Biggest tank battles

Well...........

.....I don't know about the biggest 'tank battle' but certainly the most interesting period from an armour warfare point of view would be the winter battles of the western Ukraine from Dec 1943 to April 1944.

This was classic armour v armour theatre. I should say the most intense and prolonged of the war. Bad winter weather precluded air involvement and due to the constantly shifting lines and mobile nature of this period of time, foot infantry played a secondary role...as did artillery. The tank and SPG played the predominant role in this struggle. During this period, over 7,500 Soviet tanks and SPGs were lost and 2,500 German.

In my opinion, this period was the most interesting for armoured warfare, played out amongst largely a bleak backdrop of open snow or mud covered terrain and an overcast sky. Fields of view for a tank crew was optimal here.....which would explain the high German to Soviet kill rate....considering the German supremacy in tank guns at the time.

The Tiger I was in it's real element here and racked up some very high scores. The Panther ausf D and A were at last proving their worth as 1944 approached. The Panzer IV ausf H and Stug III ausf G were also ably suited here with their excellent guns. In contrast, the most common Soviet tank of the time was the T34/76 model 1943 which was undergunned compared to the German tanks. There was also the new and less common SU85. The rare KV85s and SU152s made an appearance but not to a great extent. The latter part of this period also saw the introduction of the IS2 and T34/85 (in late Feb/March 1944) but their influence was negligible.

 

The best tank battles are at Operation Barbarossa, Battle Of Stalingrad and battle of the bulge.

 

Hey there, welcome to the forum. Would you care to support your point with some arguments?

I'd say none of the campaigns you mention are actually tank battles. Barbarossa is far too large to be considered a tank battle, as is Stalingrad which was a part or rather a result of Fall Blau, the German 1942 summer offensive. The Ardennes Offensive (or "Battle of the Bulge" to pop culture) really wasn't a tank battle but a full-scale campaign which used as many divisions as the main breakthrough into France of 1940.

 

Stalingrad wasn't a tank battle either, there being few tanks compared to the amount of infantry.

 

Prohorovka was the biggest tank battle.

 

I totally agree with Lyndon , the "mud offensive " of the 43 ,44 ukrainian campaign is the classic eastern front setup , culminating in a moving encirclement of army size

checking on something else , I came across the battle of dubno ,
a pretty good battle in early barbarossa , the first week of battle on the southern front .

the soviet commader, Kirponos got a couple of good breaks , the germans had only one panzer group ( von kleist ) and the forces on the rumanian front started three days late .
He also had a political commissar less stupid that usual ,named nikita krutchev and bright young generals called vlassov and rokossovsky .

he concentrated all the armor of the 5th 6th and 26th armies in one massive strike force , leaving his infantry to take care of itself ,
this amounted to some pretty impressive numbers
6 tanks , three motorised corps, more than one thousand machines on paper .
Some were brand new T34 and KV , some units had hardly any tanks at all , training machines or scavenged ones ,
everybody was short of trucks and radios , the germans an ukrainians had destroyed the telephone lines

Kirponos stiffened his front , took his losses on the chin and waited for the panzers to move clean out in a proding finger at the junction between his 5th and 6th armies , then he hurled all his machines at the base of the finger , the small town of dubno !
things got pretty hectic , the panzers were just being launched into open ground and 48th panzer corps had to backpedal in some haste ,
the luftwaffe got busy , the stukas being employed around the clock , tracing the soviet columns by the dust trails
the soviets had problems moving , a soviet division had five rivers to cross to be in position , logistics broke down ,communications were mostly by motorcycles courriers , the columns were bleeding broken machines at an alarming rate
by the 25 ,26th it became a furnace stoked by the soviets commanders feeding units as they came on line , hammering madly at the evershrinking german life line
soviets commanders were creating " mobile group " ( I.E. anything they could lay their hands on ) and were pushing then behind the german 11th , 16th panzer division
by the 29th of june , the soviets were spent , the remains falling back toward lwow , wich fell to the germans on the 29 ,30 th of june in a maestrom of fighting and carnage ,the NKVD shooting thousands of political prisonners while ukrainian nationalists joined in the killing madness

it had been a hard fight , colonel general hadler groaned in his journal on the close call and large losses the panzers had suffered ,
Kirponos had done rather well , he brought the remains of his forces on the old 39 borders and dug himself in .
The tool in his hands wasn't yet ready , the dreaded soviet tanks armies were still in the distant future .

The germans tank crews were in shock ,
their opponent tanks were fearsome machines ,totaly unknown previously
the PZKW IV suposedly heavy was totaly outclassed ,the mark 3 officialy the "tank hunter" was a pretty much a prey , mark 2 was dead meat

the scrapping of the bottom of the barrel by kirponos of everything with tracks and gun brought all kind of machines on the battlefield ,
at hitler headquarters wild talk of 100 tons tanks came about ,either a mistake or an exageration !



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kursk was deffinitly the biggest tank battle in history

 

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So did I , so did I

I was told that I was wrong , the brody/dubno battle would have been the biggest on one theater , kursk had , arguably , two distinct battles north and south
with ~1200 soviets tanks and 800 germans ones , I did not know about it until recently ,
it was the main effort of the RKKA as it stood on the first week of the war

the inevitable wiki link with substantial differences and similarities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Brody_%281941%29

commentaries and criticims welcome

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Bastogne ??? Ardenen Offensive a biggest tank battle no no becose more german tanks are destroyed from airplanes not from alied tanks and i can say that generals how Patton never tolerate a tank battle with weak alied tanks

 

More German tanks have been possible abandoned and destroyed by crew than destroyed by Aircraft.

 

Ok, two things:

For the entire opening phase of the Ardennes Offensive there was no Allied air activity. In addition, very very few tanks were ever directly destroyed by aeroplanes on the Western Front. We know this because the RAF went round and checked.

Secondly - your statement about Patton seems to be incorrect both in your assessment of Patton himself and in your assessment of Allied tanks! Can you back up this claim? Especially when compared to existing history...

 

Oh yes I forgot the part about the bad weather and fog.

 

no no no i read his autobiography and he say yes that alied tanks are good but if a german tank agains alied with identical conditions alied tank lose patton use his tanks for quckly counterattack not for tank battles :smok:

 

Kursk, hands down!

 

I was under the impression that the Allied air force shot at anything moving on the streets during Normandy. I also do recall that 2nd SS Das Reich was constantly being harassed by the French underground and Allied planes while making their way to the front after the Normandy landings.

 

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Das reich was coming up from the bordeaux ares were it was resting , the french partisans did little to slow it ,
the most effective delay was when one of its unit wasted a day slaughtering civilians and burning down a small town
the constant harassment by air attack was well reported but it was mostly the "soft " targets such as trucks , halftracks and other vehicles who got hammered , the tanks could mostly brush it off ,
Still a tank column doesn't go very far without its support

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3inch rockets can do a hell of a lot of damage to a tank. You have to remember that the armour on the top of the turret is relatively weaker than that of the front and sides. Also during I believe operation Cobra which was an offensive after D-Day to break out, there was a large area carpet bombed and it turned over if not destroyed tanks. Also a crew could possible becoming incapacitated while in their vehicle.

 

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I agree with the proposition that Cobra is a good indication of damages an air force could do to tanks , I was under the impression most of the damage was done by Typhoon , more details would be welcome

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IIRC carpet bombing was used a few times during the opening phases of "Goodwood" and "Cobra" to batter German positions, a bit like 1916 style artillary barrages before an assault.

On at least one occasion there was a major "friendly fire" incident. According to (pathfinder commander) AVM Bennett's biog, the coloured smoke used by troops to indicate their positions to the TAF pilots was the same as the target indicators used by Bomber Command.

 

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During the Normandy campaign , there was two reported cases of bomber command having stuffed up ,
once by bombing at right angle to the front !!
and the other bombing a perfect line parallel to it... but on the allied side


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