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Special Units · Battle of Kursk, 1943
The Soviet 1st Tank Army
Mikhail Katukov’s tank army was the Voronezh Front’s armored reserve on the southern face of the Kursk salient. From 6 July 1943 it held the road to Oboyan against the XLVIII Panzer Corps, and the German spearheads never reached the town.
- Red Army · Voronezh Front
- Oboyan axis, Kursk salient
- 5–18 July 1943
A tank army for the defense
The 1st Tank Army was one of the new Soviet tank armies of 1943, the formations the Red Army had built after the disasters of 1941 and 1942. It was formed at the end of January 1943 on the headquarters of the 29th Army, and Stalin chose Lt. Gen. Mikhail Katukov to command it. After a first assignment to the North-Western Front, the army moved south to the Voronezh Front of Gen. Nikolai Vatutin, which held the southern face of the Kursk salient. It spent the spring of 1943 preparing positions on the front’s second defensive belt across the Oboyan axis, where the Soviet command correctly expected the main German blow (Glantz and House; Chapter 4).
Its striking force was three corps. The 6th Tank Corps of Maj. Gen. Andrei Getman had the 22nd, 112th and 200th Tank Brigades and the 6th Motorized Rifle Brigade. The 3rd Mechanized Corps of Maj. Gen. Semyon Krivoshein had three mechanized brigades and the 49th Tank Brigade. The 31st Tank Corps of Maj. Gen. D. Kh. Chernienko was added for the Kursk defense. Together they had more than 500 tanks, most of them T-34s with the 76 mm gun, and T-70 light tanks made up a large part of the rest (Glantz).
Katukov brought a lesson of his own to the command. In October 1941, with a single tank brigade, the 4th, he had fought the 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions of Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 at Mtsensk on the road to Tula from 4 to 11 October, using small groups of T-34s and KVs in ambush positions to delay a much larger force. The brigade was renamed the 1st Guards Tank Brigade. Later study of the German records has shown that the German losses claimed for Mtsensk were exaggerated, but the action became a model for the Soviet tank arm: tanks waiting in cover could do great damage to an attacker who had to come to them.
Into the second belt, 5–6 July
On 5 July 1943 both panzer corps of Generaloberst Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army struck Lt. Gen. Ivan Chistyakov’s 6th Guards Army. The XLVIII Panzer Corps of Otto von Knobelsdorff, with the Großdeutschland Division, the 200 new Panthers of Panzer-Regiment 39 and the 3rd and 11th Panzer Divisions, attacked at Cherkasskoye; the II SS Panzer Corps attacked up the Belgorod–Oboyan highway. Chistyakov’s first-echelon divisions were broken within two days, but they made the Germans pay for every strongpoint and gave the tank army time to move up. By nightfall on 5 July Vatutin had committed almost all his operational reserves, and the 1st Tank Army was ordered forward to the second belt (Glantz and House; Clark). Katukov’s corps moved into it during the night of 5–6 July.
The question that divided the Soviet commanders, then and later, was how to use them. Vatutin’s instinct was to counterattack the flanks of the German penetration with tank corps and throw the enemy back. Katukov had learned that T-34s attacking across open ground against German tanks and antitank guns firing from cover would be slaughtered, and that the same tanks dug in hull-down, behind the infantry and the antitank strongpoints, could inflict heavy losses. In his memoir of 1974 he described objecting to the order to counterattack on 6 July and being backed, after a telephone call, by Stalin himself. That story rests on his own recollection, written three decades later, and no contemporary document confirms it.
The operational record shows a compromise. Large parts of the army fought from dug-in positions on the second belt, and there the XLVIII Panzer Corps’ advance slowed to a crawl. But Vatutin’s orders also sent tank brigades and corps forward in local counterattacks on 6, 7 and 8 July, and these were costly (Glantz and House; Zamulin). The pattern, frontal counterattacks with little reconnaissance or artillery support, would recur on a larger scale at Prokhorovka.
The Oboyan road, 6–11 July
Krivoshein’s 3rd Mechanized Corps took the full weight of Großdeutschland and the 11th Panzer Division along the Oboyan road around Syrtsevo, Dubrova and Gremuchy. On 6 July the two German divisions broke into the second belt near Dubrova. On 7 July Großdeutschland, with the Panthers still running, fought for Syrtsevo and the ground toward Gremuchy, while the 3rd Panzer Division pushed up the eastern bank of the Pena against the 71st and 90th Guards Rifle Divisions and Getman’s 6th Tank Corps. From 7 July elements of the 31st Tank Corps held a chain of villages and ridges astride the road. Syrtsevo fell on 8 July, and the German armor turned toward Verkhopenye, the large village on the Pena that anchored the western side of the road (Glantz and House; Clark).
On 9 July the German spearheads reached Novoselovka and Kochetovka on the highway, about 30 km from their start line and roughly 20 km short of Oboyan. They never got closer. The 6th Tank Corps and the rifle divisions west of the Pena had not been destroyed, and they threatened the long western flank of the German penetration. On 10 and 11 July Großdeutschland had to turn west and southwest, away from Oboyan, to clear the bend of the Pena around Verkhopenye and Berezovka. The Germans won those fights and inflicted heavy losses on Getman’s corps, but every day spent on the flank was a day not spent driving north. By the evening of 11 July Knobelsdorff’s corps held a deep salient of its own, with Soviet forces on three sides (Chapter 4).
Hoth had already turned the SS corps northeast toward Prokhorovka on the evening of 9 July, in line with a plan he and Manstein had agreed in May. On 12 July, when the 5th Guards Tank Army struck the SS divisions at Prokhorovka, the 1st Tank Army and the 6th Guards Army were ordered to attack the western flank of the German penetration as part of Vatutin’s front-wide counterstroke (Chapter 6).
The price of the Oboyan line
The defense was paid for in tanks. Christopher Lawrence’s count from the Soviet unit records gives the 3rd Mechanized Corps 132 tanks destroyed and 99 damaged between 4 and 18 July, the 6th Tank Corps 118 destroyed and 33 damaged, and the 31st Tank Corps 110 destroyed and 70 damaged: 360 destroyed and 202 damaged for the army’s three corps. A Soviet study of the army’s losses found that about 73 percent of its tanks were lost to armor-piercing shot rather than to mines, aircraft or artillery (Lawrence, Dupuy Institute). The T-34 had to close to short range to penetrate the front of a Tiger or a Panther, while the long German guns could hit it at distances its crews could not answer.
Across the whole southern face the exchange ran the same way. Lawrence counts 1,379 Soviet tanks and self-propelled guns destroyed and 1,092 damaged from 4 to 18 July, 55 percent of them permanent losses, against 226 German tanks and assault guns destroyed and 1,310 damaged or broken down; some vehicles on both sides were damaged more than once. The Germans, holding the ground, could recover and repair most of theirs. His ratio of armor losses of all kinds, Soviet to German, is about 1.6 to 1.
Yet the army did what the defense plan asked of it. The XLVIII Panzer Corps never reached Oboyan, its first operational objective, about 50 km north of the German start line. A Soviet defense that the postwar German memoirs described as crude and merely massive had absorbed the strongest armored blow the Germans could deliver in the East and stopped it short of its objective, at a cost the Red Army could replace and the German army could not. The 1st Tank Army became the 1st Guards Tank Army in 1944, and Katukov led it all the way to Berlin. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union on 23 September 1944 and again on 6 April 1945.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. The Red Army had no unit shoulder patches; its tank troops were identified by branch emblems, and the drawings borrow the silhouette of a tank.
Timeline
- Katukov’s 4th Tank Brigade fights two panzer divisions from ambush at Mtsensk; it becomes the 1st Guards Tank Brigade.
- The 1st Tank Army is formed on the headquarters of the 29th Army, under Katukov.
- Transferred to the Voronezh Front, it prepares positions on the second defensive belt across the Oboyan axis.
- With the 6th Guards Army’s first belt breaking, Vatutin orders the tank army forward.
- Katukov’s three corps occupy the second belt on the Oboyan axis.
- The 3rd Mechanized Corps fights Großdeutschland and the 11th Panzer Division around Syrtsevo, Dubrova and Gremuchy; costly local counterattacks.
- Syrtsevo falls; the German armor turns toward Verkhopenye on the Pena.
- German spearheads reach Novoselovka, about 20 km short of Oboyan, their deepest point.
- Großdeutschland turns west to clear the Pena bend; the 6th Tank Corps suffers heavy losses but holds the flank.
- The 1st Tank Army and the 6th Guards Army attack the western flank of the penetration during the Prokhorovka counterstroke.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- Chapter 4: The Southern Face: Panthers, the SS and the Road to Oboyan
- Chapter 6: Prokhorovka, 12 July 1943: The Battle and the Legend
- Chapter 2: The Soviet Fortress: Minefields, Strongpoints and the Waiting Armies
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
The 1st Tank Army by the numbers
The price of the Oboyan line, by corps
Tanks destroyed and damaged, 4–18 July 1943, counted from the Soviet unit records.
Source: Christopher A. Lawrence, Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (2015), pp. 1365–1367, and his Dupuy Institute posts (2018).
Armor losses on the whole southern face
Tanks and self-propelled or assault guns, 4–18 July 1943. Some vehicles on both sides were damaged more than once; the Germans, holding the ground, recovered most of theirs.
Source: Christopher A. Lawrence, Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (2015), pp. 1365–1367, and his Dupuy Institute posts (2018).
How far the panzers got
Kilometres on the Oboyan axis; figures are approximate.
Source: Glantz and House, The Battle of Kursk (1999); Chapter 4 of this collection.
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), chapters on the defensive battle in the south, 4–11 July, and appendices on orders of battle; David M. Glantz, Companion to Colossus Reborn (2005), as cited in Wikipedia, “1st Guards Tank Army.”
- Christopher A. Lawrence, Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Sheridan, Colo.: Aberdeen Books, 2015), pp. 1365–1367, and his Dupuy Institute posts “Soviet Damaged versus Destroyed Tanks at Kursk” and “Armor Exchange Ratios at Kursk” (2018).
- Valeriy Zamulin, Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943, trans. Stuart Britton (Solihull: Helion, 2011).
- Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011); Karl-Heinz Frieser et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. 8 (Oxford, 2017).
- Memoir, read as recollection: M. E. Katukov, Na ostrie glavnogo udara [At the Point of the Main Blow] (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1974).