In the summer of 1943 the German army gambled everything on a single hammer blow. On the maps a great Soviet bulge, or salient, jutted westward around the city of Kursk, and Hitler's generals resolved to pinch it off and destroy the Red Army massed inside. Instead they walked into the most heavily fortified killing ground of the war, and what unfolded across the fields around Kursk that July became the largest series of armoured clashes in history and the moment the initiative on the Eastern Front passed forever to the Soviets.
Operation Citadel
The German plan, codenamed Operation Citadel, was simple in shape: two pincers would strike the northern and southern shoulders of the Kursk salient and meet behind the city, trapping enormous Soviet forces. Hitler repeatedly delayed the attack from spring into July 1943 to wait for new Tiger and Panther tanks and Ferdinand assault guns, machines he hoped would prove decisive. But every week of delay was a gift to the defenders. The Soviets, forewarned by excellent intelligence, guessed the plan almost exactly and chose deliberately to stand on the defensive first, absorbing the blow before counterattacking.
A Wall of Defences
While the Germans waited, the Red Army turned the salient into perhaps the deepest defensive system ever built. Across the plains around Kursk, an estimated hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers dug belt after belt of trenches, laid vast minefields and sited thousands of anti tank guns in mutually supporting strongpoints. The defensive belts ran back for tens of kilometres, and a powerful strategic reserve, the Steppe Front, waited behind the salient ready to counterattack. When Citadel finally opened on 5 July 1943, German armour ground forward into this maze under a storm of fire. In the north the attack stalled within days after only limited gains. In the south the Germans pushed deeper, but every kilometre was paid for in burning tanks and dead crews.
Prokhorovka
The climax came on 12 July 1943 near the village of Prokhorovka, where advancing German panzers collided with a massive Soviet armoured counterstroke. Hundreds of tanks manoeuvred and fired at close range across the dust and smoke of the open steppe, a swirling melee that has become legendary as one of the greatest tank battles ever fought. Losses were terrible on both sides, and though the details are still argued by historians, the German drive in the south was blunted for good. In those same days, far to the south west, the Western Allies landed in Sicily, and Hitler began pulling divisions away from the East.
The Tide Turns
With Citadel broken, the Soviets unleashed the counteroffensives they had prepared, codenamed Operation Kutuzov in the north and Operation Rumyantsev in the south, driving the exhausted Germans back and retaking cities including Orel and Kharkov within weeks. Kursk cost both armies staggering numbers of men and machines, with casualties running into the hundreds of thousands and thousands of tanks destroyed or damaged. Crucially, Germany could not replace its losses while the Soviet Union could. After Kursk the Wehrmacht in the East never mounted another strategic offensive of that scale, and the long retreat toward Berlin had begun. Widely remembered as a decisive turning point on the Eastern Front, the gamble of 1943 had failed completely.