The Biggest Tank Battle in History Wasn’t at Kursk: The Battle of Brody in 1941 was bigger [tr]

War is Boring ^ | March 20, 2017 | Robert Beckhusen

[C19fan]

A thousand coffee table books and countless hours of popular history programs have described the Battle of Prokhorovka, part of the Third Reich’s 1943 Operation Citadel, as the largest tank battle in history. Near the city of Kursk on the Eastern Front, hundreds of Soviet tanks slammed into the 2nd SS Panzer Corps in an enormous conflagration of flesh and metal.

[C19fan]

There is a very book about this battle called the "Bloody Triangle" by Victor Kamenir. The Red Army threw all their Mechanised Corps in the Southwest Front against the armor spearhead or Army Group South. One of the corps was commanded by Rokossovsky. The operation was a fiasco and the Germans annihilated all the armor. The post-Purge command cadre was not up to the task, the Soviet attacks were launched in piecemeal fashion, often driven by demands from Moscow and political officers. The Mechanised units were blasted by the Luftwaffe as they attempted to move to their launch points; often based on prewar plans that became irrelevant once the Germans attacked. The infantry that were suppose to support the tanks did not have enough trucks so the tanks would attack without infantry support. The tankers were not properly trained and did not know how to repair their vehicles so there was high attrition just from vehicles breaking down and being abandoned.

[DIRTYSECRET]

What about the one at the Battle of the Bulge?

[LS]

I once ran a simulation where the US didn’t enter the war and the 30% of the air that was used to intercept bombers in the West was diverted to the Kursk offensive.

It was enough to allow the Germans to win.

[Old Teufel Hunden]

The Ruskies don’t seem to have a problem in how to wage war in the Ukraine now...

[OKSooner]

The Bulge was won by American artillery... with some help from everyone else, mind you.

[HenpeckedCon]

What about the one at the Battle of the Bulge?

______________________________________________

Peanuts compared to the Eastern front. The Germans attached the USSR with 250 divisions. The American army had about 80 divisions on the entire Western front.

[blam]

Battle Of 73 Easting

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

The one in the movie?

[bravo whiskey]

Back injury has caused me me to postpone teaching a class on the eastern front until the fall but I continue to read. I have this book and it is a good read. Author hates the defector Viktor Suvorov. Suvorov wrote ICEBREAKER which is his theory Stalin was going to attack the Germans in summer of ‘41.

[TTFlyer]

Napoleon and Hitler may have failed but, by God, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Col. Ralph Peters, the 'Rat Party, and the US Propaganda Media will take the Russians on in the Ukraine and will prevail!

Globalist Marxism will return to Russia!

[Farmer Dean]

I remember watching an interview with a former German officer.He said the thing they feared the most was American artillery.

[OKSooner]

Yes, I knew a guy who could have told us about that first hand.

On an unrelated note, I think I'm gonna go have some chicken tonite. :)

[AzSteven]

One of the other major factors operating against the Soviets in this battle was the quality and organization of the armor - the Soviets had split their armor into rather small Tank Brigades rather than massing them, and the armor available for this particular action tended to be older, lighter models like T-26s, BT-3s and BT-5s. The infamous T-34 was appearing in numbers, but the early model T-34s were under-gunned and had a very weak engine.

The German tanks at the time were not the unstoppable juggernauts of 1944, but they were very well organized and competently led. And the Germans had been focusing heavily on the concept of close air support in the interwar years. Oddly, much of the proof-of-concept work for that was performed by the Germans in secret pre-war training sites in the Soviet Union. Germany and the USSR had some interesting relationships pre-war.

[FreedomPoster]

If the US didn’t enter the war, Soviet logistics would have been significantly degraded. Have you ever seen the material manifests of what we sent the USSR during WWII? They are mind boggling.

[LS]

All their trucks, radio equipment. Almost everything but artillery and tanks themselves.

In early 1942, the BEST Russian fighter was the P-39, Aircobra, a plane so bad we used the Warhawk instead.

[hinckley buzzard]

I once had several long conversations with a man who served in Iran as a construction contractor during the war. We built railroads and highways through Iran into the Soviet Union solely to move supplies and equipment in support of the war effort. One example, American farmers couldn't buy new tractors during the war because they were all shipped to Russia.

[sphinx]

WWII for later

[FreedomPoster]

Yes, a terrible air superiority aircraft, but fairly useful in ground support because of the 37mm cannon firing through the propeller hub. You could penetrate the top armor of a tank of that era with that.

On the material list, huge amounts of foodstuffs as well. Enough SPAM to keep Hawaii happy for decades, for one example. Industrial raw materials, the list goes on and on.

[semantic]

The Germans (and Japanese for that matter) were always going to lose regardless of particular conventional weapon design, production & deployment.

For some reason, both the Germans and Japanese cannot quite successfully execute advanced non-linear design theories. They are certainly self-aware about their superior engineering & manufacturing capabilities, which has repeatedly caused them to over-estimate their war chances.

Consider this: what is the acme of German engineering & manufacturing as of 2017? Mercedes-Benz? Same question for the Japanese: micro electronics?

Now, ask yourself the same question about the US. Truthfully, you cannot even begin to guess because the R&D is tied up in secret black operations centered around quantum computing (crypto), AI, bio-engineering (replication/restoration), robotics (man-machine), etc.

US capital has controlled the globe since the Spanish-American war. Since we control finance, we control budgets. Money attracts talent, so we can support research and acquire/hire the very best scientists & engineers. Our best don't both trying to build better quality cars; that is way, way too pedestrian. Which is why we leave it to the Germans & Japanese.

[Nailbiter]

later