XX0025 – Kursk, 1943

Kursk, July 1943: The Largest Armoured Battle in History

The German summer offensive of 1943 aimed to pinch off a Soviet salient some 250 kilometres wide around the city of Kursk by attacking its base from north and south. The Battle of Kursk that followed committed around two million men, six thousand tanks and five thousand aircraft, and it ended the German army’s capacity to mount a strategic offensive in the East.

An Attack That Was Expected

Operation Citadel was postponed repeatedly from April to July so that new Panther and Tiger tanks could reach the front. The delay gave the Soviet command what it needed. Warned by intelligence and by the obvious geometry of the salient, the Red Army built eight successive defensive belts to a depth of some 300 kilometres: minefields laid at densities of thousands per kilometre, anti-tank strongpoints sited to catch armour in crossfire, and hundreds of kilometres of trenches dug largely by the civilian population.

Prokhorovka

The southern pincer made the deeper penetration and met the Soviet armoured reserve near Prokhorovka on 12 July. The engagement was long described as a clash of some 1,500 tanks in which the Waffen-SS panzer corps was destroyed; archival work since the 1990s has substantially revised both the numbers and the outcome, with Soviet losses now understood to have been far heavier than German ones. What is not in dispute is that the German advance stopped there.

The Turn

Hitler cancelled Citadel on 13 July, partly because of the Allied landings in Sicily. The Red Army immediately opened its own offensives at Orel and Belgorod and did not relinquish the strategic initiative for the rest of the war. Kursk is generally taken, with Stalingrad, as the point after which the outcome of the war in the East was no longer in question.

Giuseppe Rava’s Original Work

Giuseppe Rava reconstructs the equipment of both armies as it appeared in the summer of 1943, from the armoured vehicles to the field uniforms, in the open steppe terrain that made the battle a contest of armour, guns and prepared defences.

This is a limited edition fine art print, hand-signed by the artist, produced in SRA3 format on fine art paper. Ships worldwide.