800 Soviet Tanks Charged at Prokhorovka. They Lost 5 to 1.

800 Soviet Tanks Charged at Prokhorovka. They Lost 5 to 1. On the morning of July twelfth, nineteen forty-three, a young German tank commander named Rudolf von Ribbentrop drove his Panzer four up the slope of a low hill outside a Russian rail town and looked down at more Soviet tanks than he could count. The matchup, laid bare: The legend said eight hundred Soviet tanks met seven hundred German tanks and left four hundred of them burning. Almost none of that was true. The Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army outnumbered the Second SS Panzer Corps better than two to one, attacked, and still lost five to ten of its own tanks for every German tank it destroyed. The Psel river and a tall railway embankment funneled the charge into a narrow neck, straight at an anti-tank ditch the Soviets had dug themselves and failed to mark. By one careful count the Germans permanently lost four Panzer fours and a single Tiger that day. They held the ground, recovered their damaged tanks, and repaired them. It was a tactical disaster that still folded into the Soviet operational victory at Kursk, then spent fifty years buried under a propaganda legend. The call sheet on Prokhorovka is pinned up top. Subscribe for more armor history, and call the next matchup in the comments. #Prokhorovka #Kursk #WW2 #TankBattle #EasternFront #RedArmy #Tiger