HOME WEB NEWS IMAGES CLASSIFIEDS YELLOW PAGESPOLLS - SURVEYS WIKI COUNTRIES PHOTOS US UK INDIA
Cities Stocks Weather Movies Coupons Travel Blogs Health Horoscope Maps ASIA EUROPE Classifieds Yellow Pages
|
| Eastern Front |
|---|
| Barbarossa – Baltic Sea – Black Sea – Finland – Leningrad and Baltics – Crimea and Caucasus – Moscow – 1st Rzhev-Vyazma – 2nd Kharkov – Blue – Stalingrad – Velikiye Luki – 2nd Rzhev-Sychevka – Kursk – 2nd Smolensk – Dnieper – 2nd Kiev – Korsun – Hube\'s Pocket – Baltic – Bagration – Lvov-Sandomierz – Lublin-Brest – Balkans (Iassy-Kishinev) – Budapest – Vistula-Oder – East Prussia – East Pomerania – Silesia – Vienna – Berlin – Prague |
The Eastern Front (German: Die Ostfront 1941-1945)[1] of the European Theatre of World War II was a theater of war between the German Reich and the Soviet Union which encompassed central and eastern Europe from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945. The German term for this conflict is the \'Russlandfeldzug 1941–1945\' (Russian campaign) or more commonly the \'Russian front\'0The term \'front\' is not used in Russian because it refers to the many Fronts as military formations that existed during the conflict that operated within several Strategic Directions.. Nazi propaganda dubbed the conflict The Crusade against Bolshevism. In all Soviet and the majority of Russian sources, the conflict is referred to as the Great Patriotic War, and includes operations against Japan in 1945. Some scholars of the conflict use the term Russo-German War, while others use Soviet-German War, Nazi-Soviet War, German-Soviet War, or Axis-Soviet War.
It was the largest theater of war in history and was notorious for its unprecedented ferocity, destruction, and immense loss of life. More people fought and died on the Eastern Front than in all other theaters of World War II combined. With over 20 million dead, many of them civilians, the Eastern Front has been called a war of extermination. It resulted in the destruction of the Third Reich and the partition of Germany and the rise of the Soviet Union as a military and industrial superpower.
The series of events preceding the opening of the Eastern Front included the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Nazi Germany and the resulting fourth partition of Poland when the Soviet Union used the invasion as a pretext to occupy the eastern regions of the country as outlined in the secret codicil to the August 1939 Soviet-German non-aggression pact, which also paved the way for the 1940 Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, and the annexation of Bessarabia.
This article, however, concentrates on the much larger conflict fought from June 1941 to May 1945, in which the two principal belligerent powers were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet-Finnish Continuation War may be considered the northern flank of the Eastern Front.
Contents |
The war was fought between the German Reich, its Allies, and many pro-Nazi volunteers from occupied states, against the Soviet Union, and eventually its Allies of the British Commonwealth, France and the United States. The conflict begun on 22 June 1941 as part of the Operation Barbarossa Offensive, when Axis forces crossed the borders, described in the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, thereby invading the Soviet Union. The war ended on 9 May 1945, when Germany\'s armed forces surrendered unconditionally following the Berlin Offensive, a strategic operation executed by the Red Army also known as the Battle of Berlin.
The states that provided forces and other resources for the German war effort included the Axis Powers — foremost Italy, Romania, Hungary, and pro-Nazi Slovakia and Croatia. The anti-Soviet Finland, which had fought two conflicts with the Soviet Union, also joined the Offensive. The Wehrmacht forces were also assisted by anti-Communist partisans in places like Western Ukraine, the Baltic states and later Crimean Tatars. Among the most prominent volunteer army formations was the Spanish division, sent by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to keep his ties to the Axis intact.
The Soviet Union received cooperation from partisans in many Wehrmacht-occupied countries in Eastern Europe, notably those in Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In addition the Polish Armed Forces in the East, particularly the First and Second Polish armies, were armed and trained, and would eventually fight alongside the Red Army. The Free French forces also contributed to the Red Army by formation of GC3 (Groupe de Chasse 3 or 3rd Fighter Group) unit to fulfill the commitment of Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, who thought that it was important for French servicemen to serve on all fronts. British and Commonwealth forces contributed directly to the fighting on the Eastern Front through their service in the convoys and training Red Air Force pilots, as well as in provision of early material and intelligence support. The later massive material support of the Lend-Lease by the United States and Canada played a significant part particularly in the logistics of the war.
Hitler had argued in his autobiography Mein Kampf for the necessity of Lebensraum, acquiring new territory for German settlement in Eastern Europe. He envisaged settling Germans as a master race in western Russia, while deporting most of the Russians to Siberia and using the remainder as slave labour. After the great purge of the 1930s, Hitler saw the Soviet Union as militarily weak and ripe for conquest: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. p. 238 Thus, another short Blitzkrieg was expected, no serious preparations for warfare in winter, or prolonged over years, were made. In the aftermath of the Battle of Kursk in 1943 and the resulting dire German military situation, Hitler and Nazi propaganda proclaimed the war to be a German defense of European (Western) Civilization against destruction by the vast "Bolshevik hordes" that were pouring into Europe.
Stalin\'s vision also included the occupation of foreign countries: using the occasion of world attention drawn to the Western Front, he annexed the three Baltic countries in 1940, thus gaining a place d\'arme in case of a possible war with Hitler-Germany. Soviet active participation in the 1939 invasion of Poland should also not be underestimated. Yet, unlike Hitler, Stalin did not have any far-reaching plans of expanding Soviet territory to include Eastern Europe, let alone Germany; Soviet policy might rather be interpreted as the attempt to create a buffer zone between the USSR and Germany before Hitler\'s attack, which the Soviet Union had all the reasons to consider inevitable.
The Eastern Front was by far the largest and bloodiest theatre of World War II. It is generally accepted as being the deadliest conflict in human history, with over 30 million killed as a result. It involved more land combat than all other World War II theatres combined. The distinctly brutal nature of warfare on the Eastern Front was exemplified by an often willful disregard for human life by both sides. It was also reflected in the ideological premise for the war, which also saw a momentous clash between two directly opposed and radical ideologies. To hard line Nazis in Berlin, the war against the Soviet Union was one of a struggle of Fascism against Communism, and the Aryan race against the "inferior" Slavic race. Hitler referred to it in unique terms, calling it a "war of annihilation", one in which the Soviet Union was to be utterly destroyed and the populations of Eastern Europe and Russia were to be enslaved and exterminated. This would further German expansion and provide for the colonization of Eastern Europe and Western Russia. In addition, Hitler also sought to wipe out the large Jewish population of Eastern Europe (see The Holocaust). Aside from the ideological conflict, the mindframe of the leaders of Germany and the Soviet Union, Hitler and Stalin respectively, contributed to the escalation of terror and murder on an unprecedented scale. Stalin and Hitler both disregarded human life in order to achieve their goal of victory. This included terrorization of their own people, as well as mass deportation (planned, in the case of Germany) of entire populations. All these factors resulted in tremendous brutality both to combatants and civilians that found no parallel on the Western Front.
The war inflicted huge losses and suffering upon the civilian populations of the affected countries. Behind the front lines, atrocities against civilians in German-occupied areas were routine, including the Holocaust. German and German-allied forces treated civilian populations with exceptional brutality, massacring villages and routinely killing civilian hostages. Both sides practiced widespread scorched earth tactics, but the loss of civilian lives in the case of Germany was incomparably smaller than that of the Soviet Union, in which at least 20 million civilians were killed by the Nazis. When the Red Army invaded Germany in 1944, many German civilians suffered from vengeance taken by Red Army soldiers (see Red Army atrocities). After the war, following the Yalta conference agreements between the Allies, the German populations of East Prussia and Silesia were displaced to the west of the Oder-Neisse Line, in what became one of the largest forced migrations of people in world history. The German minority scattered over large swaths of Eastern Europe was thus expelled and those who did not manage to leave were exterminated.
Much of the combat took place in or close by populated areas, and the actions of both sides contributed to massive loss of civilian life as well as a tremendous material damage. According to a summary, presented by Lieutenant General Roman Rudenko at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the property damage in the Soviet Union inflicted by the Axis invasion was estimated to a value of 679 billion rubles. The largest number of civilian deaths in a single city was 1,2 million citizens dead during the Siege of Leningrad. The combined damage consisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, 2,508 church buildings, 31,850 industrial establishments, 40,000 miles of railroad, 4100 railroad stations, 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools, and 43,000 public libraries. Seven million horses, and 17 million sheep and goats were also slaughtered or driven off.The New York Times, February 9, 1946, Volume 95, Number 32158.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 had established a non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and a secret protocol outlined how Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania would be divided between them. The two powers invaded and partitioned Poland in 1939. In November 1939 the Soviet Union waged the Winter War against Finland. And in June 1940, threatening to use force if its demands were not fulfilled, it won the diplomatic wars against Romania and three Baltic states, which allowed it to peacefully occupy Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania de facto, (while no Western state regarded the annexation of these states de jure) and to return the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Moldavian territories in the North and North-Eastern regions of Romania (Northern Bucovina and Basarabia).
For nearly two years the border was quiet while Germany conquered Denmark, Norway, France, The Low Countries, and the Balkans. Hitler had however always intended to renege on the pact with the Soviet Union and invade, and appears to have made his decision of when to do so in the spring 1940. Hitler believed that the Soviets would quickly capitulate after an overwhelming German offensive and that the war could largely end before the onset of the fierce Russian winter.
Some say Joseph Stalin was fearful of war with Germany or just did not expect Germany to start a two-front war, and was reluctant to do anything to provoke Hitler. Others say that Stalin was eager for Germany to be at war with other capitalist countries. Another viewpoint is that Stalin expected war in 1942 (the time when all his preparations would be complete) and stubbornly refused to believe its early arrival.[Hardesty, Von. Red Phoenix: The Rise of Soviet Air Power 1941-1945. p. 16, Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-071-0]
British historians Alan S. Milward and W. Medicott show that Nazi Germany--unlike Imperial Germany--was prepared for only a short-term war (Blitzkrieg).[125] According to Andreas Hillgruber, without the necessary supplies from the USSR and the strategic security in the East, Germany could not have succeeded in the West. Had the Soviets joined the Anglo-French blockade, the German war economy would have been starved. With its own raw materials in September 1939, Germany could have been supplied for a mere 9 to 12 months.
Even though Germany had been assembling very large numbers of troops in eastern Poland and making repeated reconnaissance flights over the border, Stalin ignored the warnings of his own as well as foreign intelligence. Moreover, on the very night of the invasion, Soviet troops received a directive undersigned by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and General of the Army Georgy Zhukov that commanded (as it was demanded by Stalin): "do not answer to any provocations" and "do not undertake any actions without specific orders". The German invasion therefore caught the Soviet military and leadership largely by surprise, even though Stalin did receive a message from his spy detailing information on the attack.
For Soviet preparations, see Operation Barbarossa: Soviet preparations.
While German historians do not apply any specific periodisation to the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front, the Soviet and Russian historians divide the war against Germany and its allies into three periods, which are further subdivided into the major Campaigns of the Theatre of war:
1. First period of war (Russian: Первый период Великой Отечественной войны) (22 June 1941 - 18 November 1942)
2. Second Period of war (Russian: Второй период Великой Отечественной войны) (19 November 1942 - 31 December 1943)
3. Third Period of war (Russian: Третий период Великой Отечественной войны) (1 January 1944 - 9 May 1945)
Undoubtedly the best analytical works in English written on the history of the combat operation on the Eastern front in the past 20 years have been those by David Glantz, which deal with large strategic as well as smaller scale operational and tactical aspects of the conflict.
Soviet propaganda poster of 1941. The inscription reads: "Join the ranks of the front female helpmates, a companion is an aid and friend for fighter!".
.jpg/58px-Russian POW (1941).jpg)
Russian POW\'s in 1941
Main article: Operation Barbarossa, Battle of Bialystok-Minsk
Just before dawn on June 22, 1941 the Germans wrecked the wire network in all Soviet western military districts to undermine Soviet communications.Zhukov, Georgy (1972). Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya. Moscow: Agenstvo pechati Novosti. At 03:15 on 22 June 1941 ninety nine (including fourteen Panzerdivisions and ten motorized) of 190 German divisions, drawn against the Soviet Union stormed it from Baltic to the Black Sea. They were accompanied by ten Romanian divisions, nine Romanian and four Hungarian brigades.Zhilin, P.A. (ed.) (1973). Velikaya Otechestvennaya voyna. Moscow: Izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury. On the same day the Baltic, Western and Kiev special military districts were renamed to North-Western, Western and South-Western Fronts respectively. For a month the three-pronged offensive was completely unstoppable as the Panzer forces encircled hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in huge pockets that were then reduced by slower-moving infantry divisions while the panzers charged on, following the Blitzkrieg doctrine. As part of this lightning campaign the German airforce began immediate attacks on Soviet airfields destroying most of the initially antiquated and inept Soviet Air Force before it left the ground.
Army Group North\'s objective was Leningrad via the Baltic States. Comprising the 16th and 18th Armies and 4th Panzer Group, this formation drove through Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Russian cities of Pskov and Novgorod.
Army Group Centre comprised two Panzer groups (2nd and 3rd), which rolled east from either side of Brest-Litovsk and converged ahead of Minsk, followed by 2nd, 4th, and 9th Armies. The combined Panzer force reached the Beresina River in just six days, 650 km (400 miles) from their start lines. The next objective was to cross the Dnieper river, which was accomplished by 11 July. Following that, their next target was Smolensk, which fell on 16 July, but the engagement in the Smolensk area blocked the German advance until mid-September, effectively disrupting the blitzkrieg.
Army Group South, with 1st Panzer Group, 6th, 11th and 17th Armies, was tasked with advancing through Galicia and into Ukraine. Their progress, however, was rather slow, and took heavy casualties in a major tank battle. With only the corridor towards Kiev secure by mid-July, the 11th Army, aided by two Romanian armies, fought its way through Bessarabia towards Odessa. The 1st Panzer Group turned away from Kiev for the moment, advancing into the Dnieper bend. When it joined up with the southern elements of Army Group South at Uman, the group captured 100,000 Soviet prisoners in a huge pocket.
As the Red Army withdrew behind the Dnieper and Dvina rivers, the Soviet hierarchy turned its attention to moving as much of the region\'s heavy industry as it could, dismantled and packed onto flatcars, away from the front line, re-establishing it in more remote areas behind the Urals and in Central Asia. Most civilians could not be evacuated along with the equipment and were left behind to the mercy of the invading forces.
With the capture of Smolensk and the advance to the Luga river, Army Groups Centre and North had completed their first major objective: to get across and hold the "land bridge" between the Dvina and Dnieper. The route to Moscow, now only 400 km (250 miles) away, was wide open.
The German generals argued for an immediate drive towards Moscow, but Hitler overruled them, citing the importance of Ukrainian grain and heavy industry if under German possession, not to mention the massing of Soviet reserves in the Gomel area between Army Group Centre\'s southern flanks and the bogged-down Army Group South to the south. The order was issued to 2nd Panzer Group to turn south and advance towards Kiev. This took the whole of August and into September, but when 2nd Panzer Group joined up with 1st Panzer Group at Lokhvitsa on 14 September 665,000 Soviet prisoners were taken and Kiev fell on 19 September.
Hitler then decided to resume the advance to Moscow, renaming the Panzer Groups to Panzer Armies for the occasion. Operation Typhoon, which was set in motion on 30 September, saw 2nd Panzer Army rush along the paved road from Orel (captured 5 October) to the Oka river at Plavskoye, while the 4th Panzer Army (transferred from Army Group North to Centre) and 3rd Panzer Armies surrounded the Soviet forces in two huge pockets at Vyazma and Bryansk. Army Group North positioned itself in front of Leningrad and attempted to cut the rail link at Tikhvin to the east. Thus began the 900-day Siege of Leningrad. North of the Arctic Circle, a German-Finnish force set out for Murmansk but could get no further than the Litsa river, where they settled down.
Lamenting the dead. Kerch, the Crimea.
Army Group South pushed down from the Dnieper to the Sea of Azov coast, also advancing through Kharkov, Kursk, and Stalino. The 11th Army moved into the Crimea and had taken control of all of the peninsula by autumn (except Sevastopol, which held out until 3 July 1942). On 21 November the Germans took Rostov, the gateway to the Caucasus. However, the German lines were over-extended and the Soviet defenders counterattacked the 1st Panzer Army\'s spearhead from the north, forcing them to pull out of the city and behind the Mius River; the first significant German withdrawal of the war.
One last lunge on 15 November saw the Germans attempting to throw a ring around Moscow. On 27 November the 4th Panzer Army got within 30 km (19 miles) of the Kremlin when it reached the last tramstop of the Moscow line at Khimki, while the 2nd Panzer Army, try as it might, could not take Tula, the last Soviet city that stood in its way of the capital. After a meeting held in Orsha between the head of the Army General Staff, General Halder, and the heads of three Army Groups and armies, it was decided to push forward to Moscow since it was better, as argued by head of Army Group Center, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, for them to try their luck on the battlefield rather than just sit and wait while their opponent gathered more strength.
However, by 6 December it became clear that the Wehrmacht was too weak to capture Moscow and the attack was put on hold. General Zhukov thus began his counter-attack, employing fresh, well-trained Siberian reserves transferred from the east following the guarantee of neutrality from Japan.
The Soviet winter counter-offensive, 5 December 1941 to 7 May 1942: Soviet gains German gains
During the autumn, Zhukov had been transferring fresh and well-equipped Soviet forces from Siberia and the far east to Moscow (these troops had been stationed there in expectation of a Japanese attack, but Stalin\'s master spy Richard Sorge indicated that the Japanese had decided to attack Southeast Asia and the Pacific instead). On 5 December 1941, these reinforcements attacked the German lines around Moscow, supported by new T-34 tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers. The new Soviet troops were prepared for winter warfare, and they included several ski battalions. The exhausted and freezing Germans were routed and driven back between 100 and 250 km (60 to 150 miles) by 7 January 1942.
A further Soviet attack was mounted in late January, focusing on the junction between Army Groups CHoad and Choadless between Lake Seliger and Rzhev, and drove a gap between the two German army groups. In concert with the advance from Kaluga to the south-west of Moscow, it was intended that the two offensives converge on Smolensk, but the Germans rallied and managed to hold them apart, retaining a salient at Rzhev. A Soviet parachute drop on German-held Dorogobuzh was spectacularly unsuccessful, and those paratroopers who survived had to escape to the partisan-held areas beginning to swell behind German lines. To the north, the Soviets surrounded a German garrison in Demyansk, which held out with air supply for four months, and established themselves in front of Kholm, Velizh, and Velikie Luki.
In the south the Red Army crashed over the Donets River at Izyum and drove a 100-km (60-mile) deep salient. The intent was to pin Army Group South against the Sea of Azov, but as the winter eased the Germans were able to counter-attack and cut off the over-extended Soviet troops in the Second Battle of Kharkov.
Operation Blue: German advances from 7 May 1942 to 18 November 1942: to 7 July 1942 to 22 July 1942 to 1 August 1942 to 18 November 1942
Although plans were made to attack Moscow again, on 28 June 1942, the offensive re-opened in a different direction. Army Group South took the initiative, anchoring the front with the Battle of Voronezh and then following the Don river southeastwards. The grand plan was to secure the Don and Volga first and then drive into the Caucasus towards the oilfields, but operational considerations and Hitler\'s vanity made him order both objectives to be attempted simultaneously. Rostov was recaptured on 24 July when 1st Panzer Army joined in, and then that group drove south towards Maikop. As part of this, Operation Shamil was executed, a plan whereby a group of Brandenburger commandos dressed up as Soviet NKVD troops to destabilise Maikop\'s defenses and allow the 1st Panzer Army to enter the oil town with little opposition.
Meanwhile, 6th Army was driving towards Stalingrad, for a long period unsupported by 4th Panzer Army, which had been diverted to help 1st Panzer Army cross the Don. By the time 4th Panzer Army had rejoined the Stalingrad offensive, Soviet resistance (comprising the 62nd Army under Vasily Chuikov) had stiffened. A leap across the Don brought German troops to the Volga on 23 August but for the next three months the Wehrmacht would be fighting the Battle of Stalingrad street-by-street.
Towards the south 1st Panzer Army had reached the Caucasian foothills and the Malka River. At the end of August Romanian mountain troops joined the Caucasian spearhead, while the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies were redeployed from their successful task of clearing the Azov littoral. They took up position on either side of Stalingrad to free German troops for the proper fighting. Mindful of the continuing antagonism between Axis allies Romania and Hungary over Transylvania, the Romanian army in the Don bend was separated from the Hungarian 2nd army by the Italian 8th Army. Thus all of Hitler\'s allies were involved — including a Slovakian contingent with 1st Panzer Army and a Croatian regiment attached to 6th Army.
The advance into the Caucasus bogged down, with the Germans unable to fight their way past Malgobek and to the main prize of Grozny. Instead they switched the direction of their advance to approach it from the south, crossing the Malka at the end of October and entering North Ossetia. In the first week of November, on the outskirts of Ordzhonikidze, the 13th Panzer Division\'s spearhead was snipped off and the Panzer troops had to fall back. The offensive into Russia was over.
While the German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army had been fighting their way into Stalingrad, Soviet armies had congregated on either side of the city, specifically into the Don bridgeheads that the Romanians had been unable to reduce, and it was from these that they struck on 19 November 1942. In Operation Uranus, two Soviet fronts punched through the Romanians and converged at Kalach on 23 November, trapping 300,000 Axis troops behind them. A simultaneous offensive on the Rzhev sector known as Operation Mars was supposed to advance to Smolensk, but was a failure, with German tactical flair winning the day.
The Germans rushed to transfer troops to Russia for a desperate attempt to relieve Stalingrad, but the offensive could not get going until 12 December, by which time the 6th Army in Stalingrad was starving and too weak to break out towards it. Operation Winter Storm, with three transferred Panzer divisions, got going briskly from Kotelnikovo towards the Aksai river but became bogged down 65 km (40 miles) short of its goal. To divert the rescue attempt the Soviets decided to smash the Italians and come down behind the relief attempt if they could, that operation starting on 16 December. What it did accomplish was to destroy many of the aircraft that had been transporting relief supplies to Stalingrad. The fairly limited scope of the Soviet offensive, although still eventually targeted on Rostov, also allowed Hitler time to see sense and pull Army Group A out of the Caucasus and back over the Don.
On 31 January 1943, the 90,000 survivors of the 300,000-man 6th Army surrendered. By that time the Hungarian 2nd Army had also been wiped out. The Soviets advanced from the Don 500 km (300 miles) to the west of Stalingrad, marching through Kursk (retaken on 8 February 1943) and Kharkov (retaken 16 February 1943). In order to save the position in the south, the decision was taken in February to abandon the Rzhev salient, freeing enough German troops to make a successful riposte in eastern Ukraine. Manstein\'s counteroffensive, strengthened by a specially trained SS Panzer Corps equipped with Tiger tanks, opened on 20 February 1943, and fought its way from Poltava back into Kharkov in the third week of March, upon which the spring thaw intervened. This had left a glaring bulge in the front centered on Kursk.
After the failure of the attempt to capture Stalingrad, Hitler had deferred planning authority for the upcoming campaign season to the German Army High Command and reinstated Guderian to a prominent role, this time as Inspector of Panzer Troops. Debate among the General Staff was polarised, with even Hitler nervous about any attempt to pinch off the Kursk salient. He knew that in the intervening six months the Soviet position at Kursk had been reinforced heavily with anti-tank guns, tank traps, landmines, barbed wire, trenches, pillboxes, artillery and mortars. But if one last great blitzkrieg offensive could be mounted, just maybe the Soviets would ease off and attention could then be turned to the Allied threat to the Western Front. The advance would be executed from the Orel salient to the north of Kursk and from Belgorod to the south. Both wings would converge on Tim, and by that means restore the lines of Army Group South to the exact points that it held over the winter of 1941–1942.
Although the Germans knew that the Red Army\'s massive reserves of manpower had been bled dry in the summer of 1941 and 1942, the Soviets were still re-equipping, simply by drafting the men from the regions recaptured.
Under pressure from his generals, Hitler bit the bullet and agreed to the attack on Kursk, little realising that the Abwehr\'s intelligence on the Soviet position there had been undermined by a concerted Stavka misinformation and counter-intelligence campaign mounted by the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland. When the Germans began the operation, it was after months of delays waiting for new tanks and equipment, by which time the Soviets had reinforced the Kursk salient with more anti-tank firepower than had ever been assembled in one place before or since.
In the north, the entire 9th Army had been redeployed from the Rzhev salient into the Orel salient and was to advance from Maloarkhangelsk to Kursk. But its forces could not even get past the first objective at Olkhovatka, just 8 km (5 miles) into the advance. The 9th Army blunted its spearhead against the Soviet minefields, frustratingly so considering that the high ground there was the only natural barrier between them and flat tank country all the way to Kursk. The direction of advance was then switched to Ponyri, to the west of Olkhovatka, but the 9th Army could not break through here either and went over to the defensive. The Soviets simply soaked up the German punishment and then struck back. On 12 July the Red Army ploughed through the demarcation line between the 211th and 293rd Divisions on the Zhizdra river and steamed towards Karachev, right behind them and behind Orel.
The southern offensive, spearheaded by 4.Panzer-Armee, led by Gen. Col. Hoth, with three Tank Corps made more headway. Advancing on either side of the upper Donets on a narrow corridor, the SS Panzer Corps and the Großdeutschland Panzergrenadier Divisions battled their way through minefields and over comparatively high ground towards Oboyan. Stiff resistance caused a change of direction from east to west of the front, but the tanks got 25 km (15 miles) before encountering the reserves of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army outside Prokhorovka. Battle was joined on 12 July, with about one thousand tanks doing battle. After the war, the battle near Prochorovka was idealized by the Soviet historians as the biggest tank battle of all time. The meeting engagement at Prochorovka was a Soviet defensive success, albeit at heavy cost. The Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army, with about 800 light and medium tanks, attacked elements of the II SS Panzer Corps. Tank losses on both sides have been the source of controversy ever since. Although the 5th Guards Tank Army did not attain their terrain objectives, the German advance was halted. At the end of the day both sides had fought each other to a standstill, but regardless of the standstill in the north Manstein intended to continue the attack with the 4th Panzer Army. But the Soviets could absorb the fearful losses of men and equipment, and German strategic advance in Operation Citadel had been halted. Under the impression of the successful counter-attack operations in the south the Red Army started the strong offensive operation in the northern Orel salient and achieved a breakthrough on the flank of the German 9th Army. Also worried by the Allies\' landing in Sicily on 10 July, Hitler made the decision to halve the offensive even as the German 9th Army was rapidly giving ground in the north. The Germans\' final strategic offensive in the Soviet Union ended with their defense against a major Soviet counteroffensive that lasted into August. A detailed analysis of this campaign is available in the Battle of Kursk article.
The Kursk offensive was the last on the scale of 1940 and 1941 the Wehrmacht was able to launch, and subsequent offensives would represent only a shadow of previous German offensive might. Following the defeat, Hitler would not trust his generals to the same extent again, and the quality of German strategic decision fell correspondingly. The Battle of Kursk cost Hitler over 500,000 troops and 1,000 tanks, forever hampering future war efforts on the Eastern Front.
The Soviet juggernaut got rolling in earnest with the advance into the Germans\' Orel salient. The diversion of Hitler\'s favourite Grossdeutschland Division from Belgorod to Karachev could not halt the tide, and a strategic decision was made to abandon Orel (retaken by the Red Army on 5 August 1943) and fall back to the Hagen line in front of Bryansk. To the south, the Soviets blasted through Army Group South\'s Belgorod positions and headed for Kharkov once again. Though intense battles of movement throughout late July and into August 1943 saw the Tigers blunting Soviet tanks on one axis, they were soon outflanked on another line to the west as the Soviets advanced down the Psel, and Kharkov had to be evacuated for the final time on 22 August.
German prisoners being searched by Red Army soldiers
The German forces on the Mius, now constituting the 1st Panzer Army and a reconstituted 6th Army, were by August too weak to sustain a Soviet onslaught on their own front, and when the Soviets hit them they had to fall back all the way through the Donbass industrial region to the Dnieper, losing the industrial resources and half the farmland that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union to exploit. At this time Hitler agreed to a general withdrawal to the Dnieper line, along which was meant to be the Ostwall, a line of defence similar to the Westwall of fortifications along the German frontier in the west. Trouble was, it hadn\'t been built yet, and by the time Army Group South had evacuated eastern Ukraine and begun withdrawing across the Dnieper during September, the Soviets were hard behind them. Tenaciously, small units paddled their way across the 3-km (2-mile) wide river and established bridgeheads. A second attempt by the Soviets to gain land using parachutists, mounted at Kanev on 24 September, proved as luckless as at Dorogobuzh eighteen months previously, and the paratroopers were soon repelled — but not before still more Red Army troops had used the cover they provided to get themselves over the Dnieper and securely dug in. As September proceeded into October, the Germans found the Dnieper line impossible to hold as the Soviet bridgeheads grew and grew, and important Dnieper towns started to fall, with Zaporozhye the first to go, followed by Dnepropetrovsk. Finally, early in November the Soviets broke out of their bridgeheads on either side of Kiev and captured the Ukrainian capital, at that time the third largest city in the Soviet Union.
Eighty miles west of Kiev, the 4th Panzer Army, still convinced that the Red Army was a spent force, was able to mount a successful riposte at Zhitomir during the middle of November, blunting the Soviet bridgehead via a daring outflanking strike mounted by the SS Panzer Corps along the river Teterev. This battle also enabled Army Group South to recapture Korosten and gain some time to rest; however, on Christmas Eve the retreat began anew when the First Ukrainian Front (renamed from Voronezh Front) struck them in the same place. The Soviet advance continued along the railway line until the 1939 Polish-Soviet border was reached on 3 January 1944. To the south, Second Ukrainian Front (ex Steppe Front) had crossed the Dnieper at Kremenchug and continued westwards. In the second week of January 1944 they swung north, meeting Vatutin\'s tank forces who had swung south from their penetration into Poland and surrounding ten German divisions at Korsun-Shevenkovsky, west of Cherkassy. Hitler\'s insistence on holding the Dnieper line, even when facing the prospect of catastrophic defeat, was compounded by his conviction that the Cherkassy pocket could break out and even advance to Kiev, but Manstein was more concerned about being able to advance to the edge of the pocket and then implore the surrounded forces to break out. By 16 February the first stage was complete, with panzers separated from the contracting Cherkassy pocket only by the swollen Gniloy Tikich river. Under furious shellfire and pursued by Soviet tanks and cavalry, the surrounded German troops, among whom were the SS Division Wiking, fought their way across the river to safety, losing half their number and all their equipment. Surely the Soviets would not attack again, with the spring approaching - but in March 3 the Soviet Ukrainian Front went over to the offensive. Having already isolated the Crimea by severing the neck of the Perekop isthmus, Malinovsky\'s forces advanced across the mud to the Romanian border, not stopping on the river Prut.
Soviet advances from 1 August 1943 to 31 December 1944: to 1 December 1943 to 30 April 1944 to 19 August 1944 to 31 December 1944
One final move in the south completed the 1943-44 campaigning season, which had wrapped up an advance of over 500 miles. In March, 20 German divisions of Generaloberst Hans-Valentin Hube\'s 1st Panzer Army were encircled in what was to be known as Hube\'s Pocket near Kamenets-Podolskiy. After two weeks hard fighting, the 1st Panzer managed to escape the pocket, suffering only light to moderate casualties. At this point, Hitler sacked several prominent generals, Manstein included. April saw the capture of Odessa in April 1944, followed by 4th Ukrainian Front\'s campaign to recapture the Crimea, which culminated with the recapture of Sevastopol on 10 May.
Along Army Group Centre\'s front, August 1943 saw this force pushed back from the Hagen line slowly, ceding comparatively little territory, but the loss of Bryansk and more importantly, Smolensk, on 25 September cost the Wehrmacht the keystone of the entire German defensive system. The 4th and 9th Armies and 3rd Panzer Armies still held their own east of the upper Dnieper, stifling Soviet attempts to reach Vitebsk. On Army Group North\'s front, there was barely any fighting at all until January 1944, when out of nowhere Volkhov and Second Baltic Fronts struck. In a lightning campaign, Leningrad was liberated and Novgorod was recaptured; by February the Red Army had reached the borders of Estonia after a 5 inch advance.
Wehrmacht planning was convinced that the Soviets would attack again in the south, where the front was fifty miles from Lvov and offered the most direct route to Berlin. Accordingly they denuded of troops Army Group Centre, whose front still protruded deep into the Soviet Union. The Belorussian Offensive (codenamed Operation Bagration) started on June 22 1944, was a massive Soviet attack, consisting of four Soviet army groups totaling over 120 divisions t
 crowned.svg/58px-Flag of Italy (1861-1946) crowned.svg)
.svg/58px-Flag of Bulgaria (1878-1944).svg)
