Kursk Salient or defeat of World War II, it certainly numbered among its greatest battles and did much to confirm and accelerate the trajectory of attrition that led to ultimate Soviet victory and German defeat See also Donbass offensive operation; HUSKY; intelligence; Izium-Barvenkovo operation; Ostwall; Schwerpunkt; ULTRA Suggested Reading: Walter S Dunn, Kursk: Hitler’s Gamble, 1943 (1997); David M Glantz and Harold S Orenstein, eds., The Battle for Kursk, 1943 (1999) KURSK SALIENT A great Red Army bulge into German lines formed during fighting along the Eastern Front in the first half of 1943 It centered on the important junction town of Kursk It was the locale of the great Battle of Kursk in July 1943, and focal point of two related and even more important Red Army counteroffensives that followed: KUTUZOV and RUMIANTSEV KUTNÁ, BATTLE OF (SEPTEMBER 1939) See FALL WEISS KUTUZOV (JULY 12–AUGUST 18, 1943) Soviet code name for the Red Army counteroffensive launched to reduce the “Orel balcony”—a German salient around Orel—simultaneously with the Battle of Kursk It was fully planned before Kursk by a Stavka determined to first hold the Germans up, attrit them badly, then counterattack in massive force along multiple fronts It was executed by the Western, Central, and Briansk Fronts against German forces in the Orel balcony Western Front’s 11th Guards Army broke through the weakly defended German line north of the Kursk salient The breakthrough was quickly exploited by three tank armies and additional mobile corps, which pushed aside 5th Panzer Division and advanced on Orel Having smashed though the German lines, the Guards captured Orel on August But the operation failed in a much greater objective: to encircle all German forces That was because Adolf Hitler had earlier ordered the exposed defenders withdrawn from a potential kotel, and because he needed to reinforce elsewhere along the Eastern Front and in Sicily, where the Western Allies were engaged in Operation HUSKY landings When the Soviets arrived the Germans had already pulled back from Orel to the Hagen Line More rolling Red Army attacks were made farther north, which drew in more German reserves and additional Soviet tank and infantry corps KUTUZOV was more important in persuading Hitler—whose attention was strangely drawn away to the landings in Sicily—to cancel ZITADELLE and seek to disengage his Panzers from Kursk It also prepared the way for liberation of Smolensk in September Reflecting the fact that the Red Army was on the offensive north of the Kursk bulge, it lost nearly twice as many men and tanks in KUTUZOV than it did at Kursk: 113,000 compared to 70,000 men, and 2,600 tanks lost compared to 1,600 The complementary operation on the southern flank of the Kursk salient was RUMIANTSEV 652