In order from south to north, the southern flank of the Red Army was engaged in a total of four fronts:

The southernmost point was the Stalingrad Front commanded by Yeremenko, relying on the Volga River, responsible for defending the front of about 400 kilometers from Astrakhan to Stalingrad, and he absorbed the main forces of the Caucasian Front, with a total strength of 750,000 troops;

The second is the Don Front under the command of Rokossovsky, relying on a strong urban defense system, guarding the Volga, Don, and Stalingrad triangles, with a front of about 200 kilometers and a total strength of 550,000;

Further north was the Southwestern Front under the command of Vatutin, relying on the right bank of the Don River, guarding the Stalingrad flank, with a front of about 300 kilometers and a total strength of 600,000 troops;

Finally, the newly formed Central Front, which was responsible for connecting Tambov with the Southwestern Front, was the core of Borisogrebsk, which held the intersection of three railways, with a front of about 250 kilometers and a total strength of 500,000 troops. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

In addition to the 2.3 million troops on the front line, Zhukov also held in his hands the theater reserve with Malinovsky as the commander of the independent army, saying that it was an army group, but in fact it had more than 250,000 troops, and another 150,000 troops were scattered on the northern shore of the Caspian Sea.

The southern flank battlefield has a total of 2.8 million troops, but the total number of tanks and planes is only about 2,000 (note: the relevant troop statistics include the air force and logistics forces assigned to the front defense area, and the actual front-line land officers and soldiers are smaller). Although the supreme commander above the four fronts was not specified, most of the time Zhukov was in command and coordination, in charge of the southern front.

The central battlefield is centered on the defense of Moscow, and it also has four fronts with a total strength of about 2.65 million.

At the southern end was the Bryansk Front, commanded by General Leitel, which was responsible for connecting the Central Front, with the core of the Tambov front, a front of about 250 kilometers and a total of 550,000 troops;

Then there was the defense of Moscow, the Western Front under the command of General Meretskov, which was responsible for defending the semi-arc defensive belt from the Tula and Ryazan lines in the south to the Rzhev and Kling lines in the north, with a front of about 550 kilometers and a total strength of 1.15 million;

Finally, the Kalinin Front, commanded by General Pulkaev, was responsible for the defense of the Novgorod to Rzhev line, covering the flank of the Western Front, with a front of about 400 kilometers and a total strength of 750,000 troops.

The base camp reserve was reorganized after being drained by the battlefield on the southern flank, but now it only has a nominal establishment of about 200,000, which is actually useless.

Although the total number of Red Army troops in the central battlefield was slightly less than that of the southern flank, the number of tanks and planes exceeded 2,500, and the degree of training was better, which could be regarded as a more combat-effective theater.

The Northern Front is centered on the defense of Leningrad, and although it also has the establishment of the four fronts of Volkhov, Leningrad, Northwest, and Karelia, the total strength is only about 1.85 million, of which the Northwest Front also serves as a strategic reserve in the Moscow theater. Due to the relatively small establishment of the army in all aspects, the base camp had abolished the Volkhov Front Army, but due to the poor transportation conditions and meteorological conditions on the northern front, a large front army like the southern flank was not conducive to command, and finally it was divided into four front armies, and the independent 7th Army assumed the task of reserve in the theater; The strength of the armies in all sectors is generally around 400,000-450,000, and there is a theater reserve of about 100,000 people. The theater has the fewest technical weapons, with only a few tanks and planes in the early 1,000s.

Among the forces that confronted the Axis on the front line, in addition to the supplementary troops that were collected by all means, the rest of the troops also paid a heavy price. Taking the Navy as an example, before the war, the Black Sea Fleet was an important part second only to the Baltic Fleet, and after the loss of Sevastopol and the entire Black Sea Primorsky Zone, all the officers and men of the Black Sea Fleet, with very few exceptions, were transferred to the Army on the spot. Generally as an infantryman, those who can operate naval guns go to artillery, and those who can drive torpedo boats to become armored soldiers - the sea is gone, and it is useless to keep the navy. The Air Force will also inevitably be transferred, and the pilots will definitely not be reduced, but due to the reduction of the control area and the large-scale loss of airfields and anti-aircraft guns, this group of garrison forces and anti-aircraft artillery forces will also be transferred to the Army.

A rather favorable situation for Germany was that it had finally basically equaled its opponents in terms of the number of technical weapons. At the beginning of Barbarossa, the number of tanks in the Axis offensive was about 4,000, while the Soviet tanks exceeded 23,000 in the same period, and there were 14,000 concentrated in the western military districts, and after nearly two years of fighting, the Axis destroyed and captured more than 40,000 Soviet tanks, and at the same time the number of its own tanks exceeded 5,000 (Eastern Front), the Red Army tanks were reduced to only more than 6,000 (more than 1,500 in the Far East and Siberia, and more than 1,000 in Central Asia and reserve training).

However, the Red Army still had more than 13,000 tanks in its hands, but more than 4,000 of them were mothballed, which was an inevitable choice made in desperation. After the loss of the Baku oil field, the source of oil was sharply reduced, and the overall supply of the whole Soviet Union was even less than that of Germany before the Middle East oil fields were obtained, while Germany's crude oil production exceeded that of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union in the same period last year.

The Soviet Union's coal resources were scarce, far from Germany's, and there were no coal-to-liquid projects, so despite emergency measures such as increasing the exploitation of new oil fields, demanding more supplies, and reducing fuel consumption in other areas, the oil production gap could not be filled in the short term.

In addition, due to the continuous losses of the armored forces and the serious shortage of reserves of the effective armored corps, Stalin was forced to issue an order under the repeated strong advice of Zhukov and Vasilevsky, requiring all armies to mothball most of the light tanks in the troops, such as the BT-7, T-26, T-60, and T-70 light tanks, not only completely discontinued, but also forced to reduce the use of those that had been produced, so as to leave the most valuable fuel and vehicle fleet for trucks, T-34 series tanks, and Su series tank destroyers.

After this reorganization, the T-34 and T-43 accounted for more than 80% of the more than 6,000 tanks facing off against the Axis, which had the same effect as Germany's comprehensive replacement of No. 2 and No. 3 with No. 4. Due to the low penetration rate of light armored vehicles in the Soviet Union, a small number of light tanks remained to assume the functions of reconnaissance, vigilance, and liaison, but they were no longer engaged in armored warfare to avoid unnecessary losses.

A similar situation also occurred in the aircraft, at the beginning of Barbarossa, the number of aircraft put into the attack by the Axis was about 3,500, the number of Soviet aircraft in the same period exceeded 20,000, and more than 10,000 directly engaged with the Axis, after nearly two years of continuous operations, in the case of a high exchange ratio of more than 1:7 in the Axis, there were still more than 6,000 relatively modern aircraft left in the Soviet front line (nearly 2,000 in the Far East, and more than 1,000 in Central Asia and the hinterland).

Since the Soviet Union was more dependent on Anglo-American supplies for high-grade aviation fuel, the blow to aviation was now greater than that of armored forces after the cut off of foreign aid. No matter how reluctant they were, in the face of a dwindling supply of fuel, the Red Army aviation units could only respond by reducing their strength and flying hours, and the latter further led to a decline in the quality of the pilots.

The difference is that Germany has an absolute advantage in the armored forces, but in the field of air force, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland and even Slovakia have a large number of pilots involved in the operation, and their performance is better than that of the ground forces.

Although Germany's monthly oil production was less than that of Germany in the same period last year, fortunately, the Soviet Union did not have to maintain a large submarine fleet, nor did it need to help its allies, and the number of cars was also small, so after reorganizing its armored and aviation forces, its monthly fuel consumption fell to the point where it was basically the same as its output, but what worried Zhukov was that now that the weather was gradually getting warmer, the demand for heating oil basically did not exist, and if the supply conditions could not be significantly improved in winter, I was afraid that a large number of people would freeze to death, but at the moment Comrade Stalin did not seem to care so much.

"After the loss of the first line in the Caucasus in April, through our efforts, we initially stabilized the situation along the Volga River on the Astrakhan and Stalingrad lines, but the situation was very dangerous, and the Caspian Sea has become a place for the enemy and us to hold together, and the defense has been opened." There is a sentence that Vasilevsky did not say, but everyone knows very well that fortunately the Caspian Sea is a closed sea area, and if it is directly connected to the Black Sea and can pass through warships, I am afraid that the German and Italian fleets will already carry out a large-scale landing, instead of fighting with aircraft and small warships of about 100 tons as now.

"In the past month, we have found three places where there has been a surge in radio signals." Vasilevsky pointed to the map with a whip and said, "One is in the direction of Smolensk, where the enemy's Army Group Center is located; One is near Orel, where intelligence shows that it is the gathering place of the enemy's Eastern Army Group, which is a new army group formed this year, positioned as a strategic reserve on the Eastern Front, with a large number of rebels in it; The third was near Voronezh, where intelligence indicated that Hoth's Panzer Army was there, and the rest of the situation was unknown. But the southern flank, especially the line south of Stalingrad, was calmer, somewhat unusually. ”

"The General Staff has four judgments on the possible direction of the enemy's attack: first, to attack from the Rzhev-Vyazma line and re-establish the salient, which, in my opinion, is relatively unlikely; secondly, the possibility of attacking from the Orel line, detouring the Tula direction, and encircling Moscow from the southern front, is not small; Thirdly, an attack in depth from Voronezh in an attempt to encircle and annihilate our Bryansk Front is more likely, but it is not the main direction of attack; Fourth, by virtue of superior forces, the use of the method of encirclement on all sides to seize Stalingrad. ”

"Surrounded on all sides?" Everyone looked at each other. (To be continued.) )