Word: kursk
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...deadly game began early this summer. Anticipating Hitler's great offensive, the Red Army massed its men and guns in the Kursk-Belgorod sector. The Wehrmacht massed its strength south of Sevsk, near the center of the 300-mile-long chessboard...
...Offensives. Pursuing the same strategy that carried them from Stalingrad to Kharkov last winter, the Russians had waited until the German drive on Kursk spent itself, then had launched a mighty counterattack. This quickly developed into a two-pronged offensive-actually two offensives - along a 300-mile front. One prong jabbed hard at the heels of the Germans routed at Orel, liberated hundreds of Russian villages and advanced toward Bryansk. Farther to the north, other Russian forces stabbed southwest from Vyazma toward the main Nazi base at Smolensk...
...Russians claimed the capture of 12,418 German officers and men, 621 tanks, 875 guns, 2,521 machine guns, 325 supply dumps. Not listed in the communiqués, but of great value to the Soviet Union, was the recovery of the direct rail link between Moscow, Tula, Orel, Kursk and Belgorod. Russian losses were heavy, too, but relatively lighter than in previous summer campaigns, especially as they were incurred in a successful advance...
...Russian forces "along the arc of the Kursk salient" constitute a goodly portion of the Red Army's best troops and armor. Kursk itself is a valuable railway and military center. But, as the Russians indicated, Nazi Field Marshal Günther von Kluge may well be more interested in the "encirclement and annihilation" of those forces than in geographical gains...
...German tanks and 1,126 planes, killed 43,900 men. Berlin claimed the destruction, in the same period, of 1,640 Russian tanks, 1,197 planes. These figures showed that great forces were concentrated on narrow and fiercely contested fronts. To the men along those fronts, the battle for Kursk was no "limited engagement...