Operation Citadel:
July 1943 Kursk
The launch of 'Operation Citadel' was delayed until the arrival of new German tanks which could compete with the Russians' invincible T-34s. A massive build-up by both sides led to the engagement of 2,300,000 men, 6,300 tanks, 30,000 guns and 5,000 aircraft. The Germans attacked on 5 July 1943 with a pincer movement on the two flanks of the salient. This was exactly what German generals always did and the Russians had anticipated it. The southern thrust advanced25 miles but the northern hardly moved. On 12 July the Russians counter-attacked to the south of Kursk in the biggest tank battle in history. The same evening Hitler ordered a retreat and the next day to prevent a rout he called off the offensive. The Germans, who had invented and perfected mobile tank warfare, had been beaten at their own game - their first defeat in the field since the war began.
Within twelve hours both sides were furiously stoking the great glowing furnace of the battle for Kursk. The armour continued to mass and move on a scale unlike anything seen anywhere else in the war. Both commands watched this fiery escalation with grim, numbed satisfaction: German officers had never seen so many Soviet aircraft, while the Soviet commanders had never before seen such formidable massing of German tanks, all blotched in their green and yellow camouflage There were tank armadas on the move, coming on in great squadrons of 100 and 200 machines or more, a score of Tigers and Ferdinand assault guns in the first echelon, groups of 50-60 medium tanks in the second and then the infantry screened by the armour. Now that the Soviet tank armies were moving up into the main defensive fields, almost 4000 Soviet tanks and nearly 3000 German tanks and assault guns were being steadily drawn into this gigantic battle, which roared on hour after hour, leaving ever greater heaps of the dead and the dying, clumps of blazing or disabled armour, shattered personnel carriers and lorries, and thickening columns of smoke coiling over the steppe. Once at close range, with scores of machines churning about in individual engagements, front and side armour was more easily penetrated, when the tank ammunition would explode, hurling turrets yards away from the shattered hulls or sending up great spurts of fire....
From J Erickson, The Road to Berlin
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Axis
109f4
109g2
109g6
190a5
110c4b
ju88
VVS
Spit V (fantasy lendlease addition)
Hurri IIc (fantasy lendlease addition)
Yak9t
Lavochkin La-5 (la5fn)
IL2
B26 as a replacement for Petlyakov Pe-2 and a20g
Both
all GVS
c47s
This is my plan tell what yas think. no yak 1 or yak 7 or yak 9d so 9t will carry the load.
No perks all planes and gvs available everywhere
Map
