3rd Army (Soviet Union)
Open-knowledge reference entry
The 3rd Army (Russian: 3-я армия) was a field army of the Red Army during World War II.
Polish Campaign
The 3rd Army was formed on 15 September 1939 from the Vitebsk Group of Forces, part of the Belorussian Front, which had been formed four days earlier from the Belorussian Special Military District for the Soviet invasion of Poland. The army was commanded by Komkor Vasily Kuznetsov. It included the 4th Rifle Corps with the 50th and 27th Rifle Divisions, in addition to the 5th Rifle Division, the 24th Cavalry Division, and the 22nd and 25th Tank Brigades. The units numbered 121,968 men and fielded 752 guns and 743 tanks on 17 September.
The 3rd Army saw its first action in September 1939, taking part in the operation in Belarus and Poland. The invasion was conducted under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and guaranteed that neither country would attack the other.
Order of Battle on 2 October 1939:
10th Rifle Corps
5th Rifle Division
50th Rifle Division
115th Rifle Division
3rd Rifle Corps
139th Rifle Division
150th Rifle Division
3rd Cavalry Corps
7th Cavalry Division
36th Cavalry Division
15th Tank Corps
25th Tank Brigade
Eastern Front
After the start of Operation Barbarossa, it included three corps, including the 4th Rifle Corps (27th, 56th, and 85th Rifle Divisions), as well as the 21st Rifle Corps (17th, 24th, 37th and 50th Rifle Divisions) and 11th Mechanised Corps (29th and 33rd Tank Division and 204th Motorised Division).
The 3rd Army took part in the operations of the Western, Central, Bryansk Fronts during the defenses of Grodno, Lida, and Novogrudok.
The 3rd Army also took part in 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 (110 km) away from Moscow. During the second half of the Eastern Front, the 3rd Army took part in the Battle of Kursk, where numerically superior Soviet forces, using 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.
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