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 Their response was compared to the Soviet style of cover up and stonewalling like that during the Chernobyl disaster. Minister of Defence Sergeyev said in interviews on 21 March 2000, that he had never refused any foreign help. "The Guardian" wrote in a 2002 review of two books, "Kursk, Russia's Lost Pride" and "A Time to Die: The Kursk Disaster": While most experts agreed that a torpedo had exploded, they differed on what caused the explosion. Many Russians did not believe that "Kursk" could be so easily sunk. The tragedy spawned a number of wild conspiracy theories to explain the