Giffard Le Quesne Martel the Head of the Military Mission to the Soviet Union. He assessed the effectiveness of the Soviet order of battle and tactics during a visit to the frontline in the Kursk-Oryol region between 11 and 19 May 1943. In his autobiography, Martel describes advising the Soviet High Command, Stavka, to allow the Germans to strike first at the Battle of Kursk. To what extent his advice affected the course of the battle is debatable since his first conference with Stavka did not occur until late May 1943 while the Soviet Western Front commander, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, had been advocating the
Battle of Kursk retreat and increasingly lost tanks in combat as well as from abandoning and destroying damaged vehicles. Across the entire Eastern Front 50 Tiger tanks were lost during July and August, with some 240 damaged. Most of these occurred during their offensive at Kursk. Between 600 to 1,612 tanks and assault guns sustained damage in the period from 5 July to 18 July. The total number of German tanks and assault guns destroyed during July and August along the entire Eastern Front amount to 1,331. Of these, Frieser estimates that 760 were destroyed during the Battle of Kursk. Beevor writes that