Quote Originally Posted by Dromikaites View Post
The Soviet regulations mandated to consider that 80-90 indirect hits with the 122mm canon would be required to kill a single AT gun or a machine gun nest. By contrast, a tank commander was expected to use up to 3 high-explosive rounds in order to achieve the same result with direct fire.

(80-90 rounds needed to suppress a single AT gun or machine gun nest).
You are mistaken here. Physically destroying a gun or machine gun, and killing and suppressing the crew are two different things. Destroying it was as hard as you claim, those things are made of robust metal and need an almost direct hit to be destroyed, and they are tiny targets. But suppressing and/or killing the crew takes a lot less fire. An artillery shell will kill a man at many times the distance it will destroy a robust metal machine. Of course in an ideal world you would also destroy the weapon, or given a breather, the enemy will find replacements or drag the surviving crew out of cover.
Quote Originally Posted by Dromikaites View Post
This also explains while at Kursk in 1943 the Soviets not only used large scale fortifications but also brought the largest number of tanks ever to be used in a battle: minefields, anti-tank ditches, AT guns and trenches would not have been enough to stop the German advance. After the combat engineers would have cleared paths through the minefields and after filling in some portions of the anti-tanks ditches, the German tanks would have arrived close enough to take out the AT guns and machine gun nests with direct fire. The only way to stop them was to send the Soviet tanks against them. No other countermeasure would have worked.
There are plenty of examples of infantry defences defeating armoured assaults.