CITADEL The Battle of Kursk 1943: the greatest tank battle of the Second World War

‘An absorbing, wholly accessible account’ The Times

‘A first-rate narrative account’ Publishers Weekly

‘A masterly account of the titanic struggle’ Daily Post

THE GREATEST TANK BATTLE EVER FOUGHT

In July 1943 Hitler gambled the last of his armoured strength on a single offensive. Operation Zitadelle was designed to bite off the Kursk salient, destroy the Soviet armies inside it and recover the initiative lost at Stalingrad. It was the last great German attack in the East. It lasted two weeks.

The Red Army was waiting. Warned that the blow was coming, Soviet engineers turned the salient into the most heavily fortified position on earth: eight echeloned defence lines reaching over a hundred miles into the rear, more than a million mines, five hundred miles of wire, 1.3 million men. One German general called Kursk the strongest fortress in the world. Hitler admitted to Guderian that the thought of the attack made his stomach turn over.

Robin Cross reconstructs the battle from both sides. The feuding between Hitler, Manstein, Model and Guderian over whether to attack at all. The intelligence operation that handed Stalin the German plan, and the truth about who was really running it. The greatest single day of air combat of the entire war. The armoured collision at Prokhorovka, which Cross argues has become one of the great myths of military history. And the Allied landings in Sicily that forced Hitler to break off the offensive and begin the long retreat to the Dnieper.

Kursk and the withdrawal that followed cost the German army 365,000 irreplaceable losses, far more than Stalingrad. After it, the initiative on the Eastern Front passed to the Red Army and never returned.