The Nazis came to Kursk for history’s greatest tank victory. They found history’s greatest defense

Operation Citadel was designed to destroy the Red Army – and ended by destroying Germany’s strategic initiative By 1943, World War II had turned decisively in the Allies’ favor.

At Stalingrad, the Russians destroyed the Wehrmacht’s largest field formation, the Sixth Army.

In the Pacific, the Americans and their allies won a hard-fought victory over the Japanese at Guadalcanal.

In North Africa, Allied forces trapped the German Afrika Korps and its Italian partners and forced them to surrender.

And back in Russia, the Red Army won the decisive Battle of Kursk.

Beating the enemy with a shovel In the winter of 1942-43, riding the momentum of their triumph at Stalingrad, Soviet forces launched a series of operations across the southern sector of their enormous front.

Most met with at least some success.

But in March, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein mounted a surprise counteroffensive that drove the Red Army’s battle-weary forces back from Kharkov and Belgorod.

Elsewhere, however, victory at Voronezh allowed the Russians to break through quickly to Kursk, a major transportation hub in central Russia.

The result was a bulge in the front known in the West as the Kursk salient and in Russian as the Kurskaya Duga , or Kursk Arc.

It projected roughly 150 kilometers westward, measured about 200 kilometers across at its base, and had Kursk at its center.

To the north, it was flanked by the German-held Orel salient, which was roughly the same size.

To the south, the German line formed a right angle with Belgorod at its corner.

Read more The Soviet sacrifice in WWII: What is often left out in the West The broad outline of Germany’s plan for the summer campaign of 1943 practically drew itself.