Kursk 1943 - The Tide Turns in the East

It was with the onset of the 'rasputitsa' - the great thaw that presages the return of spring to Russia — in mid-March of 1943 that the die for the great battle of Kursk was cast. The rising temperatures turned rivers, now being fed by the thawing snow, into unbridgeable torrents and the roads into quagmires, impassable to man and machine alike. For the SS Panzer Corps, the cutting edge of the German counter-offensive in the Ukraine, any advance northwards beyond Belgorod floundered to a halt in a countryside transformed into a sea of mud and in the face of rapidly hardening Soviet resistance. While the exhausted German and Soviet armies took advantage of the temporary lull imposed on them by nature, to rest and refit after the prodigious exertions of the winter, planning was alreadv under way as to how the war in Russia was to be prosecuted come the onset of the warmer weather. As the planning staffs of STAVKA and OKU pondered the possibilities, their deliberations were governed by a number of considerations which were to have a major impact on their unfolding designs.
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