The intensity of the controversy surrounding the supply of tanks to Ukraine demonstrates the extent to which these vehicles have become a key weapon on the diplomatic and propaganda front, but above all on the military. However, the weight of tanks in modern conflicts is not a novelty, especially in this part of Europe. As if responding to an endemic disease, just 100 kilometers east of the current Ukrainian border, the Battle of Kursk between the German and Soviet armies was fought 80 years ago, the largest clash of armored vehicles in history in which 6,000 tanks fought in terrible conditions.
This battle, a propaganda icon in Russia, is much less known to the general public in the West, as is the case with the vicissitudes of the Eastern Front of World War II, except for Stalingrad. However, it was the hell of steel and fire at Kursk that really sealed the turnaround of the war as Germany lost all initiative on the Russian front and began to beat a retreat.
After the fall of Stalingrad in early 1943, the German army, defeated but still formidably capable of combat, planned Operation Citadel, a counter-offensive to pocket the most advanced Russian forces. To do this, he assembled a force of 2,700 tanks against which the Soviets opposed 3,600. More than 6,000 tanks consecrated this battle, which began at the beginning of July, as the greatest clash of its kind in history. In the south, the German attack started from Kharkov, a city with very current resonances.
An old sentence ensures that no military plan resists the first encounter with the enemy. It should be added that this is even more true when that enemy knows the plan in advance, which is what happened, but that anticipation did not prevent chaos from breaking out on the 5th. The German army, despite past setbacks, was overconfident, perhaps thinking that the improved armor of its Tigers would be enough to defeat the Soviets. Vasili Grossman, the great chronicler of the war on the eastern front, collected in his notes how the guns fired at these armored vehicles and “the projectiles hit them” but bounced like peas “.
USSR armored vehicles had a lower range than their rivals, so they were forced to get very close to the enemy to fire. A Soviet officer recounted how tanks from both sides “bumped into each other” and that “when they got locked and couldn’t break away they fought to the death until one of them burned.” On the other side, a German tank officer, quoted by the British historian Max Hastings in All Hell Breaking Loose (Criticism), recalled that “we were faced with a mass of armored cars that seemed inexhaustible; Never before had I had such an overwhelming sensation of Russian strength and mass as on that day.
A reflection that refers to the enormous industrial capacity of the USSR during the Second World War and that evokes the recent statements by Vladimir Putin in which he highlighted that current Russian production made victory in Ukraine inevitable.
Also British, Antony Beevor, recalls that, despite the huge number of armored vehicles, the Kursk battle was much more than a battle between tanks. It is often forgotten that the mechanized and industrial warfare that tanks represent would not be possible if there were no soldiers inside them to kill and die. The historian recalls that the development of the clash would have been different if the Soviet sappers who planted the minefields, the artillerymen or the aviators had not taken part. In total, the USSR took to the battlefield 1.3 million soldiers who faced 900,000 Germans.
With more than 250,000 dead or missing, the Soviet death toll far exceeded that of its rivals, as often happens in Russian military history. Germany, on the other hand, lost just over 80,000 men, but, despite the fact that their casualties were lower, a month and a half after the first cannon shots they had been defeated. It cannot be said that it was a military disaster, but from that moment the Nazi forces completely ceded the initiative on the eastern front.
Kursk became a propaganda icon and became, like Stalingrad, a symbol of Russian military power and the country’s capacity for sacrifice. The nuclear submarine sunk in 2000 with 112 crew members on board in the worst naval catastrophe of the post-Soviet era was named after the battle.
But since February 1991, another armed conflict has disputed the first position in Kursk. Although not widely known either, the day and a half battle between 3,000 US and Iraqi tanks during Operation Desert Storm was also colossal. It is true that it involved half the number of vehicles than the one that took place on Russian soil but, instead, it was concentrated in just 36 hours.
Actually, in that period of time there was not just one armed encounter, but three, in which the US technological superiority was amply demonstrated. The former pitted their modern Abrams against antiquated Soviet-built Iraqi T-72s, models which, in their most modern versions, may once again come face-to-face on Ukrainian soil in the coming months.
The Iraqi army had only numbers in favor, a factor that, in any case, was not enough to win a fierce clash. The testimonies from those hours speak of confusion, of 60-ton American vehicles charging at full speed and of which it has been said that they were almost limited to practicing target shooting thanks to their superiority. Of the 219 US soldiers killed in that war, 154 perished in this battle, many of them by friendly fire. The worst part was taken by the Iraqis, who lost between 25 and 50,000 men in the war.
