After which battle was Germany forced to retreat from the Soviet Union?
1 Answer
In the titanic struggle between Nazi Germany and the USSR, no one battle drove the Germans off Soviet soil and there were still some troops fighting there up until May 1945.
Explanation:
While the Red Army finally gave Stalin a significant victory outside Moscow in December 1941, the tipping point in the Nazi-Soviet struggle is generally accepted to be with the Soviet encirclement of 6th German Army in November 1942. After that, it was still a long hard struggle that killed millions of troops on both sides to roll the Germans back.
Significant campaigns included Kursk in July 1943, where the planned German summer offensive walked into a meat-grinder; the advance across the eastern Ukraine that summer and autumn. The siege of Leningrad -- which had cost so many lives -- was only lifted in January 1944. The Soviets also achieved a spectacular success with Operation Bagration on June 22nd, 1944 which commenced the destruction of Army Group Centre.
By the end of the Summer of 1944, almost all German troops had been driven from Soviet territory except for isolated pockets on the Baltic coast. The German defence on the Kurland Peninsula in Latvia continued right up until the German surrender in May 1945.
One point to remember in both the German advances of 1941-42 and the Soviet drive eastwards in 1943-45 is the centrality of logistics. Armies in the field consume thousands of tons of food, ammunition and fuel -- even when sitting idle. There is only so far that troops can advance before they have to wait for more supplies and much of the pace on the Eastern Front was determined by brigades of workers laying and repairing railway track and converting railway gauges in the rear of the armies.
