CNN —
The Ukrainian invasion of Russian territory in the Kursk region covers some of the same territory where the Soviet Union won one of its most significant victories over German invaders in World War II, a victory some historians say changed the course of the European war almost a year before the Normandy landings.
While the June 6, 1944 landing on the coast of France is often considered in the West to be a turning point in Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's conquest of Europe, historians say Germany's defeat was sealed between July 5 and August 23, 1943, when millions of soldiers and thousands of tanks and armored artillery battled around Kursk.
The victory at Kursk “gained the Soviet initiative in the east and never relinquished it until the end of the war,” said Michael Bell, director of the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
In the spring of 1943, Hitler's eastern forces suffered heavy losses in the Battle of Stalingrad. German forces lost nearly a million troops in an attempt to capture cities on the Volga River, route the exhausted Soviet forces, and seize the oil fields of the South Caucasus that would fuel their conquest of Europe.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the defense of Stalingrad at all costs, and German advances in the late summer and fall of 1942 were pushed back over the winter, with the remaining German forces in the city surrendering by February 1943.
As German forces were pushed back on the eastern front after the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler's generals sought a way to regain the initiative in the east and to cut off the Soviet salient, a 150-mile salient north and south of the German front centered around Kursk and defended by more than one million soldiers.
Although the generals had hoped to launch an offensive in the spring, Hitler delayed the start of what was to become Operation Citadel so that he could send some of Germany's most advanced tanks to the battlefield.
This gave the Soviets plenty of time to prepare defenses against obvious attack points, said Peter Mansour, a history professor at Ohio State University and a former U.S. Army armored cavalry commander.
“It was easy to see that the Germans were interested in squashing this bulge in their front,” Mansour said.
The Germans would deploy as many as 800,000 soldiers and about 3,000 tanks to occupy the salient.
But they faced a strong defense.
Bell, of the World War II museum, said the Soviets prepared a series of defensive lines, dug 3,000 miles of anti-tank trenches and laid 400,000 mines to defend salients, while placing 75 percent of their armored forces and 40 percent of their personnel in reserve in or behind the Kursk salient on the eastern front.
The new tanks Hitler wanted for the battle were more powerful than the Soviet armoured cars, but Stalin's forces had a numerical advantage, Bell said.
“The Germans had superior equipment, but the Soviets clearly had superior numbers,” Bell said.
Some estimates put the Soviet military strength at the Battle of Kursk at over 2 million soldiers and over 7,000 tanks.
According to historians, the Allied landing on the Italian island of Sicily on July 9 gave the Soviets even more numerical superiority and opened a new front that Hitler had to defend, leading him to move some of his troops from the eastern front to Italy.
The remaining German forces were unable to penetrate the Soviet defenses, were far from their objectives, and were unable to penetrate deep into the rear areas.
Histories of the battle indicate that Hitler's forces suffered heavy losses, with over 200,000 killed and wounded, and the loss of around 1,000 tanks.
“The Germans were never able to reassemble forces in the size they had attempted in this battle,” Bell said.
“The Battle of Kursk wiped out German panzer forces and made it impossible for the Germans to defend the Russian front for the rest of the war,” Mansour said.
“After the Battle of Kursk, the Germans were unable to replace their human losses, and lost the cream of their armored forces there,” he said.
When Ukrainian forces crossed the border into the Kursk region on August 6, they had an advantage the Germans did not have in 1943: surprise.
The attack was planned in complete secrecy, with troop movements made to look like reinforcements to defense positions or military exercises within Ukraine.
Russia is not prepared to defend its territories, such as some of the areas of Ukraine it has occupied, Mansour said.
In fact, he said the defensive positions that Russia has built in parts of Ukraine's occupied Donbas region – layers of trenches, mines and anti-tank weapons supported by artillery and armored vehicles – are very similar to those of the Soviets at Kursk in 1943.
“Russia hasn't changed much about how it wages war,” Mansour said.
And that may work to Ukraine's advantage today, said a former U.S. Army Armored Cavalry officer.
Ukraine has used combined arms tactics, successfully synchronizing and supporting infantry, long-range artillery, and aircraft, to create a maneuver space inside Russian territory that the Kiev military has not been able to do before.
“It really changes the nature of the war, at least in that part of the front line,” Mansour said.
