Another front lay in reserve, with the entire complex of multifront operations coordinated by two of Stavka's best commanders, Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky. These troops were arrayed in five fronts (army groups) with 19,000 guns, 3,500 tanks and self-propelled guns, and about 2,000 aircraft. Accordingly, the Soviets concentrated about 1.3 million troops within the salient and on its shoulders. Once the Germans had spent their offensive momentum, Stavka, the Soviet Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, planned to surprise them with an immediate and powerful counteroffensive. As the Germans built up their forces and means, the Soviets reinforced their defense in depth with as many as six belts of field fortifications. Thanks to this delay and also to good intelligence, possibly including information from Enigma intercepts passed to Stalin by the British, the Soviets were able to anticipate Manstein's attack. However, Hitler delayed the offensive, code-named Citadel, until July to permit a buildup of German armor and assault guns. To regain the initiative, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein successfully lobbied for an offensive against the Kursk salient, a prominent Soviet bulge in the German lines between Orel and Belgorod.
Soviet failures to crush German Army Group South after the victory at Stalingrad, along with the annual spring thaw, imposed an operational pause as both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army regrouped for the campaigns of 1943. One of the largest and most decisive confrontations of the war, Kursk marked Adolf Hitler's last serious attempt to regain the strategic initiative against Joseph Stalin's Red Army. The Battle of Kursk comprised a failed German offensive operation and a successful Soviet defensive-offensive operation, 5 July to 23 August 1943, on the eastern front in World War II.
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