The Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in World War II, witnessed a fierce German offensive, clashing with determined Soviet defence. On the third day of the battle, near Teterevino village, a famous German tank ace confronted over 50 Soviet tanks, a legendary encounter with disputed details. For this controversial topic, we included both the Soviet and German perspectives, so you can decide.
It’s the 8th of July 1943. A platoon of German soldiers takes cover under heavy fire with shells pummelling the ground, a machine gun fire zipping over their heads in a brutal and disorienting frenzy. They peek over their embankment to the battlefield beyond, opening fire with their rifles. But they do little, because they aren’t facing off against men, but a wall of heavy war machines.
Up and down the front line, massive numbers of T-34 tanks roll through the rain of lead. It’s a giant counter-attack with 9 tank brigades and infantry. The entire line is alight with a thunder of war. “Retreat!” The Germans retreat to their shallow trenches just as the Soviet tanks take full advantage, powering forward towards their lines.
As the tanks approach, the German infantry have a plan. They have a new weapon, a shaped-charge grenade. The tanks rumble over the German trench. The infantry hold their breath as machine gun fire takes out a few unfortunate souls. The tanks pass and the infantry throw the Panzer-Wurf mines at the backs of the T-34s.
Not all are successful, but two T-34s are taken out by this brave attack. The Soviets press on. But unbeknownst to them, a predator stalks in the distance. It is the mighty Tiger I heavy tank, under command of Unterscharführer Franz Staudegger of the 1st SS Panzer Division. He isn’t supposed to be fighting, he’d fallen behind his unit to repair a broken suspension But now three T-34 tanks roll across the field in front of him with no appreciable formation.
They halt on occasion and fire at the rudimentary German trenches while surrounded by the smoke and haze of battle. It’s too perfect. He points out a target to the gunner and orders “Fire!” In a flash, the Tiger unleashes its mighty weaponry, propelling the 88 mm shell across the air. It streams green tracer behind it and then punches square through the enemy’s front plate, stopping it where it stands.
The rest of the enemy tanks don’t seem to notice, but that doesn’t come as a surprise to Staudegger. He’ll enjoy turning all the distracted enemy tanks to scrap. “Fire!” Another bang washes across the fields and with it another T-34 goes up in flames. “Nice shot. Another!” The loader picks up another armor-piercing round and slams it into the breech, just as the gunner sets his sight on their third victim.
“Fire!” The shell strikes the enemy machine, bringing it to a dead stop. But then its turret starts to turn. Another! The T-34 is slammed by a follow-up shot and smoke pours out of the hatches. In little more than a minute all three enemy tanks in his view are eliminated without a single return shot. Then more movement catches his eye. It’s another T-34 and it’s rolling over the railway embankment.
And then another. And another. The bulk of the charge has arrived, but Staudegger is undeterred Shells rain on the enemy vehicle and it suffers the same fate as his comrades before. The rest of the tanks take notice as even more T-34s roll over the embankment. There are more than a dozen and they are still coming.
But Staudegger’s Tiger strikes down another enemy and the Soviets finally spot the German machine. One of the T-34s rotates its turret and returns fire, its shell striking the earth. “And it only took them 5 tanks! Keep firing.” Staudegger now keeps on the move, carefully moving from cover to cover. The German crew take expert aim.
Another T-34 bursts into flames as the wall of armor wisens up to their situation. The volume of fire, headed the Tiger’s way, is increasing now by the second. Staudegger keeps changing his position constantly to avoid becoming an easy target. But the Soviet guns find him as an enemy shell slams into the armor with a deafening clang, but it fails to penetrate.
Staudegger is completely unfazed, he knows his machine. He knows this technology is superior. The Soviet 76mm is no match for the Tiger. “Target. 37 degrees. Fire!” The gunner obeys without hesitation and yet another T-34 explodes into a million pieces. More shells hit the Tiger, reverberating through the hull as the loader hurries to slam another armor-piercing shell into the breach.
Another shot rings, and then another, and then another. The Tiger is doing its best to seek cover. But with the deluge of enemy fire, the shells are getting stuck into the armor and ricocheting every which way, but completely failing to injure the seemingly invincible heavy German tank. Staudegger is still very calm, directing fire with cold and calculated precision.
The Soviet losses mount, but they still don’t turn back. In fact, they push harder. The T-34s rush across the open field, away from the cover of the embankment they just drove over. “Come to me, my pretties.” The Tiger continues to take victims left and right, firing as fast as he can reload, while shells continue pinging off its armor.
Its exterior is dotted with dozens, maybe hundreds of impacts, but the beast is still completely operational. “We are out of armor-piercing shells, commander!” They run out of armor-piercing ammunition, but the Germans are so confident that they switch to high explosive ammunition, and their grim work continues.
Please support the channel, comment, like and subscribe on this video. Without any assistance, Staudegger and his Tiger bring the Soviet advance to a grinding halt. Defeated, the T-34s finally see reason and reverse back to roll over the embankment into safety. Staudegger keeps barking orders to fire throughout, hellbent on getting as many as he possibly can.
But eventually they get away and the battlefield falls into silence. Before him are 17 burning wrecks. But it’s not enough. “Driver, get ready to move. We are hunting them down.” It’s an incredibly risky maneuver. They would be leaving the safety of their ambush position while out of armor-piercing ammunition and with a suspension that they’ve just repaired which may not be perfect.
“Are you sure, commander?” “There is nothing to be worried about. Go!” But Staudegger doesn’t care. Remarkably, despite the many hits, his tank tracks are undamaged. The Tiger’s engine roars as it gets going. The driver being mindful of their ad hoc suspension repairs as they drive all the way across the kilometer-long battlefield, untill they reach the embankment.
Then they drive over the railway lines and on the other side they spot the surviving T-34 tanks and their crews ,regrouping in the distance. An 88 mm shell washes over the battlefield one more time, propelling the shell at their targets who were totally unaware. The shell detonates into the gathered tanks, destroying one of them and taking out some of the men.
The crews rush back to their vehicles and open fire, but their shots easily bounce off, just like every single one before them. The Tiger turns its turret and crushes the closest T-34 with a single brutal blow. Many retreat in a panic, some try to fight back. Other tanks remain parked, their crews having fled on foot with the arrival of the fearsome Tiger.
When the dust settles, five more wrecks have been added to the pile for an incredible total of 22 destroyed tanks by a single lone Tiger I under Staudegger’s command. But his Tiger I was not unscathed, with 67 scars, left by the Soviet tank commanders. For his part in this battle Staudegger was awarded the Knight’s Cross of Iron Cross.
It’s 8th of July, 1943, and the 26th Tank Brigade of the 2nd Tank Corps are south-east of Prokhorovka village. The 282nd Battalion Commander, Captain Leonid Raigorodsky, waits nervously aboard his T-34. He’s been given an extremely vague set of orders to attack the Germans and take over two villages: Teterevino, near the expected line of engagement, and Luchki, a bit further on.
16:30 comes around and 32 T-34 medium tanks and 21 T-70 light tanks begin to roll. The villages were lost just the day before, battle plans are pretty much non-existent, and all five company commanders and both battalion commanders have no maps of the area. No artillery support and mechanised infantry has been left in the rear.
But orders are orders. Soon they hear the crackle of gunfire against the hull and screams to open fire sound over the radio. The massive tanks come alive, firing volleys of high explosive shells into the German positions ahead. The 76mm guns slam backwards with recoil, filling the turrets with foul smoke.
Raigorodsky tries to keep focus. His view of the world is limited to his sight and a handful of vision slits. In the T-34-76 the commander is also a gunner, so he has a hard time looking around and finding targets. Then, through the explosions, ricocheting bullets and desperate combat chatter, he hears something, something in the distance, growing louder.
It’s a howl, a howl of a Stuka. “Maneuver!” He can only keep moving and hope as the scream grows louder and louder, a harbinger of doom, punching through every other sound to terrorise the souls of the Soviets. A giant explosion sounds outside. The crew doesn’t know if it got anyone nor can they check as “Forward!” sounds on the radio.
Five tanks on the right of Raigorodsky roll forward over the raised railway lines and disappear out of view. The sounds of battle grow louder and there are several huge explosions. Now it’s Raigorodsky’s turn. He and a group of more Soviet tanks head up towards the railway lines. As they crest the railway lines and the tanks go nose down, what’s revealed is a terrifying sight.
From the five tanks that went over, three are already burning and the battle is ongoing and fierce. Raigorodsky’s tank fires, pummeling the enemy lines. Plumes of dirt rise into the air and flashes of orange pierce through the haze, exploding masses of metal that used to be Soviet tanks. The Soviets are under intense fire.
Mortars, anti-tank grenades, artillery and tank fire is raining down upon them. The Germans are firing with all they have. Captain Raigorodsky sees his comrades falling all around him, never to rise. “Into cover!” He orders his driver into cover behind a burning tank while he tries desperately to piece together the situation.
Radio chatter is saturated with comrades calling out targets, trying to organise in vain and talking over one another. Raigorodsky searches the terrain on his own with his small and basic optic. He sees nothing until suddenly a bright muzzle flash betrays the enemy’s position. It’s so far away, even knowing where he is he can barely see more than a dot.
But he tries to aim anyway, their lives depend upon it. The crosshairs land on the source of the flash and he fires. The shell flies off. But he has no clue where it landed. He fires again and again. All around him tanks open fire at the many enemies. But do little as one by one they are struck down. The situation is completely untenable.
Raigorodsky is unable to take a kill shot. “Damn.” At last an order comes through the radio. The brigade commander orders the retreat. “Retreat!” One by one the T-34s start their retreat. Then Raigorodsky joins them, backing up while shells crash all around them. Low caliber bullets ping off the armor as they all run for the safety of the embankment.
But the Germans aren’t letting off and another tank nearby explodes into flames. Safety is close, tantalisingly close. “Go!” Another shell slams into the ground next to them. “Go!” “Faster!” Raigorodky’s heart is racing as they retreat in an attempt to save themselves. “Maximum speed!” An 88mm shell zips across the battlefield.
Its green tracer trails out behind it. It’s heading straight for a T-34, Raigorodsky’s tank. The shell punches straight through. The crew become yet another group of men on the list of the Soviet Union’s massive tally of fallen. The remaining T-34s and T-70s roll over the railway lines, under fire all the way.
The German Panzers stopped firing. They are safe for now. At the end of the day 21 T-34s and one T-70 would be destroyed in total. Five of the wrecks were located before the railway lines, out of sight of Staudegger, most likely victims of artillery or Stukas. In the main battle area the high volume of fire made it impossible to discern which kills were made by whom.
But that didn’t stop German high command who disregarded the actions of the other participants in the battle. Instead, they credited all the kills of the day to Staudegger, parading him as a war hero and using it as an example of the might of the invincible Tiger. Unterscharführer Franz Staudegger would survive the war and was never prosecuted for his part in the SS.
He passed away peacefully in 1991. Support the channel and download World of Tanks using the link in the description.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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