Kursk, Battle of (July 5–23, 1943) built up unprecedented forces around Kursk from March to June The great mass of German armor was ordered to the area, to ready to slice off the salient Meanwhile, the Red Army also built up huge forces inside the bulge as well as along its wider flanks The Soviets knew of the German plans and intended to meet them with even larger, well-hidden tank and air formations under Marshal Georgi Zhukov These were deployed in a deep defensive field designed to absorb and bog down the German assault in its earliest stages After strategically overreaching and failing in December 1941–February 1942, and again in January–March 1943, Joseph Stalin and the Stavka had at last recognized a deep truth about the war: it was fundamentally an exercise in sustained attrition necessary to wear down the Wehrmacht before any decisive thrust could be made into the vitals of Nazi Germany Soviet forces therefore deployed in an extraordinarily deep set of seven defensive belts designed to absorb, bog down, and kill German armored thrusts at price of massive but accepted Soviet casualties and loss of equipment The armor, artillery, infantry, and air combat that ensued combined to form the largest battle ever fought Some 3.5 million troops in total fought at Kursk, nearly half the 8.5 million positioned that summer along a 1,500-mile long Eastern Front The German offensive plan, ZITADELLE, was delayed several times from April to July, partly for technical reasons and to refit on the German side but also because of the spring rasputitsa During the postponements German and Soviet casualties dropped significantly But there was also a building sense of violent tension as each side waited for the summer explosion into combat Where Adolf Hitler grew evermore cautious and dubious about ZITADELLE as time passed, the Stavka had to restrain Stalin’s urge to attack prematurely Zhukov’s plan was to draw the German armor into the Soviet defensive belts, in some places 175 miles deep Only then would he spring a great trap around the Panzer columns with simultaneous counteroffensives on either side of the salient For that, he held back huge Fronts whose presence was hidden from B-dienst and the Abwehr by some of the most elaborate and successful maskirovka operations of the war In the south, the counteroffensive was given the additional task of retaking Kharkov and Belgorod, which had been lost to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and the SS 2nd Panzer Corps in March Soviet intelligence was unusually good at Kursk, although it mistook the Schwerpunkt as the north side of the salient whereas the Germans believed it was in the south and concentrated their effort there Information came from multiple sources that allowed the VVS to catch the Luftwaffe on the ground, attacking forward airfields in a set of preemptive strikes carried out from May 6–8 And it then gave the Stavka three days advance notice of the precise hour of the German assault That enabled Soviet artillery to hammer the armor spearheads at their jump-off points before dawn on July Shelling massed Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS formations just 10 minutes before they were set to attack the first defense belt according to the usual, precise German instructions staggered the attacking troops, upset timetables, and shook the confidence of Hitler and the OKH The armor and artillery battles that followed, as Panzer columns cut into the salient and through the first defensive belts, were 650