In the city of Lodz, groups of soldiers shuttle back and forth through the streets, bringing an oppressive and tense atmosphere to the city at war.

The air trenches that were originally dug in the city are now crowded with soldiers who have been withdrawn from the front line. Viewed from above, the trenches temporarily placed between the streets have cut the originally smooth city avenues into independent grids.

Some of the grids are a little smaller, and there are only a dozen soldiers inside. Some of them are larger, and may even be crammed with a company of soldiers.

And a gray building in the center of the city that temporarily served as the headquarters of the 30th Division was surrounded by endless bandaged soldiers. Since this was both the location of the headquarters of the 30th Division and the last line of defense, their division commander Hans. Feng. Furmanred decided to gather all the moving wounded of the division here as a last stand.

There was a commotion on the positions, and the remaining soldiers of the 30th Division ran back and forth from street to street, transporting ammunition boxes and dry food bags. Many soldiers with better marksmanship were placed at the windows of buildings in the city of Lodz, holding Mauser 98K rifles equipped with scopes, acting as quasi-snipers in street warfare.

In previous defensive battles, many officers had been killed under the concentrated artillery fire of the Polish army, and many junior officers, and even non-commissioned officers, were temporarily appointed as commanders in the trenches of the streets. The surviving senior officers gathered in twos and threes, discussing how to deploy defense gradients and fire arrangements in the dozen or so districts divided into the city.

Due to the previous defensive battles, the 30th Division is now seriously understaffed. Hans assigned the remaining troops to five newly established battalion-level temporary headquarters to facilitate decentralized management, but these five temporary headquarters said that what needed command was not an ordinary battalion, but was divided into squads and platoons, scattered and scattered on every street. It can be said that the difficulty of commanding the temporary command is actually quite complex and difficult, and it is almost impossible to effectively command every unit after the start of the war.

At this moment, both officers and soldiers were desperately reinforcing the rudimentary defensive line in the city, and even many large furniture such as tables and cabinets left over from the empty buildings were placed in front of the trenches by the Germans to block a group of enemy troops rushing forward, so as to free up bayonet time and start the next step of white-knuckle fighting.

Although there are many times when bayonet battles rarely occur on the European battlefield, this does not mean that European armies will not use white-knuckle tactics!

In fact, the bayonet combat training of the German 30th Division was quite outstanding among its peers. Reinhardt, as the head of Germany, visited the bayonet fighting techniques of the 30th Division before this operation, and distributed 300 M1908 parade bayonets equipped with Mauser 98 rifles to the division headquarters of the 30th Division. This 430 mm long bayonet is definitely a good thing in white-knuckle combat.

When Major General Hans distributed these bayonets to the soldiers who had just been in the trenches, he also lamented that it was fortunate that the Führer had rewarded these bayonets in the first place, and they could be used in this platoon. As everyone knows, the situation that the 30th Division is encountering now is something that Reinhardt has known for a long time, and it is only because he wants his close confidant Manstein to take this opportunity to plan a wonderful response plan to establish his prestige as in history, so he deliberately did not point it out to anyone.

Unfortunately, Major General Hans and the officers and men of the 30th Division were now unknowingly used by Manstein as a decoy to attract the Polish High Command. A crippled German infantry division that seemed to be about to be taken was too tempting for the Polish high command. Because only by taking the 30th Division could it threaten the rear of the German 8th Army, which was on the offensive, and thus forced the German 8th Army to stop the offensive and turn around to renew the decisive battle with this carefully assembled Polish counterattack force.

In order to plan this counterattack, the Polish High Command, at the suggestion of the French Major General Bélunte, took great risks by transferring nine infantry divisions, three cavalry brigades, and 10 newly formed divisions from other parts of the Western Front, which had been left around the capital Warsaw.

According to Birente's vision, this counterattack corps, which contained all the remaining essence of the Polish army, could be used to carry out a large-scale counter-assault between the Vistula meanders, changing the fate of the Polish army, which had been passively beaten everywhere since the start of the war on the Western Front. And by counter-assault, they advanced to the south bank of the Vistula River, opening a way for the Polish army, which had collapsed there, to retreat to Warsaw, and let them retrain in Warsaw before returning to the battlefield.

Everything was so reasonable, but at the breakthrough carefully chosen by Belante, the area of Lodz, where the German 30th Division was located, had an unexpected situation.

A division of German infantry, under the repeated attack of a Polish army group and covered by the fire of 9 Polish artillery regiments, actually carried it for 48 hours!

How is this possible?!

When Belante received the report of the Polish army the next afternoon, he was speechless for a long time in astonishment. After two days of fighting, the elite forces of a Polish army group were able to seize a main forward position and a cover position with vacated troops from the hands of a division of the Germans. This is completely out of line with military common sense!

Béronte believed that even a senior military teacher from France's most famous military school would not be able to tell the reason for such a battle.

If a division can block the all-out attack of an army group, then why did his commander, who is now the famous Marshal Pétain in France, need to mobilize French troops with a small number of troops similar to the German army to resist in the Battle of Verdun in the last world war, and finally barely won a narrow victory?

Did the Germans get reinforcements? No, that's not possible. The breakthrough in Rhodes was found by his French officer corps in Belonte for a long time, and he chose this place as a counterattack position, and the Polish High Command also repeatedly called it yes. At that time, they were interested in the fact that the German military force in Lodz would not exceed one division, and there were almost no large reinforcements within a radius of 100 miles.

And according to the reports of the front-line troops, they have already found a large number of dead medics on the forward positions of the German troops that they have just occupied. These medical troops with red cross armbands are not holding medicine boxes in their hands, but real guns!

From this point of view, the German division stationed in Lodz should have reached the point where there were no troops to adjust, and had to arm the health battalions and send them to the front. In this way, the Germans looked more like they had received reinforcements. Otherwise, they would not have fought so hard and even took out the most precious health camp.

After preliminary statistics, Berente estimated that the German division in Lodz should have a casualty rate of 50 percent, right? Judging from Berente's cognition, it is simply a miracle in the military world that this German division has been able to hold on to the present!