Glantz disagrees; Lead Lease tanks amounted to 16% of Soviet tank numbers and at Kursk just 15% of Soviet tank brigades were armed exclusively with British and American tanks. [The Battle of Kurks, Glantz and House, pg 37].
My copy says 15% of Soviet brigades were mixed Lend/lease and 20% were exclusively armed with L/L tanks. He also isn't clear if he is including assault guns as tanks or not, and in any case he also doesn't distinguish between operational tanks versus broke down ones, which in the case of the T-34s available at Kursk would be significant numbers.
This is also inaccurate; the Soviets had a surplus of rolling stock that they had saved during the initial invasion. Trucks, on the other hand, were heavily American were of great usage to the Soviets.
"In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and innumerable boxcars to the Soviet Union. In addition, almost half of all the rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease. "
Ever since the Cold War, many Soviet and Russian politicians and academics have downplayed the role that U.S.-provided weapons and supplies played in the Red Army's ultimately victorious campaign against Hitler's Germany. But there is substantial evidence that the huge influx of materiel made an...
www.rferl.org
We shipped them modern locomotives and rolling stock; they were still rolling on stock like the train on
Petticoat Junction, a major reason why they couldn't shift armies from one part of the front to another. The above article points out other supplies they couldn't win without.
I'm not sure if this is speaking generally or just for Kursk, but if the latter it's hardly accurate.
They were chronically short of supplies; their rail shipments were always months behind.
Kursk had always been beyond the capability of the German armies, but it was Hitler who actually stopped it from being a larger disaster. Von Manstein had wanted to commit the II SS Panzer Corps to Prokhorovka under the assumption a breakthrough was imminent if the pressure could be kept up, but he was operating on bad intelligence; the Soviets were in fact massing a major armored grouping for a counterstrike. Hitler ordered the II SS and Grossdeutchland to disengage in a vain hope they could do something about the recent Allied landing in Italy. It was the right decision for the wrong reason; had Hitler not ordered them moved, the II SS would have likely been caught in the ensuing Soviet encirclement rather than been in position to stave off the Red Army long enough for the battered German infantry divisions to withdraw.
They couldn't defeat the minefields.
Had Manstein gotten his way the II SS Panzer Corps would have likely been destroyed as would many of the German infantry divisions of Army Group Center, turning the subsequent Soviet counter-offensive into even more of a crushing victory.
Hitler's 'no retreat' orders are why Mannstein was grasping at straws. He was limited in what operations he could do. As I said, Hitler stripped them of air superiority, and yes pulled out critical units because of the invasion of Italy. This just adds to my point FDR won the war, and the Soviets were just the hired help after the Brits saved them at Moscow.
My favorite 'what if' is if Hitler had chosen to invade Turkey and raced to the oilfields via that route instead of going the way he did and then let himself be tempted by Stalingrad. He would have killed two birds with one stone, or three, actually, one being threatening the other flank of Egypt, and two, seized the oilfields, and cut off a major Lend?Lease route to the Soviets.
