Evgeni Bessonov

Honest and irrepressibly frank, these are the dramatic memoirs of a Russian officer on the Eastern Front, where he played his part in a clash of titans and witnessed the shuddering collapse of the Third Reich.

The climax of Operation Citadel, the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 involved as many as 6,000 tanks, 4,000 aircraft and 2 million fighting men. The largest tank battle of the Second World War, it had major consequences for Germany, being the last major offensive its forces launched in Russia. Hitler’s hopes of victory on the Eastern Front were brought crashing down, and from that moment on the Axis armies faced retreat in the face of the onslaught from Stalin’s Red Army.