The Germans had given the Soviets ample time to improve their defense as Hitler held off the start date of Zitadelle while awaiting his new Wunderwaffen to lead the armored assault – the Panzer Mk. The result was the salient at Kursk, projecting like a dagger toward the Bug-Neman line marking the borders of Hitler’s Greater German Reich. Both the Soviet Stavka and OKH knew that the battle for the Kursk bulge would be the central struggle of the year and likely decide who would maintain strategic initiative well in 1944, and both prepared accordingly for this epic showdown in the north of Ukraine. The attacks were to penetrate through Soviet defenses at the ‘elbows’ of the salient – Army Group Center from the north and Army Group South from the south – before converging at a point east of the town of Kursk near the geographic center of the bulge. The German plan – Operation Zitadelle – envisioned the double envelopment of at least six Soviet armies and the breaking of the Soviet operational initiative for the rest of the year. What ensued was the largest ground force clash in history – the Battle of Kursk – with over three million men, ten thousand tanks, and fifty thousand artillery and mortar pieces.įollowing the Stalingrad debacle and the breakout of Soviet forces during Operation Uranus in the winter of 1942-1943, the commander of Army Group South, Erich von Manstein, conducted a desperate maneuver defense near Kharkiv that temporarily halted the Soviet advance. In the morning of 05 July 1943, Oberkommando des Herres (OKH) ordered Army Group Center and Army Group South to begin their attack on a 250km wide and 150km deep Soviet ‘bulge’ along the Eastern Front.
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