3rd Army (Soviet Union)

Infobox Military Unit
unit_name=3rd Army


caption=
country=Soviet Union
type=
branch=Red Army, Soviet Army
dates=1939 - 1945?
command_structure= Western Front, others
size=two or more Rifle corps
garrison=
battles=Battle of Kursk
East Prussian Offensive Battle of Berlin others
notable_commanders=The 3rd Army was an important Soviet Red Army field formation during World War II.

The 3rd Army was formed in 1939 in the Belorussian Special Military District from the Vitebsk Army Group. ['Vitebsk army group BOVO (СВЭ, Ô.8, ß.106.)(СВЭ, т.8, с.106.); ЗапОВО (А. Г. Ленский, Сухопутные силы РККА в предвоенные годы. Справочник. — Санкт-Петербург Б&К, 2000)] The Third Army saw its first action in September 1939, taking part in the operation in Belarus and Poland. In the operation, the Red Army seized eastern Poland as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. After the start of the Great Patriotic War, it included three corps, including the 4th Rifle Corps, with the 85th Rifle Division, as well as the 21st Rifle Corps (including the 24th Rifle Division) and 11th Mechanised Corps (21st and 33rd Tank Divisions, 204th Mechanised Division).

The 3rd Army saw lots of action in important sectors. The Third Army took part in the operations of the Western, Central, Bryansk, as well as the First, Second, and Third Belorussian Fronts during the defenses of Grodno, Lida, and Novogrudok.

The 3rd Army also took part in very important battles such as the Battle of Smolensk, where German troops captured the city in a difficult two-month campaign, and the Battle of Moscow, in which the Red Army's winter counter-attack led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov drove back Army Group Center over 70 miles away from Moscow. During the second half of the Great Patriotic War, the 3rd Army took part in the Battle of Kursk, where numerically superior Soviet forces, using good anti-tank defenses, defeated the German forces, thus stopping Operation Zitadelle and robbing the German Army of all hopes of victory on the Eastern Front. The 3rd Army took part in the operations in Bryansk, Gomel-Rechitsa, and Rogachev-Zhlobin. During the final phases of the war, the 3rd Army took part in the attacks on Belarus, East Prussia, and eastern Germany, where it participated in the Battle of Berlin.

After the war ended, the Army headquarters was withdrawn to the Belarussian SSR, where it was reorganised as the short-lived Headquarters Belorussian-Lithuanian Military District. By this time the army consisted of three Rifle Corps with nine rifle divisions. Later, all of them except the 120th Guards 'Rogachev' Rifle Division were disbanded.

Commanders

*V.I. Kusnetsov
*Yakov Kreizer
*P.S. Pshennikov
*P.I. Batov
*F.F. Shmatchenko
*P.P. Korsun
*A.V. Gorbatov

ources and references

*http://orbat.com/site/ww2/drleo/012_ussr/41_oob/western/army_03.html
* [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/3._Rote_Armee German Wikipedia]