1943

1943 - Eastern Front

War on the Eastern Front - German gains in Russia are over-turned, with Soviet troops finally grinding out a victory in Stalingrad and going on the offensive

Until the autumn of 1942, the German army was consistently victorious. Europe lay under German domination, from France in the west to the Volga River in the east; from the Arctic Circle in Norway to the shores of North Africa. The battle for the city of Stalingrad proved a decisive psychological turning point, ending a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and beginning the long retreat westward that would end with Nazi Germany's surrender in May 1945.

Int he summer of 1942 the German Sixth Army under General Friedrich von Paulus was ordered to take Stalingrad, an industrial center and obstacle to Nazi control of the precious Caucasian oil wells. In August, the German Sixth Army made advances across the Volga River while the German Fourth Air Fleet reduced Stalingrad to a burning rubble, killing over 40,000 civilians. In early September, General Paulus ordered the first offensives into Stalingrad, estimating that it would take his army about 10 days to capture the city.

However, Soviet General Vasily Zhukov used the ruined city to their advantage, transforming destroyed buildings and rubble into natural defensive fortifications. In a method of fighting the Germans began to call the Rattenkrieg, or “Rat’s War,” brutal street fighting bogged the Germans down as the Soviet's poured more and more men into struggle to hold the city.

In mid-November 1942, the Soviet army launched a massive counteroffensive, which involved 500,000 Soviet troops, 900 tanks, and 1,400 aircraft. Within three days, the entire German force of more than 200,000 men was encircled.

Italian and Romanian troops at Stalingrad surrendered, but the Germans hung on, receiving limited supplies by air and waiting for reinforcements. Hitler ordered Von Paulus to remain in place and promoted him to field marshal, as no Nazi field marshal had ever surrendered. Starvation and the bitter Russian winter took as many lives as the merciless Soviet troops, and on January 21, 1943, the last of the airports held by the Germans fell to the Soviets, completely cutting the Germans off from supplies. On January 31, Von Paulus surrendered German forces in the southern sector, and on February 2 the remaining German troops surrendered. Only 90,000 German soldiers were still alive, and of these only 5,000 troops would survive the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps and make it back to Germany.

After the victory at Stalingrad, the Soviet army remained on the offensive, liberating most of the Ukraine, and virtually all of Russia and eastern Belorussia during 1943.

The Battle of Kursk was a significant turning point, involving some 6,000 tanks, two million men, and 5,000 aircraft. The Soviets were victorious, and ended the last large-scale German offensive on the Eastern Front, but at a heavy cost.

In early July, Germany and the USSR had concentrated their forces near the city of Kursk in western Russia, where a 150-mile-wide Soviet pocket jutted 100 miles into the German lines. The German attack began on July 5, and 38 divisions, nearly half of which were armored, began moving from the south and the north. However, the Soviets had better tanks and air support than in previous battles, and in bitter fighting Soviet antitank artillery destroyed as much as 40 percent of the German armor, which included their new Mark VI Tiger tanks. After six days of warfare concentrated near Prokhorovka, south of Kursk, the German Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge called off the offensive, and by July 23 the Soviets had forced the Germans back to their original positions.

In the beginning of August, the Soviets began a major offensive around the Kursk salient, and within a few weeks the Germans were in retreat all along the Eastern Front.

SOURCE: History.com + History.com

Further Reading:

Wikipedia

The Atlantic - The Eastern Front

Facing Stalingrad - Portraits of German and Soviet Survivors

Spiegel - Revisiting Stalingrad

Warfare History Network - Battle of Kursk: The Eastern Front’s Turning Point

1943 - Invasion of Italy

Allies invade Italy - Americans and British land in Sicily and then the Italian mainland, forcing their way through the 'soft underbelly of Europe' and prompting the Italian surrender and overthrowing of Mussolini

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini envisioned building Fascist Italy into a new Roman Empire, but a string of military defeats in World War II effectively made his regime a puppet of its stronger Axis partner, Germany. By the spring of 1943, opposition groups in Italy were uniting to overthrow Mussolini and make peace with the Allies, but a strong German military presence in Italy threatened to resist any such action.

On July 10, 1943, the Allies began their invasion of Axis-controlled Europe with landings on the island of Sicily, off mainland Italy. Encountering little resistance from demoralized Sicilian troops, Montgomery’s 8th Army came ashore on the southeast part of the island, while the U.S. 7th Army, under General George S. Patton, landed on Sicily’s south coast. Within three days, 150,000 Allied troops were ashore. On August 17, Patton arrived in Messina before Montgomery, completing the Allied conquest of Sicily and winning the so-called Race to Messina.

In Rome, the Allied conquest of Sicily, a region of the kingdom of Italy since 1860, led to the collapse of Mussolini’s government. Early in the morning of July 25, he was forced to resign by the Fascist Grand Council and was arrested later that day. On July 26, Marshal Pietro Badoglio assumed control of the Italian government. The new government promptly entered into secret negotiations with the Allies, despite the presence of numerous German troops in Italy.

On September 3, Montgomery’s 8th Army began its invasion of the Italian mainland and the Italian government agreed to surrender to the Allies. By the terms of the agreement, the Italians would be treated with leniency if they aided the Allies in expelling the Germans from Italy. Later that month, Mussolini was rescued from a prison in the Abruzzo Mountains by German commandos and was installed as leader of a Nazi puppet state in northern Italy.

In October, the Badoglio government declared war on Germany, but the Allied advance up through Italy proved to be a slow and costly affair, typified by the bloody battles at Anzio and Monte Cassino. Rome fell in June 1944, at which point a stalemate ensued as British and American forces threw most of their resources into the Normandy invasion. In April 1945, a new major offensive began, and on April 28 Mussolini was captured by Italian partisans and summarily executed.

SOURCE: History.com