“The battle of Kursk was the Eastern Front’s transition point,” Showalter argues with a conviction supported by well-deployed evidence, “and its point of no return.” The veteran historian Dennis Showalter, whose many excellent books on the war form a remarkable canon of military history writing, makes a convincing case in this well-researched and well-written book that Kursk should be seen as the key turning point of the war, even more important than Stalingrad in its long-term implications. After advancing a mere eight miles, the German attack ground to a halt.Yet compared with the battles of Guadalcanal, Midway, D-Day, Arnhem, and the Bulge, the great clash at Kursk is very little known in the West and hailed only by aficionados, despite its dwarfing each of those other battles in size and indeed in importance. To make matters worse, the Germans were now coming under fire from ground-attack aircraft. He had survived arrest, torture and imprisonment during Stalin’s purge of army officers in 1937. Soviet Commander of the northern sector of the Kursk salient. He was mortally wounded in an attack by Ukrainian nationalists in February 1944. Soviet Commander of the southern sector of the Kursk salient. He committed suicide at the end of the war. Nicknamed the Führer’s Fireman, Hitler considered Model one of his best generals. He had been key in the defeat of France in 1940 and, earlier in 1943, had stabilised the front after German failure at Stalingrad.Ĭommander of the northern German pincer. Between them, these four men commanded around 2.8 million men, 8,000 tanks and 4,200 aircraft…Ĭommander of the southern German pincer.

Greatest tank battle of wwii