But the articles didn't get nearly as much notice until an incendiary take found in the German daily Die Welt, titled "The 'Victory' of the Red Army that was, in reality, a disaster" (DE link here). Wheatley's article was picked up by the British gutter press, because he is a British historian. Wheatley's findings clearly demonstrate Rotmistrov's claims to be rubbish. Rotmistrov claimed it was a glorious victory and that despite Soviet losses, the Germans lost a lot of tanks of their own, including many of the feared Tiger heavy tanks. Rotmistrov, commander of Fifth Guards Tank Army, the unit that led the charge at Prokhorovka. This clashes quite directly with the traditional narrative in Russia and the USSR, following the account of General P. This BBC article in particular caught my attention.Ī British historian, one Ben Wheatley, has been doing some work in the American archives at NARA College Park, MD, and has discovered aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by the Germans over the Prokhorovka battlefield showing a) basically no German tank losses and b) a.lot.of Soviet tank losses. I have no small amount of particular interest in this battle, so I've been taking some interest in the recent media dust-up over it in the British press. It remains a point of national pride in Russia, in particular the area of Prokhorovka, where on 12 July 1943 the Red Army counterattacked against the SS spearheads in an epic tank clash. The Battle of Kursk has been argued by many historians to be a key point in the Great Patriotic War, the moment when the initiative shifted irrevocably from the German military to the Soviet forces. In July and August 1943, one of the colossal battles of the Second World War raged over a vast space in western Russia and eastern Ukraine.
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