple sense. Tactically, it was won by the Germans, who destroyed many times more tanks than they lost. Operationally and strategically, it was won by the Red Army: the German attack on Kursk came to a halt at the third defence belt and was never resumed. The battle also showed how the war in the east had changed. The German panzer divisions were still superior in a head-on clash, but it was the Soviet command that had the reserves which allowed it to lose engagements and win campaigns. From July 1943 the initiative on the Eastern Front belonged to the Red Army, and for the rest of the war the Wehrmacht could only defend itself against it.