World War 2
The Red Army Bites Back
In the summer of 1942 Hitler returned to business that was left unfinished in front of Moscow in December of 1941. Once again the Panzer Divisions rolled; Army Group A struck through the Donets corridor to Stalingrad while Army Group B drove through Rostov to the Caucasus and on towards the Soviet Union's southernmost oilfields at Baku on the Caspian Sea.
The men of the Red Army were ready for action; after their near destruction in 1941, a new battle-hardened Red Army emerged to wrestle the initiative back from the Germans. Nazi ideology ensured that the war on the Eastern Front was fought with unequalled savagery. The Russian's repaid their enemy in kind. By the end of 1944 there were few Red Army men who did not have a personal score to settle with the Germans.
Hitler's plan was unhinged by his growing obsession with the seizure of Stalingrad; the industrial city on the banks of the River Volga. Russian resistance denied him the prize and, by the winter of 1942, the stronger-rested and battle-hardened Red Army turned Stalingrad into a mass tomb for the encircled German Sixth Army. On the 31st of January 1943, commander Field Marshal Paulus, and 100'000 German soldiers went into captivity. A massive Soviet counter-attack, launched in January 1943 between Orel and Rostov, threatened Kharkov and the German forces withdrawing from the Caucasus.
The Soviet offensive was halted in its tracks by a brilliantly weighted counterblow delivered by Field Marshal von Manstein in February/March 1943. When the fighting died down in the mud of the spring thaw, it left a huge fist-shaped salient, centred around the city of Kursk, in the heartland of the Ukraine, projecting westward into the German line.
The Kursk bulge exercised a horrible fascination on Hitler. He personally told General Guderian, Inspector of Armoured Troops, that every time he thought of the impending attack on the Salient his stomach turned over.
The build-up for the operation: codenamed Citadel, aimed at clawing back the initiative after the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, took nearly three months. The Red Army reorganized, re-equipped and increasingly confident, had been warned of the German plans by the 'Lucy' spy network in Switzerland and agents placed in the British decoding centre at Bletchley Park. Under the overall direction of Marshal Zhukov it prepared to defend the salient in massive stregth and depth.
When Hitler launched his tank divisions against the southern and northern shoulders of the Kursk salient on the 5th of July 1943, they were caught in the Soviet killing grounds and got mangled beyond repair, by the greater prepared and stronger Red Army. Soon after the German tank-thrusts been contained, the Red Army delivered a series of crushing counter-attacks which by September had driven the German Army back to the line of the River Dnieper. Hitler had gambled all an the throw of a single dice and had lost the initiative on the Eastern Front - never to regain it.