Not necesarily new, but this old thread has so many misconceptions that it might require an airing

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Such as?

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Pressure? We feel no pressure. We have come to cry havoc, let loose the dogs of war, and hear the lamentations of your women. Also, we will very likely kick over the cart with all those Jeter Beanie Babies. Because we're that kind of crazy.

I'd have to reread the entire thread all over again Meanwhile, here's part a text I found filed away in my PC. Hope you like it.

Jay Karamales implies that the Russian assault was literally an attack from the march, with units coming off an all night road march. Is this true?

No it isn’t. First, not all Russian formations on the map came from the Steppe Front. Only the units of the 5th Guards Tank Army proper made the road trip. These would be the 18th and 29th Tank Corps, and the 5th Guards Mechanized Corps, plus the numerous independent units that were part of the 5th GTA. The rest of the units on the board were already there, in some cases for days.

Second, let’s look at the road march itself. The 5th GTA performed the 300 km march from the 6th through 11th of July. The army did its road march at night to avoid aerial observation by the Germans and rested during the day in camouflaged areas. It arrived in the Prokhorovka area in the early evening of 11 July, having performed the last leg of the march in the afternoon, thanks to the presence of rain showers which masked its movement from aircraft. During the night the various units of the 5th GTA moved into their attack positions and got what little rest that they could before the battle in the morning.

Third, the commanders and staffs from the 5th GTA were in the Prokhorovka area as early as the 8th of July, reconnoitering the ground, coordinating their efforts with the 5th Guards and 69th Armies with whom they would be operating in conjunction with, and making plans for a deliberate counterattack further south than where the battle actually occurred. However the German advance to the southern outskirts of Prokhorovka on the 11th of July threw the original counterattack plans out the window, and the Russians had to make new counterattack plans during the night. Because there was not time to prepare for a deliberate counterattack, the Russians had to settle for a hasty counterattack on the morning of the 12th as that would surely be the time that the Germans would resume their own assault.

Thus the hasty attack was not a result of coming off of an all night road march as Mr. Karamales implies. It was the result of a hastily conceived plan made in light of the changing circumstances based on the results of the previous day’s combat.


The Russians tended to exaggerate the numbers of tanks that the Germans had (which includes over 100 Tiger Tanks and Ferdinand tank destroyers). Why is that?

There are a number of reasons for this. First let’s look at the combat units making the spotting reports. These units were making reports of what their soldiers, gunners and tankers thought they saw. One must remember that at a distance, a long barreled Pz IV tank looks a lot like a Tiger tank, and that’s in good visibility. Compound this with the smoke, haze, poor Russian optics, and the frequent rain showers of that day and one can see how the mistaken identity could be made. Nor was this problem unique to the Russians, the Western Allies experienced the same problem during the Normandy campaign the following year. The Tiger tank was something of a boogey man to the Allies and everyone kept a watch out for them.

Next, let’s talk about the Ferdinand tank destroyer. As everybody knows, the Ferdinand was only used in the northern attacks against the Russian Central Front during the battle of Kursk. As soon as they were seen and captured, the Russian sent out descriptions and crude drawings of them to their other commands in order to warn them about this new tank destroyer. Of course this information was passed on down to the combat units, including those at Prokhorovka. At a distance, a Marder could easily be confused with a Ferdinand, especially in light of the conditions mentioned above, and a lot of Russian tankers and gunners thought that they actually saw a Ferdinand when they were looking at a Marder in the distance. All in all, the gunners, tankers, and soldiers reported what they thought they saw, regardless of whether they got the identification right or not.

Now let’s look at the staffs of the middle and higher level Russian formations. When the spot reports came in from the units in the line, the staffs tended to treat each one as a report on a separate enemy unit, even when several reports were on the same enemy unit. Thus they tended to come up with inflated numbers of enemy units, vehicles, and equipment. Of course this was a problem in all armies during the war. It’s just that the Russians were the worst at it. Of course as the Russians became more experienced towards the end of the war, there was a reduced frequency of this problem, although it was never eliminated. That the higher commands accepted these figures is evident in the command staff studies that were done on the Battle of Kursk in 1944 (and translated into English in 1999). And this was before all the myths and falsehoods about Kursk and the Battle of Prokhorovka that got started after the war.


The Russians tended to exaggerate the number of losses, especially in AFVs, which they inflicted on the Germans. Why is that?

Again it goes back to the combat units making the kill reports and the staffs evaluating the results from the reports. To start off with, tankers and gunners tend to believe that they have killed an AFV when they see that they have hit it and it is burning, it blows up, or it does not move or shoot for some time after that. The problem is compounded when multiple weapons have scored hits on the same target AFV and each weapons crew believes that they are the ones who killed it. This problem was not unique to the Russians, it was common in all armies in the war. Then we must look at the target AFV. When an AFV is hit, it may only be damaged so it can not engage in further combat for the rest of the battle but is still be repaired afterward. It can also be that the AFV crew is only stunned in an otherwise undamaged vehicle and may take a while to recover and resume fighting, long after the enemy firing units have switched to other targets. Let’s look at the German AFV losses for the 12th of July at Prokhorovka. Over 150 German AFVs were hit that day. Of these about a third of them were not damaged (rounds bounced off of their armor) or suffered minimal damage that did not effect their fighting or movement capabilities. Another third of them suffered damage which took them out of the fight but were repaired in their units once the battle was over and put back into operation fairly quickly. These usually showed up on the end of the day AFV strength reports as operational if they were repaired or would be repaired by the next morning. The last third were AFVs that were either destroyed, captured, or were so heavily damaged that they had to be sent back to rear area repair units to be fixed. Ones sent back for long term repairs were absent from their units in excess of 24 hours. Of the 49 AFV losses that the Germans claimed that they suffered that day, about 8 or 9 were destroyed or captured, and the rest were sent back for long term repairs. Now of course the Russian gunners and tanks could not know all of this so they reported what they hit as kills.

The Russian staffs had the same problem with kill reports as they did with spotting reports, they tended to accept each one as a separate kill on a separate enemy AFV. Thus multiple hit reports on single enemy vehicles greatly exaggerated the estimated number of enemy AFVs destroyed. As before this was a common problem in all armies during the war, its just that the Russians were the most prolific at it. As the war continued and the staffs gained more experience, the amount of exaggeration decreased, although it was never eliminated.

One final thing, there were individual commanders in all armies who did inflate the number of AFVs that their units knocked out in their reports. Obviously this was done down at the tactical and operational levels by officers who were trying to enhance their own careers with an excellent war record. But their numbers were small and many were eventually found out and discredited, in many cases long after their reports were used in the official histories and it was too late to change them.


So how did the story of the gigantic tank battle at Prokhorovka really get started?

First and foremost, it got started because it really was a gigantic tank battle. About 1,100 AFVs packed into a small area around the town of Prokhorovka could hardly be called anything else. The problem is not what it was, but how it was portrayed in the post war histories. Soviet historians, after the war, used the massive meeting engagement around Hill 252.2 and the October State Farm on the morning of 12 July to set the tone for the entire battle of Prokhorovka. Just about every engagement in that battle was described in those terms. And they did not do it out of a sense of the dramatic, they were under orders by the Communist Party to do so.

After the war, the Communist Party, under a personal mandate from Stalin himself, supervised the rewriting of the history of the Great Patriotic War. This was done to put the Russian government and the Army in a more favorable light not only to the world, but to the Russian people as well. Having regained control of the Russian Army after the war, the Party made sure that all Army operational records, plus captured German records, were put under lock and key, so that only those people with high security clearances had access to them. The generals had nothing to do with the creation of the myths and falsehoods about the war, though I sure a good number of them collaborated with the Party in the rewriting of the history. Those generals that were against the rewriting of the history were either cowed into silence or removed from their duties. Thus the generals lied about the war because they were ordered to lie by the Party, not because they were afraid of Stalin.


If that is true, then where did the story of the lying generals get started?

The story got started in the early Nineties when the leaders of the Russian armed forces were negotiating with the new Russian government in an attempt to keep as much power in the new government as they had in the old Communist one. The leaders were attempting to justify the actions of their predecessors during the years of Communist government. Naturally the time when Stalin ruled figured prominently in the story. While it may be that the generals lied to Stalin some of the time, they certainly did not lie about the massive casualties incurred by the Russian Army during the war. Stalin did not care how many casualties it took as long as the Germans were defeated. As to the possibility of generals lying to make them look better that what they were, this does not seem to of happened much. Besides after the end of the war, it was the successful victorious generals who had much to fear from Stalin. It seems that he returned to his old paranoid ways of the pre-war era and started arresting or removing generals that he felt were a threat to his power. Thus lying to improve one’s success rating as a general was in fact detrimental to one’s career and in a few cases, one’s life. So the story of the lying generals does not hold much water.

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