Liberation 1943. 'From Kursk and Oryol the War Led Us On...'

Just as the Nazis explained the derailment of the Blitzkrieg with tales about the “General Mud” and “General Frost,” in the Red Army during the first war years a rigid division of the enemy into a “summer” and a “winter” German took root—supposedly with different, if not entirely incomparable, combat capabilities. The “winter” German could be smashed both near Moscow in 1941 and near Stalingrad in 1942, while the “summer” one seemed unstoppable until 1943—and it was only at the Battle of Kursk that Soviet troops for the first time defeated the Wehrmacht without the decisive “help” of winter. Why, then, could German command not repeat the success of earlier summer offensives this time? How did the balance of forces on the Soviet–German front change? Where did the great “Liberation” begin? And what price did the Red Army’s first summer victories—and that very “turning point”—cost?

From the triumph at Stalingrad to the German counteroffensive near Kharkov, from the “fiery arc” to the crossing of the Dnieper—this new work by a leading military historian examines the key battles of World War II in which the Red Army seized strategic initiative from the Wehrmacht and did not let go of it all the way to Berlin.