Giffard Le Quesne Martel the Head of the Military Mission to the Soviet Union. He assessed the effectiveness of the Soviet order of battle and tactics during a visit to the frontline in the Kursk-Oryol region between 11 and 19 May 1943. In his autobiography, Martel describes advising the Soviet High Command, Stavka, to allow the Germans to strike first at the Battle of Kursk. To what extent his advice affected the course of the battle is debatable since his first conference with Stavka did not occur until late May 1943 while the Soviet Western Front commander, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, had been advocating the
Kursk submarine disaster Kursk submarine disaster The sinking of the nuclear-powered "Kursk" (Russian: ), took place during the first major Russian naval exercise in more than ten years, in the Barents Sea on 12 August 2000, killing all 118 personnel on board. The Russian government and navy came under intense criticism over the incident. Nearby ships registered the initial explosion and a second, much larger, explosion which registered 4.2 on the Richter scale on seismographs as far away as Alaska, yet the Russian Navy did not realise that the sub had sunk and did not initiate a search for more than six hours,