TANK BATTLES KURSK FULL

The most urgent reinforcement priority in Germany’s air war lay far away from the low hills around Kursk. The forces at Kursk would have to make do with what they had.įacebook | Twitter effect of the production debacle was reinforced by the strategic one. Any of the “newest offensive weapons” the struggling German aircraft industry produced went to fight Britain and America. Crew training had not kept up either, so only a small number of Me-410s entered combat in June and these went to the Mediterranean as reconnaissance planes, in the hope that their higher performance would allow them to evade the swarms of fast Allied fighters. In practice, all 52 of the new Messerschmitts were delivered as fast bombers, since Germany desperately needed something better than the Stuka. The only new type on the verge of mass production was the Messerschmitt Me-410, originally intended to replace the obsolete Me-110 in the role of bomber destroyer. This included a mere six Heinkel He-177 heavy bombers, none of them combat ready.

TANK BATTLES KURSK FULL

The full set of German monthly aircraft delivery reports from 1939 to 1943, recently discovered in a German federal archive, shows just how few advanced aircraft the Luftwaffe accepted from factories in June 1943, on the eve of battle.

(Bundesarchib Bild 101I-641-4527-17 Photo: Heinz Ritter)Įven now, more than 75 years after the war, the true extent of Germany’s production crisis remains obscured. Heinkel He-111s seek out logistical targets in the southern Soviet Union in 1943. In July 1943, the only place the Stuka could fly in daylight was in the East on other fronts it was little better than an aerial target. The plans did not mention how Nazi Germany intended to survive that long. Production of the antiquated fixed-undercarriage Junkers Ju-87 Stuka, the technological opposite of the Me-262, was planned to continue at a steady rate of 150 a month until September 1945. The planning for German bombers had meanwhile lost all touch with reality. For the moment, Germany would have to struggle for air superiority with the Me-109 and the Fw-190, even though neither airplane could match their British and American opponents. Yet less than a month before the attack on Kursk, production of the Me-262 had not advanced beyond the discussion phase. The planned piston-engine successor to the ubiquitous Me-109, the Me-209, had been cancelled in favor of a technological breakthrough, the Me-262 jet fighter. German production chiefs were beginning to panic. German aircraft, especially fighters, were no longer state of the art and the introduction of new equipment had suffered catastrophic delays. The problem for the Germans was that the Luftwaffe was not what it had been in the early days of the war. Another noted that “the movement of enemy tanks takes place under the cover of his aircraft.” This close cooperation between the Germany Army and Luftwaffe was the linchpin of Germany’s entire war machine, and thus the key to any possibility of victory in the planned attack on the Kursk bulge, called Operation Citadel. “The enemy is again attacking us heavily with his air force,” said one Soviet report that emphasized the importance of German air power. The Luftwaffe had proven essential during the Third Battle of Kharkov in March 1943, a German counteroffensive that made the July attack on Kursk possible. As Operation Citadel advances, Junkers Ju-87Ds overfly an advancing armored unit in the Belgorod-Oryol region as they return from a close support mission on July 10, 1943. Without air power, the Germans lacked a vital ingredient for their projected Blitzkrieg. Even in February 1943, five months before the battle began, Hitler spoke of his new tanks as a “gigantic concentration of the newest offensive weapons” that would restore German superiority on the Eastern Front. The Kursk battle is most often remembered as a gigantic tank clash, when German Tigers, Panthers and Ferdinands crashed into Soviet defensive lines that bulged westward around the Russian city. Yet despite this initial success, the seeds for a German defeat at Kursk had already been sown, in the air and on the ground. In terms of numbers, that made it the Luftwaffe’s greatest day of air combat in the entire war. The Germans reported 367 victories that day. The German pilots in their Messerschmitt Me-109s and Focke-Wulf Fw-190s had a field day against their Soviet adversaries and their inferior Yakovlev fighters.

Think It’s Easy to Destroy Tanks With Airplanes? Think Again At the Battle of Kursk, the Nazis Learned You Can’t Win a Tank Battle Without Air Power | HistoryNet Close

Tank battles kursk