German 9th Army

The German 9th Army was a field army of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Before the Battle of Kursk in 1943 it belonged to Army Group Centre under Field Marshal Walter Model and held the Orel salient. When Operation Citadel opened on 5 July the army attacked south from the salient toward Kursk, hoping to link up with the 4th Panzer Army coming from the south and so enclose the salient. Soviet Central Front troops, dug into a deep belt of minefields and successive defensive lines, blunted the advance; by mid-July the army had been forced over to the defensive. It was substantially reduced in the fighting east of Orel during August, and later took part in the Soviet summer offensives of 1944. The army was destroyed together with Army Group Centre in the collapse of Army Group Centre Front, its survivors finally being eliminated in the Halbe pocket in April 1945. This entry is a schematic order-of-battle record derived from dated situation maps: unit positions are approximate headquarters-area locations rather than tracked front lines, and the strength and casualty figures quoted for the northern sector are contested between different historiographies. The northern face of the salient was the quieter of the two, and the fighting there was dominated by infantry and artillery preparation rather than by massed armour.