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General Pavlov, who was taking a walk, talked with his henchmen and generals: "Zhukov's first shot to the Southwestern Front was to let the troops retreat? ”

"Yes, Zhukov, fearing the power of the enemy, took the lead in spreading defeatist rhetoric, and abandoned large areas of the country, completely handing over the initiative to the enemy!" Pavlov's cronies, of course, knew what he wanted to hear, and quickly spoke out to slander Zhukov.

Maybe it was because the sunlight reflected from the snow was too strong, or maybe it was because these words reached Pavlov's heart, and he narrowed his eyes slightly and nodded thoughtfully.

For some reason, Pavlov suddenly remembered the last exercise, which had just ended.

It was a chaotic disaster!

In Pavlov's opinion, he had never heard of the Red side losing to the Blue side in the exercise.

As is customary, the General Staff informed Zhukov's Blue side of the plan for the deployment of troops on the Red side under its command. And this guy Weikov, without waiting for the official start of the exercise, advanced his blue troops by nearly 100 kilometers and entered the major attack positions in advance.

Thus, as soon as the exercise began, Zhukov's Blue Army completely surrounded Pavlov's main force of the Red Army in the center, and quickly completed the tactical task of dividing and strangling.

From Pavlov's point of view, this is simply a foul. No, it's a violation of discipline, a serious violation of discipline!

The purpose of the exercise was only to test the Red Army's territorial defense and counteroffensive combat capabilities from the beginning, but the Red Army in charge of defense was surrounded by Zhukov's Blue Army before it could be launched.

"Zhukov, the guy who likes to show off, has previously messed up the offensive and defensive exercises organized by the General Staff with great expense and painstaking efforts. Now, the Germans don't tell him in advance about their configuration. So his little cleverness didn't work, and it seemed normal. Pavlov did not hide the slightest accusation of slandering Zhukov.

Of course, such a thing is nothing new to him.

It's just that the current Zhukov will not be able to show the past record at all for a while. On the other hand, Pavlov, who has been stationed in the rear, has all kinds of opportunities to spread rumors and slander Zhukov and distort the facts to slander the other party's low ability.

But in fact, among the two, the one who is really incapable is precisely Pavlov himself, who speaks ill of people!

Perhaps in the eyes of outsiders, Pavlov can be regarded as a new wave of rising in the Soviet Red Army in recent years.

Pavlov and Zhukov were appointed as the two commanders of the first two tank regiments of the Soviet Army.

And he also took part in the Spanish Civil War, where he was awarded the medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union. Later, he served as the director of the Soviet Army's automobile tank armored forces. Together with Zhukov, General Jinjing was appointed commander of an important military district.

Zhukov is in the Kiev Special Military District, and Bayulota is in the Western Special Military District.

And because of that exercise, there was a gap in the status of the two for the first time. Zhukov, who won the exercise, became the chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Army, while Pavlov remained only a commander of a military district.

Even so, Pavlov's every step of the way up seemed to be very smooth.

However, behind these honors, there is no terrible fact that Pavlov is not at all a battle-hardened military genius like Lekov, but more like a politician.

Pavlov's ascension to such a prominent position as commander-in-chief of the Western Special Military District was due to the vacuum of the top commanders of the Soviet army caused by Stalin's "Great Purge". In order to fill the vacancy, many low-ranking generals of the Soviet army were exceptionally promoted, including of course military geniuses like Zhukov, but there were also a large number of opportunistic politicians like Pavlov with the title of military strategist.

For example, when he was advising the Soviet army as a tank expert, he mistakenly accepted the experience of the Spanish Civil War, believing that the Packer troops could not fight alone and could only support the infantry, which led to the disbandment of the Soviet mechanized corps, which had already been formed.

It wasn't until 1940 that Zhukov, another Soviet tank expert, suggested that Pavlov's view was actually based on the poor protection of light tanks like the T-26, but General Pavlov mistakenly rejected all tanks on this basis.

Including the previous exercise, Pavlov also completely exposed the incompetent nature of his "military novice".

During the exercises, his command of the Red Army did not deploy troops around Minsk, but deployed the main forces of the Red Army in the area of the Bialystok salient, not far from the border, and he even forgot to set aside enough strategic reserves.

As the commander of the Blue Army in the exercise, Zhukov, who had real materials, soon clearly saw this serious problem, so he moved his troops in advance, quietly approached the main forces of the Red Army, and immediately advanced in two directions at the beginning of the exercise, encircling the main forces of the Red Army in the Bialystok salient.

Pavlov's deployment did not include enough mobile reserves to break the salient or engage the Blues in depth. 、

As a result, under Pavlov's command, the gates of Minsk were completely open to the Blues.

Originally, Zhukov realized the crisis of Pavlov's misdeployment and taught the other side how to fight a war with his superb military command level.

But Pavlov secretly accused Zhukov of changing his concept: "The main reason for the failure of this exercise is due to the repeated violations of the rules by the commander of the Blue Army, Zhukov, and the actions of the Red Army. They knew in advance about our disposition, and they acted in advance, and the method of attack and the use of troops arranged by General Zhukov did not follow the arrangements of the general command of the exercise. ”

At the end, Pavlov once again satirized Zhukov's excellent performance in the exercise: "I think that the General Staff spent a lot of effort to prepare for this exercise to test the combat effectiveness of the Red Army, not to show military talent for individual people!" ”

These few words infuriated Zhukov thoroughly, causing him to retaliate with Pavlov-for-tat: "If the blue side were Germans, would they inform you of the time of the attack and strictly observe it?" Will the Germans cooperate with the actions of your troops?"

In the end, the two men did not give in to each other, and both stared at each other fiercely.

Pavlov has kept this feud in mind to this day, and then replaced all his prejudice against Zhukov with revenge in the war, which added a lot of trouble to Zhukov's Martian operation.

It is no exaggeration to say that the things that Pavlov did in the rear and the huge amount of materials withheld from the front-line troops were enough to affect the war on the front.

To a certain extent, he did more harm to the Soviet army than all the spies that Germany had arranged in advance on the territory of the USSR combined!