Losses vs Repairs

When talking about armoured forces, people often brag about the thickness of armour on the tanks of their favourite army, perhaps the caliber of the guns, or speeds of the tracks. Often, the recovery vehicles and the actions of the engineers and repairmen are ignored. Unjustly so.

This graph shows the number of working tanks in possession of the 1st Guards Tank Army during two operations, the Belgorod-Kharkov operation (dashed line) and Lvov-Sandomierz operation (dashed-dotted line). To highlight the effort of the engineers, two more lines are included for the two operations. The solid black line shows the amount of working tanks minus the amount of repaired tanks for the Belgorod-Kharkov operation, and the double black line does so for the Lvov-Sandomierz operation. As you can see, the efforts of the repairmen managed to keep the army at about one third to one half strength, while in their absence, the armies would be devoid of tanks two weeks into the fighting.