Almost eight months have passed since Ukraine occupied by Las Bravas in the south of Kursk, the border region with Russia that has marked the revolts of the war since then. His goal was to have a currency to use … When the negotiation has come. But these dreams evaporated last Thursday, when President Zelensky’s troops left the city of Sudzha, the largest in the area, and left their enemies free. A concession based on the vulnerability of its logistics lines and the conclusion that, with the entrance of the United States and the promise of a high fire, little was already scratching.
The Kursk battlethe witnesses claim, he has left thousands of dead in eight months and many other armored and calcined armored vehicles. Fulled and bitter instantaneous figures reminiscent of the contest between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in this same region between July and August 1943.
Although the reality is that this battleship confrontation was much more for the development of the great European conflict than the partial withdrawal of the Ukrainian troops that are lived these days. According to historians such as the Spanish Jesús Hernández, author of ‘That was not in my World War II book’ (Almuzara), “It was one of the most decisive battles of the entire contest” and, in practice, the last great offensive of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front before its definitive collapse. “It is usually undervalued, but it constituted the final challenge between Hitler and Stalin,” he explains to ABC.
Towards the battle
The germ of the battle was planted at the end of February 1943, when little remained of the glorious Germany that had invaded the USSR two years earlier. After suffering a severe setback in the city of Stalingrad, the units of the Wehrmacht and the SS withdrew before the mass advance of the Red Army. That messy evasion created a bump in the front of about 3,000 kilometers near Kursk city. Stalin saw that as a kind of razor that was admitted to the German territory; However, Hernández subscribes that the situation offered an unparalleled opportunity for Germans. “The generals informed the ‘Führer’ that they could organize an attack in Tenaza against the flanks of this extensive outgoing and pocket the Russians,” he adds.
Hitler, always daring, accepted the order and gave orders to his mechanized units of replicating the old lightning war with which they had crushed Poland and France at the dawn of the conflict: “You must surround the adversary forces found in the Kursk region through a very concentrated, brutal and dynamic attack.” The icing was the election of the officers: to the north, the onslaught was entrusted to the general Walter Model, and, to the south, to the more than popular Mariscal von Manstein.
His problem, according to Hernández, was that English intelligence revealed those plans and the Soviet had time to reinforce the area with up to eight concentric circles of trenches and mines. From then on a race between both sides began to accumulate more and more battleships and artillery.
Disaster
On July 5, 1943, the offensive began under the code name of ‘Operation Citadel’. There is controversy over the figures, but historian Vincent Bernard argues that the Nazis had 800,000 soldiers and about 3,400 vehicles, while the Soviets added almost two million men and 5,600 armored. What the authors of the authors do coincide is that the tanks of the third Reich, the ‘Panther’ and the ‘Tiger’ of rigor were superior. «The Germans could fight at a very long distance. They could open fire at 1,200 meters and easily reach our T-34; We could only do it at 800 meters, ”admitted Russian Lieutenant Vladimir Alexeev after the conflict.
The progress was disparate in both tenazes. «The first day of the attack, the Germans could only advance ten kilometers in the north. At the southern end, the armored ones did not find so many difficulties and covered 120 kilometers, which filled the ‘Führer’ headquarters with optimism, “says Hernández. Hitler, in the belief that he had won the first assault, sent his reservations to the weakest area of the front to cross it. For their part, the Soviets ordered their reinforcements to go to the same point. Both contingents collided on July 12 in Prokhorovka, the final confrontation. And, although it ended in a German Pyrrhic victory, it did not allow them to close the bag.
What was lived those days was a nightmare that was recorded, indelible, in the memory of thousands of soldiers. Vasili Bryukhov, commander of one of the many thousands of combat cars deployed by the Soviet Union that summer, defined the confrontation as “a tanks slaughterhouse” never seen before: “Everything burned and was wrapped in smoke, dust and fire. An indescribable stench floated on the air on the battlefield ». On the other side of the front, the radio operator of the third Reich Wilhelm Roes was also shuddered by the plague that the metal alive and the corpses on fire gave off: «You could smell burned leather, smoking bodies and calcined armored bodies. I find it impossible to describe the combination ».
In the end, with their blocked divisions and the newly arrived allies to Sicily, Hitler chose to accept defeat and retire. “In mid -August, the two entrants who had served as a pincer for the Germans were already in the hands of the Russians,” says Hernández. Although on paper the casualties were similar for both sides, Heinz Guderian, one of the most famous generals of Reich, admitted that the contest “sank the German army in misery.” The military, in fact, attributed “the loss of war to this defeat, rather than that of Stalingrad”, because “the losses of the Russians were comparatively minor and later counteratacious, causing new advances.” The final setback, go.
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