The collapse of the Soviet-German war plunged the Soviet high command into shock and chaos. Fastest updates

Stalin really did not expect that the war that he had started in a hurry would usher in such a crushing defeat as today.

Now calculated, it seems that the war of the Soviet Union's outward expansion will basically develop into an unsatisfactory end, and Finland, Poland, and now Germany, it seems that they have not achieved their strategic goals.

In this case, the failure of this challenge to Germany is not so surprising.

Even many people guessed that it would fail, after all, it would be difficult to succeed with such an ill-prepared attack, but everyone really didn't guess that the failure would come so badly.

Until now, although the various army commands of the front have not counted specific losses, reporting to the Soviet High Command.

But even so, the reports of damage, which had been roughly summarized, were enough to make Stalin tremble. For example, the Soviet Air Force lost more than 6,300 aircraft after the start of the war!

This figure is not a complete figure, because the Luftwaffe has calculated that more than 7,500 Soviet planes have been destroyed.

Although it is not certain exactly how many aircraft were lost, it is certain that air supremacy was lost at the front.

The Soviets had to fight without air supremacy, and in this case, both the offensive that Stalin hoped for and the retreat that the front commanders expected became extremely difficult.

The situation now is that the offensive of the Soviet army on all fronts has completely stalled, and there is no longer any front army capable of continuing to advance.

On the Allies' side, Army Group North and the Finnish army were preparing to take Leningrad. Bock's Army Group Center was taking Minsk on both flanks with the powerful Italian and Spanish expeditionary forces. Rundstede's Army Group South, Antonescu's Romanian army, advancing in coordination with the main SS forces led by Moder, and the Wehrmacht on the southern front were preparing for a siege on the outskirts of Kiev.

At this time, the situation within the Allies was already very good.

Field Marshal Lebu of Army Group North was ready to join the Finnish army on the outskirts of Lelingrad and encircle the Soviet town.

Field Marshal Bock of Army Group Center was busy uniting Army Group North, and asked Army Group North to send a German unit south to cooperate with Army Group Center to encircle and suppress the Soviet troops in Belarus.

And Marshal Rundsteide of Army Group South can be said to be about to become the commander-in-chief of the "Wanguopai" joint **.

According to the plan put forward by Manstein, an old subordinate of Rundstead, Army Group South will apply to Army Group Center for borrowing troops, transfer all the Spanish and Italian mobile units in Army Group Center to the south, and complete a huge siege and annihilation battle of Kiev together with Army Group South.

Within Army Group South, Romania's hundreds of thousands of troops were already in a state of front-line combat, and they were jointly attacking the Soviet troops dominated by the Southwestern Front with the German army.

Further back, the two infantry divisions provided by Yugoslavia and the two infantry divisions provided by Greece have also arrived at their intended positions, ready to take over the occupied areas left behind by the German and Romanian armies, and free up garrisons for the front line.

Bulgaria agreed to send a division to the Soviet Union at the beginning, but because they had not yet solved the logistics convoy arrangements for this division, and the fuel and vehicles for the transport vehicles had not yet been prepared, the Bulgarian division would be in position a little later.

After all, the German logistics department had enough work on its own.

In addition to arranging for the transportation and supply of German equipment and supplies, they also had to transport some of the artillery captured from France to the front.

Under the leadership of Reinhardt, the German artillery has long focused on the direction of maneuverability and convenience, so the caliber is somewhat small.

But French artillery is different, in this era, in order to come up with artillery of satisfactory caliber on the battlefield of the Soviet Union, it is necessary to use a large number of artillery produced by the French army. Fortunately, when France surrendered, all these cannons were called out to offset the war reparations, so the only thing that the German logistics department needed to do was transport.

Of course, just to transport, it is already a great test of the scheduling and scheduling level of German logistics personnel.

This is only the Eastern Front, and on the Western Front, a large number of strategic materials and various equipment seized from Britain are also being busily transported to the European continent.

As for the logistical needs of the allies, they have to solve them on their own. Prepare enough logistics transport vehicles and send them to the front with enough fuel for one month (the rest of the fuel is also being transported from the allies themselves to the German Eastern Front, but they can get some additional supplies from the German Ministry of Oil.) ）

As a result, Bulgaria, which is poor in terms of logistics, is a little slower to prepare. However, the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense also gave assurances that within two weeks, an infantry division of the Bulgarian Expeditionary Force, including its logistics and transport team, would set out from the Balkans and rush to the front.

The member states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were already on the right track, which meant that the member states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were uncomfortable.

The most uncomfortable thing is, of course, Stalin himself in Russia, in the Moscow Kremlin.

"Zhukov is incompetent! Pavlov stupid! Didn't one of the two of them command the armored forces decently like the tank commanders of the Germans? Stalin sat down, looked at his men, and asked with a frown.

Zhukov and Pavlov were both Stalin's top performers, and their roles both existed as replacements for Tukhachevsky.

Because of the Great Purge, there was a break in the senior command level of the Soviet Union, especially the large-scale mechanized war officer faction originally headed by Tukhachevsky, which was basically disposed of along with Tukhachevsky. Therefore, Zhukov and Pavlov, two new experts in the theory of mechanized warfare, joined the core command circle of the Soviet military as rising stars.

As a result, after the Soviet-German war began, one stressed all day long that he wanted to retreat, and the other shouted all day long that he wanted to attack.

Zhukov, who shouted retreat, has now been thrown by Stalin into the train to Siberia. shouted attacking Pavlov...... Now Stalin could not even find anyone at all, and he was in a state of disconnection.

Now it seems that even if Zhukov had listened to him at the beginning, stopped the senseless offensive, and slightly narrowed the defensive line, it would not have been possible to be so completely suppressed by the Allied army......