The German preliminary bombardment that began on 5 July was answered by an even more intense counter-bombardment, indicating just how ready the Soviets were. The battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle in world history, with six thousand vehicles engaged on each side. It was also distinguished by an unprecedented scale of carnage and slaughter, even on the eastern front. The upshot was a Soviet victory; by the end of July, Germany had lost half a million soldiers and was forced to retreat another two hundred miles. This battle was a true turning-point in the Second World War, for henceforth the Germans would be largely on the defensive in the east.
By January 1944 the Red Army had raised the siege of Leningrad and had crossed the old 1939 border. In May it had liberated Ukraine and was driving deep into Poland and Romania. The most significant event of the year, however, was ‘Operation Bagration’, the Russian attack on Army Group Centre, which held a salient in Lithuania and Belorussia that protruded into Soviet lines. At the end of June the Soviets struck into the salient with a series of co-ordinated thrusts, even one staged through the Pripet marshes. Offensive operations continued until the end of the summer, utterly destroying seventeen German divisions, and reducing the combat strength of another fifty divisions by half.
By the end of 1944, Soviet armies had already overrun Romania and were swinging north towards Budapest. The central group of Soviet fronts were poised to clear Poland of the enemy, before invading Germany itself. The first step in this process was the Vilna–Oder operation in January and February 1945, where the Red Army used its superior numbers and firepower to smash into East Prussia. Indeed, certain units under Zhukov’s command had crossed the Oder and were but forty miles from Berlin. But because Zhukov’s forces were exhausted and had outrun their supply lines, the Soviet High Command decided to defer the battle for Berlin until the spring. In mid-April 1945, some 2.5 million Soviet troops squared off against 1 million Germans, many of them young boys, cripples, or old men. There was little doubt about the outcome. By 25 April Berlin was encircled; two days later Soviet troops had shot their way into the centre of the city; two days after that Adolf Hitler killed himself. The German government’s emissaries travelled to Zhukov’s headquarters and signed the act of unconditional surrender on 9 May 1945.
With Germany now defeated, Stalin honoured his pledge to the British and American allies to enter the war against Japan. Over the next three months tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers entrained for the Far East. On 9 August (the very day that the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki) Stalin’s forces erupted into Manchuria and rapidly pulverized the Japanese Kwantung army. Within days Tokyo had decided to treat with its enemies. On 2 September 1945 Soviet representatives were present to witness the Japanese surrender on the deck of the American battleship
How the Soviets Won the War
To understand how the Soviet Union managed to prevail in its war with Nazi Germany it is no less important to consider the reasons for German failure as the reasons for Soviet success. In key respects, the Germans undermined their own war effort.
In the first place, German strategy for the invasion of the Soviet Union was based on entirely erroneous intelligence. For example, prior to the war the Germans had calculated that the Red Army had only 200 divisions; by early August 1941 they had identified 360. The German intelligence services also under-counted the Soviet tank park (by at least 50 per cent) and grossly underestimated the scale, and productivity of the Soviet war economy. Nazi racist ideology also contributed to this depreciation of the enemy. Regarding the Russian as an
