The Competition & Teaser Thread

[ComradeP]

But the HQ unit is clearly labelled "HQ 18th Tank Corps", and 18th Tank Corp is also mentioned behind each of the other unit names...for instance, the guards hvy tank regiment in post #475 is clearly labelled "36th Guards Hvy Tank Regiment - 18th Tank Corps".

As Kuriltai mentions, maybe the picture is not connected with the scenario, but I can't figure out what Guards Hvy Tank Regiment you are talking about?

There seems to be a misunderstanding somewhere.

What I mean is that the OOB screenshot of the 18th Tank Corps doesn't show its divisional colours, so we can't compare it directly to the divisional colour/marking of the NATO counters of the unit on the map and say "it's 18th Tank Corps".

What we can do is see that the Guards (Heavy) Tank Regiment has the same colour as the Tank Corps below it, which means it is part of the same formation (for this battle).

The next step is determining how many regular Tank Corps had a Guards Tank Regiment attached, and the only corps I can find that qualifies is the 18th.

Obviously, I can't tell with 100% certainty that it's a Heavy Guards Tank Regiment. However, the only regular Tank Corps with any kind of Guards Tank Regiment attached is the 18th, which has the 36th Guards Separate Tank Regiment (Heavy).

The "Separate" can be the indication it was attached for a certain period. SU and Tank Regiments were often assigned and then centralized again over and over by the Soviets, which meant that some units could not have their supposedly organic SU regiments whilst a neighbouring Rifle Corps had several SU regiments. The units might be available, but centralization meant a lot of them were kept at Army or Corps (HQ) level.

The 2nd Guards Tank Corps seems to have had a Regiment for one of its Tank Brigades instead of 2-3 battalions, and both the 2nd and 5th Guards Tank Corps had an additional Guards Tank Regiment. In the screenshot, the Guards Tank (?) formation in the middle has two full Tank brigades and what might be two Tank Regiments (there's one regimental HQ next to a Tank unit and one single hex Tank unit for one of its brigades) whilst the Guards Tank formation in the south has 3 normal Tank Brigades as well as a Tank regiment.

After thinking about it, there is one Guards Tank Corps too many here for it to be Prokhorovka (after all, 5th Guards Tank Corps was attacking from the west with 1st Tank Army). I don't believe we're looking at 5th Guards Mechanized Corps either: it was split up for the actual battle and unless those battalion HQ's next to the infantry are stacks of battalion HQ's, there's not nearly enough infantry. There's also no brigade HQ for the infantry. There was another Tank Corps attacking from the east, but that was the 2nd, a regular Tank Corps.

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I checked whether this could be the Vorskla river, but the river isn't nearly wide enough and the river on the left in the screenshot seems to stop in the woods.

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I'll just wait for the "how could I have not recognized this/been so stupid?" moment at release.