Библия Времени. Найди свое. Лим Ворд
the night of May 13—14, Soviet aircraft dropped about 100 tons of bombs on the SS barracks in the city, causing enthusiasm among the insurgents. There are victims among the Jews, but some of them, during the raid, manage to escape. The whole uprising was suppressed on May 16, this area of Warsaw was leveled literally. 7000 defenders were killed, 6000 were burnt as a result of arson of buildings by German soldiers, 15 thousand of the remaining inhabitants were sent to Treblinka. In total, from 1940 out of 450,000 inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto, about 37,000 remained alive. According to the report of the German officers, SS losses were 18 «Schutze», according to the Polish underground press, 400 and even 1,000.
In 1940, the Jews, who were in the power of the Hitlerite leadership, were not yet accepted by the free European countries, including the USSR, and also were not resettled to Madagascar, the colony of France. During the war, they were destroyed by special Einsatzgruppen recruited in the SS troops, the Wehrmacht, or by the local population, such as Croatia 20,000, Lithuania 140,000, Latvia – 70,000, and Western Ukraine 130,000 (at some point the Germans even made protection of the Jewish population) and Crimea (Crimean Tatars) – 22 000. In total during the Great War, more than 6 million Jews were killed.
The battle on the Kursk Bulge begins on July 5, 1943. In this direction, the Wehrmacht received 150 Tigers (T-6) and 200 Panthers (T-5), its T-4 workhorses covered themselves with screens against the cumulative shells and acquired a long barrel 76 mm. gun and broadened tracks, almost equaling in combat worth with the T-34. Participated in the battles also «Ferdinand», weighing 65 tons, and 380 units of all «trivia»; T-3 and even T-2.
In total, the Wehrmacht concentrated on the Kursk Bulge 850,000 people, 2,700 tanks and 2,000 aircraft.
There were light tanks and in the Soviet forces – 300 T-70 with 45-millimeter gun and 35-mm. armor. About 150 tanks were «imported», delivered in lend-lease, in particular, well-armored, but slow-moving «Matilda Mk. II», quite good though archaic in form» Churchill III» with a 57-mm gun and M3» Li», with a» Valentine’s». The basis was, of course, T-34-76, already with an improved transmission, «breaking», not aligned with the guns sighting sights, commander’s turrets and tuned radio stations. An additional advantage was given by the fantastic maintainability of the tank even in the field; interchangeability of parts with other types of combat vehicles, easily detachable units and assemblies, hardening of armor, in which, after hitting shells, cracks did not appear.
In all, the Red Army has 1.3 million combatants on this theater, 3,400 tanks of various types, mostly T-34-76 and KV, and, in addition to the armada of guns and brave combat calculations, 2,200 aircraft.
For the second time after Stalingrad, an inexplicable force fetters the consciousness of the German commanders, forcing them to attack the defenses prepared on a narrow eight kilometer section, without completing the previous extensive roundabout maneuvers. Tanks are bogged down in the minefields, they put the sides of the artillery batteries, they break without hope of being evacuated to the repair site. So, in the north of Dougie, German divisions, from July 5th to 11th, attacked the fortified point near the settlement of Ponyri, losing more than 200 tanks, 22 000 servicemen, against 33 000 Soviet soldiers and not a certain number of guns.
Traditionally, it is commonly believed that on July 12, 800 Soviet and 550—600 German tanks, including 43 Tigers, met on the field near Prokhorovka (on the southern facet of the Kursk Bulge) in a head-on battle. Such figures are used by British historians (including the consultants of the ВВС, Discovery), and they can not be considered, on the one hand, supporters of the Soviet government, on the other – great amateurs of Hitler Germany. The German chroniclers, if only because of their belonging to the people, who never realized the gravity of their crimes in the USSR, write about four or even three «their own» irretrievably lost tanks under Prokhorovka. For them, the war is something like a sporting contest in which the leader is the one who has the higher score of the destroyed human and material units of the enemy, with less of his own losses. And, if you manage to challenge the numbers of the lost match, the war can still be won. They are echoed also by some of their Russian accomplices, «khivi», whose purpose is already to create an information occasion and a desire to show off before television cameras.
…Perhaps the columns are already ready to enter the operational space of the 2nd Panzer Corps SS (three tank divisions – «Dead Head», «Adolf Hitler», «Great Reich») could become an excellent target for the IL-2, very effective 2.5 kilogram cumulative bombs, as it was at the beginning of the battle, we do not recognize this.
At the same time, the 5th Panzer Army Rotmistrova completes its motor life after a 300-kilometer march, making a dash deep into the enemy’s defense. The clash for both sides is unexpected. At the beginning of the battle, Soviet tankmen have an advantage: the rising sun blinds the optics of the advancing from the west, or the SS-men who hid in the hollows. Soon, the battle formations are mixed, so that sometimes it is more convenient to ram the enemy tank, and not to shoot at it, the field is covered by smoke walls, and in the sky the planes of the opposing sides, not seeing the targets on the ground, cling the claws to each other.
Strictly speaking, the battle of Prokhorovka on July 12 is divided into two districts; in one of them the intensity of the battle and the number of tanks is somewhat less. Perhaps the contradictions in the memories of veterans are connected with this circumstance.
Individual battles continue on June 13 and 14, and on the 17th, after a counterattack near Oboyan (in particular, with the effective use of heavily armored «Churchill» at the point of attack), Soviet troops are on the offensive, finally pushing the enemy from the battlefield. Evacuation of any significant amount of technology under such conditions Germans are not physically able; besides the main repair bases are located far enough in Kharkov and Kiev. Sappers blow up machines suitable for repair, some are transported for remelting. In total in the vicinity of Prokhorovka there are 330 skeletons of German tanks, as well as 500 Soviet tanks. The situation on the battlefield is not documented, for example, by aerial photography, so that until now one has to rely on the eyewitnesses’ memories, something like; «… There and there were groups of burned tanks, ours, and German’ – «Whose else is more?» – «I do not know, maybe German and more.» It should be noted that veterans of the Soviet Army are inclined to overstate their own losses a little, and ex-servicemen of the Wehrmacht do not recognize them at all. The latter write their memoirs roughly like this: «The hurricane artillery fire fell on the location of our regiment. We hardly got out of the shelling. Losses amounted to four wounded…». Only on some memoirs of the memoirist it is possible to understand that «the four wounded» – the sanitary loss is not the whole regiment, but actually, the division in which the narrator Hans, numbering eight or ten people, fought.
General loss of the parties; The Soviet Union – 250,000 dead, 3,000 tanks and self-propelled guns (in the process of fighting, military units were replenished with new machines), 1,500 aircraft. Wehrmacht: 120,000 people irrevocably, 1,600 tanks, 1,550 aircraft.
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