The Prochorovka myth

[JasonC]

Actually, none of the previous comments mention the 2 largest problems with the cited article. The author ignores the rest of the I SS panzer corps and pretends the fight only involved one division, and that said single division fought all of 2 Russian tank corps single handed. That is problem one. Problem 2 is that he gives tanks ready and changes in tanks ready only for the 11th and 12th, and completely covers up the absence of any report from that division on the 13th - precisely because that is when the losses for the battle actual showed up. There is a report again later and it is lower, but the actual tanks ready change day-change from dawn of the 12th to dawn of the 13th, the Germans simply removed from their own records.

The Russians certainly suffered a tactical defeat over those couple of days in front of I SS corps as their reserve tank army counterattacked. The counterattack was too aggressive and tactically premature, and the force would have been better employed in a defensive stance or making only occasional opportunistic attacks. This was entirely typical of misuse of large armor formations by the Russians at this stage in the war, or early for that matter.

But the Germans were also seriously depleted in this fighting. They ended it with only about 125 effective AT hitters left running in the entire corps (long 75 vehicles or better). There was no prospect whatever of what amounted to the armor strength of a single panzer division defeating an entire Russian reserve front, and the last location along which the Germans enjoyed any local odds edge had thereby disappeared, so the offensive was hopeless from that point.

I seriously do not understand why historians of all stripes, from early popularizers with journalist level understanding, to later pros with a full knowledge of the facts and military relationships, continue in the same hopeless ruts on this subject, and a hundred others like it. It is as though one person having been wrong about a subject once, sets the bar so low that everyone afterward thinks themselves just peachy if they are a little less wrong, while focusing on the same nonsense.

The outcome of operations does not ride on day kill counts, nor on tactical dramatics. What malfunction prevents human beings from dropping such gladitorial canards for sober analysis?

Expecting any advantage from attacking with armor requires the possession of initiative to confer a local odds edge on the attacker, and then requires translating that through lopsided tactical fighting, into lasting dislocation of the enemy force, so that many of its subunits become useless and irrelevant to later stages of the operation. To prevent any such effects from occuring, it suffices to eliminate every local odds edge the attacker achieves by matching every attempted "hole" with a "linebacker". When every other hole has been stopped, and only one is still open, the last linebacker stopping up the last hole ends the offensive and defeats it.

What is so frickin complicated about that? Why is it so hard to explain to people? What drives men to pretend that Tiger tales or ramming T-34s or whatever the movie of the week is, matters more or instead? Do they think anyone interested enough in such a subject can't even understand the idea "plugging the last hole"?

I don't get it...