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The record · Battle of Kursk, 1943
Panzer-Regiment 39 and the Panthers
The first two battalions of Panther tanks went into battle at Kursk under a new regimental headquarters attached to the Großdeutschland Division. They appear here for what their debut showed: a new weapon committed before it was ready, against ground the Soviet engineers had prepared.
Illustration A neutral marker made for this site, not a unit emblem.
The tank Hitler waited for
The Panther was designed in 1942 as the German answer to the Soviet T-34, with a long, high-velocity 75 mm gun, sloped frontal armor and wide tracks. Production began in January 1943, and Hitler’s repeated postponements of Operation Citadel from May into July were driven partly by his wish to have the new tanks, and the Ferdinands, in numbers (Frieser; Glantz and House; Chapter 1).
Panzer-Regiment 39 was a headquarters created in 1943 to command the first two Panther battalions, Panzer-Abteilungen 51 and 52, under Maj. Meinrad von Lauchert. For Citadel it was attached to the Großdeutschland Division in Gen. Otto von Knobelsdorff’s XLVIII Panzer Corps, part of Col. Gen. Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, and combined with that division’s own panzer regiment under a brigade staff, Panzerbrigade 10, commanded by Oberst Karl Decker. By one account Decker was recalled on 6 July and command of the combined armor passed to Oberst Hyacinth Graf von Strachwitz (Tank Archives, after Forczyk).
The battalions reached the front only on 30 June and 1 July, by rail to the Kharkov–Belgorod area and then on their own tracks to the assembly area near Moshchenoye. Their crews had had little time to train together, radio silence before the attack ruled out battalion-level radio practice, and there was no time to reconnoiter the ground (Clark; Healy).
Faults before the first shot
The Panther Ausf. D weighed 44 to 45 tonnes and was built around a Maybach V-12 gasoline engine of about 700 horsepower and a set of final drives designed for a lighter vehicle. The final drives stripped their gears, especially when the tank was steered hard under load. Fuel and oil lines leaked into a cramped, poorly ventilated engine compartment, and a leak on a hot engine meant fire. Engines overheated. None of these faults was unusual in a new tank; what was unusual was committing it in quantity before they were fixed, with crews who had no experience nursing it (Jentz; Frieser; Chapter 4).
On the approach march two Panthers caught fire in their engine compartments and burned out, and by the morning of 5 July 16 had broken down, leaving 184 ready for action. Some German-language accounts give much higher breakdown figures; the regimental and divisional records used by Christopher Lawrence and Lloyd Clark support the lower ones (Healy; Clark; Lawrence).
5 July: the Berezovy ravine
At 08:15 the Panthers set out behind the Großdeutschland grenadiers toward the village of Cherkasskoye. Their first fight, according to a study of the Soviet records, was against American-built Lend-Lease M3 medium and light tanks of the Soviet 245th Tank Regiment; Soviet reports admitted the loss of up to 17 tanks, and German reports claimed 28 (Tank Archives).
Around 14:00 the Panthers reached the Berezovy ravine in front of Cherkasskoye: a valley with a soft bottom, swollen by a cloudburst the night before, mined on its approaches and slopes and covered by the artillery and antitank guns of the 67th Guards Rifle Division. The tanks bunched up at the crossing points while German engineers tried to build passages. Some ran onto mines; others bogged down; Soviet artillery fell on the stalled vehicles and the engineers in front of them. By about 17:00 the engineers had made crossings that let about 30 Panthers of one battalion across; the crossings were then destroyed, and the other battalion did not get over that day. Cherkasskoye fell that evening to Großdeutschland and the 11th Panzer Division (Lawrence; Glantz and House).
How many Panthers the mines claimed is less clear than the legend suggests. The regiment’s after-action report of August 1943 said about 40 had been lost to mines in the first days, but Lawrence, who examined its reports in detail, found no report naming a Panther lost to mines on 5 July itself. His estimate is that at most about 38 were knocked out by mines on 5 and 6 July, and that the true figure may be 10 or 20 lower; the rest of the losses came from artillery, antitank fire and breakdowns. On the evening of 6 July the regiment reported about 40 Panthers operational out of 200 (Lawrence).
Toward Oboyan, 6–11 July
On 6 July Großdeutschland and the 11th Panzer Division broke into the second Soviet belt near Dubrova. On 7 July Großdeutschland, with the remaining Panthers, fought for Syrtsevo and the ground toward Gremuchy against the 3rd Mechanized Corps of the 1st Tank Army, and Syrtsevo fell on the 8th. On 9 July the corps’ spearheads reached Novoselovka on the Oboyan highway, about 20 km short of the town. Then the advance stalled on its own left flank, and on 10 and 11 July Großdeutschland had to turn west to clear the bend of the Pena around Verkhopenye and Berezovka (Glantz and House; Chapter 4).
On the evening of 10 July the regiment’s own report counted 10 Panthers still facing the enemy, 25 total losses (23 hit and burned out, 2 burned on the approach march) and 100 in the workshops, 56 of them from battle damage and mines and 44 with technical faults. For the whole offensive, 4–18 July, Lawrence counts 42 Panthers destroyed and 188 instances of damage or breakdown, the highest rate of any German unit on the southern face. Most damaged Panthers were repairable: by 20 July about 41 were operational again, and the repaired tanks fought on in the retreat to the Dnieper (Lawrence).
What the record shows
The legend says the Panther failed at Kursk because it was a bad tank, and that the whole regiment was wiped out in a Soviet minefield on the first day. The record is narrower. The Panthers were committed too early, with unresolved faults in the engine compartment, final drives and fuel system and with crews who had trained only briefly, and their losses came from breakdowns, mines, artillery and antitank fire together. At the ravine the textbook answer to an obstacle covered by fire, a deliberate breach with reconnaissance, suppressed guns, cleared and marked lanes and recovery vehicles at hand, was not ready when some 180 tanks arrived to use it. The losses that followed were as much a failure of the breach as of the tank (Chapter 4).
Guderian, then Inspector-General of Armored Troops, attributed the high losses mainly to the severity of the fighting. Once its faults were corrected in later models, the Panther became one of the best tanks of the war, and the Western Allies met it in Italy and Normandy. At Kursk, about 200 Panthers were less than 7 percent of the German armor, and they did not change the outcome.
Timeline
- Panther production begins; Citadel is later postponed in part to wait for the new tanks.
- Panzer-Abteilungen 51 and 52 arrive; two Panthers burn out from engine fires on the approach march.
- 184 Panthers move off behind Großdeutschland toward Cherkasskoye.
- The Panthers stall in the mines and mud of the Berezovy ravine; about 30 get across by evening.
- About 40 Panthers operational; by one account Decker is recalled and Strachwitz takes the combined armor.
- Großdeutschland fights for Syrtsevo and Gremuchy; Syrtsevo falls.
- The XLVIII Panzer Corps reaches Novoselovka, about 20 km from Oboyan.
- The regiment counts 10 Panthers facing the enemy, 25 total losses and 100 in the workshops.
- About 41 Panthers are operational again.
Read the full story
- Chapter 4: The Southern Face: Panthers, the SS and the Road to Oboyan
- Chapter 1: After Stalingrad: Kharkov, the Salient and the Decision for Citadel
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
Panzer-Regiment 39 by the numbers
Panthers ready for action, July 1943
Number of the regiment’s 200 Panthers reported operational on each date (approximate where marked ~)
Source: Christopher A. Lawrence, Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (2015), and the Dupuy Institute, “Appendix II: The 39th Panzer Regiment at Kursk”; Lloyd Clark; Mark Healy
Where the Panthers were on 10 July
The regiment’s own evening report, 10 July 1943 (tanks)
Source: Panzer-Regiment 39 report of 10 July 1943, as given by Lawrence (2015)
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
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Sources
- Christopher A. Lawrence, Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, 2015), pp. 1209–1211 and 1365–1367; Dupuy Institute posts “Appendix II: The 39th Panzer Regiment at Kursk” (2021) and “German Damaged versus Destroyed Tanks at Kursk” (2018).
- Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 (2011); Mark Healy, Zitadelle: The German Offensive Against the Kursk Salient (2008); David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (1999); Karl-Heinz Frieser et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. VIII (2017).
- Thomas L. Jentz, Germany’s Panther Tank: The Quest for Combat Supremacy (Schiffer, 1995); Steven J. Zaloga, Panther vs T-34: Ukraine 1943 (Osprey, 2007).
- Tank Archives (Peter Samsonov), “Panthers at Kursk” (2014), drawing on Soviet and German unit records and on Robert Forczyk.
- Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (1952), used as recollection.