Pavel Rybalko

Pavel S. Rybalko
Marshal of the Armoured Troops Pavel Rybalko
Born	23 October 1892 Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Died	28 August 1948(1948-08-28) (aged 55)
Allegiance	Soviet Union
Years of service	1914 - 1948
Rank	Marshal of the armored troops
Commands held	3rd Tank Army 57th Army 3rd Guards Tank Army
Battles/wars	Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive Vistula–Oder Offensive Upper Silesian Offensive Battle of Berlin Prague Offensive
Awards
Other work	Commander of Armoured Forces of the Red Army

Marshal of the Armoured Troops Pavel Semjonovich Rybalko (23 October 1892 – 28 August 1948) (Russian: Павел Семенович Рыбалко, Ukrainian: Павло Семенович Рибалко) was a commander of armoured troops in the Red Army during and following World War II.

Pavel Rybalko served in the Russian and then the Soviet Army from 1914. He served during World War I as a soldier, as an assistant commander of the partisan squadron during the Russian Civil War and as a cavalry commander and a commander and instructor during the Polish-Soviet War. After attending the Frunze Military Academy in 1931–1934, he served in the Far East in 1935 and was afterwards assigned to the Auto-Armoured Tank Directorate in Moscow. During this period, he studied intensively the principles of modern armoured warfare, as developed by western theorists (Generals Von Kleist, Guderian, Fuller) as well as the doctrine of "Deep Operations" as theorized by Triandafillov and Tukhachevsky. His next assignments were as military attaché in Poland (where he was the last military attaché, leaving few days before the Soviet invasion) and China, before taking a post of lecturer in tactics at the Kazan tank school.

Very surprising, and to his extreme frustration, Rybalko spent the first year of the war as a lecturer in Kazan. He finally got an operational assignment in May 1942 as deputy commander of the 3rd Tank Army of the Reserve of the Supreme High Command. All through the war, Rybalko's name was closely associated with the 3rd Tank Army. In the winter of 1942–1943, included in the Voronezh Front, his Tank Army spearheaded the different operations that tried to exploit and transform the Germans' defeat in Stalingrad in a large-scale strategic victory in the southern theater of operations. This included Operation Star in February, aimed at the liberation of Kharkov – one of the first major Soviet cities to be reconquered by the Red Army. But Manstein's counter-offensive recaptured the city and inflicted serious damages to an exhausted and over-extended 3rd Tank Army.