Both sides had assembled thousands of planes, which duelled in the air, attacked enemy airfields and swooped down to bomb and machine-gun enemy targets on the ground. After advancing a mere eight miles, the German attack ground to a halt. Kursk may be known for the size of its tank battles, but the clashes in the skies were also some of the largest in history. To make matters worse, the Germans were now coming under fire from ground-attack aircraft. He had survived arrest, torture and imprisonment during Stalin’s purge of army officers in 1937. Soviet Commander of the northern sector of the Kursk salient. The terrain provided an advantage to the Soviets because dust clouds prevented the Luftwaffe from providing air support to German forces on the ground. He was mortally wounded in an attack by Ukrainian nationalists in February 1944. The Battle of Kursk was fought between the Germans and Soviets on the Eastern Front. Soviet Commander of the southern sector of the Kursk salient. He committed suicide at the end of the war. Nicknamed the Führer’s Fireman, Hitler considered Model one of his best generals. He had been key in the defeat of France in 1940 and, earlier in 1943, had stabilised the front after German failure at Stalingrad.Ĭommander of the northern German pincer. Intended by German planners as an opportunity to break through Soviet defenses, it instead became the last great German push on the Eastern Front of World War Two. Despite their efforts, the Germans around Kursk were still heavily outnumbered.īetween them, these four men commanded around 2.8 million men, 8,000 tanks and 4,200 aircraft…Ĭommander of the southern German pincer. Fought from the 5 th to the 23 rd of July 1943, the Battle of Kursk was the greatest tank battle in history. This proves fatal in the battle of Midway. The United States Navy and a Australian fleet repel this attack and sink a aircraft carrier, damage one and destroy all the planes of another. But would it be enough? Conventional military wisdom states that, to have a chance of success, an attacking force needs to outnumber the defender by three-to-one but, at Kursk, the invaders had no such advantage. Imperial Japanese forces attempt to occupy Port Moresby in New Guinea and Tulagi in the southeastern Solomon Islands. In the end, 70 per cent of all their tanks and nearly two-thirds of their aircraft in the east were committed to the operation. To build up the force to carry out this ambitious plan, the Germans brought in troops, tanks and planes from other sectors of the front. Success would also give the overstretched German army a shorter front line to man. Hitler’s plan, which was code-named Operation Citadel, was to mount attacks from the north and south in order to cut off and surround the Russian troops in the salient. Soviet advances after the battle of Stalingrad and subsequent German counter-attacks had left a huge salient, or bulge, sticking out into the German-held territory around Kursk in Ukraine. “Whenever I think of this attack, my stomach turns over,” he told a subordinate. The summer of 1943 saw the German army mount a risky operation that made even Hitler nervous.
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