Historically High - The Battle of Kursk

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Just a few months after the Battle of Stalingrad ended in a crushing German defeat, Hitler decided he needed to reverse course on the Eastern Front. Enter Operation Citadel, the Nazi plan to pincer a large bulge (salient) the Soviets had caused in the German defensive line taking a large amount of Soviet troops prisoner. To make this happen Hitler would repeatedly delay the operation for months in order to wait for his new Wunderwaffen (Wonder Weapons), namely their newest tanks, The Panther and The Tiger. We while waiting for these hopeful game-changers to roll fresh off the assembly line, the Soviet Union was hard at work turning the salient into what would become a living nightmare for the Nazis when they finally did have a change to put their new tanks into the field.   Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh and get enrolled for some fun extra content Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, yeah. Back to war. Back to war. Back to reality. This is another installment of prime examples. We're happy that Hitler was a moron. Because of decisions like this in which, oh, you put Operation Shittadel. I see that.

I was going to say he shit to Del bed. Operation Citadel are what's more widely known as the Battle of, of Kursk ends up being just a I don't know it's there's so many Hitler's follies but this is kind of the last gasp on the Eastern Front

for the Third Reich I have so many peaks in valleys when I think about alternate realities for how World War II could have gone because there's a very real thought in my mind that if the H-man had just focused on the West

and never touched Russia it's a good chance Russia would look or Europe would look very different Yes Right now I don't know how you say it doesn't I mean you can't You could say like well eventually

They might have come into it or anything like that Had he just left them alone And focus like you said on the West And used all of those resources That he had to use during Barbarossa Stalingrad Keeping Leningrad You know pin down and then also this

He might potentially still be sorry, he might potentially still be getting fed oil from Russia to keep running his machines. Yeah. They might have not even stepped in and said, we're neutral and started selling the Germans all of the arms and all of the oil and everything that they needed. Yeah. All this liens robin that they needed. They could have just basically like sublet that from Russia and been like, hey, we'll cut you off

the Netherlands, Denmark and the rest of this shit once we get done. Well, and here's the thing, too, is they were so, they wanted to build. I think kind of where the prime contributor of them failing is because Hitler wasn't willing to be like, hey, you know that Lib Chauvin or whatever was the living space? Lins Robin, yeah. Lensrobin. That doesn't necessarily have to be next door. I mean, we can have all of France.

We can have all of like, you know, we can do Norway, we can have Scandinavia, all of that. But once we've also defeated these other countries, don't their colonial assets also become ours as well? And that could be the living space. and then eventually maybe we do something against Russia after we've then rebuilt our strength and everything. We're so advanced anyway. But I don't know. Like anything that happened in Russia during World War II is just a bad decision. And that's the beauty of these alternate realities.

Because at the end of every alternate reality, the only thing that is the constant never changing in every single one of those scenarios. Hitler is an idiot. He will always do something. They could be on the road to victory, but the one thing that stops all those alternate realities from happening is that Hitler's always going to screw something up. Yeah, dude's on drugs, man. He has some crazy.

He has supreme power in Germany. And even if he had maybe pulled off of that throttle a little bit, we might have a different outcome in World War II. Hey man, I mean, idiots get into supreme power all the time. It's not that rare. Apparently, it's more common than we hope. But it just, that's the most amazing thing is every single scenario that we look at. And we're talking about a situation that's fairly similar to the Battle of the Bulge.

Yeah. This just happened earlier. It's a reverse bulge. It happened on the eastern front. There was really no outcome that was going to make sense, even if they, scored a decisive victory, but he just had this chub for trying to break salience and trying to break bulges. I think he had to, because the actual battle of the bulge, and not saying the actual one,

was it relatively much smaller in comparison to this, because that was like Bastogne and everything. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's Western Front, smaller, tighter areas to fight. Yeah, this literally encompasses a bulge that is what, like 120 miles wide, and then I think they said like 160 miles deep. Pretty deep too, which is also why this battle is so spread out. Before we get too far into it,

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Five star ratings. We'd love to see them. We'd love to receive them. You guys are the best that give them. Keep the reviews flowing. We got a message. I don't remember if it was a common. or it was another message,

requesting David Attenborough. And I love that idea, but I am scared to death because of the age of David Attenborough that if I had to have that on our conscience. We do have, it has been scientifically proven that we have a wee bit of power

when it comes to call in somebody's shot for them. And, I mean, I guess we just kind of leave this to the people, You guys are the one, I mean, we're going to miss David, but we don't want to take him from the world or even put the risk of that happening without the opinion of the people. So put out a poll or something like that. Like, should we, should we do David Attenborough? And it's a great suggestion.

I love the suggestion. I just don't know if I can keep that on my conscience. Like, people die when we do them. Yeah. Look no further than the whole episode that we did on the Vatican City. Yeah. And then like three weeks later, the Pope dropped dead. That was an odd occurrence that happened.

Okay. Got anything else? No, let's jump in. All right. Okay. So this is literally coming off the back, or coming on the back, however you prefer it, of Stalingrad. The final two weeks of 1942 see Operation Little Saturn put out by the Soviets.

And this is the Operation, that helps encircle the 6th Army in Stalingrad and turned, there were some good things that happened for the Germans here because Friedrich Paulus got promoted to field marshal. So that was a nice little addition. Immediately followed by his capture. Well, he was already captured. Because no, oh, what was it?

If you remember, it was Adolf saying, you can't surrender. And him saying, I think I'm going to surrender. And he goes, okay, well, guess what? Now you're a field marshal. and no field marshal on German history has ever surrendered. That's what I'm saying, but he was captured. He didn't surrender, but he was captured, right?

I think he surrendered to the point because we see him pop back up. It was an aggressive surrender. Yeah. And after the loss at Stalingrad happens for the Germans, the Nazis, Germans, Nazis, interchangeable, their situation looks much different in the Eastern Front because you basically see the annihilation of all of the other countries. that they have taken soldiers from that were outside on the flanks that the Soviets just basically destroyed. People that were close to the Soviet Union that had a beef with the Soviet Union were the ones that fought.

So I want to say, well, and the Italians. But there were, I believe, like some Romanian regiments or something like that. Belarusians, too, maybe. Yeah. And so he had pretty much, yeah, those forces were gone. So you lose basically all your auxiliary forces. Just to give you a lay in laying, because that's the end of 42. This is where 43 is sitting just in the area of World War II and all these theaters.

Spring 1943, you have allied bombing raids on German infrastructure, which if you have a bunch of the Luftwaffe sitting on the eastern front, they can't be back trying to defend all your infrastructure in Germany. After you made all of these promises to all of the people saying that they would never be touched, Well, guess what? Now they're getting touched. Yeah. Not only that, you have the surrender of Italian troops and German troops in North Africa.

This is all coming off to the loss at Stalingrad. You are pretty much losing in your little U-boat blockade that you have floating around in the Atlantic. There's so much stuff coming over that you can't keep up with it. And this is before Allied boots are technically even in Europe. Yeah. So there's a lot of. of things going wrong on the Axis side of World War II. And usually when things are all going bad, we've seen this in France, we talked about it during World War I when we were talking about

Verdun. Sometimes pulling a defensive strategy isn't exactly the worst option. And I think, I don't know if we've talked about it in other wars or in other battles, but I think we've seen it in a couple of parts of the research. Usually if you're going on the offensive, you want, like a three to one numerical advantage on the people that you're going after. I think that's what I've heard. It's usually a pretty safe bet that that's going to be affected. Because you're going against entrenched positions. So to go on the offensive against a red army that has, by your estimations, an incalculable

amount of people. You got no clue. You just know they don't run out. It seems like... Yeah. It seems like it would be better on the eastern front to sit in a defensive position and try to build up some forces. Which, do you think you would have learned this?

because you were, you know, well, I guess everyone that was fighting at Stalingrad technically did not really make it out. No. A Stalingrad from on the German side. So there's no one to explain to them and be like, hey, what happened at Stalingrad? I mean, you guys had that city surrounded for a long time. They're like, they had a river crossing. And it was just a constant flow of men into the city. And eventually there were just too many of them.

And we couldn't get enough supplies coming back our way. You guys lost a city that you held like 97% of. Yeah, because the 3% had a funnel that was pushing everything. The hose never, the tap never turned off. And eventually you get tired of treading water. And you're also in Stalingrad. That's the amazing thing. And I guess this is something that we can look at with hindsight and say this was a big change.

The Red Army going into Stalingrad was kind of a shit show. They were kind of a circus. And part of the reason that they were a circus is because, and we'll talk about a little bit later, but in the late 30s, Stalin purged his generals in the military. Oh, yeah, and literally the purging is in, like, most of them, killing them because he was also coming into a position

where he wanted to keep power. What normally happens is if something goes wrong during a war or someone's going to launch a coup against you, it's going to be someone higher up in the military, someone that has the support of the troops because they have to have support of an army in order to actually, you know, pull the coup off. So Stalin's freaked out back in 39 because he finally gets a hold on it or he was a little bit before that.

That was around the time, right? I want to see it was like 38, 39. Yeah, I think you're pretty on. So he is trying to surround himself with just the guys that he came up with into this position. Not all of them are even very good, like as far as like being strategists or tacticians or running the military. all the guys that can do that that could possibly turn against him have been taken out by this purge

most of them killed some of them just like locked away and maybe a few of them just send into retirement or something but during the first part of World War II there's no one really to organize or to build up any type of cohesive strategy and that's why during Barbarossa

it's just like the Soviets turn tail and just run until they're told that if you turn tail and run, we're going to have guns. Until they are able to develop the system of saying too much turn, tail and run, we're going to start shooting you guys now. And once that happens, and then finally Stalin goes and starts snatching these guys that he forced into retirement, pulling guys out of their cells and being like, hey, guess what, you're going to lead some troops and I'm not going to kill you in there, like, fantastic, that he pulls in some guys that are able to kind of whip this thing

into shape. One of them, last name, I think, was Zukov. There was another one that was Chewykov, and then there's a couple guys during the battle and those guys are kind of guys that proved themselves during Stalingrad or I think one of them was also at Leningrad but Zucca's in a funny position too because I don't know if you called it a change of heart from Stalin

but maybe his heart of stone maybe melted a little bit or maybe he was just thinking I have to figure out a way to do this Stalin brings back like the old Russian Empire style army guys that served under like the Tsar in the Tsarist army. You have guys that have like the rank boards on their shoulders that show all of their ranks.

You're handing out medals to everybody, even down to the cooks, they're handing out achievement medals to. And Zukov, who's seen the way that Stalin's run the army before comes back into a situation. Like, what the fuck? Why is everybody so shiny? Why are all of our uniforms looking like this? And to Stalin's credit, I think it was because he realized that he kind of had a peasant army at that point in time and maybe put,

put a little lipstick on a pig might give them some confidence. Yeah. And I think it did because we're going to be talking about a time during Operation Citadel in this battle at Kursk where the Red Army still doesn't have their shit together. Yeah. It's going to be a long ways down the line before they can hone this craft. But luckily, for the Russians, it doesn't matter. Numbers.

Yeah. You could be fucking up a little bit, but if you're just fucking up repeatedly, but taking, you know, advancing the entire time, you're still going to get somewhere. Just to point this out, February in 1943, the Red Army had taken back Rostov. Army Group South, the Nazis, had engaged the Red Army in this counteroffensive. It was led by, I believe he was a commander, Manstein, led this elite SS Panzer. Oh, that was the other thing. Stalin started naming the troops, the cores that did well.

Yeah. He would call them the guards. So guard was like the elite of the Red Army. Gotcha. That's where we get like the fifth guards army and stuff like that. And you have, again, the elite SS Panzers. This isn't just the men that were drafted into the army in Germany that could be anybody. The SS are the guys that are down to clown.

They are full-blooded. We're going to do anything that Adolf Hitler says. Yes. And if you become an elite SS Panzer group, you're the shit while being also crazy. So the Panzer or the SS Panzer and the 4th Panzer Army strike these Soviet flanks. They scatter the formations again. February 19th this happens. And there's just house-to-house fighting in the city of Karkov that starts on March 11th.

And they consider this, I guess it's the second battle of Karkov. They call it Little Stalingrad because it's just house-to-house fighting like they were doing in Stalingrad. And I can't imagine that the Germans doing that again. And they're probably thinking, God damn it, we just lost doing this. Why are we doing this again? Well, we're in the city this time. Yeah. We'll make sure we defend it because that was the whole gripe is that they, you know, we took 97% of it.

Yeah, that's true. And after four days, they end up having control of the city by March 15th. And I mean, the, the both armies kind of run into the same issue at different times. And one seems to kind of learn it's less a little bit more, but you have during this point after Stalingrad, you have, whoever got away from Stalingrad is still moving back toward friendly, defensible Nazi-taken areas. Yeah. And so as the Red Army are chasing them back, they end up capturing, I think, Kursk was previously,

because again, this is all where they stopped them at Stalingrad. They chased them back and retake all this territory. So one of the cities they did retake was Kersk, Rostov that you mentioned, and then Karkov. So that's when Manstein basically launches this counteroffensive in late February hitting what was an overextended army. Yeah. So the Red Army had fallen in the same trap that the Germans did on the way there. And if anything was built up as far as infrastructure to move or anything, the Germans are destroying that on their way back as well to slow down the advance of the Russians. It's just this weird back and forth that goes on on the Eastern Front.

The expenditures for the Red Army to lose Karkov. 45,000 killed or taken prisoner, 41,000 wounded. And this is just in Karkov alone. The Germans lost 4,500 that were either killed or missing and had 7,000 wounded. They lost almost 90,000 of the Red Army in the fighting in Karkov. To recapture it. Well, that was, they lost it. That was when they lost Karkov.

Okay. That was how much they were willing to. expend in this fight. That was when that was on May, March 15th, 43, when they came back and when Manchin came in and took it, okay, gotcha. At that point, it was kind of to the point where winter was coming to an end, which you're like, okay, that's what they want. They want winter to come in in. You can't fight in like the spring thaw because all that shit that was frozen now turns to swamp and mud. So there's this weird period where technically you can fight through the winter. I mean, it's horrible and it's horrible for the equipment, but you can still

get around a little bit. But then in the springtime, it's like, oh, no, no, no, no. We just, we have, we can't do anything. We've got to wait until stuff dries out. And then in the summer, we can launch something. It's like a spring dysentery. Pretty much. Everything just flows right through. And shit, man. Think of all the frozen bodies. Yeah. That we talked about this. When was it? I mean, I'm sure we've done it several times where there was like a thaw or something when all the bodies on the battlefield started to kind of like... It had to be Stalingrad. It might have been also one of the World War I, like Somme or...

Yeah. What was the other one? We're done. We're done. That's right. The amount of bodies would just keep showing up. So basically when they came in, when the German advance came back in and stalled before the spring thaw, they'd created this thing.

It was the Kursk salient, so the bulge. And the bulge basically protruded roughly like a hundred. 100 miles westward into German lines. So if you think about it, it's like taking, Germany just kind of pushes back into Russia, and it doesn't push the center section, and in the very center of that bulge is where Kursk is. And you could say from every picture that I looked at,

midnight to 6 o'clock is basically the line. Yes. You have Russia to the east from 1 to 6. You have Germany to the west from 7 to 11. and then kind of right in the middle of this clock, you have this salient that pushes out. Toward like 9 o'clock. The German line, I want to say at one point,

was extended to like 1,400 miles. Yeah, I mean, think of it in the sense of like 100 miles deep, and then I think it was 150 miles across. And just for them to be able to watch, and that was just the salient. That wasn't the part that leveled out. Yeah. And you're going east or north to south at that point.

The thing about the salient being there was if you already have 1,400 some miles on a front to cover, if you can knock that salient out, that knocks off right around 250 miles of the German line that has to be guarded. Well, Hitler looks at this and is like, oh my God, this is the perfect opportunity to like just encircle everyone that's in this in Kursk and we can both destroy a bunch of their armies, but we are hurting. for slave labor. Because I'm having to send everybody that was in these factories that was working as part of Lake the Knots Party for the country

to now go into the military, but we need people to take their places in the factory. So yes, if we can surround and capture these large portions of the Red Army, we can just send them back into Germany,

flatten this bulge out, and, you know, great, we're set. We have 250 less miles of line that we have to have guarded, too. And the Soviets don't get to use Kurosk, which again, was like kind of an industrial place as well.

I want to say the biggest problem, but we know the biggest problem still Hitler. At this point in time, the German offensive playbook is really kind of a smash and dash. It's lightning war. It's Blitzkrieg. That's what made them their hay in the West. That's kind of what Barbarossa did on its way to Stalingrad. As you had the, what was it, Army Group North was headed up towards Leningrad, and they besieged them for like a hundred straight days. Central was going deeper in.

South was supposed to go down to the caucuses and take the oil fields, right? Well, when they were retreating, they had to pull back from all of that as well, so they didn't get cut off. Yeah. They still, or Hitler feels that they still need that because that's going to be the lifeblood of the army. Thinking about it in the sense of like, yeah, man, they smashed in during Barbarossa and they went deep.

But then thinking about it. the sense of like, yeah, they went pretty much all the way across the same distance as France before they even got to like Stalingrad, maybe even further. The only reason that France, France just had nowhere to go. France couldn't go into Spain, France couldn't go into Portugal or anything. So as soon as Germany had control over the majority of the country, Russia's just sitting here looking like they're looking, they didn't even get to, you know, Berlin. And they're looking at this and they're saying, or not Berlin, Moscow. And you're looking at this and you're looking to the east. You're like, we still have so much country back there.

Do you know how far they're going to have to get across this country to make us have to give up and we're going to run out of space to retreat to? Like it's not possible. Long way between here and Asia. Yes. The other thing is if you're pushing into France, you're moving lightning quick in France because they have roads. They have ways that you can move your military very quickly because you're pulling horses

or you stuff for the Germans. When you get into Russia, guess who doesn't have roads? And guess why they don't need roads? Because there's no reason. There's nothing there. There's very few roads because they're going between the very sparse and separated like cities and everything. But you know who knows how to move across all this other plate, like this landscape, and who knows to which mountain passes you should go through and what months you can actually travel with how heavy of equipment, the locals. We're not going to know Russia more than this.

And what are they moving? Shit that takes three horses to move. they're not moving artillery pieces or anything like that. Well, eventually. The Reds know how to do it. Well, yes, but from the Nazi perspective, yes. They think, yeah. And it's the obligatory you got to throw in, hey, the other allies were doing things to help Russia on the Eastern Front because we hadn't opened a second front yet.

The Len Leas program was huge. Yes. Because not necessarily on the artillery side, because Russia had already moved their, um, their factories and shit into the Ural Mountains, was it? Which is so nuts. That's one thing, like the scope and like the time frame. I mean, like, you know how long it takes to build a fucking factory? And it's like, yeah, when cities were getting destroyed, and it makes perfect sense.

You can't just be like, well, I guess we don't have that shit anymore. But you're just like build the factory somewhere back where they can't get in. They're like, oh, okay. And we'll just do that lickety split and have it happen. They did. But the big part of the Len Lees program was the United States in Great Britain were sending them over food rations. They're sending them over spam, Russian spam, I'm sure it was nuts. But the big thing is, is troop carriers.

You have jeeps, you have big deuce and a halfs that are able to move their soldiers a lot faster to the front lines because they're not just being pulled or marching down there. By the time they get there, Len Lease says, we just drove these guys 600 miles that they would have probably. had to march. So they're going to be a little bit fresher on the front lines once they get there. Well, okay, so like by the summer of 43, when this whole thing's going to take place, the United States had shipped hundreds of thousands of trucks to the Soviet Union. The one thing that they said or that they said stood out the most was this thing. It was the Sudebaker, US 6. It was a two and a half tonne six by six. I don't know if it was just about like Europe and.

And aside from like Russia, had very established road systems or something like that. But so many of the German trucks were two-wheel drive. That shit ain't going to cut it. And so you're designing these six-by-six trucks that are being sent over where they're just able to move troops at, you know, a very fast forward pace. But then at the same time, they said they would strip the beds out of these trucks. And they started mounting those rocket batteries on them as well. that's pretty bad ass. Yeah, they found it so reliable and sturdy that they would put,

it was the Kait Yusha rocket launchers. And then what they would do is the big thing when those rockets came out is they were pretty big and bulky, but they were hard to make. So you didn't want them getting blown up. They could park these trucks, get them leveled, fire these things off, and then just pull away to another location. If they're not sitting there for long enough for you to dial an artillery shell in,

you're not getting rid of them. Yeah. They're just going to keep peppering away at you. for as much fawning as we're doing over the Red Army and we've got to take their side in this one because they're fighting the Nazis and they are technically an allied force which is why we're doing Len Lease

you would think all the stuff that we just talked about with the Russians and the Soviets would make the Germans think probably don't want to push an offensive on these guys because they do seem to be getting their shit together and the right thing to do would be to sit back in a defensive position but again, Tada! Hitler

says, we haven't had a lot of good press in the paper lately. And if us taking a defensive position in the eastern front's not going to be headline news, we need something hot. There hadn't been like a report that came out, I think in Germany, up to that point of them suffering a defeat to where there was nowhere that they could spin it, that Word had gotten back from outside of maybe the approved state media type, you know, channels that said Stalingrad was bad, especially when so many people died there and people stopped getting letters and everything, but they knew they maybe were at Stalingrad or something like that.

So people knew about Stalingrad. And as that's happening, even though they take Karkov, it's 400 miles from Kersk to Stalingrad. They lost 400 miles, 400 plus miles of territory. and even though Karkov happens and they retake that and they take out 90,000 or however many you said it was for the Red Army, no one gives a shit because for the first time at Stalingrad, the Nazis were stopped and not just stopped, but they lost a lot of people and don't have anything to show for it. People know the name Stalingrad. They don't know Karkov. And this comes up during the planning of this thing for Kersk Operation Citadel is at one point, I think it's,

is it modal? That calls for the attack? No, no, no. It's, I can't remember if it's Manstein or modal, but they finally just look at Hitler when they're starting to have doubts about this and they say, nobody knows where Kersk is. When he's trying to explain this and his rationale for wanting to do this operation, he's saying, we have to try to snatch back some of our shine. We need to go, if we're going to go into like the spring,

we at least need to go out on like a winning note maybe. And that way we can build some momentum off that, give the people something to talk about. We got to do something to get the taste of Stalingrad out of people's mouths. Most of the people that are in Hitler's ears are saying we need to sit out 43 on the eastern front. We need to maybe take a breath for a little bit,

a year. No offensive this year. We'll play defense. Yeah, we lost at Stalingrad. It's the first L we've really had to take so far. But think of it this way. Our existing position is very close to a river, very defensible. And guess what we can do? We can dig in there. We can hold them off. And then once we build up our strengths, we can go ahead and get back to it. We'll design another operation. We're going to be okay. And Hitler's like, sure, sure, you guys are making a lot of solid points or or we could

you know completely just throw that shit out the window and try to take Kursk back by pinching off this this salliant and they were so close I want to say it was like maybe a hundred and fifty

miles away from the Denepp River you could have hopped the river blown up every bridge Embankment, railway, everything to the north of that river. You'd have to keep a couple of those in case you wanted to launch an assault, but you would be in full control of them.

You would have them set to be destroyed if need be. The same thing that keeps you from winning the Battle of Britain and launching Operation Sea Lion, that big giant fucking English channel that makes Britain so defensible, you don't have the English channel, but you do have a river that's going to take the Russians a hell of a lot longer. There's so many better plans. So many.

So many. So many better options. And at the end of the day, it comes down to Hitler basically being like, listen, so he's nervous about the Italians that, especially after he lost a bunch of Italian troops of Stalingrad. Hey, who isn't nervous about the Italians? Am I right? Yeah. But he's thinking to himself, he's probably thinking that Mussolini is getting scared. He's like, I got to keep him in this fight. And the only way he's going to stay in this fight and not give up the soft underbelly of Europe is if I can show him that.

I'm still on top, that I'm top dog in Europe. So I need to basically take Kursk and be like, see, we're beating the Russians. So you stay in this fight too. And he's also aware that North Africa has been taken. The next logical step, considering that the Americans and British have taken North Africa is you're thinking, well, they got to be coming from North Africa to Italy or Sicily or Greece or wherever, if I don't keep Mussolini in this thing and on my side, they're just going to be able to march in there and march right through Italy and hit me right underneath. We need to stack those Ziti-filled Italians up to try to slow down the U.S. Well, then also we have Operation Mincemeat.

The fake dead body with the fake plans to go, was it to head into Greece? I can't remember exactly what it was, but Operation Husky has been on the books, is being at this point, Husky happens during the Battle of Kursk. So all the timing and certain you know, all this timing matches up but Husky's already in place.

So they've seen a buildup of troop movements. There's a suspected invasion site probably and it's Sicily where Husky invades, right? Yeah, Hitler knows. How does Hitler not know? But at that point too, is this also Hitler saying if Husky goes off,

is it going to be better if I have lost and I'm just holding the line up here? Is Mussolini going to look at that and say, hey man, remember Stalingrad? You haven't really done anything since Stalingrad. And now they're on Sicily. I got to start thinking about maybe surrendering.

But if he's able to say, no, no, no, we took curse back and everything, we're going to be pushing into the Caucasus again. We're going to get that oil. No, you're going to stay and keep doing what you're doing. Maybe it gives Mussolini less of an out. There's a certain line of Nazi bullshit here that I can't quite tell how much I believe it. but just to fast forward a little bit, April 15th, Hitler had called for directive number six,

after he'd called for directive number five, they got scrapped by weather. Directive number six is Operation Citadel. He calls this April 15th. Now, when they're going through these plans for Citadel and they're talking, his chief of staff that had stepped in, I think the guy before him had gone back to Germany for something.

I want to say they're sitting somewhere in Poland, like East Prussia is what they renamed it or something like that. There's this guy that was his chief of staff named Kurt Zeitzler. And Zeitzler draws up this battle plan for this double envelopment of the salient. Now, he's pitching this very well. And there's certain times over the next coming weeks and months that people will come and talk to Hitler about the plan. And it's known to these people that Hitler didn't exactly want to do the plan and he didn't exactly agree to the plan. and he had always kept saying,

well, no matter what happens, if we go with Operation Citadel, the very second that Husky lands or whatever that, the soft underbelly is penetrated by the allies. Whatever the Allies land, wherever they're going to be in the South. We're going to pull out.

So their thought was Hitler was maybe just wanting something to do in hopes of doing that. Well, at the same time, not really running it through the line of common sense of thinking, but if you know that they're coming, why wouldn't you build up your forces down there? Why are we going to start, even at the worst, if they're chipping away out our forces with Operation Citadel, we're going to lose people, we're going to lose resources, and we're going to burn a bunch

of ammo and fuel. And you just did it in Stalingrad. Like, you just lost so many people in Stalingrad. So much stuff. And so the operation, you said April 18th? Uh, April, I believe it was April 15th was the day that they called for Operation Citadel. It was supposed to begin on May 3rd or shortly after.

So that tells you right there just how quickly they're trying to throw this together. Now, with supply issues and all that stuff, they still had to try to bring these armored units like back up to strength. And because of that, May 3rd completely goes out the window. Now, as they're having to wait for new tanks to come out and for them to like build up reserves, for them to go ahead and train crews, things like, that, like you said, leadership staff are just being like, I feel like they're looking over his shoulder and he's looking at him up and they're like, oh, yeah, that, that's not going to be good. And he's like, but? And they're like, yeah, do you see right here this is? And just everyone trying to drop tidbits. And then like you said, Hitler being like, he tells a guy at one point,

I don't know if it's modal or Manstein. But he's like, and he's like, you know, I'm sick to my stomach about this operation. And it's one of these situations where they're walking together. And he's like, you know what this, thinking about this thing makes me sick to my stomach. And so modal's got to be waiting for the obvious, you know, continuation of that of being like, we're going to cancel this. This is a bad idea. And it never comes.

And so he's just, it's like he says, oh, I'm sick about this. And then just gets in his car and modal's like, so like, cancel. So he's like, and as he rolls down the window, he's like, oh, no. He's like, but you just said you were sick to your stomach about it. He's like, well, yeah. He's like, well, shouldn't you kind of go with your gut on this? He's like, no, we're going to do this. Do you know how many drugs are affecting my gut right now?

No, we're not going with my gut. It was Heinz. It was Heinz, it was Haynes, it was Haydardian. Okay. So it told him, you know, how many people even know where Kersk is. Well, Model was telling him the entire time, hey, we've let the Red Army sit for so long that they have dug into this place like we've never seen before. And again, Hitler, as you're talking about, it's like, ah, stomach hurts, don't really like that. Maud's thinking, all right, we'll have

two more of these conversations and it'll, it'll be done. We won't have to worry about this. You can only be so sick to your stomach. Didn't happen. Because maybe Hitler's sick to his stomach feeling was worrying about trying to finish up these, we decided it was the Panzer 5 Panther tanks and the Panzer 6 Tiger tanks? Yeah, his ability, I think kind of the answer to those concerns from his leadership staff is, hey, don't worry about the defenses because the reason we're waiting is because these new tanks that we're going to have are just going to blow past not only their defensive defenses, but anything that they're going to field out there against it isn't going to be up to

snuff. These things can destroy their tanks from much further range, and they don't have, you know, the artillery in order to zero in on these things. So he's waiting for these. He called him Wunderbaffen. They were wonder weapons. And like he said, it was the tiger and then the panther tanks. And Elefantes? And the Elephanter, however they want to pronounce it.

But he was convinced that the standard German tanks, they wouldn't win in a head-to-head battle with the Russian tanks, not even in a situation where it was like on parity. so like if it was one on one maybe he still thought they would but he also saw based on Stalingrad they were pumping out T-34s from Stalingrad

out to go fight we talked about during that episode where they would be like no frills on them or anything and they would just send them off the line to go out and try to fuck stuff up and anything that they couldn't turn into a T-34 they were just turning into a self-propelled gun yes so Hitler's of the mindset of saying they're going to keep building more than we are

but what we can do is we can build something of such quality that it'll destroy. It'll be worth 10 of their tanks because their tanks won't have large enough guns on them to penetrate or to destroy our tanks. So it doesn't matter. Are we in Tank Talk? Can we do Tank Talk? We can do Tank Talk. We're like 40 minutes in.

And I, this is the first, I'm not going to be anywhere near the intelligence that you have. But this is the first time that there's been a weapon that's kind of caught me by the short ones. And I've really tried to dig into the. this a little bit. The Soviet side had, I believe it was the T-60, was the predecessor to the T-34. This thing was slow on the battlefield. It had a very small gun on it. It had a gun that wasn't going to penetrate even the Panzer-Fors armor. So it's pretty much ineffective as a tank killer. But the big kind of centerpiece of what a Soviet attack was going to look like was pretty much fully based on the artillery.

Yeah. They had artillery pieces coming out the wazoo. And we'll talk about it kind of the build up in the losses that they suffer. The artillery numbers shock me with how many pieces that they had, how many pieces that they rained down.

But it was also because as the Soviet infantry moved in closer to the German side, the Soviet artillery barrage didn't stop. Yeah. They could give two fucks if their infantry was even interwoven with the tanks, they're still firing on them.

Buddy, it's just bigger machine guns that are sitting behind charging people. Yeah, but still, if your infantry is starting to penetrate the area that you're blanketing with artillery shells, maybe stop, maybe see what they can do. Maybe instead of just killing 20,000, 25,000 of your own guys that you will eventually replace within probably a day or two, maybe just don't. Yeah. You can just have more guys later. Yeah.

So after the T60, this T34 comes on the line and this thing is hot. It's got a big gun on it. But the big part of the T-34 is the slanted armor. Yeah. So you have what's going to eventually lead to Russia winning this thing and overall just being able to beat the Nazis back, to beat them off, both hands, is they're not going for like a heavy tank. that's not going to be their mass produced tank it's not going to be on the same level as like the the nazi tiger tank the t34 it's a medium tank and kind of in the same way that the allied or that the united states had had the sherman they had the same outlook of let's just build something that is good it doesn't have to be great

it doesn't have to be a one-on-one fighter with the tiger the panther anything like that but if we can make this thing reliable if we can make a fuck ton of them then ever every engagement we go into, instead of making a good one-on-one tank, we're going to make a good three-on-one tank. We're going to be able to build these things so quickly and have them be repairable that if we do run into a tiger, the tiger's going to run into four T-34s. And the Panzer 3 and the Panzer 4 at the time, which were the main German workhorse tanks, because of the sloping armor that you were talking about on the T-34, they couldn't take it out from a distance. And that was their advantage at the time was the range in which they could take out

those tanks versus the range that the T-34s could take them out. And that sloping armor, I don't know if anyone here, most, you know, a lot of people have probably seen the movie Fury. So there's a tank battle there that's between, I want to say a tiger tank and like three or four Sherman tanks. And they basically have to run straight at this thing in order to, fuck, almost sacrifice one of them to allow the other ones to try to swing around. to get to the outside because the tigers are so armored from the front that there's no chance

of the Sherman's main gun punching through. They've got to take it from the side or anything. So as you're watching this happen, this tank is firing at them and because of kind of the sloping armor that the Sherman's have, you see ricochets happen.

Did you end up watching that scene? I didn't watch the scene because I spent what I want to say is 20 minutes, but it was probably about an hour trying to find, just because I got pulled in every which way direction. Trying to find any sort of video evidence of a shell ricocheting off of a tank because

I, look, I believe it's there. The science to me sort of makes sense. The logic that an artillery shell could hit something going the direction that it's going probably on a down slope because you're going to fire in an arc, right? Correct. If the armor is sloping upwards and the tank is heading down, something about a ricochet doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Okay.

imagine it in this way. You have, just give yourself like a dome, like a dome sitting on like your desk, so a half dome. Yeah. Okay. If you're coming down an angle, really the only time you're striking that at a true 90 degree is if the angle matches that front portion that you're hitting of that dome. If you come around to the side of that on any side and you're not hitting that thing straight on, it's an angle ricochet that's coming off of the side. And then just the thickness of the armor is what stops it from I'm going to sound like such a fucking clown trying to explain this But if the amount of force It takes to try to penetrate the armor crack the armor at that point Maybe outweighs the inertia of pushing that in that direction or whatever the train It can force it and by making it sloping you're making it easier for it to move off the side

So you're trying not only is artillery trying to hit these things from a long way away, even other tanks. But think of it in the sense of like a glancing blow, even if you're a tank to tank and you fire straight on. You still have to hit it straight on. If you hit it to the side at all, it's curving around. So it's trying to bounce that off the side. Yeah. You're not hitting it. It's not to stop it from taking a point blank 90 degrees side on hit. It's to keep it from getting hit from the front and being to glance something off if it's not perfectly dead center, I think.

And I think that's where it falls off of me is I can't quite get my mind over something that heavy moving that fast, just bouncing off of something. Yeah, but it's also the weight of that slug or the weight of that shell compared to the weight of the tank. And I think that's one thing too,

the amount of weight that these tanks weigh because when you see them, they're moving and they're squeaky as fuck and all that stuff, but you still don't have a concept of saying, like, there is so much metal and steel on this thing. The weight of it is insane. And so those things still weigh so much more than whatever inertia that that shell is causing that it can, you know, but you're giving it the help you can by making it sloped. Yeah. And I think the only thing harder to do than penetrate one of

those things, or penetrate one of those sloping armor tanks is to find video of it. because I spent a long time looking for it, couldn't find anything, and finally just like, all right, chatbot's probably the last thing I got. I'm going to throw some AI at this, and AI didn't even have to think. AI is just like, at the rate of speed that a shell is hitting a tank, it's virtually impossible to catch that with the technology that they had back in the day as far as a high-speed camera. Where's it mounted? It's mounted on a tank that's bumpy as fucking everything. And as soon as I realized, or as soon as I saw that, read that, I was like, okay. this makes more sense.

That's why I was saying, like, if you watch that scene from Fury, seeing it hit and ricochial, it's so crazy because the sound it makes, too. Yeah, Hollywood just scares me. I don't want to get a false sense of understanding. It does. But also when we kind of get it a little bit further into this episode, man, there's a tank that takes, like, they said over 200 anti-tank rounds between shells from other tanks, the rifle-fired rounds and everything like that.

What does that sound like in the tank? Yeah. You're constantly just hearing just things hitting against the outside. Insane things. Liqueify your ear drums type shit, I'm sure. Yeah, that's kind of what it seems like, right? Yeah, just to put it into perspective. I mean, you're wearing protective, like, hearing protection, but how advanced is it.

It might not matter. That's what I was going to say, though. It's still so, like, because it's all keeping that concussion in there. You'd have to have pillows duct tape to the side of your head to even make a dent in it. So a T-34 weighs 26 and a half tons. So we're talking about what? 52, I guess a half ton, 53,000 pounds is what one of those things weighs.

That's a T-34. Do you know how much the tiger weighs? Was it more? 60. 60 tons? 6-0. And it was still that agile and that nimble, huh? I mean, it really wasn't.

The other panzers were. Was it the panther that was? The panther was a little bit more, but the tiger, man, like, the weight for that, I think they said in some instances, it couldn't get over certain bridges because it just weighed too much. But this is also situations

where they're going into like fields, mud, I don't care how good the tracks are in these things. Move in something that's 70 tons through a muddy field, and then it's so heavy, what's going to pull it out? Yeah, it's a lawn ornament at that point. Yeah. all this stuff is going to come in to bite, you know, bite the Nazis in the ass. They also on the Nazi side had an elephant that was something that they had produced.

And again, I think that was, was that the one that you were looking at, 65 tons, 143,000 pounds? Yeah. Okay, so the tiger, which had an 88 millimeter cannon, which could punch through anything that any of the allies could put against it. That's why they had to put up more numbers. And the Panther, they beat, you know, both had these high velocity cannons that could take out any Soviet tanks from a distance where the Soviets couldn't even fire back. So Hitler thinks that this is going to be a huge advantage. And at the same time, he's still looking for ways to bolster his forces. Ford and Porsche had been in the process of trying to secure a contract to design tanks.

He was so confident that he built like a hundred of these giant chastis. And I think what ended up happening is Hitler and end up approving whoever built the Panther or the tiger. Was Ferdinand Porsche somebody in history that this is the only time that he pops up and he has absolutely no relation to the Porsche cars? No, this is the same. Oh, you don't say? Yes.

Interesting. Hmm. Is it interesting? Imagine that. Imagine. So he takes a larger 88. Now these 88s are also the, the artillery pieces

that they're firing up for like flack thousands of feet in the air up to hit these planes so they're putting these in tanks now there's a larger one even larger than what the tiger has that they decide to mount on these Porsche chassis these Porsche tank chassis and turn into this thing

called the elephant so it doesn't have a turret which would make it an actual tank and a lot more expensive so they take these anti-aircraft guns put them in on this chassis and then just build like an armored shell over where they're loading and naming it. So this is one of those tank killers that has to be pointed in the direction where you just kind of get it stationary and then you hope something kind of comes across your path.

You put it at like the T section of a road or something like that. But these things like you said are also so heavy that they're going to get bogged down. And with, especially with this one, it has no weapon on it except for this gun. there's no machine guns on it to protect it from like troops or anyone close. And the visibility on this thing is basically just you looking forward where you're going to be aiming. Or you're going to pop your head out of the port and pray that there's not a shell or a bullet that's got your name on it. Because that's where they've trained on their sites. Yeah.

I think they said that the German or the Soviet attack on tanks. Traditionally, the first two places that they fired was the site port and then the commanders. It's like the little periscope area that he would look through. And then the commanders latch on top to climb out because they said if they could hit that and they could blow it off, the next time they hit the tank with a round, it was just going to kill everybody inside of it. Just because if they could hit the same spot where it had blown that port off,

it was just like dumping an artillery around inside a tank. Gotcha, okay. So I guess like a long range three-pointer, if they can put one in there that everybody's done. Well, I mean, this two-month delay does end, resulting in, I think, like, roughly 200 additional panthers, 140 tigers, and 90 of these elephant tank destroyers. So he is getting some additional stuff, but... He missed some steps. What do you do... He missed some steps. What do you typically like to do

after you pull something off of the line and before you put it into battle? I mean, you don't want to test it. That's stupid, right? Yeah, because what if something goes wrong, then you're delayed even longer. Yeah, of course. Exactly. You just prove my point. You can't get those extra 200 panthers out on the line if you're having to go through all the business of testing and making sure they're reliable.

And that things like engine fires don't happen or anything like that, because nothing's going to kill your boner for a salient pinching than having your tank break down a mile down the road. Ed. Electrical problems inside of a tank wouldn't completely render it

useless, right? No. I mean, they said the panther It had a Maybach, like 230 engine. They called the HL 230 engine. This thing was prone to severe overheating. They said on the march to the front, multiple panthers burst into flames without a single enemy shot being fired. Are we under fire? No.

So not only are you losing these things before you even get to the front, but then once you get to the front, you're still looking at a bunch of these panthers. And you're thinking yourself, shit, how reliable are these things? if these broke down they didn't even get to the front how many of these things are going to get a couple miles down the road

and the engines are going to catch fire? Well, just like you were talking about with Hitler's side of looking at a tiger and thinking, this tiger tank is going to be so superior that we can take on 3 t3 or 10 t34s and we'll be fine and Stalin's version of that on that side is okay if the tigers can take out 10 to 1 we'll just build 11 to 1 pretty much

yeah or you just okay so a couple of the things with the panther real quick. The gears were made of this low-grade steel and would, like, routine, like either shear or shatter when the driver attempted to turn on rough terrain, that's instantly going to make it to where your tank's immobile. So you lose your engine, it overheats, bursts into flames, you're immobile. Useless. Gear shears off, you're useless. The hydraulic mechanism that was used to turn the turret was tied directly to the engine RPMs, which means that unless you were cranking up the RPMs, the thing turned insanely slow. and if you lost your engine, there was a hand crank.

They said... You probably got to do it from the outside, right? No, no, no. It was from the inside. Okay. Well, at least it was that. But to get it around in a 360, it took 700 cranks. You wouldn't have any arms to do anything else after that.

So moving on to the Tigers, Tiger issues, select the Panther. The Tiger used this overlapping, like, road wheel type deal. If you ever look at, like, a bunch of tanks side by side, take a look at the track system. and how like the wheels work to actually move the tracks. If you're looking at the German ones, they had pretty big wheels.

They looked like they almost just operate as road wheels. And this was something that made the tanks pretty speedy. But because of this model, in Kursk and like the dusty terrain and everything around it, mud, rocks, and this other debris would pack into the gaps between the wheels, and at night it would dry and it would harden, and it would be like concrete. And it would just lock the wheels up and completely immobilized the tanks the next morning.

They said if a driver of a tiger tried to force the tank out of like a deep anti-tank ditch or thick mud, the gears would instantly strip. And once they strip, turns it into basically a stationary 50-ton or 56-ton pillbox. And because it was so heavily engineered, fixing a broken transmission wasn't like it was on a Sherman or T-34 were a crew to come out there in the truck, throw it in like an hour, maybe two hours and get it back going. fixing a broken transmission or the final like drive shaft and everything required removing the entire turret, which you couldn't do on a battlefield. So if a tiger broke down or threw a track like in a battle zone, the crew just had to kind of detonate the vehicle to pretend it or to prevent it falling into Soviet hands. There was no survive, like if it was running, deadly.

But you don't have to penetrate through the armor when you can just hit the tracks, make it stationary and then guess what? Work around it. Or then just run up behind it when you're trying to crank the turnaround and it's taken 30 seconds to do it or something. This also feels like it might be just me being dumb and not quite understanding this.

But the Tigers had a steering wheel. Now, in my thinking, driving in a tank, I would assume just because you have a track on each side, this is like a 360 mower where you have forward, you push both, of the sticks forward backwards, both the sticks backwards, pull one to turn. Correct. So with a steering wheel, those hydraulic steering wheel that they had, a turn the wheel to the left,

automatically slows the left track down and speeds the right track up. I believe so. That feels like a lot of different things that could go wrong trying to steer this. I don't know what the idea behind that was, but just from like jumping into it, you could get people that were already familiar with how to drive that way. It would be more intuitive if you were having to come in and serve later in the Army as someone that didn't train a lot on tanks to come in and be like, fuck. So it's like going forward, forward even more makes this tank track go faster.

And then if I pull this one back, it slows it down. But then when I'm turning that way, how do I know which speed and how to swing it? If they had some type of system where they put a wheel, a gas pedal, and a brake pedal in there and you're like well if i turn it this way and give it more gas that naturally just speeds up this side and they had something within the tank that was basically like we're just going to make it like a steering column so they lowered the difficulty i think they tried to bridge the gap to make it more um you were more apt to like get used to it very quickly going to take longer to train more tank drivers kind of if they just dumbed it down i kind of feel like that it just feels like a lot

of moving parts that can go wrong on these things. It does, but when, I mean, when you boil it down, maybe it's not because you would still have to design a system where the acceleration of each side of the track was tied to one lever versus maybe just a gas pedal where it was just,

I don't know. If you pop one of those tracks, though, it doesn't matter. It's going to stop you from turning either way. You're fucked, yes. 100%. And along those lines, this situation and waiting for these tanks, just gets, are we done?

You got anything else for tanks? No. God, I enjoyed that. Next up is just a bunch of them getting destroyed. Enjoyed that so much. You want to do bathroom break before that? Oh, sure. Okay.

Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it.

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the good stuff. Okay. So we already talked about the problems that are going to be facing the Vermacht. Now,

what makes it even harder is if somebody knows where you're going to attack, when you're going to attack, how you're going to attack, that's going to make it even more problematic, right? It's just so much more difficult

when the other side knows your plan. Yeah. I can't... This is the 2,000 to Super Bowl between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Oakland Raiders at the time

where John Gruden had just the year prior gone over to the Buccaneers. And the Raiders thinking to themselves, there's no way in hell. What are the chances we're going to be facing our old coach in a Super Bowl year, right? I mean, we can't afford to change our playbook because we're not going to run into him until you do.

And he knows every fucking thing you're going to do. even if we run into him he's not going to remember our playbook right he's not going to maybe unintentionally that was not me compared to the Raiders to the Germans either I was just saying modern day you know

no in the parliance of our times man in Tom and Mendoza we trust right in who and Tom and Mendoza well you got to say you would say Brady and Mendoza yeah

he's Tom now Brady played football. Listen, I've made my stance on this clear. At this point, call me what you will. But I'll make a deal with the devil if it means winning a Super Bowl. Tom's there. Whether I want him to be there or not. So yeah, Tom, fucking succeed.

Turns out your deal with the devil is the devil owning part of your team. I have stronger feelings about that than I do about these two people. But the two groups we're talking about. Okay. So, yeah, thanks to this spy system called Lucy that was based in the, Switzerland, but also but run by Bletchley Park in Britain? I believe the Swiss Lucy Spy Ring did have connection with Britain, but Stalin didn't trust Britain for any number of reasons, whatever runs through Stalin's mind.

So wasn't it that any information that he got from them, he would run them through this Lucy spy ring to see if the information matched up enough to where he could believe it? he had a two-factor authentication on the information that he was getting. I think what he ended up doing eventually is he was just like, I'm not even going to get the information from, or the Brith were like, he's got to pass everything through Lucy anyway, and we're involved with Lucy. So just have Lucy give him the information. Let's just save ourselves the time.

So, yeah, British intelligence, code breakers, they had broken the enigma, and I want to say, what was the other one? It was an enigma and something else. but they had broken that. They were able to intercept the plans. And this allowed the Red Army to turn Kursk into just basically a 150 mile wide trap. This was if you gave Kevin McAllister two months

to prepare for Harry and Marv to break into that house. You saw what Kevin did in the night. Well, yeah, if you don't want to give me any more time after they had squandered the May 3rd date, they push it back to June 12th and then they pushed it back to June 20th so we're just giving them more time to intercept more information

what is Stalin doing on that side of the eye of listening today? He's like, wait, now they're going back to the 12th and then very shortly after that maybe the 20th he's like this has to be wrong. Okay, so at that point when he's hearing about the delays he's just going more minds,

very more minds because in the time it took for the Nazis to get their shit together the Russians use the entirety of the time to prepare the defenses in the form of like almost a million mines across the whole cell unit in these areas the most critical like tactical zones

the mine density reached like they said 2,400 anti-tank and 2,700 anti-personal mines per mile they were about a tank of foot or a mine a foot had they lined them up and they built these defenses in this like almost an eight layer there were three main fortification type layers but there were like eight total layers of the defense that they would have on this they said it was the most multi-layered defensive network in the history of warfare what is it it was three front facing lines three fallback lines and then there were like two lines back behind kursk just in case

Yes. Through this... It was like reinforcements that they could then send those lines up to bolster the other ones. We're talking about them digging out 50 miles of just anti-tank trenches by themselves. So these aren't any other really kind of embankments. Unfortunately, they're going to forget... They have so many miles of anti-tank trenches that they tend to forget where they put them. And that's going to be a thorn in their side later on.

So Kursk itself, the battle. It's considered one of if not the... largest battle in history. And if you look up what is the most, you know, the, what do people know most about Kerk, Kursk, if they know anything about it? And someone will say, oh, largest tank battle. So it's known as the largest tank battle because it is the largest tank battle. But in and of itself, it's one of the largest battles just because it features almost every aspect of like this new modern form of warfare. The only thing that it doesn't have is a naval. component to it. So this is armor fighting in numbers against each other on a scale that was never

seen at that point. It hasn't been seen since. You then get artillery that is set up to go against one another in insane numbers. And then you have the Russian Air Force against the Luftwaffe also going at it in pretty staggering numbers as well. And because this just happens to be the instance in which there's the most tanks there that's kind of why it's known in that sense but on par for what happens during this battle it happens in a really small amount of time but from a casualty perspective this thing doesn't go that far or like rank that far underneath stallingrad for all the equipment that we're going to talk about those numbers pale in comparison the only way that i can describe this is it's just stupid because we're

We've talked about some of these big involvements on the Western front. There's only so much room. You're only going to pack so many people in there. I want to say, how many troops did we land on D-Day? Like 140,000? Which sounds like a hell of a lot. And it was in a little area.

So these battle plans are finalized for July 5th, and that's secondary to this. The Soviets, just on the Soviet side, they had 2.6 million soldiers that were fighting in this Kersk, Scylian. It was that big. They had 2.6 million. The Germans were throwing 900,000 soldiers at them from the other side.

That was how many people were in this area. And as you were talking about, Soviet side, 47,000 guns. Those are those artillery pieces. I was talking about 47,000 artillery pieces. You had 5,900 aircraft, 8,900 tanks. On the German side, you had 10,000 guns. 1,800 aircraft, and 3,900 tanks. Just on numbers alone,

if the Germans could somehow ballpark, which they definitely couldn't, what the Soviets had over there, how do you begin to think that this is even still feasible? I don't think you do know what they have over there, because everything from, like you said, how compacted Europe was, if you were trying to ship something to the front line,

lines, there were only so many places that it could come from and so many places that it could travel to to get to the front lines. And they knew what that was. And they could get planes over those areas and try to spite troop movements or anything like that. Stuff was so far away in Russia that there may have been trains that were miles long hauling tanks. But if you're not there on that day or you're not surveilling that area, that train comes and goes and just drops off shitters, constantly moving stuff to the front. And that's one thing too. Every aspect about this was not in favor of the Germans. I'm trying to remember which episode we talked about it.

I think it was when we were talking about the German to, like when Germany invaded France. We talked about the differences in the rail lines, how each of the countries used a different gauge. And so you would have to either switch trains or you'd have to replace railway lines just in order to be able to move stuff. Well, in that 900,000 the Germans are going to put up, that's just troops. That's not a fighting force.

That's not the battle guys that are going in to fight. That's support staff and everybody else that's running behind the scenes. Whereas 2.6 million, even if you have 600,000 of them in support roles,

that's still 2 million people. 2 million people is just never, you're never going to beat 2 million people with less than a million people. It's just the mass never going to add up there. And I love that you're bringing up railway lines because this is what they're facing on the front. You also have partisan attacks that are the bane of the Nazi existence.

So leading up to this, by May, Soviet High Command had already made contact with some of these partisan groups to kind of coordinate these attacks in concert with military operations. In June, before this all kicks off, the partisans had already conducted over a thousand, attacks on railway lines in June alone. 30, 31 days in June, don't know, don't give a fuck. A thousand attacks is a lot of attacks a day.

Yeah. That they're seaging on these railway lines. By August, which is kind of after, I guess, the end of this engagement, 20% of the trains that the Germans were sending to the front were getting picked off by partisans. Yeah. So if you're looking for 100% supplies to try to stay in this thing, you're maybe getting 80%. And you're still getting information.

Kind of jumping back real quick to that Lucy spiring. Oh, yeah. So the guy that ended up, and this is, I'm going to look into this more because this might be a patron episode. His name was Rudolph Rossler. His code name was Lucy. Huh? The partisans?

No, this was the Lucy spiring. Okay. There's something called the Rail War that we're probably going to have to do one on two. Yeah. So this guy routinely passed like top secret German high command decisions to Moscow. Now, this guy sources inside Germany were so high. place that he often transmitted German operational plans within 24 hours of Hitler signing them. So what I mean by that is if he had people in those types of positions, all that information

has to go to is Moscow. Moscow forwards it to the partisans and says this is when train shipments are coming in. It's that simple. It's that fast to know when shit is coming. And the partisan thing is kind of interesting to me. I guess we can kind of get into some of these questions. questions now. I don't see how the ideology would ever allow this to happen. But what does the Eastern Front look like if the Germans go into Ukraine as liberators instead of antagonists? If they look at the Soviet Union, this is after all of the Ukrainian deaths and from the what happens when you can't grow crops? Famine.

Yeah. After this Ukrainian famine that kills millions of people in Ukraine because Stalin is pushing all of this wheat and shit towards Russia and towards Moscow. What happens if the Germans roll into Ukraine and say, hey, your Bolshevik overlords are holding you in this position hostage? We're here to fight back the Red Army who's killed millions of you

and done untold poor things to you in Ukraine, you can join greater Germany and fight for a cause that will protect you. If you drop that whole ideology of fuck the Bolsheviks and you go in there to try to liberate. But you're not going to drop that ideology. I get interesting. I mean, yeah, it's definitely going to help you,

but they had the mentality that everybody that was that side of Germany were like Untermensch and everything, that like they were subhuman. it's just one of those things that they had a chance, they had an ability, because we know what they did on their way into Barbarossa to some of those places. And had they not been fighting these partisans, like I was talking about this rail war that I'm sure we're going to have to do a Patreon on 100,000 partisans that had broken up into roughly 170 brigades from August to September blew up tens of thousands of rail lines in occupied Nazi territory. That was Operation Rail War, you said? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So they said that in June and July of 43 Parsons detonated over 20,000 explosive charges on rail lines in the German rear. They said on the eve of the battle, so like just the time frame leading up to that, they were destroying or delaying up to 30 supply trains a day. One of the SS Panzer Corps sought ammunition deliveries cut in half in the final days. So even before they started the operation, commanders were rationing. shells before the fighting even started. Probably not a good thing, right? Well, and then while they're also

trying to not only just get things by rail, because the gauge going into, I believe it was Russia, was different. So the German supply chain depended entirely on trains as much as possible. The Soviet rail system used a wider gauge track that was five feet and the European standard was

four feet, eight and a half inches. So they had to convert thousands of miles of Soviet track to the standard gauge and where they weren't converted, every single ton of ammunition fuel food, all had to be manually unloaded at stations or points and then loaded from European trains onto captured Soviet trains to get that stuff. That's a passive defense, right?

That's the only reason that you do that and don't have a standardized gauge on your rails. It's passive defense to know that if anybody invades your area, they can't use your rail lines because your rail sizes are different. Because what's the other reason not to? Well, I don't. It could have just been happenstance because when each country was developing its system, they found that one was more stable or the leading manufacturer of an engine made them in this size. But at some point in history, they discovered this maybe during World War I or something like that when this was, you know, train travel was definitely the main way.

Yeah. And be like, wow, these are really close. this would have stopped them from coming into our country via this way. The first country to get invaded in that sense was like, oh, fuck. Shouldn't made him so close. They sold us the rail lines. This is why. Well, and then what it ended up happening too is the German railway network had this huge shortage of engines

that were capable of handling not only like the brutal conditions, but also apparently coal on like the eastern front was like low-grade coal. coal and the engines weren't like capable of using it to convert the type of power that they had been designed for because they weren't going to be getting coal out of Germany. And so it would leave just like when they didn't have enough of this coal or enough, you know, power to transport this stuff, it would end up leaving these like supplies just sitting stranded like, stranded like hundreds of miles away in Poland. Doesn't do you much good there.

No. As far as the German plan, it was, would you call it? called a pincers movement. Yeah, it was just, it was like making, what is it when they peel off the, you ever watch someone make dumplings? Yeah. Okay. So you know how they just pinch off the dough in the little ball?

That's exactly what they're trying to do. That's the salient. They're trying to reach in there and pinch a ball off the dough. Trying to make a Russian dumpling. And then they're trying to flatten it out with their hands. And then they stick the little meat in it and all the little filling. And then they go around it and they pinch it again. The top part of this pincher was led by field marshal Gunther von Klug.

You also had Walter Model underneath him. We talked about both of them that was commanding the 9th Army. You also had two army cores, three Panzer Corps. The second Panzer Army was led by a man named Eric Heinrich Klubner. He had three army cores underneath him. Southern Pinser, you're going to have Herman Hoth as your first. field marshal Herman had or no you'll have

shit Eric von Manstein was your field marshal Hoth is going to have command of one army corps two panzer cores but one of those panser cores is the second SS Panzer Corps that's these bad motherfuckers Army

Army detachment Kemp was led by Werner Kemp which is great title to get your name as the The partition that you're in is your own little army detachment. He had the third Panzer Corps and two Army Corps. And the Red Army had a central front that was led by a man named Constantine Rukosovsky.

Bad-ass name. He was an Army General. He led four tank cores, ten rifle corps, and three air cores. This is what I find interesting in this is you're putting an Army General in charge of air cores that are separate from everything else. Like the Vermacht was all just one piece, right? They had their own high command or, wow, yeah, the Vermox, right?

Yeah, and then you had the Luftwaffe, which was the Air, and then you have the Kriegsmarine, which I see what you're getting at. You're saying they seem to all be their own separate things that had their separate leadership, and although they worked in conjuncture, I think this is a smart way to do it because this guy's like, I have armor, I have troops I can send with it, but he's not.

making the decisions for everything. He has a guy that's in charge of the tech. He has a guy that's in charge of the soldiers. And he's like, what do you need from him? And he was the guy that made stuff happen. He's like, that's going to happen. This is going to happen. Here we go. You don't have to run anything by air command. You already have these cores that you're in charge of. They're just there to help make the decisions on what's feasible to use these things for. Yeah, that makes some sense. Then there was the Verona's front, which was the south. It was led by Army General Nikolai Voughtitin. He had 10 rifle cores, three tank cores, and three air cores.

Judging by the numbers that we just talked about, it sounds like I named a whole shitload of different cores that the Germans had and then just kind of were very light on the Red Army cores. It's because the Red Army cores were huge. Yeah. Like the numbers were pretty incomparable to a rifle corps compared to just an Army Corps on the German side. The Panzer Corps on the German side were just a Frankenstein mish-mashing of all of these different tanks that they had in different numbers.

There were no uniform. Like every Panzer Corps didn't have two Tiger tanks, two Panther tanks, an elephant. No, they would do it to where they would have entire cores that were made up primarily of one type of tank and maybe a few others. But it was like they had like legacy or prestige cores that were going to have like, like the newest or heaviest equipment or that we're going to spearhead the attacks. Kind of jumping back real quick. And I know we're all over the board with this one, but just with the order of this, once the battle starts, it's all pretty quick.

It doesn't last very long. But just the preparation on this that the Soviets had. So with these guys being set, having a ton of soldiers available to them, they would have these mobile mining squads. So when German tanks managed to bypass like a known mine, field, these engineers would rush to like active breakthrough zones

under heavy fire and basically just like lay new mines. So like in certain video games where you do like a little thing and it launches mines all over the place, it was basically like a truck that was like, go, go! And guys would just go out and set mines where they thought the Germans were going to be. We would also have the Germans passing through areas

because not to give anything away during the battle, not all these defensive lines held back to Germans. But as they would pass, you would have other groups, that would be sitting behind where the Germans had just passed. And if there were any infantry that were following behind these tanks, which seems counterproductive, they would be attacked,

or they would mine everything back behind them. So once they got them on retreat, they weren't just trying to chase them down. They were chasing them through another minefield. So to shield the nearly almost 2 million plus men from like artillery and air raids, because again, there's going to be a huge artillery and a huge air component to this. the Russians used over 300,000 local civilians to dig this massive maze of defenses. This was, I think it was the largest system of, what I'm trying?

Largest system of like trenches and stuff like that that have ever been built. And I know you're thinking, well, it's not World War I. You know, they had all the trench warfare. Those were in smaller areas that was mostly in what part of France like. Verdun, Somme. Up in like northern France and like where the Benel, countries are. This was across this whole salient and also in layers. So they said it was 900 or sorry, 9,000 kilometers or over 500,000, sorry, 5,500 miles of trenches that were enough

to span across the entire United States and back. And instead also spreading out like their anti-tank guns in like a thin line to where it was one every half mile or quarter mile or whatever you want to say, what they would do is they would put them in these like heavily fortified clusters, and they call them pack fronts. And so each of these little strong points or pack fronts contained up to like 10 to 15 of these anti-tank guns basically linked under one commander. And they would hide completely until like a German tank platoon entered a kill zone and then just open fire simultaneously to obliterate the entire unit at close range.

So instead of giving them an opportunity when they went into this little area that they had designed to be funneled into by minefields and things like that, they would just basically wait till they came in there and then these little pack fronts would just completely open up. Were the pack fronts the ones that they dug in? So they were probably more like fortified in disguise like that, but they also had like obsolete tanks that they would bury up to like the bottom of the turret

or the top of the, not the top of the tank, but of the like chassis, I guess. And they would use them as low to the ground, basically reinforced pillboxes. When I read that, I heard it a couple times too, and after I read it, I was trying to picture it. I assumed that it was like they dug a slope down into something that they could then park it and back out of. But they just buried them? Nope, they did that in Desert Storm.

Okay. That's what they didn't. Yep. So river banks and hillsides were artificially shaved down to, like, create vertical dirt walls so the tanks couldn't climb them. They dug miles of like, steep, like, so I can't read right now. Deep ditches that were basically meant to kind of, again, funnel them or draw them in a certain direction. So it was in line of sight of Soviet anti-tank guns. 400 miles of barbed wire entanglements were strung up to separate their infantry from the tanks.

Because the tanks are usually going to be moving, could be moving in a faster pace. Or if they came under fire, they're going to be trying to get out of there. And then there was this thing named the Stepfront. And it was basically this massive force that had over half a million fresh troops, 1,500 tanks and 1,000 planes, but it was strictly forbidden from engaging in the initial fighting. Their sole purpose was to wait in hiding until the German army completely exhausted itself

trying to punch through the first few defensive lines, and then they were held for a fresh counteroffensive to just come in and try to sweep them. Well, it's better than having one army for defense, having one army for defense and having one army for offense. Exactly. And what's nuts is the whole, knowing their plan, it's not just knowing, okay, this is when it's going to take place,

this is who the players are. It's like Aldo Rain says off of Inglorious Bassey, he's like, we want you to know how many people are being invited and what type of shit they're bringing with them. It wasn't just that. It was also order of battle routes they were going to take. So even once it started if let's say the Germans broke through and started you know pushing toward their objective they knew where their objective was and they knew where they were going to be traveling so defenses were set up in places where they knew they were going to be coming from or the strongest points of the defenses it also didn't hurt that if they were going to get to kersk it was like a hundred miles that they had to travel wasn't it and most of the fighting when they break it down

that's how big the front was, but like they said that 90% of the fighting happened within an area of like a 20 mile stretch. They didn't even get into 20 miles. No, no, what I mean by the fact that think of how far like the trenches would have to be or the defensive lines. They said that 90% of stuff happened within a 20, not the singular 20 miles,

but within a 20 mile area of that together is where like 90% of the encounters and like battles happened. Didn't even sniff, Kurt. No. Didn't even lay eyes on Kersk. It was just, they were so far away. And every single thing that just continually happened to the Germans was, I mean, it was incredible. So we already kind of answered these questions, but just to run through them, you answered coming into Russia's liberators.

Interesting thought, but ultimately you're never going to give up the ideology that put you there in the first place. why not hide behind the highly defensible Deneper line? I think the answer is easy enough to that. Hitler was the answer to that. It's just dipshit. You could say that to the first question, too. My answer to the first question is you're not going to go into Ukraine as liberators because Hitler. What was the ultimate goal?

It was, as you talked about earlier, to nip this thing off like a dumpling and try to capture a million Russian soldiers. to use his slave labor? Yeah, man. It doesn't make sense when you kind of try to lay it all out. But, I mean, we've gone into the psychology of it and everything. But when you're one of those military guys and you've seen so many other guys in your position, maybe disappear. Are we taken out of position for disagreeing with him? You're still not super late in the war.

I mean, 43. I think we kind of, again, this is a U.S. thing because we're, we're still not super late in the war. thing because we learn most about this war after 44 when D-Day happens and we get, you know, on to mainland France or into mainland Europe. But so much of this war has fought before 44, at least in Europe. It didn't start until we got there. It didn't? No. World War II and we weren't here yet. You're not thinking like an American. You're not thinking like American. Yeah, sorry. But I, I, no one was in a position to tell him no that they wanted to try to maintain their positions.

He was not a good, that's the thing. He was never a good military commander. The reason why they got, they had as much success early on is because no one had seen anyone to fight like that. It would be the equivalent of like all of a sudden an infantry is like, dude, dude, we're, you know, moving along. and then all of a sudden people roll up on horses. The first time people rolled up on horses and just ran them down, that's kind of what it was. The advancement from World War I to World War II

and the fact that how the Germans played it, yeah, they just mowed over them and gave nobody time to take a breath. They created the fast break. Except they were able to accomplish the fast break because they would keep guys up and attacking 72 hours straight by putting them on meth. The Purvitin flowed deep into the German ranks.

What did they call something chocolate? Vermachalk chocolate or something like that. They called it Stuka pills. Stuka sugar or something shit. Stuka sugar maybe. And then I think it was Erming Gering pills. So Guring was the name of the Purvitan. Interestingly enough, and I don't believe this at all,

This is a little look into the Patreon episode. They said that they were handing out these pills to the soldiers for any sort of quick blitz because they knew that they could get about 24 to 36 hours straight of fighting out of them. They said they would get 72 at times. 72. But then the problem with that was they were just dead for the next two days. Like they could, they saw the lungs, they saw the chest inflate and deflate and they felt the pulse. but that was really all they were getting out of them.

For the 1940 invasion of France, tank drivers, infantrymen, and liftwaffe pilots took three to five pills a day. Oh my God. So it allowed them to march, drive, and fight for up to 72 hours without sleep. Even if you are fighting at your maximum, without that, you're fighting for maybe like 24 hours,

but after that, and especially if you're making moves based off the fact, like defensive moves, and you're like, we just got to hold off for like 24 hours, and then they'll have to rest and bring in reinforcements and we can catch a breath. When you're just like, we're on hour 36 and they're still just like hammering us.

And you're wondering why you're under attack and there's like a whole army cord that's pointed the opposite direction, firing at nothing. Like, oh, they're hallucinating. They think we're over there. Everyone quiet. They're on hour 48 of the purvant.

They're fighting dragons. They're not even fighting Frenchmen. But yeah, I mean that you're, no one told them no. Yeah, the last question, and this might put this into a little bit more perspective, like we said. The jumping off point of this is finally hard date July 5th. Operation Husky, the Allied invasion into Sicily, starts July 9th. Four days.

You're telling me that German intelligence couldn't put two and two together to say, hey, there's a massive buildup in North Africa that's headed directly for Sicily. four days before it happened? You knew where it was building up, maybe, but at the same time, you just got your ass kicked out of North Africa. You probably do still have a network there that's able to tell you certain information,

but especially planning an invasion there, they're going to be high alert for that kind of stuff. So information is probably going to be a little bit sketchy. You know, regardless, though, that that's the whole goal of them having North Africa is foreign invasion. So regardless of the buildup, because there is going to be a continual buildup, just because they're going to be moving people into North Africa. You don't know when that's going to be.

Maybe there's inklings. But again, you're still Hitler making the decision of being like, hey, I got to try to impress Benito by trying to win this thing. When you know that you're already down from a numerical perspective, from a strength perspective, and that you just basically gave them like an extra. two months to basically to to reinforce themselves you have no idea they know your exact plans but even if you were like oh you know do you think they're aware of some of it they're like probably sir we should probably call off he's like but they don't know all of it right they can't know all of it there's no way it's not like even on july fourth the night before there's two sapper defectors from the german side that come over and basically give them

the hard start date and time that Stalin then has enough time to run back through that Lucy spy ring, get the confirmation from him and say, okay, well, before jumping hour, before zero hour, why don't we just bomb the fuck out of the front? Yeah, while they're getting ready, while they're in marshalling yards, while they're getting everybody lined up in everything, an hour when they're trying to give their speeches or getting their tanks topped off, why don't we just open up on them? Hopefully it's effective. It scatters them.

But at the very least, what are they going to think when they just got to the starting line? And we know exactly we're already firing. Like there's no surprise. Yeah. They're having to drive into us firing. I, for as much as the intelligence helped the Red Army, there was still the fact that they were doing some of their own reconnaissance and that they were just not equipped on the command side to really understand what was going on

because they had pinpointed a bunch of airfields in German-held territory that they were planning on going and bombing. And there was one excerpt that I heard read from one of the Luftwaffe pilot diaries. It said they heard the sound of planes as they were loading up to take off. they were lined up tip to tip on the runway ready to go and they were waiting and somebody radioed in and said we can't leave because of the air traffic in the skies they immediately knew that that was a red army that was coming as they were trying to take off and the scariest thing for the lufwaffe at that point in time was losing aircraft on the ground i think that's probably the most embarrassing thing that can happen to an air force right is losing aircraft on the ground it's got to hurt the worst. So the excerpt said that as he was sitting there, the plan was to try to back off all of the bombers so they could launch the fighters up first to go and try to handle the red air force that's coming. And once they realized they couldn't do it, everybody kind of batten down the hatches. And then the Soviet Air Force flew over the top of them. They were heading to some of these

dummy airports that the Germans had built to go attack them and they're bombing empty airfields and bypassing these Luftwaffe airfields that are full because their orders are to go beyond them. How lucky do you have to feel in the Luftwaffe to be? You better hope they're not flying in like staggered formation where they're just like, oh my God, they passed us and they're like, we weren't your assignment. The guys behind us have got you guys. So they were able to launch their fighters, get up on the tails of the Air Force

that just passed overhead and start taking out some of the bombers. And in truth, the Red Air Force, whatever the fuck they're called, I don't even know what they're called. I think it would be like the Red Air Force. Red Air Force. They didn't have air superiority

for like the first four or five days. And I know that the first four or five days doesn't sound like a lot because in truth, it's really not a lot. This battle doesn't take that long. No, this is like the entirety of the battle for as many people and as much equipment gets destroyed. I think it's being a total of like a month and 15 days or something like that, isn't it? 45, 50 days somewhere in there.

And really the end days are just the Red Army mopping up a couple areas that they want to take back. Yeah, because the official, as far as the German or Hitler is concerned, this ends a lot quicker. Yeah. Yeah, they got a solid weekend. The South Pincers decided to move out and start clearing. some of the minefields on July 4th, the night of July 4th, going into the 5th. So before, I think they said, crazy enough, I wonder if it's because it was this, or it's this far north.

They said sunrise was at 4 o'clock in the morning. That feels like a pretty early sunrise. So from midnight to 3, the south pincer was down clearing out mines, which sounds like the worst job in the army. Yeah, they said it was just metal detectors. and then people with sticks pointing in like at an angle to be able to hit them. It's a bad game to play out there. But it did help them as they were able to advance a little bit further on the first day.

The North Pinser that was led by Modal begins attacks after this all-out shelling of the front line. Yeah. Which I'm sure had to shake them pretty bad to start. Well, and then it happened in reverse. So basically, after the shelling happened, then the Germans got on all their artillery and started then shelling these defensive positions that they had sided in and everything like that as well.

So then they're just both going at each other. Well, the way that these things sort of happen when you're on a timeline, because there was a timeline for Citadel, because, again, Husky is going to happen, and they know it's going to happen, but they're still pot committed. It's just about the Soviets slowing down the advance.

And after this artillery barrage, from the Germans, the Germans send in the infantry first, and then they're supported by these heavy tanks and guns. And all it took was the initial delay to start throwing these off. The first day saw in advance of about five miles in the north. That's five miles sounds like a lot. And it is a lot in comparison to what they're going to do after this, because I think they said after the initial first two days,

they were fighting over like half miles. Yeah. Models forces kind of hit this really dense network. And they end up fighting around this like important city. I think it's called Pondri. And it was like a rail junction city where then stuff could get brought in to try to resupply even more so once the salient was taken. And within a week, the northern attacks had stalled completely. And they'd only advanced.

I think they said six to seven miles. So a day they were getting a mile. And again, this is like... And this was like 120 miles across is what this thing is. Manstein's Southern Force, they had better success. I think they were a little bit better stocked up with the Tigers and the Panthers. So they were able to punch through that initial Soviet defensive line a little bit easier. And they advanced, I think, roughly like 18 to 25 miles toward their objective,

which was this little town called... I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of this. Prokahorvaca. So that was their total. On their first day, they were seven miles in. So they had fared a little bit better in the north. They had broken through the first belt, and they were laying siege on the second belt. After they broke through the first belt, there's this clash with these T-34s,

and this is the first time that you see, like, heavy tank-on-tank engagement. And there was a tiger that had broken down, and these T-34s, and these T-34s, and these T-3-4s, and this, 34s were advancing to finish the job. And there was a second tiger that had come up and basically ran defense circling this broken down tiger and firing at all of these T-34s enough to where it had knocked two T-34s out. And they were able to rescue the crew that were inside the tiger and get back behind their line. Yeah. And it was kind of the first look of the Germans maybe having a little bit more confidence

because they just saw a tiger knockout two T-34s. Yeah, but it depends on the instance too. Because basically the tactic that the Red Army was going to use with the tanks was you guys aren't going to fire at them from distance. We're going to set you guys up to where you were basically going to run at these guys. And you're going to stay mobile. You're going to step to speak because I want to say that the T-34s could go like 30 miles an hour. Pretty fast.

So they could move pretty quick. and if they're moving, they're much harder to hit. The rush or the German tanks would have to slow down, try to get their bearings and everything to fire on them. They were like, don't fire until you get within like 500 meters to where your firing is actually possibly going to do something, or there are multiple tanks there that can open fire. In fact, get even closer.

Send a couple runners out there to draw their fire to keep their attention because we need to get on the side of them to knock out their tracks. it was more of a, it's kind of the situation where the Nazis are kind of walking in there like they're a grizzly bear in the forest. Hard to take down. It's going to be able to take down something, anything smaller than it if it's just attacking it. But then they're like, no, we're going to operate as wolves, though. And we're just going to go ahead and bring in a whole bunch of them, draw their attention in different directions and eventually just wear them down with numbers. Well, yeah, what's the most important part of a German attack, speed?

Yeah, if you can slow them down. Or you don't have surprise. I kind of feel like that's what it was when you boil it down. It was the surprise of having them be on you so, you know, in such overwhelming numbers. If you can slow them down and throw way more numbers at them. Yeah. Then you're going to grind them down. I would also say that the three months in between when this plan was decided and launched was a loss at that point.

because three months of waiting for tanks and trying to make a decision is three months that the Red Army had a chance to pump that many more tanks, that many more planes, get that many more trucks in from Len Lees, put that many more guys on the front, dig that many more trenches. It was just every day they fell further and further behind a starting point that wasn't feasible in the beginning. Well, I mean, in some of these situations, they said the most intense like close quarters combat. When you're saying close quarters and you mean tank battles, this is occurring at like 50 to 200 meters. So that would basically be what like 150 to 600 feet, something close to it? During the battle that we're going to talk about, I heard numbers of about 30 yards. Oh, no, no. There were certain circumstances on that.

Yeah. But like things, a lot of like large scale stuff was also happening within that, you know, distance. Yeah. with Red Army coordination still poor, they didn't really have a counterattack in the north. Reds bowed up in defense in the village of Okorovtka that was in the second belt. And Germans spent most of the day two

just failing to dislodge these Soviet forces from this town. I don't know why they felt that this town, this village was so important, but they just had to take it. Maybe it was a win. They picked it. Take this. Yeah. The North and Modal spent the next three days attempting to take this town called Ponrienne and Okatovka.

There was more house-to-house-fighting in Pornri that you were talking about that was intense. I was wrong earlier. Pornri is the one that gets referred to as the Stalingrad of the Kursk salient. Southern flank had made better inroads. like you were talking about in Porn Rui. They'd advanced 18 miles by the end of July 8th. They'd taken the second belt. They were cut off on the way to go in this place called Obion,

and they shifted their focus. Prokerovka is what it's called. Yeah, so they shifted their focus onto Prokirovka, is where they were going after they were turned away from Obion. July 9th, there is a meeting in the north with all of the North commanders where they realized that they just didn't have the juice to break. through. They decided that this wasn't going to be feasible. Commander Klug wanted to continue. By the 8th and the 9th, the thrust had basically stalled, and he wanted to keep pushing because

he wanted to draw support to basically help the south. The only reason that the south went further than the north or had some measure of success is because at one point where they got into, or they were going into the salient, there was a change that one of the guys had made, one of the commanders of one of the cores or something like that. He's like, we're actually going to go this way. We're going to go a little bit left of this city. And they said because they were going along and had reinforced the points and knew where the Nazis were going to go, that guy made those decisions without clearing them with the chain of command. So they didn't pick up on it when it came back through the Lucy network. And they were. And so at one point they're looking like, are those fucking German tanks

driving on the freeway over there, and they're like, yeah, they're like, they're not supposed to be there. So that's why they end up getting a little bit further. And as they did, you know, threaten the breakthrough, I think that's when they deployed that fifth guards tank army. And isn't that who met them in Prokharovka for that battle? That is right. This battle would take place on July 12th.

And would you say that Russian history paints this as something? more than it was. Yes. Yeah. We'll talk about why that was, but I believe the telling that I had heard that came through the network and was kind of standard for a very long time, was that the Soviets had launched 1,500 tanks. Is that what it was? I know what the actual more agreed upon number is. I think that it was 1,500 tanks. I think that it was 1,500 tanks. believe they said that the Germans had launched like 600 and they had launched like 900, which I can't even really imagine.

That sounds like the biggest tank battle that could ever take place anywhere. Numbers are a little bit different. So this happens 54 miles away from Kursk. So they've made that far of an advance. It's near Prokirovka that we talked about. The second SS Panzer Corps, so the cream of the crop that the Germans have to throw on. the Woff and SS Panzer Divisions. They take on this Soviet

Fifth Guards tank. The German strength I think this is kind of agreed upon is they had 294 tanks and assault guns. You can correct me if you have a different number. The Soviet strength was 616 tanks and self-propelled guns. That number is still

insane in my mind because that's a whole lot of equipment out there at once. But it makes a lot more sense than 1,500. So 500 Soviet tanks busted ass across the battlefield to close the distance on the SS. The reasoning, and I think you were talking about a little bit earlier, is the tiger's greatest strength is to fire a distance. Yes.

Knock them out before their gun even comes into play. So if you can go ahead and scoot those T-34s up close to where the Tiger tank has a tougher time, Tiger Tank has a tougher time. Getting a shot off on you accurately, that's going to help. Also, the artillery bombardment that's coming from the German side will have to stop and cease once you get close enough to the German tanks. I think they said that's calling, give him a hug. By closing the gap to under 100 meters, basically the Soviet tank drivers use their speed to get in there, mix it up with the German lines to basically prevent the enemy from like maneuvering. or from calling in heavy artillery

without hitting their own vehicles. So they're breaking it down to just basically at that point, it's just tank on tank. You know who didn't have to make a call back to their artillery because they knew what was going to be happening? The Russians? Yeah. Yeah.

Russian artillery is still hammering down on the German side as the Russian tanks are closing the gap. This, from what I've heard, just kind of turns into a game of bumper cars, which is so crazy to think that somebody would have the balls to see a tank coming towards them and think, I'll just go right at them. We're just going to play a game of tank chicken

except for nobody's going to bail out of this and they're just going to smash into each other. The thought of these things bouncing off of each other and you had infantry commingling with this whole thing that's going on. How many guys got run over in this? Way too many. They said it basically just,

became like this weird as much as it could be. They said this weird like claustrophobic massive just like smoke and dust and like the smell of burning steel and explosions that you were hearing from tanks that had been, you know, penetrated. But all of their like ammo racks and everything going off as well. Penetrated works because this was a tank orgy. Yes. And that's what they wanted is because they were going to over, it's like a swarm of bees is what they were trying to do. So they deliberately engage at like close range basically to just say hey that greatest strength

you guys have that 88 that's supposed to knock us out before we get here well we're here and so now it's on parody because if we're going to shoot you yeah you can aim at one of us but there's two of us to each side of you hitting you in the tracks or hitting you in the like armor that's not as

thick and wouldn't you know it the panthers and the tankers were not great on the battlefield because all of the prior testing had been skipped, and they started having electrical problems left and right. You have the elephant that we had talked about that was this big, massive gun on tracks, had terrible vision. And the elephant didn't have to be taken out by the T-34s,

because it would be taken out by just infantry going on a stroll, slapping a magnetic, what was it a charge? Magnetic mines. They would just throw them on the side of the track. and try to blow the tracks out. They pulled the same thing basically. Have you seen saving private Ryan? I've seen saving Ryan's privates.

Is that a... Shaving Ryan's privates? Yeah. Same idea. Same plot. Different plot. God damn it. Don't.

A lot of penetration. Nope. You're going to get so much shit from this. Oh, no. More? Yes. This one's only a two and a half hour movie. You should be able to watch this.

The fight at the end is there against a, it might be a panther or a tiger, but the guys they're hiding in like the foxhole next to where the tank's going to be in. And as it comes by, they take these sticky grenades and put it on the wheels of the tank and it blows the tracks off. So like you're saying, in these situations where these tanks aren't defended from the rear like these elephant ones, they're just walking up and disabling them because once they're disabled, that thing can't rotate. Don't walk in front of the tank. And then they can just get up closer to it and put charges on the side of the tank and try to blow the thing open. They found out that because of the overheating thing with the Panthers,

what they would do is they would walk up behind it with Molotovs. And because the top portion was where the grates were to allow cooling and the exhaust to get out, they would toss them in there. The fire would go down. It would melt the fuel lines and would start fires and the engines and destroy them or force the guys out of the tanks. I used to think the vodka was the most Russian thing on the planet. Like if you say vodka, the first thing that you'd,

think is Russia. Vodka. Vodka, yes. There's nobody else that I associate with a Maltov cocktail. Like, everybody makes vodka now. Maltov cocktails are pretty specifically Russian. Moldov is a pretty Russian name. They go back a very long way in the history of fighting.

We have all these advanced T-34s and all these tiger tanks out there. And one of their greatest weapons against tanks was just a glass that was filled with accelerant that had something shoved down in there and then lit and they just throw them and walk away. Could have used to have been old lady's panties. You tore into strips and you turned into Molotov. No woman in Kursk had any underwear left because that's what they were using for the wicks and the cocktails. All like put yourself in the mindset of your job is you're out here in a tank battle, but you're not in a tank. You're out here laying in a ditch waiting for the tank to go over you.

and then you have to wait for your friends or your buddies to be like okay it's your turn as soon as the thing passes us run up behind it throw on the magnetic mine or throw the molotov or do whatever you're going to do and then get back into the trench you you're just hearing shit explode all around you guns are firing all around you and you're walking up to this just behemoth death machine and it's just like, please don't turn around please don't start turning and you're just trying to be like so I just stick it here on the side of it

the whole time you've got to be worried you're going to get spotted they can't see shit inside the tank they're like Vasili quickly hurry and the whole time everything is running through your mind is this can't be this easy right

or is someone else in another tank going to see me behind and try to fire their machine gun at me somebody's going to pop out of the top the commander port and they're going to shoot me. It's going to be that simple. I would say that as terrifying as that job sounds,

the job that I wouldn't want to be on is the machine gun nests. Because they said these machine gun nests, they obviously tried to bomb them out with artillery, but basically the way that they would overrun these nests is they would send a wave of troops until the machine gun

exhausted all of its ammo and then they would overtake it by the guys that didn't get shot. I wouldn't want to be the front of the line because you know what's going to happen. You're just fodder for bullets at that point. Yeah, you're there and just soak it up. As soon as if you're running and you start hearing the clicking, that thing out of ammunition, you're so happy.

You've got to be hoping you're close enough to get to them before they're either able to pick up their own weapons or reload it. Yeah. If you hear that thing run out, I just, it's so scary to think of what the infantry did. And that's on a battlefield where you have hundreds of tanks swarming on each other and fighting. For the most part, the weirdest part about this Prokavrovka battle is the numbers that come out of it. Because it sounds stupid. The Germans lost, they said 43 to 80 tanks and assault guns.

The number that I heard that was shocking was I believe that they said that they had lost like a total of four Tiger tanks. tanks actually. Yeah. And the numbers of reporting are a little bit different because the Russians counted a lost tank as something that they had put out of battle because on their side when they lost a tank, they didn't go try to retrieve it because they knew they had five more coming. Or they knew that if you push the line a little bit further, go back and get in one of the empty tanks, our guys will get that tank back up and working and someone else get in it. German spent a lot of time trying to get their tanks back. They couldn't manufacture them as fast. Yeah, everything that you had you had to work with.

There was nothing else coming in reserve. So if you lost a tank on a battlefield, your ass was out there trying to get it fixed and drive it back to behind your lines. So the Germans losing that much. I mean, that's pretty nuts. They had 842 casualties. There were 19 aircraft that were either destroyed or damaged.

Again, a finite resource at this point in time. So talking about that, just because some notes on kind of the air battle because we haven't gone into that a lot. Oh, yeah. So at this point, was more dominated by the Luftwaffe in the beginning of this. But at this point in the war, the Russians had designed a plane, and it was kind of along the same lines as what they were doing with their tanks or vehicles.

They would just design one model that would work pretty well, and then just make a shit ton of them to where, oh, you're a couple planes up in the air. Well, we're going to send six planes at you. Yeah, your plane may be better, but you're not going to shake off three guys on each of your tails. So their main plane was a fighter. It could also drop bombs, but then it had a gunner in the back as well. So you could use it to also like strafe the ground and stuff like that. And they would use them for actually trying to like pick off smaller tanks.

The Germans had the Stuka, which was the one that used to do the dive bombing that had the horns on the wings that would make that. They strapped these cannons under each of the wing and they would use those as dive bombing tank killers as well. that was the impression that I kind of got was it feels like air superiority meant more of fighting off and trying to protect just low-flying battlefield attackers. You were trying to protect your tanks by shooting down the aircraft that were trying to shoot down your tanks, while at the same time hoping their aircraft didn't shoot down your aircraft trying to shoot down their tanks. A lot of it sounds like it was fairly low to the ground fighting, though. Like it was, they were kind of strafing the battlefield a little bit,

trying to fire down at tanks when they could, but then also having fighters going out and trying to pick off the radar. They said the model that the Red Army used to do its, bombing runs and everything was specifically meant for, like, low altitude stuff because it even had extra armor, like underneath it and everything to protect. Just from flat guns. Kind of in the same way that, like,

the 8-10 Warhog has that really reinforced cockpit in area, because it does slow, like, and it goes to take out tanks as well, kind of the same idea. The thought of an airplane being slow and still staying in the air is Until you hear it coming back Don't do on the other side of that We went through all the Germans The Soviet side fared a lot worse

340 tanks and self-propelled guns were destroyed here 3,563 casualties 14 aircraft lost And again the reason why they are counting these as legitimate is because they didn't try to go fix these 340 tanks or self-propelled guns, because guess what? There's that many coming on the train. The next train. The very next day. But this does end up result. This is not considered a, they call it a strategic defeat for the Red Army, but it was a victory in the sense that they pushed them back out. All you're trying to do,

the only reason that you wouldn't count this as a win is if the Nazis got past you. Yes. So when they're talking to Stalin and he's like, we heard you lost many tanks. He's like, I did. He's like, we heard you lost a lot of men. He's like, we did. He's like, so what was he? How are you feeling? He's like, I'm sensational. Fantastic. Worth everyone. What do you say that? Because they're back where they came from. It doesn't matter. You see how many, you see how big Russia is? You see how many people I have? You see how many people have killed already? This was a circus game in Russia just spent $300 to win a bear. But they won the bear. They're walking away with the bear. And guess what?

They're cash rich. The 12th is a pretty remarkable day for just what happens here because that same evening after Prokirovka happens. And I'm sure Hitler hadn't gotten any reports here because he might not have, he was always going to do this. He meets with Klug and Manstein in East Prussia, which is in Poland. Operation Husky had begun two days earlier. and the shift of troops and arsenal was now necessary.

So it was time for Hitler to call off Operation Citadel. This, and this is where the German lore kind of, I don't know, sticks in my craw a little bit. Because they make it sound like Hitler was always going to pull these troops off to feed Operation Husky, or to feed into Operation Husky. Some of the troops that they had pulled off of the line didn't go anywhere. They just returned to Germany.

A lot of the Luftwaffe that they pulled off returned to Germany to try to defend themselves against these bombing raids that were coming from the Western powers. Well, yeah, because as soon as, like, it was just going to get closer and closer, if they were starting to be able to get to the Rhineland and things like that.

Yeah, it seems like this was more of a Hitler was all in on this idea and then just used Husky as an excuse to pull out of all this. Klug was relieved. Manstein wanted to go all in. And Manstein after the war was still in full belief that they had a chance to make it to Kursk and to not only make it to Kursk, but to take Kursk. I think that's the other thing that I just realized as I was saying that sentence is they can do everything that they can to make it to

Kursk, how fortified was Kersk? Because all these villages that they fought these door to door fights in, these house-to-house combat, what happens when you get to Kursk? What do they have in Kursk? It was going to be worse the further end that they went. It's fucking nuts.

And then what was going to happen if they got too far and over-extend themselves? And then what happens when these reinforcements? Like, imagine it, like, they almost got the pinch. Like, you put your fingers like this and your fingers are almost touching. And then all of a sudden, this reinforcement of this step force comes in and literally just cuts into each of those lines and then cuts off your salient. Like they didn't know what they had. In fact, honestly, it's probably lucky because if they would have stayed there and kept pouring

resources, even if they would have got more than seven miles in from the north, even if they would have reestablished themselves going in. Like you said, what was going to happen in Kursk as they got closer? I would have been another Stalingrad probably You would have had an encirclement at that point in time, I'm sure I think it was July 13th that he ordered the halt to the operation Citadel And was basically like well we need to transfer German forces to the Italian front And I'm not going to say to their credit because they're dumb as shit

But this SS Panzer group had continued operation with very little success until the 17th And at that time was when they began the withdrawal but four more days they continued to push and just got nowhere. They were spinning their tracks trying to get there. And this withdrawal begins when that step front that you were talking about is about to engage in an offensive. Yep. And you're going to be chasing the Germans not only back through all of the area that they just struggled to get through. You had the partisans on the other side that are watching them come towards them and just

rubbing their hands together. So what you're basically looking at is whereas the Germans were trying to pinch that salient closed and kind of make that line all the way across. Think of the furthest west portion that the Russians are in control of.

The very tip of the bulge. The very tip. The reservoir tip of the bulge. Basically what the Russians are going to do on this counteroffensive is they're just going to take the salient the bulge and they're just going to try to bring everything up level with the westernmost portion

of that and start trying to kind of widen out the walls of that. They're going to try to rame it out is what they're going to do. Well, you don't need to push from the bulge. You already have the majority of the bulge under your control. It's the other sides around it that you need to bring forward. That's what I'm saying is you're just working your way kind of from the outside, like pushing it to get level

with that western portion. Soviet offensive in the north begin with Operation Kutuzov. And they were planned. That's the thing. They knew so much about the German plan that it wasn't just like the Germans are pulling back

we should do something it was when the Germans start pulling back we initiate this that's already worked that already has a force dedicated to it that I think is the most it was like a fresh army

like you said of like half a million you're ready to go you're ready to tear into these assholes again Kutuzov pushes into Orel which was a place place that the Germans had held for a while, widening out this salient.

And the other cores are beginning to join to push on this Orel, or push from this Orel salient. At that point in time, the other Germans that were off of the SS Corps and the other groups, because again, we didn't mention a lot of these cores because there's so many soldiers out there that if we were to keep track of all the movements of these things, this would be a 15-hour episode. You just talk about the mass of movements is basically where it is. So all of these troops are starting to gather back with the Germans, unknowingly misunderstanding that they're all coming into one area and the Soviets are beginning to make a little bit of a Stalin grab-type grab

around these people in the South. The Soviets had one approach to fighting at this point in time, and it was the battering ram approach. There weren't going to be any feints, there wasn't going to be any fancy footwork. here. This was just throwing straight rights. It's, it's, there's, you know, when you see a train derail. Yep.

And every car just goes after it and it just keeps going and nothing is slowing down. That's kind of how it is. Is it take out the first one. There's another one behind it. Take out that one. Eventually, we're going to get close enough to you that they're fighting two different types. They're both fighting a war of attrition. Yeah.

But they have different definitions of what the war of attrition is for Stalin. the war of attrition is, yes, I will win this war, and I will have the most attrition of anybody, but I will win the war by having the most attrition. Yeah, he might not have the correct definition for attrition. His was just like, yeah, yeah, that's definitely what it's going to take to win this is. Well, there were days with this battering room approach where they would slam into the Germans, and then nothing would happen for three or four days while the Soviets brought in more reinforcements to do it again.

because there was a lot of people that were dying. Yeah. It was, okay. We'll mourn them for 15 seconds, but we hear that the trains are coming back in with more and more soldiers, and once they would reload, they would batter them again, and just continue to push them west. They attempted an encirclement on the German 9th Army,

and the German 9th Army stayed in this pocket for far too long. This was a very, very close to a full encirclement, and to take, I believe it was the 6th Army that got taken in Stalin Greed? Yes, I believe so. And then have the 9th Army get taken and cursed directly after that. There's nothing dumber than losing two encirclements. Yeah.

If it happens to you once. Yeah, the same thing 400 miles west. Get encircled once, shame on you. Get encircled twice. Shame on me. Yeah. They were able to escape and the 9th Army goes into retreat. There was a concentrating defensive force that began to lose ground pretty quickly, as I was talking about, before they exited this pocket that was about to be taken.

The conclusion of this offensive in the north was the liberation of Smolensk. And this was just, I wouldn't call it a route simply because the Soviets lost so many soldiers, but this was just an ass kicking at the very least. It's so weird that you can consider The only measure of victory That is chalked up as a victory in this situation Is that they were able to force the Germans back Yep They pushed them back

They ceased to allow them to go on the offensive For the rest of the war on the eastern front In that matter But when you're looking at the casualties It somehow defies defies logic when you're looking at it to say Russia continued to be the aggressor and continue to push them back. Because when you start listing out

860,000 casualties Oh yeah, we still got the south. Okay. Operation Rumianstev. Oh, that's right. Didn't begin in full until August 3rd. This was preceded by a pretty righteous artillery barrage. This was the dude that has the longer name Rorostock or what? Rostakov, I believe, was in the north.

This is another Russian name that we talked about earlier. By August 5th, they'd take in and liberated Belgarod. I want to say Belgrade so much, but I think it's Belgrade, because Belgrade somewhere else. They reached the outskirts of Karkov, August 12th. Karkov was the one that they had lost previous two operations. That was the one Manstein had taken, right? It was kind of, yeah, I guess you would say it was where the Russian counteroffensive stopped at that point in time.

That's what essentially built up them taking that as what created the salient. There were two SS Panzer divisions that met them for just another round of tank battles. This is fighting that's so intermingled with these tank battles. And again, we're talking about a little over a month since this whole thing started. More Soviet losses were absorbed and taken until they stopped messing with the second SS Panzer and just focused on liberating the city. Heavy fighting continues all through the city until they end up achieving liberation on August 23rd. So if you're on the outskirts by the 12th and it takes 11 days to take it,

you're going to see a lot more losses in those 11 days because you're just getting closer. As you just said, this was the first time that a major. German offensive had been stopped before achieving a breakthrough in the entirety of World War II. If you don't get the news back somehow and stop the news before the papers hear about Stalingrad, the next piece of news that's coming is for the first time in the entirety of World War II that you were stopped before you had a breakthrough. It's bad. Yeah, it's bad press. The only success on the Eastern Front that the Germans had achieved during this operation. They made it 7.5 miles to the north,

I think you had said that earlier, and 22 miles to the south, which I think you'd said earlier. And the Germans just underestimated this ability to replace lost men and equipment. As we talked about earlier, land lease kept all these supplies and troop movement vehicles flowing.

The factories that were in the Euro Mountains just kept pumping out supplies, tanks, guns, planes, ammo, everything. And you were just a little to it these casualty numbers. I, we talk about how much different World War II seems from World War I because World War I was just basically

stacking bodies. Yeah. In this sole operation, or this Battle of Curse, not even operations. The Eastern Front was a World War I type casualty type thing, but just with tanks and planes. What do you have for casualty numbers? Because I, I bounced around.

So for the Red Army, 860,000 casualties. They said roughly like 250,000, 254,000 were killed with 608 missing or wounded, loss of approximately 6,000 tanks and assault guns, and then 1,900 to 1900, so 1,600, 1,900 aircraft. Now, compared to the Germans, you would think after hearing the German numbers, like, of course, they had to have won inflicting such horrible losses on the Russians, but nope, they still lost.

the Germans had over 200,000 casualties, roughly 50,000 killed, and then 150,000 missing or wounded, and then approximately 760 to 1,200 tanks destroyed and assault guns, and then about 600,000 or sorry, 600 to 1,000 aircraft destroyed. And it boils down to, like you just said, you have an overwhelming advantage in manpower reserves and wartime factory production in the Soviet Union. and they were just able to pump stuff off the assembly line. You took out four times as many troops as you lost. You killed five times as many people as you had die. And you got your ass beat. But like as a, think of being a, like a German general.

And it's like, how did this happen? How did this happen? and you're like, we don't, like, we took out 6,000 of their tanks. Like, we had to get out of here after they took out, like, 1,200 of ours. We, we couldn't, and they just kept coming. It's not like we chased them and took them out. They came to us. What more can we do?

We ran out of, you couldn't get us enough ammunition. We ran out of ammunition. We were killing so many of them. But still, they kept coming. And, I mean, Germany threw. basically its finest, it's most technologically or technologically advanced

Panzer divisions, and then its newest heavy tanks into the operation. And regardless of how well they performed, there was just so much of an overwhelming force going after them that when they did lose stuff, they couldn't be replaced.

I had maybe just a little teaser on that point of throwing the newest, greatest, latest technology in this. On July 5th, So start day, they had 184 operational panthers. By the end of July 7th, they had 40 operational panthers. Not because they had been taken out in battle. Yeah.

Because they just broke down. You waited months to get these things off the assembly line and out onto the battlefield. And you lost, what, 144 of these in the first two days? Like 60 or 70% of them. In the first two days, man. And not even, like you said, not even a bulk of them to probably enemy fire. It was fire. It just wasn't enemy fire.

Or it could have been enemy Molotov fire. Who knows? Yeah. Well, it was probably a combination of both because once they caught fire, the Soviets were probably like, let's go get them. They're not going anywhere. And from this point on, this is going to be just the slow taking of territory as the, you know, as the Nazis kind of retreat or strategically lose. ground heading back to Germany because again it takes all the way up to 45 it's so crazy to say this is happening mid 43 and it takes up until the spring of 45 for this thing to be done

and it's the Soviet evolution it's the the red army evolution of becoming a better fighting force little by little I don't even really want to talk about right now because it's going to be disgusting episode. Once the Red Army passed out of Soviet territory, there was no real concern about citizens. No. About anybody in the public that they were going to run on. They had just spent from 41, let's say it takes some 44, 40, yeah, late 44 to get into actual German territory, because Berlin is much closer. Yeah. Once they, having that mentality of seeing you guys have been in our country doing this for three years. Yeah, there was no rules.

But back to the horseshoe theory of Hitler. This happens in 43. Stays around until April of 45. For as stupid as this guy was, I'm shocked that he held out that much longer. I get that there was also the, because this is again, he survives Normandy to an extent for another less than a year. June 44 He survives Operation Husky

Which happens again in 43 Right when this is happening This push from the south He survives the Red Army Finishing this off And continuing to march towards Berlin Which all sound like That would happen rather quickly

But he holds out for like another year and a half That's not the Craziest I've ever heard Two years No he is just because you know, it has to end when there's a threat on Berlin. And it takes a long time, especially when you hit the fatherland. Sigfried line.

Yep, to start moving in when you're actually fighting for the land of the people. So you got Mon Casino that you fight and kind of get hung up on in Italy. So yeah, I mean, I guess it was the, it wasn't necessarily the defense was superior. It was just there was enough defense along the routes. And I mean, looking back on it, Hitler, the war had been lost by 43. there wasn't a way if you couldn't prevent the Russians from coming up from the East and everything and swarming you that way, regardless of you're going to have to pull forces from one direction or another. And that's it. What ended up happening is you've got to pull resources from the Atlantic Wall. That's why you're underband there because now you're not only fighting in the East, you're fighting in the South as well. And so just all that pressure. But I mean, I think, and we've mentioned it during several episodes, but the Russians definitely did the bulk of the fighting. And dying.

Yeah, that's why they got there first. Yep. There's a head. And again, this is another one of these alternate universes. Because during this time, I heard a lot of, there's a lot of this research that was tied into finishing Stolling Greed up and then jumping into this. And I had heard this on a couple different documentaries and read this. And obviously, it doesn't matter. This is just something to think about.

But I've always kind of looked at. is the turning point of World War II is Stalingrad, just because it was kind of getting the Russian bear into the fight. And I heard a lot of debate about how this wasn't the turning point, and it would come later on, or it was a collection of turning points. Was the turning point the Battle of Britain? I think it depends on what you mean by that. I think there are pivotal moments,

but I think there's also turning points in different theaters. European theater, I don't think, should just be Europe as a whole between Russia and Germany and Britain. I think you need to have the eastern front. You need to have the Western front. I think those are two different theaters. Do I think that the turning point happened and that was in Stalingrad? 100% on that front because that allowed the Russians to finally start pushing back and going on the offensive. This was a point that could have been a turning point. It's a pivotal point because had the Germans pulled this off, it could have started swinging that pendulum. them back the other direction. I think this is a pivotal moment

when the Russians are able to stop them from doing it and keep the momentum going their way, but I don't think it's a turning point in the sense of it reverse the fortunes of something. I think a pivotal time is the Battle of Britain because they didn't allow Germany to go ahead and establish anything. They didn't necessarily come back and beat them,

but they basically held them off. So I think there are portions of the war where you can definitely say had this not happened, things would have gone to dress. drastically different, but I don't know if there's a singular moment for that. Maybe there's two. Maybe that, because I like to think about a singular turning point, but I think there's a

strategic turning point and then like a visible turning point. Yeah. Strategic turning point has to 100% be the Battle of Britain because we know that the strategy changes when he starts leaning back into Russia when he can't take Britain because, A, they need supplies, B, he needs his lean, Robin. And in the same way that that was him basically needing to lean back more into the eastern front, that also allowed the United States to look at Britain and say, okay, now you're a viable option for us to start sending over troops.

We can use that as a staging ground because that area not been there. What do we do? Is it North Africa? Is it even an attempt to do anything? So I think there's just a lot of different. And I also think that there are probably pivotal points in every conflict between two different countries. I think the Battle of Britain was definitely the pivotal point between Nazi Germany and Great Britain. Stalingrad was between Russian Nazi Germany.

I don't know if technically, I don't know if the United States between us and Nazi Germany really had that pivotal point. Maybe it was, maybe it was the Battle of the Bulls because, again, that was primarily just that was that pivotal point between the American forces and the Nazis. But then again, how many pivotal points are there in the Pacific theater? And that's Guadal Canal probably, I guess Midway and Guadalcanal. Midway is, I think Midway is probably the biggest. Yeah. Because to not be able to project power, to be able to say, and I'm sorry, we're getting off topic, but once we get into these war spirals, it's kind of hard to come out of,

when you are basically telling Japan, you're no longer going to be able to operate any side, this side of Midway, and all of your stuff is now going to be down in the, the South Pacific in that area, we basically took that theater of war and we said, nope, and we just shrunk it to closer around Japan. Bit of an encirclement. Yeah. A naval encirclement. Pretty much.

That's kind of how I look at it. Yeah. Like I say, it feels like you have a strategic turning point at Battle of Britain, but between Stalingrad and this, this is like the, I keep saying it wrong, Stalingrad. The, this is like the visually verifiable, like. Like, shit's different. I think this is probably, I think Stalingrad probably had people being like, what the fuck?

Like, that was crazy. So many people died. I think this is what showed people like, oh, fuck. Like when the Russians are coming at you in such waves and numbers with like very little regard for their own like lives or the way that their commanders are treating the troops' lives, I think that was a moment where it was like, shit. This is going to get really bad. think it was a realization of what the Russians were willing to do to win.

And you're just like, okay, we're going to need to rethink our tactics. This was a turning point and it was the beginning of the Cold War. Once the Allies figured out how strong the Soviets were, they thought, man. It kind of feels like that, right? Like you looked at what they were willing to do and everybody, not just the enemy, but everyone else had to take notes. Like they fucking lost how many and they kept going. So if we ever fight, they're willing to do the same shit.

That's nuts. Yeah, for sure. It was an end and a start and a turning point all at the same time. Kind of feels like that. All right, you got anything else? No, I'm glad we got back to a World War II episode. I guess probably back into World War I will be the next episode. Who knows about the more episodes, yeah.

More's crazy, man. All right, thanks for joining us, everyone. We'll catch on the next one. Peace.