1943 the battle of kursk the largest tank battle in history begins

The enemy required about two hours to put their forces back in order.”Īfter that, two groups of German forces went on a general offensive on the northern and southern face of the Kursk Bulge. This, naturally, threw a wrench in their works, sowing confusion among the German soldiers. “The enemy decided that the Soviet side itself had launched an offensive. “The German Fascist regiments were caught off-guard,” Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky remembered, who back then was the commander of the Central Front. However, Soviet intelligence managed to retrieve the date of the beginning of the operation, and in the early morning of July 5, right before the beginning of ‘Operation Citadel’, Soviet artillery delivered a preventive mass strike on the enemy positions. The success of the German advance in many respects depended on the surprise factor of the first strike. For example, in the defensive line of the 13th army more than 90 guns and mortars were concentrated per one kilometer of the front line – not a single defensive operation prior had such artillery density. The troops, preparing to repel the enemy’s offensive, were en masse supplied with artillery.

The Soviet forces built powerful defenses on the Kursk Bulge, which included eight defensive lines and frontiers with a total depth of 250-300 kilometers. It would be better if we exhaust our enemy with our defenses, destroy their tanks and then, introducing fresh reserves, transition to a general offensive and finish off the main group of the enemy’s forces…” In the report to Stalin from April 8, Marshal Georgy Zhukov informed: “I consider the transition of our troops to the offensive in the coming days with the goal to pre-empt our enemy inexpedient. Having achieved a number advantage over the enemy in all respects, the Soviet military command, nonetheless, decided to act defensively. By the beginning of the large-scale battle in the region of the bulge, it had concentrated 1,3 million soldiers (with 600,000 more in reserves), more than 26,500 guns and mortars, more than 4,900 tanks and self-propelled artillery units and about 2,900 aircraft.

1943 the battle of kursk the largest tank battle in history begins