Panzer III (L60) ammo consumption in 10 days (IIIrd PzK, 346 tanks): 2,446 APCBC, 4,098 HE and 254 APCR.
Well, since losses are a function of munitions expenditure, the ammo consumption of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps (report ) by type: 1,387 105mm Gr.19 170 210mm Mörser 18, 537 50mm Spgr 38 Pak 720 50mm Pzgr 39 Pak 913 50mm Spgr KwK 39 692 50mm Pzgr 39 KwK 155 75mm Spgr Pak 40 375 75mm Pzgr 39 78 75mm GrPatr HL/A/B 5,460 75 mm Spgr KwK 40 3,840 75mm Pzgr 39 KwK 1,135 75mm Grpatr HL/B for a total of 1,645 t consumed. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019) His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department.
He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict.
Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. There is a lot of the other Kursk material there in my discussion of human factors in combat.Ĭhristopher A. In retrospect maybe I should have included this discussion in Chapter 3: Attacker versus Defender of my book War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat. One does wonder if Katukov’s decision to defend with his First Tank Army was the main difference here, as compared to the heavy counterattacking against the SS Panzer Corps that was done under the command of Vatutin and Chistyakov. This difference in the exchange ratios between the two German corps probably had a lot more to do with how their opponents choose to fight than the differences in performance between the two German corps. The XLVIII Panzer Corps lost 317 tanks while they may have been responsible for 438 Soviet tanks. In this case, from 6 to 11 July, the SS Panzer Corps lost 234 tanks and may have been responsible for 598 Soviet tanks. Furthermore, it also eliminates a lot of the Panther losses and German losses to mines on the 5th. This has the advantage of skipping the 5th, when both German corps were penetrating the defensive lines and not facing much armor. One could, rather, look at the losses from the 6th to the 11th of July for both German corps. Even if one assumes 120 Panthers broke down, and subtracts them from the calculation, this comes out to a 1-to-1.43 exchange ratio. This text is pulled from page 745 of my Kursk book.īy comparison, the XLVIII Panzer Corps from the 5th through the 11th took 449 tank losses, including broken down Panthers, and may have been responsible for 471 Soviet tanks.