He 177?

[Adnan Meshuggi]

Originally posted by Mike Santos:
Adnan, do you have a piblished source with your 30 tank losses for the SS Panzer korps at Prochrovaka??. all of my sources and most are taken from official military records have the 1st SS PZ Korps at nearly 700 AFVs at the start of the day with little more than 350 operational remaining at the end of the day for about 300-250 lost in 1 day. Your statement of SS PZ corps having 300 tanks remainig is largely correct, That's what they had left, but it was was less than1/3 of what they started with on 4 July 43. Each of the 3 divisions had nearly 300 AFVs at the start.
Here is a listing of the German quarterly losses for 3Q 1943 (Jul-Sep 1943) where nearly all the action was in AG center and AG south in the Ostfront. Remember there was no fighting in Western Europe or Africa, The landings in Sicily didn't start until mid July (and there was not a large Panzer force ever in Italy and the remaining sectors of the east were relatively quiet.

PZ II 59
PZ 38T 6
PZ III 374
PZ IV 707
PZ V 247
PZ VI 138
other 71
STuG 489
STuH 29
STmPZ 17
Elefant 39
Marder 176
Nashorn 53
TOTAL 2370
Total for 2nd Qtr 43 1019

Most of these losses were at Kursk. The german panzer force was bled white in the summer of 1943

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Well, sorry for answering late, but i found a new interesting source, an US Army information from 1999. I found it on a "Kursk" homepage as rawsources...

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/avenue/vy75/data.htm


it is quite huge and very "technical", and i still wonder why every army loves shortnames for everything...

If i understan it fully, the russians had an overall loss ratio 6,8 : 1 in tanks, and the german had totally losses of tanks of 100 (or 200), it´s quite huge, but as an example, at july 12. 1943, (procherovka battle) the germans lost 10 amd the russians 200 tanks...
But if you look at the dabaged tanks, the germans had 5.6 damaged for every totaly destroyed tank, the rusians about 0.9...

This thing is called "Kosave II" and its from the US Army... maybe you should read it and then we can discuss more.. and to be honest, maybe you can understand most of these shortcuts better then i... <img src="smile.gif" border="0">

Your losses could be true.., but i think, if the germans had huge losses, then after the russians advance and the germans destroy damaged tanks of it own... and this happened AFTER Kursk and the fall of charkow, in August/September 43...

well, i wait for your comment, but be carefull, the datas are est. 3 Meg large....

[jager506]

Thought I'd enclose some excerpts from Glantz's When Titans Clashed on the Prokhorovka battle.


"About 400 tanks of 2nd SS Pz Corps succeeded in penetrating to Prokhorovka... Rotmistrov, the commander of 5th Guards Tank Army, received 2 extra tank corps to reinforce his attack... Despite these [better guns, thicker armor] German advantages, 5th Guards Tank Army's 18th and 29th Tank Corps conducted an almost suicidal charge across open, rolling terrain in order to close to a range where all tank guns were equally effective. In the process, Rotmistrov lost over 400 of his 800 tanks, but the Germans lost 320 tanks and self-propelled guns as well."


If memory serves, Erickson said that of those 300 or so wrecked German AFVs, some 70 were Tigers. Perhaps not all the tanks were destroyed, but they were certainly badly damaged, and since the Russians gained the battlefield, they were lost to the Germans who retreated.

Also, it was not only the minefields that killed many German tanks. In the initial belts of defense, there were numerous anti-tank batteries of up to 12 anti-tank/artillery pieces, and these were instructed to concentrate their firepower on INDIVIDUAL tanks. By the time the Germans reached Prokhorovka they were already jaded from a whole week of this abuse, while Rotmistrov's forces were quite fresh.

[ September 01, 2001: Message edited by: Chimera ]</p>