Very soon the 60th anniversary of D-Day will be upon us and we will be able to honour the generation of men and women who swept ashore on the Normandy beaches to open the second front against Hitler's Germany.

However, perhaps we should spare a thought for their Soviet comrades who were performing equally epic feats on the Eastern Front.

At Kursk in the Ukraine in July 1943, the greatest clash of armoured forces in history took place. It was the decisive land battle of the Second World War and saw armoured and aerial clashes on a ferocious scale.

The Germans gave way and never recovered from this battering.

With the collapse of communism it has become easy to forget the wartime role of the Soviet Union. But it was the Red Army who, in Winston Churchill's words, "tore the guts out of the German war machine".

-John Hodgson, Peacehaven