Third Army (Soviet Union)

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The Soviet Third Army was an important Soviet Red Army field formation during World War II.

The Third Army was created in 1939 in the Special Belorussian Military District as part of Vitebsk Army Group. 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, the Third 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 Third 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 Third 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 Third Army took part in the operations in Bryansk, Gomel-Rechitsa, and Rogachev-Zhlobin. During the final phases of the war, the Third Army took part in the attacks on Belarus, East Prussia, and eastern Germany, where it participated in the Battle of Berlin.