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“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. (Imperial War Museum HU 40710) The germans had proven Air Power 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 After advancing a mere eight miles, the German attack ground to a halt.At the Battle of Kursk, the Nazis Learned You Can’t Win a Tank Battle Without Air Power Close

To make matters worse, the Germans were now coming under fire from ground-attack aircraft. He had survived arrest, torture and imprisonment during Stalin’s purge of army officers in 1937. Soviet Commander of the northern sector of the Kursk salient. He was mortally wounded in an attack by Ukrainian nationalists in February 1944. Soviet Commander of the southern sector of the Kursk salient. He committed suicide at the end of the war. Nicknamed the Führer’s Fireman, Hitler considered Model one of his best generals. He had been key in the defeat of France in 1940 and, earlier in 1943, had stabilised the front after German failure at Stalingrad.Ĭommander of the northern German pincer. Between them, these four men commanded around 2.8 million men, 8,000 tanks and 4,200 aircraft…Ĭommander of the southern German pincer.