The most interesting thing about the Battle of Kursk is that it’s a fraud.
In order to cover up the enormous Russian losses that were sustained in the Russian victory over the Germans, despite having weeks and months to prepare, the leaders of the Russian armies made up a lot of the data. They pretended there was this enormous “clash of armour”. They tripled the number of tanks the Germans actually had. They put Tigers and Panthers and Elefants in the hands of units that had no tanks.
And until the fall of the Soviet Union everyone believed them.
The first major Western work on Kursk was Paul Carrell’s “Scorched Earth” published in 1963. He based his research solely on Russian propaganda and never once examined the German records on the battle held in the US Army archives. His book was used as primary source material for every work afterwards. Carrell claimed that “a gigantic clash of armor and anti-tank guns” took place at Kursk, with somewhere between 1500 and 1600 tanks taking part. Some historians have stated there were as many as 1900 tanks involved, including hundreds of Tiger tanks. There were only 45 Tiger tanks involved in the entire battle. In truth the Russians had about 850 tanks and the Germans had about 350 tanks and at any given time these tanks were often hundreds of kilometers apart. In the biggest part of the tank battle the Germans had no more than 62 tanks in the primary battle. More then 150 of the Russian tanks were over 100 kilometers from the battlefield and never fired a round. In the main area of combat it can be said that fewer than half the reported 1500 tanks were ever even near each other.
The overall commander for the Russians, Rotmistrov, told a fable of huge proportions to Stalin to account for the enormous Soviet losses - in one case almost 80 Soviet tanks destroyed by two battalions of the Grossdeutchland who didn’t even have a single tank. Marshall Vasilevsky, as Chief of Staff of the Soviet Army said he viewed the massive tank battle “with his own eyes” when he was nowhere near it.
In 1996 Soviet historian Grigoryi Koltunuv, the primary reporter for the Soviets on the battle said to a group of NATO officers in a briefing, “I have committed forgeries and I have lied. I was ordered to exaggerate German losses and to minimize Red Army casualties far below genuine figures. My works cannot, therefore, be taken seriously.” (exact quote).
The myth of the “greatest tank battle of all time” is just that - a myth. The Battle of Brody and even the Battle of Bautzen at the end of the war were bigger tank battles. There have been many bigger tank battles.
The Battle of Kursk was a titanic battle spanning weeks in July, 1943, and it was a triumphant victory for the Red Army - but it was not the massive armor clash the world has thought.
Source: Blood, Myth and Steel by George Nipe
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