![]() ![]() ![]() Rokossovsky had actually set up the ambush after ignoring an order to continue counter-attacking, deeming it pointless. Konstantin Rokossovsky of the 9th Mechanized Corps - who would become one of the USSR’s most famous commanders - bombarded it with artillery and inflicted a heavy loss of life. When the 13th Panzer Division advanced on Rovno, Gen. There were some limited Soviet successes. However, lightly-armed BT and T-26 tanks comprised the bulk of the Soviet force.īy June 29, 1941, as the advancing German tanks encircled and annihilated the Soviet units, with others falling back, “the battles the Soviets were still waging elsewhere were now battles more for survival than anything else,” Glantz wrote, “because at this point the Soviets began running out of fuel and ammunition.” The Soviet 10th Tank Division of the 15th Mechanized Corps alone had 63 KVs and 38 T-34s, according to Glantz’s book The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front. What’s all the more remarkable is that the Soviet corps had considerable numbers of heavier KV and T-34 tanks, tougher than the German army’s best tanks at the time. German warplanes bombed them incessantly, and fast-moving Panzer divisions with coordinated artillery support chopped them apart. The six Soviet corps were disorganized and lacked enough trucks and tractors to transport infantry, howitzers and supplies, and their attacks were uncoordinated. Making sense of the chaotic battle on available maps is … difficult. It’s unclear how many tanks of the 1st Panzer Group were destroyed in the battle, but the force did lose 100 of its tanks during the first two weeks of the war. The battle which developed and then concluded on June 30 was a confusing morass that swallowed 2,648 Soviet tanks out of a total force of 5,000 versus some 1,000 German tanks. Mikhail Kirponos launched a counter attack into the advancing 1st Panzer Group advancing toward Kiev. Beginning on June 23 between Dubno, Lutsk and Brody in far western Ukraine, six Soviet mechanized corps under Gen. Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. “This, in fact, is the biggest tank battle in World War II,” Glantz said regarding the Battle of Brody during a 2007 lecture available via the U.S. That’s also according to Zamulin and David Glantz, a historian of the Eastern Front and Soviet military. But they were not concentrated and committed in the same numbers as at the Battle of Brody, which hardly anyone has written about. As many as 400 Soviet and 80 German tanks were destroyed.Įxpanding the battle beyond Prokhorovka, the total number of tanks fielded by the 2nd SS Panzer Corps and the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army at and near the battle amounted to 1,299, according to a statistical analysis published in 2000 by Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson.Įxpanding the number to encompass all of Operation Citadel would include many more tanks. The actual number was 978 tanks in total - 306 German and 672 Soviet, according to Zamulin. ![]()
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