Dan Snow's History Hit - Transforming Our Understanding of The Battle of Kursk

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

The Battle of Prokhorovka was one of the largest tank battles in military history. Taking place on the Eastern Front, it was fought on 12 July 1943 as part of the wider Battle of Kursk. Two elite SS divisions were obliterated, and about 300 panzers were destroyed as the Red Army began to turn the tide for Hitler. Prokhorovka has always been notorious, but British historian Ben Wheatley has challenged the traditional myths surrounding the battle by fine-combing through the evidence. He joined me on the pod to reveal his findings, and argue how it was impossible for the German's to have suffered the major losses which have been marked out in history books.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This month, July in 1943, saw a gigantic battle raging in the very west of Russia, the eastern part of Ukraine, around the town of Kursk, where a giant German attack was blunted and then pushed back by the Soviet forces. It is an enormous battle. It's often seen by the Soviets, one of the great decisive battles of the Second World War. But recent scholarship has changed our perception of that battle. It is now believed to be fairly misunderstood and misrepresented. Ben Wheatley teaches at the Defence Studies Department at King's College, London, and he has done some extraordinary research, not just about the Battle of Kursk, but about the Battle of Prokhorovka, which is often seen as the kind of climax of the battle. It's regarded as the biggest tank battle in a single day of history. It's said by the Soviets to be the day that the German panzer

force, the German armed forces, were catastrophically destroyed and potentially decided the fate of the entire war on the Eastern Front. Ben has decided this is not true. He's gone back to look at extraordinary detail at the records for individual vehicle maintenance and losses for the German army and he's discovered that the battle has a very different story. Of course it was important but for the Soviets it was a catastrophe as vast amounts of their armour was lost and in return the Germans didn't lose that much armour at all. So the legend of this battle was actually largely created by Soviet commanders who wanted to justify their losses to Joseph Stalin. And to be honest, who can blame them? This is a deep dive into one of the most extraordinary battles of the Second World War between the Germans and the Soviets on the Eastern Front. I wanted to celebrate and bring more attention to Ben's extraordinarily detailed

research and demonstrate that it is still possible to re-evaluate and change what we believe, rewrite the history, even of some of the most celebrated and remarked upon moments in our past. All this has caused a little bit of friction between Ben and the Russian embassy in the UK, proving that history still matters very much to people, particularly those people seeking to control the present. You can go and learn much more about that history if you want by subscribing to History Hit TV. It's my digital history channel. You just go to historyhit.tv, you enter the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and then you get a second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. If you do that, you can

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and in the meantime though please listen to this remarkable bit of research by Dr Ben Whaley. Ben, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for welcoming me on. The whole world is talking about the work you're doing because let's talk about the events, the battle that you've researched first and then we'll try and give everyone at home a sense of the titanic nature of your scholarship. I can't even pronounce the name of this battle so tell us what was going

on in July 1943. Actually give us give us the big background we've got the battle of curse going on haven't we which is the last attempt that the Wehrmacht make to seize the strategic initiative and decisively win the war on the eastern front right? I studied the battle of Pokorovka the pinnacle of the German attack in the south of Operation Citadel. So that's the German offensive to try and pinch out a bulge which has developed the previous spring following Stalingrad. So the Russians have had a tremendous victory at Stalingrad and then they've pushed to the west and they've tried to get to the Dnieper River but then Manstein, the commander of Armour Group South, does this tremendous success, a counterattack quite against the odds,

and pushes the Soviets back to the Donetsk River. And in doing so, it creates this bulge in the front line around Kursk. And so the Germans in 1943, their position is one of total hopelessness, really, strategically. There's no way they can actually win the war in 1943 Hitler himself recognizes that he cannot do any major strategic offenses in 1943 he actually said like I can only do small forays in 1943 that's quoted and on the 18th of February he says they can I can only do small forays in 1943 he's recognizing he's in a kind of hopeless

situation of course he won't admit that but that that's his position. So the Germans, by the summer of 1943, they're recognising that the Soviets have tremendous superiority in numbers. So on the main Russian front, roughly six million Soviet troops on this earth, from the Baltic Sea right down to the Sea of Azores. And the Germans have actually managed to build up their strength to three million, which, as you might recall from the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, they committed 3.3 million troops to the offensive. And then after Stalingrad, they suffered tremendous losses, their strength dropped, but they've actually managed in the quiet time in the spring to build up their strength again, 3.1 million troops. And then after the summer's fighting and the strategic situation changes

around Europe there's the Allies landing in Sicily in July, Normandy as well there's a suspect offensive will come a second front as they call it so the actual eastern theatre will never get up to the summer strength again of 3.1 million again so the Germans are really well to get their troops back up to strength you know a relatively decent strength in view of the Barbarossa strength but then this quickly drops down to 2 million by the autumn. So the Germans go 3.1 million. The strength rapidly drops after Kursk to 2.1 million. But the Germans do not see Operation Citadel, so that they're offensive at Kursk,

as a chance to take back the initiative on the eastern front. They view it as a purely strategically defensive operation to try and forestall massive Soviet attacks, which they know will come because of this massive troop superiority that I mentioned. And in terms of tanks as well, they're very much aware, but they're heavily outnumbered. So the idea is to pinch out the sailing from Operation Citadel. So you've got the Northern attack from 9th Army and the Southern attack of Armour Group South, which is 4th Panzer Army and also Army Detachment Kempf. So they plan to pinch out the Soviet salient, which has developed from the spring, and therefore shorten the front line, which will release

troops, so they can fight the strategic war, which is now developing in Sicily. They can move troops actually away from the Eastern Front, because already the feeling is that the East is pretty much a lost cause. And what I've been studying is the Battle of Prokhorovka, which is a pinnacle culmination of the German effort to try and break through the Soviet defences and encircle Kursk. But they come to an abrupt halt at Prokhorovka. If anyone's heard of Prokhorovka before, they've heard of a massive tank clash, and the Soviets suffered very heavily there. But the Germans were actually stopped at Prokhorovka,

but mainly actually due to the strength of the Soviets' anti-tank strength. Because the massive battle happened on the 12th of July, which is very famous, and that's why there's a memorial at Prokhorovka, and it's deeply woven into the Russian understanding of the war. So there's a massive clash at Prokhorovka on the 12th of July. The Soviets suffered very heavily, but the Germans were already exhausted from Citadel offensive, which had began on the 5th of July, a week into the offensive when this clash happened, and their physical strength was exhausted, if not their material strength. Citadel, the Kursk battle,

you've given us the numbers across the front. What were the numbers involved in this gigantic clash, particularly because it's become famous, one the if not the largest battle of armored vehicles armored fighting vehicles that the world had ever seen so just give me a sense of the overall picture the whole curse clash is made up of three offensives there's got a german offensive from the 5th of july which ran through to the 16th of july when hitler called a halt to it he called a halt to it on the 13th of july but in the south they continued it to the 16th to try and make small gains. And then it's also during the German offensive, the Soviets were making a strategic decision to be on the defensive. They wanted to absorb the German attack,

rapidly roll over the Germans, who they presumed would be heavily weakened by grinding through their numerous defences which they'd built up, massive defensive anti-tank ditches, massive minefields, dug in tanks, they prepared along those lines, and their plan was to go over to the offensive on the 12th July in the north against 9th Army. They planned to attack behind the German attack Pinsir and roll over 2nd Panzer Army and take Orel, and they were very successful in doing that. They took heavy casualties there as well but they forced the Germans back to Hagenlein by the 18th of August and also they

planned to have another offensive in the south which they planned to take Kharkov, the fourth largest city in Ukraine at the time and then roll hopefully again onto Dnieper and roll back the Germans. They actually hoped to defeat Armageddon itself. The Battle of Kursk, as I mentioned, is regarded as the largest battle in military history. It's over all military history. Four million troops involved on both sides. So it's quite humongous. There's 69,000 cannon, 13,000 tanks and 12,000 aircraft.

So it's actually a humongous battle. It brings to instantly, how can this not be a strategically important offensive? Surely with those sort of numbers it could be, but because the Germans were already heavily weakened, not only Moscow, Barbarossa and Stalingrad, the Germans already had no chance of a victory. Obviously these battles still had to be won by the Soviets, and they did so. A great cost in the number of lives, really.

So 50 days, roughly, the Battle of Kursk. So it's the 5th of July to the 23rd of August. It's estimated that Soviets lost 1.6 million troops in that time, in those 50 days. And the Germans lost 170,000. So that's, again, to put that into context, that combined number of German and Soviet deaths is greater than the entire killed and wounded for the USA and Great Britain during the entire Second World War.

So you've got within 50 days on the Eastern Front, the number of deaths is greater than British and American contribution in lost lives during the Second World War. So that puts the magnitude of the Eastern Front quite clearly into perspective, really. I've been studying the pinnacle of the German push in the South, which was this clash at Okarovka. How has that battle traditionally been told, the story of that battle?

It started off General Rotmistrov, who was the commander of the 5th Guards Tank Army. There's mythology why he gave these figures. He said that the Germans lost 400 tanks at Prokhorovka in this massive clash, where the Germans were attacking at the same time as the Russians, and the German forces consisted of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps. These are all the classic SS names you know for divisions like the Lipschendarte SS Panzergrenadier division, the Das Reich Panzergrenadier division and Todmkopf Panzergrenadier division. They contribute to the 2nd SS Panzer Corps. The Russian view was that

SS Panzer Corps was basically crushed because they lost 400 tanks. But in actual fact, the SS Panzer Corps wouldn't have had that many tanks to begin the offensive with, so you can see clearly that those losses could not have occurred. That's Rottmastroff's view, but I think traditionally the Soviet view is that 300 German tanks were lost, so that's 100 less than Rotmastroff gave in his memoirs. The general belief is that the Soviets came perfectly well to bring up this 5th Guards tank army from the steppe, their strategic reserve. The Germans hadn't picked up this large formation arriving, so they expected a counter-attack on the 12th, but nothing like what actually occurred. It was a large, massively large clash. The Germans actually

hadn't started to attack yet on the 12th. They were recovering from their large exertions the previous day, taking the area, which is very close to Proporovka, just two kilometres south. They were not going to planning to attack until later in the day. So when the Soviets' 5th Guards Tank Army did attack, on the day of the 12th, they were taking a defensive posture. So we have the actual events, is that the Soviets were launched a planned attack on the 12th of July

against the German forces who were not expecting it. They had to rapidly take to the defensive, hold their positions. And this is where the scholarship comes in, because what did you decide to do? To say it's in minute detail is another statement. What did you do to try and get an accurate picture of actually what happened in this titanic clash? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

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Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Going back three years, I was asked by the defence of King's College London to produce an operational study of Kursk. I knew all the mythology of the battle and thought it would be a good fun thing for the soldiers to engage in, so I looked into it and I've heard about this notorious anti-tank ditch,

which plays a central part of the battle. Recent scholarship says that, clearly the correct scholarship, that a large part of attacking Soviet forces accidentally tumbled into their own tank ditch. A maximum of about 60 tanks could have done this, really, depending on where all the brigades attacked on the day. So I thought, surely there must be photographic evidence of the anti-tank ditch. So first of all, I used Google Maps and looked at the area, and it seemed quite clear where the anti-tank ditch could be.

There were some very useful maps which helped to do so, but remarkably, quite a few publications do not list the anti-tank ditch could be. There were some very useful maps which helped to do so, but remarkably, quite a few publications do not list the anti-tank ditch in the correct location. So I thought, well, perhaps there's a photo reconnaissance of the area, so I looked for Luftwaffe reconnaissance pictures. Again, I did a Google search, and some pictures of the area appeared, and I inquired to the website holder where you managed to get these pictures from, and he said the National Archives in America. So I delved deeper into their archives and lo and behold I found pictures of the area which had not been published in any detail.

They were actually published in 2015 by an American historian called Christopher Lawrence in 2015 but he didn't analyse the pictures at all. But I employed a professional photographer to get the very best pictures possible. When you do so, you can actually see individual tanks on the battlefield. This hasn't been seen before, as in any detail. And quickly all the key areas of the battle sprang up. There's this Hill 252.2, which is very famous. And I'm sure you've heard of Joachim Peiper.

He commanded the Liebchen Darte's Armoured Panzergrenadier Battalion. This is the one with the half-tracks, because each Panzergrenadier division would have one battalion which was equipped with half-tracks, so the whole battalion travelled in half-tracks. All the other Panzergrenadier battalions were travelled in just trucks, but this was the one which went up front with the tanks. On the night of the 11th, the previous day,

they took over Hill 252.2 from the Soviet 7th Army, and then they took position on top of this hill. These were the guys who faced the onslaught of the Soviet offensive the next day, and that was by the 29th Soviet Tank Corps. There's the 32nd Tank Brigade and the 31st Tank Brigade. They launched an attack over the top of the hill against this German battalion, which is overwhelmed and basically just takes cover to try and fight for its life. And then the Soviet tankers, the chief mission is to engage German tanks.

They bypass these troops and go over the hill and towards this anti-tank ditch, which lies a kilometre further on. The 5th Guards Tank Army did not expect to find the anti-tank ditch which lies a kilometre further on. The 5th Guards Tank Army did not expect to find the anti-tank ditch because they'd only just arrived into the area, as I said previously, they were from the Steppe Reserve. They hadn't had time to do a proper reconnaissance of the area because they'd just come in to go onto the offensive. For some reason they did not realise that this was the third line of the massive Soviet cursed defences and so the forward elements unwittingly went straight into the ditch.

And the Germans were situated, the main panzer regiment was situated behind the anti-tank ditch. And this made it easy for the Germans to pick off the Soviets. The Soviets had stopped in front of the ditch and they didn't know what to do. So they made easy targets for the Germans. That's what happened in the core centre. And I found images of the tank ditch which right near the road of the main Prokhorovka and the Rowa line as well. Prokhorovka to Belgorod main road and Rowa line and there was nowhere to cross for these tanks. On the images it looks

completely blackened like with oil and explosions near the ditch. The ditch extends further on away from the road and there is German testimony that says that these tanks smashed into each other and piled into each other, so that sort of ties in really with the images. And then further away you can see individual tanks which are in the ditch as well. Obviously the battle was less intense, but they're still visible. The German losses were not very significant at all. Again, going right back to what we were saying previously, how they said that the Germans suffered heavily in terms of tanks,

but actually they lost five tanks on the day. You know, it goes against what was being said. Give me a sense of how do we know exactly about German vehicle losses? Because that's the thing that you've done that's just so remarkable. There's the 4th Panzer Army, which is the controlling army for SS Panzerkorps. So they kept meticulous records of inventories. I mean, all German armies would have done this, but it seems that this is the only Panzer Army's records

which have survived in real detail, which still contain monthly chassis numbers of each individual tank. So we have the base date for 1 July, so it's just four or five days before the start of the German offensive citadel. So that's your base date of what each individual tank number was around the time. So you can then track these tanks later in subsequent chassis number reports. So that's one of the ways of doing it. And there's also total loss reports. And these were given by the divisional and corps engineers who were the people who wrote off German tanks. So they were the people who gave it the final say-so. And there's these reports of total loss reports, and they give chassis

numbers as well, so you can mark those off with the inventories. And then there's 10-day status reports. So every 10 days, the Germans had to fill out what happened in the last 10 days and what their strength currently was, and how many tanks were meant to be in a unit, how many were under short-term repair, so that's repair with the troops, and then how many were in longer-term repair at army level or even further army group level where there's these forward repair facilities like large factories. So these are charted out in these 10-day status reports and they also give losses. So they had two categories of losses. There's 3A losses which they thought could be repaired but they had to be

sent all the way back to germany major factory repair so that the forward units regard them as a loss and then secondly there's these 3b total losses which was as it says as you might imagine these are losses you know tanks have been destroyed blown up you know no hope of repair at all so you've got these two forms of losses. The 10-day status reports also give new tanks which have arrived in those last 10 days. And then further to that, there's also monthly reports which divisions gave, which they also listed, you know, amongst troop strength, they listed how many operational tanks there were in the divisions, and typically how many tanks were under medium-term repair every three weeks, you know, expected to return within three weeks. So those are the major types of reports I studied.

The key ones was this chassis numbers report because then you could track them after this massive battle at Pokorovka and how they would follow them later on. There's a big black hole in the archives all the way up to October, but then they pick up again. That's chiefly because for the SS units because they left the 4th Panzer Army's control after the battle, but then they came back in October, some of the units.

Again, you pick up these inventories, you can see, oh yes, this tank was here in the beginning of July, and it's gone through Prokhorovka, and it's still around in October. So October was the most important chassis number of reports that I had. There's 386 fighting vehicles with the two SS divisions that took part in Prokhorovka, so that's Libyansk Data and Das Reich. And then on 1st November, 218, which was still around on Eastern Front.

You know, it's over half have survived, which goes against the historical narrative of the battle, where it was basically a wipeout. On 1st December, there's still 192 ex-Prokhorovka vehicles still on the eastern front. That's four and a half months later. By tracking individual tanks you can get a true narrative. You talk about confirming the narrative. What is it you think you can really teach us about just when and where the disastrous damage was done to the German armoured units on the Eastern Front if it wasn't actually on the couple of days in Prokhorovka. The Lipschendarte, which faced the main brunt of the offensive,

had 78 tanks available in the infantry the day prior to Prokhorovka battle and 74 tanks after the battle. And actually operationally, so they started the offensive with 79 tanks. The day before Prokhorovka they had 47 Panzer IVs, which were the workhorse of the German army, and then on the 18th after Citadel they had 55. So actually the strength had gone up, it wasn't actually a death knell for the Panzer forces because they were able to carry on. So after Citadel, when the Germans started to face these massive Soviet offensives, which they knew

were going to come, the operational strength actually started to eat away, started to corrode, because the Germans didn't have time to do the repairs necessary to keep these tanks in operation. The tanks were still in the inventories. They didn't have the time or the spare parts to get these tanks back into action. So there was a big battle of attrition of the tanks between the Soviets and the Germans. The Soviets, again, were suffering heavily, but the Germans were suffering less in total losses, but their operational strength was eroding so that carries on all the way through some for any period you care to mention pretty much afterwards right through to the spring of 1940 for those there's a fair number of tanks in the inventory but their actual operational numbers are so low

the situation looks quite ridiculous for the Germans, really. Two quick questions. One is, I read in your research that a big reason for losses of tanks is if you're retreating, if a tank gets bogged down or loses track, it could be quite a minor bit of damage, but you have to abandon it. You can't recover it. So the nature of going backwards is very attritional to tank numbers, is it? It was Karl-Heinz Friesler who did the major research for Okarovka itself, you know know and discovered the true story of events really and Roman Topol has also done superb work in that area. The last two papers I've written are confirming a narrative which has already been proved correct but you need to confirm it in so many other ways which is probably unique to Prokhorovka. I mean looking at the Lipschendarte, again, when they returned to the Eastern Front, the Soviets conducted a massive offensive in late December, from the 24th of December.

So the main effort of that went through to the 10th of January. And the Lipschendarte lost 123 armoured fighting vehicles in the two categories I described for losses in that small period. So that shows you how massive losses they were experiencing later in 1943. But that would be chiefly down to the difficulties of withdrawing tanks they needed to recover them there wasn't recovery vehicles so you have a large number of tanks waiting repair you just have to abandon them basically and that's what they were forced to do plus the train at the time wasn't not good for panzer operations

wintertime wooded area as well so that that's the defence, the German sort of defence of 123 tanks. Compare that with the Lipschendarte losses during Citadel, so that's 12 to 13 days, similar timeframe. The Lipschendarte only lost 18 armoured fighting vehicles through the whole of Operation Citadel. So you can see the difference between offensive and defensive action. So there would have been damages during Citadel which they could recover. They controlled the battlefield after the battle each time and even at Prokhorovka the Germans controlled the actual battlefield even though the number of damaged tanks wasn't that severe. So you can see the difference between offensive and defensive action and the opportunities it gave the Germans to retrieve tanks and or not vice versa so your research confirms together with the research course of your

colleagues that if you're looking for the cause or the locus of the astonishing i mean there were lots of decisive reverses for the germany on the eastern front in the second world war but of course probably the most important outside moscow in 41 but if you're looking for this terrible, terrible reverse that the Germans suffer in 1943, we need to think much more widely than just Kursk Operation Citadel. Yeah, basically, the losses sustained by the Germans during Kursk were not severe at all. They were manageable for the Germans. It's a general attritional whittling away at strength. Thank you very much, Ben. Of course, I will tweet where people can find your research as well when they've listened to the podcast. Thank you very much, Ben Wheatley. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Ben. Of course, I will tweet where people can find your research as well when they've listened to the podcast.

Thank you very much, Ben Wheatley. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Dan. Hi, everyone. It's me, one teacher. very grateful. I understand if you want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.