While Rommel led the German army on the battlefield in Iceland, the southern flank of the Eastern Front entered a more massive and expansive pursuit battle. Pen % fun % Pavilion www.biquge.info

Upon learning of the Russians' intention to make peace, Manstein instructed his troops to speed up the pace of the offensive and focus on annihilating the forces of the Red Army, especially to encircle and annihilate its combat-ready tank and guard units. The clusters understood and changed the initial passive defensive scene to launch a powerful interspersed tactic

Molotov was relieved to receive the Bulgarian reply that Ribbentrop had agreed to meet on 1 June, and although he was anxious, he did not think about the Germans' deliberate delay. Because he only submitted a request for talks on May 28, the German side had to at least discuss and communicate internally, and in addition, it was necessary to discuss specific matters such as venue arrangements with the Bulgarians, and it was completely efficient to reply and promise a meeting on June 1 the next day.

And he can see clearly: the German army now has a clear advantage on the battlefield, how can it be willing to stop if it is not released to take advantage of it? Comrade Molotov, an old diplomat, knows very well that diplomatic negotiations are no trivial matter, that the military situation determines the negotiation scene, and that if the Germans want to deliberately delay, they can find 10,000 ways and reasons, and now they not only readily agree to the meeting in four days, but also submit some of the requirements for the talks through secret channels the next day.

But the conditions written in black and white left him speechless, and the conditions on them greatly exceeded expectations: the Red Army still had at least two salients in Moscow and Stalingrad, and the Germans were going to retreat the Bolsheviks to the east of the Ural Mountains with a wave of their hands; The German army in Central Asia was obviously blocked in the basin, and the separatist forces were also suppressed by Zhukov with an iron fist, but they kept calling for the independence of Central Asia; The Bolsheviks were explicitly asked to reduce their forces to less than 2 million, but they said that Germany would garrison 1 million troops on the land of the Menshevik regime and withdraw gradually over 20 years......

The core conditions of the German rhetoric have not changed, but in Molotov's eyes, many of the terms are simply unreadable - didn't the last negotiation end up hanging in the end because the conditions were too harsh? But after thinking about it and obtaining Stalin's consent, he decided not to spread the conditions so as not to cause an uproar, but at least to listen to Ribbentrop himself in order to deduce the true intentions of the other side.

However, the atmosphere was different in the middle of the night on the 29th, when the Red Army received the report that the Germans had landed in Iceland and fought a big fight, and learned that the Germans had dispatched tens of thousands of sorties to attack the British Isles and cover the landing of the army with a huge fleet.

The situation reported from the front is also very bad, the Germans not only have new tanks (Leopard and Tiger 2), but also a lot of them, and what is more troublesome is that now the German Panzergrenadiers are equipped with all armored vehicles and STG43, coupled with a large number of self-propelled guns, the level of attack and assault capabilities have completely increased by several grades, which has further exacerbated Moscow's worries.

I thought that the Soviets could slightly reverse the imbalance caused by the Tiger by coming up with new tanks such as IS-2 and T-43/85, but I didn't expect that the Germans had a lot of new equipment, and they were better performed, stronger, and more numerous, which made everyone frustrated. Now that the T-34/76 tank has basically been discontinued, Voroshilov can only ensure that the monthly production of tanks is maintained between 600-700 units, of which more than 120 are IS-2, the rest are T-43/85, and there are more than 200 SU-85 or SU-122 produced using the T-34 chassis.

Seeing the dazzling Leopards and overwhelming armored vehicles of the SS Army, which had been fully reequipped, everyone knew how big the gap was with Germany at present.

This is true of tanks, and the same is true of aircraft, which was thought to have concentrated all the forces of the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front, but now it seems that it is far from it, and Germany still has at least 5,000 planes in the direction of Western Europe, while the number of aircraft available to the Red Army has dropped to less than 6,000. To make matters worse, the continuous battle losses have caused heavy losses to the pilots, female pilots have accounted for one-third of the Red Army, and 20% of the front-line troops, but after all, there is a difference between men and women, those young people who generally only have 20-30 flight hours of training time hurriedly catch up with the battlefield, most of them can only survive 3-5 sorties, and the pilots who can survive after 15 sorties are only one or two in a hundred.

What's even more troublesome is that from time to time, there are still people who escape by plane, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs is overwhelmed: let's expand it, then the front line will immediately fall into the embarrassment of having no planes; If you don't do it, it seems that something is missing - because the Russian People's Liberation Army continues to propaganda to lure its own pilots.

Sometimes defection and death are not even necessarily distinguished, and the troops have joked more than once: thinking that someone had died with honor, it did not take long to find out in the ranks of the Russian Liberation Army

Late that night, Zhukov hurried back to the southern front, and the situation in which the entire Caucasus was completely destroyed made it impossible for him to look directly:

On the Transcaucasian side, Chernyakhovsky left a lone force of more than 50,000 to hold back the German and Iranian armies to buy time for his own retreat, and the offensive group retreated in two directions - one through the Caspian Sea to the east coast, and the other north to join Yeremenko;

On the Uralsk side, Malinovsky's vanguard and the German vanguard arrived at the place almost at the same time, but if you want to fight a large force, it is obvious that the German Sixth Panzer Army is faster, although there are more than 50,000 people on the books in Uralsk, but it is only the old, weak, sick and disabled, and there is no combat effectiveness at all;

On the Caucasus Plain, several army groups caught in the German encirclement are putting up their final resistance, all the troop formations have been disrupted, and they are arbitrarily divided into small pieces of troops, the large ones are 3-4 thousand people, and the small ones are only a few hundred, although it will take a little time for the Germans to solve them, but Zhukov knows that it is 3-5 days, and there is no need to consume the most powerful armored assault group of the German army, and the infantry division alone is enough to deal with the Red Army in the encirclement;

On the flank of Stalingrad, Guderian was storming the right flank of the city after eating the 3rd Army, Vatutin tried his best to resist it, Hausser was storming the left flank of the city, the forward was approaching the Volga, once the Germans crossed the river and successfully took Akhtubinsk on the opposite side, Stalingrad and Astrakhan would be separated, and the troops holding the Volga River in the middle were less than 200,000 in total, which could not stop the repeated impact of the three clusters of Hausser, Hort and Kleist.

Zhukov's order was decisive: Transcaucasian troops crossed the river and retreated eastward; The forces of the Caucasus Plain were holding their original positions on the north bank of the Volga River, and the weakened forces were supplemented by the 150,000 troops transferred from Chernyakhovsky and Central Asia, and Malinovsky was to withstand the onslaught of the Weix cluster, instructing Vatutin to move closer to Stalingrad and shrink the defensive line, while sending the 13th Army to block the advance of Guderian's cluster and prevent it and the Weiks cluster from flanking Uralsk.

His judgment was very accurate, but in the final analysis, the troops had to be able to fight, except for the relatively complete transfer of Chernyakhovsky's troops, the rest suffered more or less losses, especially the three armies on the southern front moved from a defensive state to an offensive, and after a few days of fighting, they had to go on the defensive, the troops were confused and the morale of the army was scattered, and the higher military chiefs could no longer control the troops, and those numbers were moved around on the map of the staff headquarters to look like a-for-tat confrontation with the German offensive, It's not the same thing at all.

On the 28th and 29th in a row, the total number of people killed, wounded, captured, and escaped and the total number of people lost exceeded 120,000, and many numbers were only empty shelves or only the headquarters was still operating, and even the army commanders and division commanders did not know how many people they still had under their command, so how could they really exert tactical results? Such a hollow soap bubble will be punctured even if it barely fills the defensive line.

In the early morning of 30 May, when the fighting on the southern front was heating up, Zhukov was surprised to find that several divisions and corps had been completely wiped out within a few hours of filling the defensive line -- in fact, it was not that the speed of the collapse of the troops was speeding up or that the German offensive had intensified, but that these troops were inherently weak, and they thought that they were a little successful if they did not fight, and all the true features of the battle were exposed. In the afternoon of the same day, Maikop was recaptured by the Germans; During the night, the Red Army abandoned Grozny and Baku, which had been regained with great difficulty, and accelerated the withdrawal of troops.

Although Meretskov made up his mind at the meeting to send three fronts to the rescue, the mobilization and adjustment of more than one million troops was not an easy task, and in order to shorten the front and gather troops, the area north of Yaroslavl on the northern flank of Moscow was completely abandoned. But even so, Vasilevsky did not think it was enough, and the battle on the southern flank could collapse before the rescue force arrived. He met directly with Stalin and put forward a proposal to abandon Stalingrad, to prepare for the retreat of the Southwestern and Don Fronts to the east, and to prepare to hold the line from Astrakhan to Atyrau.

It was difficult for Stalin to agree to this demand, especially since negotiations were about to begin, and the more he gave up, the more he would lose in the future. But the First Deputy Chief of Staff Antonov also held this opinion, forcing Stalin to agree to consider the idea and forward the telegram to Zhukov.

Zhukov admitted the horror of Stalingrad and Astrakhan after being divided and surrounded, but how could Stalingrad's forces be withdrawn now - if they gave up, the Germans would be pursued and suffered losses in the process of transfer, and he suggested that the situation in Leningrad be followed and that the Red Army peacefully transfer to Stalingrad as a truce of good faith, and the German army declared a ceasefire on the spot.

However, whether it succeeds or not, it depends on the results of Molotov's negotiations on June 1, at least it is impossible to give up Stalingrad for these two days, and no matter how difficult it is to fight, he will have to lead Vatutin and Rokossovsky to fight hard.