In that same instant I was knocked off my feet as though hit by a heavyweight boxer. The butt kicked and a round was sent hurtling toward a faceless Soviet soldier. I instinctively yelled a warning, dropped to one knee and squeezed the trigger of my rifle. I twisted to see a camouflaged cover being thrown off a trench. He whimpered as I moved toward him, but was silent by the time that I was at his side. I expected to be cut down any moment or blown to smithereens by the shells that slammed about….I heard my old friend Ernst panting seconds before his right arm was torn from his body by an explosion that flung his rifle at my feet.
Ivan bullets zipped around us I could hear them flying past my ears. The 20-year-old lieutenant struggled toward his platoon’s objective on the morning of July 5, 1943, against a weight of fire he had never before experienced. German infantryman Raimund Rüffer would never forget the first day of Hitler’s offensive toward the Russian city of Kursk. In 1943, the Soviets and Germans unleashed some 7,000 tanks and 2.6 million men against each other on the steppes of central Russia. Kursk finally ended the myth of German invincibility.The Battle of Kursk: Clash of the Tanks Close The battle climaxed at the village of Prokhorovka, which involved some 1,000 tanks fighting each other at pointblank range.During this vicious two week battle the Red Army dealt the Panzerwaffe a severe battering from which the German war effort was never to recover fully.
The images convey the true scale, intensity and horror of the fighting at Kursk, as the Germans tried in vain to batter their way through the Soviet defensive systems. Images of War-Battle of Kursk 1943, is an illustrated account of this pivotal battle of the war on the Eastern Front, when the Germans threw 900,000 men and 2,500 tanks against 1,300,000 soldiers and 3,000 tanks of the Red Army in a savage battle of attrition.Unlike many pictorial accounts of the war on the Eastern Front, Battle of Kursk 1943 draws upon both German and Russian archive material, all of which are rare or unpublished. "The greatest tank battle in world history, known as Operation CITADEL, opened during the early hours of 5 July 1943, and its outcome was to decide the eventual outcome of the war on the Eastern Front.
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