What happened at the Battle of Prokhorovka?
On 12 July 1943, a week into the German offensive at Kursk, the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army counterattacked the II SS Panzer Corps near the village of Prokhorovka. The Soviet tanks suffered far heavier losses, but the German drive on Kursk from the south was halted. The next day Hitler called off the offensive.1
On 5 July 1943 the German army launched Operation Citadel, its last great offensive in the east, against the Soviet bulge around Kursk. The Ninth Army was to strike south from Orel and the Fourth Panzer Army north from Belgorod, meeting at Kursk and cutting off the Soviet armies inside. The Red Army knew it was coming. The US Army's official history notes that the Central Front alone had dug over 3,000 miles of trenches, and that engineers had laid 400,000 mines.2
The road to Prokhorovka
In the north the Ninth Army ground to a halt within days. In the south the attack went further. By the evening of 6 July the lead elements of the II SS Panzer Corps had advanced nearly 25 miles, and by 11 July the corps had a bridgehead north of the Psel River. On its right the III Panzer Corps of Armeeabteilung Kempf broke out to the north the same day. Ahead lay Prokhorovka and the third line of Soviet defenses in the salient.3
Twelfth of July
The Soviet commander of the Voronezh Front, Nikolai Vatutin, now committed his reserves: the Fifth Guards Army and the Fifth Guards Tank Army under Pavel Rotmistrov. Early on 12 July the Soviet T-34s charged the German positions. Bill Purdue, writing in Military History Matters, describes how the tanks raced downhill toward the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler division without allowing for an antitank ditch about 4.5 meters deep that the Soviets had dug themselves; many fell in, and those that crossed by the bridge exposed their flanks.4
It was not one great charge but many separate fights. Mark Cartwright of World History Encyclopedia counts about 25 pockets of combat along a front of some 25 km, with around 300 Axis tanks facing about 900 Soviet. Ian Hudson of The Tank Museum, following the statistical study by Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson, counts about 910 tanks on the narrowest definition, 294 German and 616 Soviet, or 1,299 if the neighboring III Panzer Corps and the whole of the 5th Guards Tank Army are included.5
Counting the wrecks
The losses were lopsided. Hudson gives the 5th Guards Tank Army's loss on 12 July as 359 tanks and assault guns, 207 of them beyond repair, against 193 German vehicles hit, of which only 20 were total losses. He warns that German and Soviet records define a loss differently. Purdue cites a wider range: Ben Wheatley's figure, based on the work of Karl-Heinz Frieser and on Luftwaffe aerial photographs, of 255 Soviet tanks against five German, and Valeriy Zamulin's estimate of about 400 Soviet against as many as 80 German. In men, Hudson counts 2,240 killed and 1,157 missing in the 5th Guards Tank Army from 12 to 16 July, against 503 killed and 57 missing in the II SS Panzer Corps.6
A myth is born
For decades Prokhorovka was called the greatest tank battle in history, with 1,200 to 2,000 tanks and up to 1,200 destroyed. Hudson traces those figures to Soviet propaganda, which needed to justify the heavy losses, and to Rotmistrov's memoirs, which put 700 to 800 tanks on each side and more than 400 German tanks destroyed. Purdue adds that Rotmistrov's claim of 400 German tanks, 70 of them Tigers, explained away his own losses, and that Stalin, though he accepted it in public, sent Georgy Malenkov to investigate. Western historians, without access to Soviet archives, repeated the claims. Hudson points instead to the fighting around Brody and Dubno in 1941, with up to 3,500 Soviet and 750 German tanks, as the larger tank battle.7
Hitler calls a halt
Purdue calls Prokhorovka a German tactical victory that did not change the outcome at Kursk. The Germans did not break through to Kursk. On 13 July Hitler summoned Manstein and Kluge and told them that Citadel was over. The Allies had landed in Sicily on 10 July, and he needed troops for Italy. Manstein protested that in the south the battle was just reaching its turning point, but on 17 July Hitler ordered the II SS Panzer Corps out of the line.8
On the same day as Prokhorovka, the Red Army had opened Operation Kutuzov against the Orel salient in the north. The German Historical Museum sums up the result of Kursk in one line: the initiative had passed to the Red Army for good. The whole battle is told in our article on the Battle of Kursk.9
