Stalin's anxiety became even more acute when news came from the south that the Germans were occupying Iraq and deterring Turkey and Persia. Although he immediately instructed Zhukov and others to send 150,000 troops into Persia to consolidate the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union as required by Britain and the United States, he still faced great difficulties - this meant that the 300,000 reserves he had prepared for the Don front were suddenly reduced by 150,000, and the second-line echelon in the direction of Central Asia became unusable. The total strength of the Don front has barely grown from 2.3 million to 2.4 million, and the numbers are increasing quickly on the books, but how much combat strength there is really no knowing.

Many army commanders complained that an infantry division was now full of middle-aged soldiers over the age of 45, and that they had not even completed three weeks of emergency training in time, and that they had almost to start from scratch -- a luxury at a time when the fighting was so fierce. They generally believed that the combat effectiveness of one division of this supplementary force was not as good as the previous two battalions, and under the direct pressure of the corps and division commanders and the repeated requests of Zhukov and Vasilevsky, Stalin gritted his teeth and again transferred 150,000 troops from the Far East. After successive transfers, the total strength of the Red Army in the Far East dropped from 1.45 million to less than 1.05 million, but the average level of combat effectiveness was still the highest, the total number of troops still exceeded half of the enemy in front of it (the 700,000 Japanese Kwantung Army), and the main heavy equipment was more than three times that of it.

The battle on the Don front now even Stalin himself had the idea of retreating, wanting to abandon Rostov, a difficult bone to gnaw, and instead divert the main forces of the army to the direction of Moscow and switch the direction of the strategic offensive, but a large-scale retreat was not an easy task, and Manstein kept an eye on the movements of the Red Army, and would pounce fiercely at the slightest flaw. Therefore, the southern flank with the Don River as the core was still the main battlefield on the eastern front - the northern flank, and the 600,000-strong Army Group North confronted the 750,000 Red Army (there were still 50,000 German troops fighting with 300,000 Finnish troops on the Finnish battlefield, and they faced 350,000 Red Army); In the middle battlefield, the 1.05 million Army Group Center faced 1.3 million Red Army; On the southern flank, Army Group South, with 1.6 million troops, faced 2.4 million Red Army. In addition to this, the Red Army had 150,000 reserves in the steppe military districts, 50,000 in Central Asia, and nearly 250,000 in Persia and Transcaucasia; There are also 1.05 million troops in the Far East. The ground forces of the Red Army, totaling about 6.3 million, were used to the brim.

The Red Army knew very well that although the strength of the German army on the front line and in the vicinity of the front line was only a little more than 3 million, its strength on the surface was by no means more than the strength of three army groups (including 200,000 Axis Allied forces), and the Germans also followed the example of the Red Army and began to set up strategic reserves -- this was the second major policy adjustment adopted by Hoffman after the disarmament, expansion of divisions, and the reduction of the size of the army group; in the original historical time and space, the German army did not have reserves on the Eastern Front, and once the front line was tightened, troops would be drawn from other theaters. It not only increases the pressure on the defense areas, but also increases the transportation burden, which is extremely passive. After careful consideration and repeated discussions and communication with Keitel, Zeitzler, and others, Hoffman decided to form a strategic reserve in the eastern part of Poland, across southern Lithuania, western Belarus, and northern Ukraine, with the initial intention of forming an Eastern Army Group with 200,000-250,000 troops. The aim was to give the troops of the three army groups a place to rest and rotate, instead of having to run back to the Western Front as soon as they rested.

Thanks to Hoffmann's means of draining the air force field divisions, liberating the prisoner camps to guard the forces, transferring German troops in the Balkans, and speeding up the replenishment of reserve forces, and because the other two army groups except the southern front used such strategies as leveling the front, abandoning the salient, and holding on to the defense, the ground forces on the eastern front still maintained relatively abundant and high-quality troops after Italy, Romania, and Hungary withdrew 200,000 troops.

At the same time, Army Group Eastern was also assisted by a large number of servant armies: the Russian Liberation Army had completed the initial establishment of three divisions, and was carrying out the formation of the second batch of three divisions, in addition to the troops of the former Soviet Union countries that had issued declarations of independence, and by the beginning of January 1943, the total strength was as high as 17 divisions - including 5 in Ukraine, 3 each in Estonia and Latvia (there were originally SS units, but now all of them have become the relevant Wehrmacht), 2 each in Belarus and Cossacks, and 2 in Lithuania. Kalmykia formed 1 division each. These units were basically formed according to the unified establishment of the German army, with nearly 15,000 personnel per division, instead of the small divisions of the Red Army, which had only more than 5,000 men, and the total strength had exceeded 300,000. According to the projections and endurance of these countries themselves, in the future there will be at least 25 divisions. The whereabouts of this group of troops are clear, and they are all assigned to the Eastern Army Group, except for those that are directly integrated into the group army groups fighting on the front line.

Considering the high prestige and rank required to coordinate these forces, on 12 January, Hoffman signed an order whereby Field Marshal Weix, the former commander of Army Group Center, took over as commander of Army Group East, and his place was replaced by General Modell, the master of defense, and his order to Moder was very simple—to defend flexibly and to demand a high exchange ratio.

On the one hand, they used the armed forces to actively promote the process of distribution of collective farms or factories in their own countries, and on the other hand, they undertook the task of second-line defense, helping the German army to reduce pressure in logistics, supply, anti-guerrilla warfare, and public security. Some units with relatively strong combat effectiveness have even been directly integrated into combat units and obeyed the orders of the group army groups to which they belong. The strength of the three army groups, though only 3.1 million, was almost entirely engaged in field warfare - a stark contrast to the Japanese situation in China.

Under Hoffman's repeated orders, the Eastern Front Logistics Office gave these servant units weapons and equipment that were not bad, and all of them were armed with captured Russian munitions; due to the large number of captured equipment and the small number of troops, the equipment level of these troops, except for tanks, soon exceeded the level of the Russian divisions, and most of the selected equipment was produced before the war and was well-made, and it was not an inferior product that had been shoddy and used in emergency response in the hands of the Red Army in the past year.

Driven by the wave of independence of the nation-state, and even more lured by the distribution of land, there were defections almost every day in the Red Army, some of whom had long been disgruntled and had been looking for an opportunity to escape, some of whom had been held accountable for the defeat of the campaign or who were afraid of being held accountable by the Ministry of the Interior.

On the one hand, the preferential treatment of dividing the land into households and the tax exemption for military dependents, and on the other hand, more and more partners defected to them, the morale of the servant troops was aroused at once, and the will to fight was also extraordinarily strong, and the German army did not accept everyone, and the obviously older and weaker personnel simply sent them to demobilize and discharge from the army, and the release rate of non-Russian national prisoners in the prisoner of war camps was also greatly accelerated, and by early January, except for some middle and high-ranking officers and political workers, there were almost no non-Russian prisoners of war left. While there were certainly problems of one kind or another among these prisoners of war and defectors, the General Staff had confidently and boldly entrusted the second-line task to these servants, specifically against the Red Army, and as for the screening of saboteurs mixed in, it was the task of the Gestapo and the intelligence and police systems of the nascent states, and the SS special detachment, which had abolished the task of "final settlement" of the Jews, was given a similar task. Baumann, who had a knack for catching traitors in Germany, was assigned the task, while Himmler, who had been idle, was involved in the Jewish trade with great interest, and both were immersed in it and kept busy.

Proceeding from Stalin's original intention, he believed that the servant army was a more vicious opponent than the German army, especially the Russian Liberation Army was a thorn in his throat, and he was eager to get rid of it quickly, so he sent a batch of "anti-rebellion" teams to go deep behind enemy lines to destroy, but judging from the situation reported up, the effect was obviously not as good as expected, although the collective land distribution work in these countries was interfered with in one way or another, but it could basically be distributed before spring sowing. Most of the missions he sent to assassinate the leaders of the independence movement and the commanders of the Russian Liberation Army also failed, and they were only lost to the intelligence officers he had cultivated with great difficulty. His henchman, Beria, who had cleaned up the mess of the purge, did not dare to tell him that many intelligence agents had defected as soon as they arrived at their destination.

Although the report on the occupied territories submitted by the Ministry of the Interior was vague and full of optimism, Stalin knew the subtext behind it: the guerrilla war had little effect, the level and scale of resistance were getting lower and lower, and pro-German and anti-Russian became the mainstream, and once these allotted fields had been harvested for a full season, they could no longer be stopped from turning into the arms of the Germans. What made him even more anxious was that the intelligence showed that the coal mines in the Donetsk Basin, which had been destroyed by the Red Army during its retreat, had been basically repaired by the Germans and were about to be mined on a large scale, and that after a large amount of coal was mined and used for power generation, the problem of restricting heating and industrial power in the occupied western areas would no longer be a problem, and as time went by, once industrial production in the west was restored, he did not dare to imagine what the prospects for future war would be.

"You mean that the Germans have gone to Istanbul and at the same time sent 2 divisions of equipment to the Turks?" After listening to Beria's report on the situation in the occupied territories, Stalin changed the topic and asked the Turks again.

"Yes." Beria considered his words, "The intelligence indicates that the Turkish military readily accepted that its militants were in tune with the German fascists, but President Inonu and some cautious figures were still hesitating." ”

"The war in Persia is tight......," Stalin sighed, and fell silent. (To be continued.) )