Courage Under Fire opens with a tank battle set in the Gulf War between American M1 Abrams tanks and Iraqi tanks and IFVs of assorted models.The Germans respond with their own tanks, which manage to slow the advance. A Bridge Too Far has a few tank engagements as the various Allied units attempt to relieve the paratroopers holding the signature bridges.Battle of the Bulge: The American commander knows the German forces are low on fuel, so he sends a group of American tanks on a suicide mission to attack the Panzer spearhead and "run them out of gas".Desert Warfare favors tank-on-tank engagements thanks to the flat terrain for miles on end, and fast movements between locations favored. After all, this is basically a case of when both sides utilize Tank Goodness.Ĭompare Hot Sub-on-Sub Action for the submarine equivalent, Epic Ship-on-Ship Action for the surface ship equivalent, and Old-School Dogfighting for the airborne equivalent. Regardless of whether or not it's a battle between Real Life tanks, as long as both sides break out the heavy armor to counter one another, it counts. Tanks are basically the modern day equivalent of knights on horseback, and the epic struggles of their crews are the subject of many stories of heroism. After advancing a mere eight miles, the German attack ground to a halt.In media, what can possibly be better then the heroes having a Tank show up to help them out? How about the villains showing their savvyness, and throwing their OWN tanks into the fight? Since World War II, tank-on-tank fights have been glorified in media, although not always for the correct reasons. 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. Despite their efforts, the Germans around Kursk were still heavily outnumbered.īetween them, these four men commanded around 2.8 million men, 8,000 tanks and 4,200 aircraft…Ĭommander of the southern German pincer. But would it be enough? Conventional military wisdom states that, to have a chance of success, an attacking force needs to outnumber the defender by three-to-one but, at Kursk, the invaders had no such advantage. In the end, 70 per cent of all their tanks and nearly two-thirds of their aircraft in the east were committed to the operation. To build up the force to carry out this ambitious plan, the Germans brought in troops, tanks and planes from other sectors of the front. Success would also give the overstretched German army a shorter front line to man. Hitler’s plan, which was code-named Operation Citadel, was to mount attacks from the north and south in order to cut off and surround the Russian troops in the salient. Soviet advances after the battle of Stalingrad and subsequent German counter-attacks had left a huge salient, or bulge, sticking out into the German-held territory around Kursk in Ukraine. “Whenever I think of this attack, my stomach turns over,” he told a subordinate. The summer of 1943 saw the German army mount a risky operation that made even Hitler nervous.
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