Chapter 196: Counteroffensive outside Moscow
The Germans in Homnich had been under threat from the partisans every day since the reinforcement, and bullets were often unexpected, killing or wounding those who hit. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 infoMore than seventy people have been killed and wounded in the past week, and the morale of the soldiers has fallen to the extreme.
The commander of the German 715th Division had to think again about whether the cost of sending a battalion in the past seemed to have the advantage in the situation and could be used as an eyeline to monitor the guerrillas' encirclement of the road.
But the division commander Scholz had more things to pay attention to, the logistics of the German army were relatively fragile, and now more and more wounded soldiers were retreating from the front line, and some of the carriages and trucks transporting the wounded passed through his defense area, and the Moziri-Lechtsa section of the road went straight to the rear. His division must provide adequate supplies for the wounded so that they can return safely.
At the same time, they also had to escort ordnance and cotton clothes to the soldiers fighting on the front line.
"Is it too late, the cold weather has lasted for almost a month, and the cotton clothes of our soldiers have only begun to be transported to the front line." Schultz could not imagine the plight of the soldiers at the front, so he had to complain to the convoys and express concern about the prospects of the battle.
Anyone with a little common sense knows that if the weather is too cold and people have little clothing, they will not freeze to death from frostbite, but also freeze to serious illness. Every time Schultz checked the wounded soldiers who had retreated from the front, a large number of them were not gunshot wounds, many of them had severe chilblains, and many poor fellows had ten toes frozen. There were also many people with high fevers, and at the stations of his division, wounded soldiers were often recuperated, and almost every day there were deaths.
The tragedy greatly shocked the 715th Division, and they were very glad that they were in the rear, and they were able to capture a large number of Soviet overcoats even through looting. And their comrades-in-arms did everything to keep warm, many of the wounded soldiers were still wearing Soviet cotton clothes and Soviet battle heads, obviously they were picking up the corpses of the dead.
Over time, Scholz did not even detail how the troops could take Moscow. It was the military-political center of the USSR, so what was the use of taking it? Will the Soviets stop resisting? No! They are constantly adding troops. Even if Moscow was taken, the Germans would pay huge casualties, and the Soviet resistance would not be able to stop at all.
As Scholz speculated, the Soviet strategic reserve was thrown into battle after the October Revolution parade on November 7, and the sudden feeling of this new force was completely unexpected by the German army.
The reserves replenished the strength of the Western Front and even included some new weapons.
Many of the German offensive units were involved in the Belarusian campaign, and some generals remember the tragedy that befell the 7th Panzer Division. In this war, it is clear that the German drama spy department did not do a good job, and the Soviet army had some shocking and headache weapons. For example, the KV2 heavy tank, which is like a land walking naval gun, and the rocket weapon that can be fired by a single soldier.
The former has too serious mechanical problems, and it is very powerful but not very maneuverable. The latter was shocking, with the Germans capturing a number of individual bazookas, the design of which was striking with its ingenious design.
Because it is not limited by caliber at all, the warhead is outside the launch tube, and the diameter of the body of the captured rocket is actually 120 mm.
Guderian had heard of this weapon during the attack, and the 7th Panzer Division was routed by this weapon, and the tank regiment was annihilated by a group of Soviet infantry in a few hours, which was an anti-tank monster compared to anti-tank guns.
The Soviet top did not forget that this weapon was invented by the Chinese Yang Mingzhi, and for these reasons he was appointed deputy commander of an infantry division with the title of Guards.
Factories in the city of Moscow stepped up the production of such weapons, and in this era, even AK47 could be made as long as the drawings were available. The industrial capacity is completely sufficient, and now it is a genius design. Compared with the production of anti-tank guns, rockets that can be fired individually are obviously the most cost-effective at medium and short ranges.
However, mass production has only just begun, and the Soviet army is far from ensuring that each squad has one launcher.
After the Germans broke through the Vyazma-Bryansk line, hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were captured again! After that, the Germans continued their onslaught and finally ran into a wall on the outskirts of Moscow.
Guderian does not fight in a daze, perhaps in this case, only the Japanese devils will shout that the sky is dark and the card board plays long live the charge, and then it is covered by the machine gun artillery fire of the Soviet army who are waiting for the rabbit.
Guderian ordered his subordinates to make tactical detours, because the city of Moscow was very large, it could maintain a strong line of defense in the east, but what about the rear? As with the advance from Ryazan in the south and Tula in the southeast, in both directions, the south of Moscow is not its soft belly?
The Germans had already taken action, and the logistical problems had become a huge state of the German offensive rather than a fierce battle on the front with the Soviets.
In any war, it is the people who decide the outcome of the war. Weaponism cannot completely control war, unless it is a nuclear bomb. The tactics of the Germans always pinned on the suddenness of the blitzkrieg, knocking the enemy out with a hammer. The only countermeasure, I am afraid, is only a war of attrition, and the Soviets are depleting the strength of the German army.
Time dragged on little by little, and the Germans hoped that the war would end before the onset of winter, and the lack of winter clothing still plagued the soldiers. The German troops attacking Tula and Ryazan, many of them were still wearing only single clothes, and some of them were dressed in various ways, which was to rob the Soviet villages and put all kinds of things that could keep them warm, and the military appearance was a mess.
Every night, the Germans moved out empty gasoline drums and burned precious gasoline to keep warm. Torches were also lit to heat the icy truck's water tank.
On the other side of the war, the Soviet troops wore white combat cloaks with excellent camouflage, their guns were covered with antifreeze cotton jackets, and the fuel tanks of armored vehicles and trucks were filled with ethylene glycol to prevent freezing.
The German offensive gradually became the end of the crossbow, and by the end of November, the balance of the battle was gradually moving closer to the Soviet side.
The fiercest German attack was a motorized engineering battalion at Hopner, which at the end of November recklessly stormed the outskirts of Moscow, only 10 kilometers from the center of Moscow, and was completely annihilated by the Soviet army. This was the closest German attack ever to Moscow, but the Germans were never so close to Moscow until the end of the war.
In terms of the comparison of troops, Zhukov asked the 20th Army, the 10th Army, and the 1st Shock Army to be handed over to his Western Front as reserves, and since then his strength has reached 1.1 million men, 7,000 artillery pieces, 700 tanks, and more than 1,000 aircraft. The German and client armies, on the other hand, numbered 1.8 million men, 13,000 artillery pieces, 1,100 tanks, and 600 aircraft.
The Germans were significantly outnumbered by the Soviets, but victory was not guaranteed. They had more than a thousand tanks, and Guderian's tank units received fatal blows in the Tula and Ryazan directions.
Soviet soldiers with the latest equipment of secret weapons, for the sake of success, they often hide in foxholes, when the enemy tank is about fifty meters away, suddenly jump out and fire rockets. The flat fire of the rocket easily hit the German No. 3 tank, and here the Soviets did not need armor-piercing shells at all, as long as the warhead was filled with a large amount of high-energy explosives, the German tank quickly turned into a sputtered part under a huge pressure wave. These parts in turn caused secondary casualties, and the German infantry fought together, and the soldiers suffered heavy losses as a result.
Tanks and half-tracks were slaughtered, and earlier than in the original history, Guderian ordered the troops to tactically retreat to the original line of defense for defense and wait for new orders. At this time, the number of German tanks attacking in this direction was sharply reduced to 50% of the original number.
On November 29, it looked like the balance of war had shifted in favor of the Soviet Union. Zhukov called Stalin, claiming that the opportunity to counterattack had finally arrived, and this time he could be disgraced, and even so angry that he hoped to eat all the more than a million German troops!
The Soviet Union wanted a victory so much that it was Stalin who announced that night: "The whole army will go on a counteroffensive." ”
His orders immediately spread throughout the Soviet Union, including the tall antenna of Catfish Village, which received a signal from Moscow, and the strategic counteroffensive from Moscow had finally begun. (To be continued.) )