![]() Supplies were becoming dangerously low, and fuel and ammunition were hardly adequate to meet the ever-growing demands of the drive to Moscow. To make matters worse, since ‘Typhoon’ had began, Army Group Centre had lost nearly 35,000 men, excluding the sick and injured some 240 tanks and heavy artillery pieces and over 800 other vehicles that had either developed mechanical problems or had been destroyed. All roads leading to Moscow had become a boggy swamp. Within hours the Russian countryside had been turned into a quagmire with roads and fields becoming virtually impassable. At first the drive to Moscow went well, but by early October the weather began to change as cold driving rain fell on the troops. With nothing but a string of victories behind them by the end of September 1941, Army Group Centre was regrouped for the final assault on Moscow, known as ‘Operation Typhoon’. ![]() In Army Group Centre, under the command of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, 800 Panzers struck across the Russian frontier and within hours the German armoured punch, with brilliant coordination of all arms, had pulverised bewildered Russian formations. The history of the Battle of Kursk began with the German Army Group Centre during the summer of 1941 when on 22 June, the German Army, 3,000,000 strong, began their greatest attack in military history. Kursk finally ended the myth of German invincibility." Read moreĭisposal. The battle climaxed at the village of Prokhorovka, which involved some 1,000 tanks fighting each other at pointblank range.During this vicious two week battle the Red Army dealt the Panzerwaffe a severe battering from which the German war effort was never to recover fully. The images convey the true scale, intensity and horror of the fighting at Kursk, as the Germans tried in vain to batter their way through the Soviet defensive systems. Images of War-Battle of Kursk 1943, is an illustrated account of this pivotal battle of the war on the Eastern Front, when the Germans threw 900,000 men and 2,500 tanks against 1,300,000 soldiers and 3,000 tanks of the Red Army in a savage battle of attrition.Unlike many pictorial accounts of the war on the Eastern Front, Battle of Kursk 1943 draws upon both German and Russian archive material, all of which are rare or unpublished. This article first appeared on July 5, 2007."The greatest tank battle in world history, known as Operation CITADEL, opened during the early hours of 5 July 1943, and its outcome was to decide the eventual outcome of the war on the Eastern Front. Photo: Soldiers with a Tiger I of the SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Das Reich advance through the southern Voronezh front at the Battle of Kursk. No longer able to dictate the course of the war to an enemy that was only growing in strength, and with its own dwindling forces being siphoned off to meet threats in other theaters, Germany's fate was sealed. Kursk was where the operational initiative on the Eastern Front passed to the Red Army. With the Allied invasion of Sicily on July 11 and a new Soviet offensive beginning in the north, Hitler called off Zitadelle on July 13. Although the Soviets suffered considerably heavier losses, overall German strength was ebbing fast. The decisive engagement was fought at Prokhorovka on July 12, with German and Soviet tanks blasting away at each other from point-blank range. The heavy Tiger I also fought at Kursk, although the bulk of the German armor was composed of up-gunned Panzer IIIs and IVs. The Germans also possessed some excellent tanks ( Panzer in German) – on paper at least – particularly the Panther, which had been designed specifically to take on the T-34. ![]() The Soviets were equipped with probably the war's most consistently efficient tank, the T-34, which had given the Germans a nasty shock early in the eastern campaign. The battle that unfolded around Kursk was the apogee of tank warfare.
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