![]() ![]() Not only did the battle give American war planners a glimpse of what an invasion of the Japanese homeland might involve but those brief weeks in 1945 forever transformed the city once known as the Pearl of the Orient – and decimated generations of Filipino families, the ripples of which still echo lives even today, nearly 75 years later. An estimated 100,000 civilians were slain in a massacre as heinous as the Rape of Nanking. Landmarks were demolished, houses torched, countless women raped and their husbands and children murdered. The end result was the catastrophic destruction of the city and a rampage by Japanese troops that terrorized the civilian population. The 29-day battle to retake Manila in February 1945 proved a fight unlike any other in the Pacific War, a bloody urban brawl that forced American soldiers to battle block by block, house by house and even room by room. In the beginning of August, the Soviets began a major offensive around the Kursk salient, and within a few weeks the Germans were in retreat all along the eastern front.This is the untold story of his homecoming. After six days of warfare concentrated near Prokhorovka, south of Kursk, the German Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge called off the offensive, and by July 23 the Soviets had forced the Germans back to their original positions. However, the Soviets had better tanks and air support than in previous battles, and in bitter fighting Soviet antitank artillery destroyed as much as 40 percent of the German armor, which included their new Mark VI Tiger tanks. ![]() The German attack began on July 5, and 38 divisions, nearly half of which were armored, began moving from the south and the north. In early July, Germany and the USSR concentrated their forces near the city of Kursk in western Russia, site of a 150-mile-wide Soviet pocket that jutted 100 miles into the German lines. The Battle of Kursk, involving some 6,000 tanks, two million men, and 5,000 aircraft, ends with the German offensive repulsed by the Soviets at heavy cost. ![]()
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