The Other Battle of Kursk

The Battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle in history and one of the turning points of World War II. In July 1943, German forces launched a massive attack that aimed to pinch off a salient in the Soviet front, destroy or capture significant numbers of Soviet soldiers and tanks, and gain the strategic upper hand on the Eastern Front. Most accounts of Kursk focus on the massive tank clash at Prokhorovka, but important fighting happened all along the salient, especially in the Tolstoye Woods west of Prohkorovka, where, in a battle nearly as large as the "main event," Soviet tank forces counterattacked and halted the Germans' forward advance. This book is the result of more than a decade of in-depth research. The narrative relies on the unit records of both sides and is fleshed out with interviews with more than 100 German and Russian veterans. Combining detailed analysis with eyewitness descriptions, it covers the battle from the bottom-up and from the top-down, highlighting strategic decisions, operational maneuvers, and tank-versus-tank fighting in the Tolstoye Woods near Ukraine. Along the way it tells vivid stories from the soldiers inside the Panther, Tiger, and T-34 tanks that did the fighting. The Other Battle of Kursk strips away the myths and digs beneath the controversies to reconstruct the fighting objectively but also colorfully.

Christopher A. Lawrence is president and executive director of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and analysis of military history and current armed conflict. He is author of America's Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate, 2015), Kursk (Aberdeen, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, 2017), and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, 2019). He lives in northern Virginia, outside Washington, DC.