World War II › Special Units › Battle of Kursk
Special Units · Battle of Kursk, 1943
The Red Army Medical Service at Kursk
From the company sanitary instructor in the trench, often a woman and often a teenager, to the hospital bases in the rear, the Red Army’s medical service received more than 600,000 wounded and sick in the seven weeks of the Kursk battle, about 12,000 a day.
- Red Army medical service
- Kursk salient, Orel and Kharkov
- 5 July–23 August 1943
Built into the defense
The fronts at Kursk had something the Red Army rarely had: months to prepare. Between April and July 1943 the Central and Voronezh Fronts built their medical system into the defense in depth, much as they built in minefields and anti-tank strongpoints. Every rifle company had a sanitary instructor (sanitarny instruktor) and stretcher-bearers. Battalion and regimental aid posts sat close behind the line. Behind them came each division’s medical-sanitary battalion, the armies’ field hospitals and the front hospital bases, stretching back toward Kursk, Kastornoye and Voronezh and linked by road and rail evacuation (Chapter 9). Building hospitals was part of the same spring’s work that stockpiled ammunition and fuel by the trainload (Chapter 2).
The most dangerous part of the work fell to the company medics. The sanitary instructor gave first aid in the trench and dragged or carried the wounded to cover, often under fire. Under People’s Commissar of Defense Order No. 281 of 23 August 1941, orderlies and stretcher-bearers who carried wounded men from the battlefield with their weapons were to be decorated according to the number they saved, starting with a medal for fifteen.
Counting the wounded
For most of the Soviet period the Red Army’s losses at Kursk were not published. The first official figures appeared in 1993 in a General Staff study directed by Col. Gen. Grigoriy Krivosheev, built from the reports that fronts and armies sent to Moscow during the war. Krivosheev divides losses into two kinds. “Irrecoverable” losses are the killed, the died of wounds before evacuation, the missing and the captured. “Sanitary” losses are the wounded, injured, sick and frostbitten who were evacuated to medical units, many of whom later returned to duty (Chapter 9).
For the three operations of the Kursk battle he gives 107,517 sanitary losses in the defensive operation of 5–23 July, 317,361 in the Orel offensive, Operation Kutuzov, of 12 July–18 August, and 183,955 in the Belgorod–Kharkov offensive, Operation Rumyantsev, of 3–23 August: 608,833 in all, beside 254,470 irrecoverable losses. On the northern face alone the Central Front counted 18,561 wounded and sick in the week of 5–11 July (Krivosheev; Chapter 3).
Some 780,000 of the 863,303 men in Krivosheev’s totals were combat casualties; the rest were sick and injured. Set beside American figures, the scale is hard to take in: the seven weeks’ total of killed, missing, wounded and sick is more than double all American military deaths in the Second World War, which the Department of Defense puts at about 405,000, and about ten times the U.S. Army’s battle casualties in the Battle of the Bulge. The burden also fell unevenly. The Voronezh Front on the southern face lost 73,892 men in its defensive battle of 5–23 July; the Central Front in the north, where the defense had been deepest, lost 33,897 in 5–11 July (Chapter 9; Chapter 3).
Two points follow. The counteroffensives cost far more than the defense: more than four in five of the wounded and sick were counted in the two counteroffensives, after the German offensive had failed. And Krivosheev’s figures are the Red Army’s own reported losses. Some Russian researchers, Boris Sokolov most prominently, argue that the reporting system undercounted, so the figures are best read as a floor. The Soviet military medical service claimed that over the whole war more than 70 percent of the wounded went back to duty, a figure that cannot be checked for Kursk alone.
What the wounds were
Kursk was a battle of guns, mines and armor, and the wounds followed. Many of the casualties the medical chain received were burned tank crews and men hit by artillery and mortar fragments (Krivosheev, as summarized in Chapter 9). The Red Army lost 6,064 tanks and self-propelled guns knocked out in the three operations, many of them recovered and repaired; each one put a crew of two to five men at risk of fire. On the northern face the German infantry divisions that led Model’s attack walked into the same storm of shellfire from the other side, and the Ninth Army reported 5,921 wounded on 5 July alone (Chapter 3).
The women in the trenches
Many of the Red Army’s company sanitary instructors and orderlies were women, often teenagers. Their names survive mostly when a photographer or a decoration citation recorded them; thousands of others are known only from the casualty returns. Three women medics of Kursk stand for the rest.
Anna Sokolova served as a medical orderly with the 676th Rifle Regiment of the 15th Rifle Division, part of Pukhov’s 13th Army, which took the main weight of Model’s attack around Ponyri and Olkhovatka; on 5 July her regiment held its positions around Butyrki long enough for the second belt to be manned. The TASS photographer Yefim Kopyt photographed her at work in a trench, and Izvestia printed the picture on 25 July 1943. She was killed on 7 August, during the counteroffensive. Beyond the photograph, her unit and the date of her death, the published record says little about her (Chapter 9).
Guards Sergeant-Major Valentina Kemaeva of the 23rd Guards Motor Rifle Brigade was photographed by Aleksandr Gribovsky of TASS bandaging a wounded soldier on the Voronezh Front in July 1943. She was killed later that year.
Mariya Borovichenko, born on 21 October 1925 near Kiev and orphaned young, joined the Red Army as a fifteen-year-old volunteer nurse in the summer of 1941 and was wounded in the defense of Kiev that August. She later served with the 32nd Guards Artillery Regiment of Alexander Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Rifle Division, which fought on the southern face with the 5th Guards Army. On 14 July 1943, in the fighting after Prokhorovka, by postwar accounts and her award submission, she threw a grenade at an attacking German tank and was killed by a shell fragment while shielding a wounded officer, Lt. P. Korniyenko, with her body. She was seventeen. She was made a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously on 6 May 1965 (Rodimtsev; Sakaida).
The dead
The dead were buried where they fell, at first: in field graves and, where possible, in mass graves (bratskie mogily, “brotherly graves”) in the villages near the line. After the front moved west, local authorities gathered many of them into larger memorial graves; the complex at Ponyri holds more than 2,600 soldiers. Many of the men in them were never identified, and many of the missing still lie where they fell. Volunteer search teams have recovered and reburied thousands of soldiers from the salient, sometimes identifying them from the small bakelite capsules Red Army soldiers carried with their details inside. The German dead lay in division cemeteries that were lost in the retreat and later levelled; only after a 1992 agreement could the German War Graves Commission rebury them, at Besedino east of Kursk among other places (Chapter 9).
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. Red Army medics wore no unit patch of this kind; the stretcher motif stands for the company medics and stretcher-bearers.
Timeline
- Order No. 281 sets decorations for orderlies by the number of wounded carried from the field with their weapons.
- Mariya Borovichenko, fifteen, volunteers as a nurse in the defense of Kiev.
- The Central and Voronezh Fronts build aid posts and hospitals into the defense in depth.
- Defensive operation: 107,517 wounded and sick (Krivosheev).
- TASS photographers record Anna Sokolova on the northern face and Valentina Kemaeva on the Voronezh Front.
- Operation Kutuzov: 317,361 wounded and sick, the costliest of the three operations.
- Borovichenko is killed shielding a wounded officer, by postwar accounts.
- Izvestia prints Sokolova’s photograph.
- Sokolova is killed during the counteroffensive.
- Operation Rumyantsev: 183,955 wounded and sick.
- Borovichenko is made a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory of Kursk
- Chapter 3: The Northern Face: Model, Ponyri and the Olkhovatka Heights
- Chapter 2: The Soviet Fortress: Minefields, Strongpoints and the Waiting Armies
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
The Red Army Medical Service at Kursk by the numbers
Wounded and sick, by operation
Sanitary losses as reported by the fronts; Krivosheev’s figures are best read as a floor
Source: G. F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (1997), as reproduced in Glantz and House, The Battle of Kursk (1999).
Order No. 281: the medic’s award ladder
Wounded carried from the battlefield with their rifles or light machine guns, by award; order of the People’s Commissar of Defense, 23 August 1941
Source: O. S. Ishutin, “80 let znamenatelnomu sobytiyu,” Voennaya meditsina, no. 2 (2021), p. 149, Belarusian State Medical University.
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Grif sekretnosti snyat (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1993); English edition, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill, 1997), as reproduced in Glantz and House, The Battle of Kursk (1999).
- Boris Sokolov, “The Cost of War: Human Losses for the USSR and Germany, 1939–1945,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9, no. 1 (1996).
- A. I. Rodimtsev, Gvardeytsy stoyali nasmert; Henry Sakaida, Heroines of the Soviet Union 1941–45 (Oxford: Osprey, 2003); Wikipedia, “Mariya Borovichenko.”
- Photo archive captions for the TASS photographs of Anna Sokolova and Valentina Kemaeva (waralbum.ru, via Wikimedia Commons).
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, in Germany and the Second World War, vol. 8 (2017), for German losses; Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), further reading.