Battle of Kursk with James Holland

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This year marks 80 years since one of the more ferocious clashes of the Second World War: the Battle of Kursk. With a combined 8,000 tanks between the German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army, it became the largest tank battle in history.

This week, James is joined by historian James Holland. Together, they unpack the wider context of this confrontation, what drove the Germans to take on such a battle, and ultimately, what led to a Soviet victory, marking a significant turning point on the Eastern Front.

You can pre-order James Holland's new book The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943, here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone I'm your host James Patton Rogers. This is Warfare and as you can hear I'm on the move again today. I am in Toronto Canada and
0:10.0	while I was here I sat down to record an episode with James Holland, an old friend of the podcast.
0:16.0	It's 80 years since the Battle of Kursk, one of the greatest battles, largest battles in history.
0:22.0	And of course, James is a wealth of knowledge on
0:24.5	everything to do with the Second World War including this pivotal battle.
0:29.9	Enjoy.
0:36.0	Hi James, welcome back to warfare. How you doing? You well.
0:37.0	Yeah, I'm very good, thanks James, how are you?
0:38.0	Yeah, I'm good.
0:39.0	Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
0:41.0	You're a very busy man. got a new book you've got a
0:44.3	fantastic new history festival tell us about all the things you've got going on yeah he is quite
0:49.0	busy at a moment actually yeah so I've got a I've been doing a book on the
0:52.2	opening bit of the Italian campaign.
0:54.0	So the sort of 1943 bit which comes after Sicily, it's Salerno, the land is at Salerno, it's
1:02.0	crossing the Volturno, so all the 8-Farmy stuff on the Adriatic.
1:05.3	It's coming up against the Bernhard line, and so San Pietro, made famous, the Hollywood director John Houston.
1:11.3	And it's an amazing story, and it's usually told as a kind of
1:14.7	afterthought or a sort of very brief kind of page or two before you get to
1:19.1	casino. But it was brutal and awful and completely sets up the rest of the Italian campaign.
1:24.0	I've been having a fascinating time doing that. Anyway, that's called the Savage Storm and that's out this autumn.
1:29.0	And then, yeah, I'm back on fiction at the moment and then, yeah, on my own podcast,
	...

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