The first expansion for BA2 Eastern Front is here.  How does Kursk stack up?

Lloyd Sabin – April 20, 2015

Largess

Here in the West we tend to be a bit short-sighted when it comes to history. Take a look at the majority of American movies and books on World War II and the Western Front will almost always be the main focus. The Eastern Front, if discussed at all, is framed as a distant, alien component of World War II, not more than a sideshow because of its foreign nature to Americans.

As grogs, we know this is a huge mistake. World War II’s Eastern Front was the central land combat theater of the entire war, far larger and certainly more pivotal than the Western Front, dwarfing land combat operations anywhere else on the globe during World War II. It was on the Eastern Front that Adolf Hitler attempted to establish his concept of lebensraum for the Third Reich, where the Reich’s logistics and supply systems were severely tested by distance and weather, and, ultimately, where World War II was decided in a massive, bloody, total war to the death between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

And within this bloody total war, the central, deciding push was The Battle of Kursk (German offensive Operation Citadel), begun in July, 1943. It pitted almost 800,000 German troops under the command of Generals von Manstein, Kluge, Hoth, and Model (among others) against almost 2,000,000 Soviet troops led by General Zhukov and a cabal of other generals. In 2015 it’s almost impossible to conceive of these gigantic numbers of men, not including the thousands of tanks and heavy guns arrayed on both sides. In the end, The Battle of Kursk would further evolve beyond just being the most colossal battle on the most pivotal front of the war – it would also morph into the most gigantic clash of armor the world has ever seen.

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