"It's 0:30 now, and the Western, Northern and Southwestern Fronts should have already started shelling!"

On the outskirts of Tbilisi, the capital of Stalin's hometown of Georgia, the headquarters building of a large divisional military airfield, the lights were also bright. Pen Fun Pavilion www.biquge.info Major General Alexander Yevgenyevich Golovanov, commander of the 8th Long-Range Bomber Aviation Division of the Soviet Red Air Force, was speaking in rusty English to a colonel of the U.S. Army Air Corps.

The colonel had a Slavic square face and a burly build, and looked like an air force general. He's Curtis. Emerson. Li Mei, commander of the 305th U.S. Bomber Wing.

At Stalin's request, from April 1942, part of the wings of the US 8th Air Force began to be secretly stationed in the USSR. By the end of May, six bomber wings, the 91st, 92nd, 93rd, 100th, 303rd, and 305th, had been stationed.

The organization of the American bomber wing is different from that of Germany, Britain, and the Soviet Union, not that there are several bomber groups under a bomber wing, but that the functional brigades under the wing, such as the combat group, the ground service group, and so on. And there is only one combat group under a wing, and there are usually 3-5 flying squadrons under the combat group, and a squadron usually has 22-24 aircraft.

Colonel Li May's 305th Wing had only recently completed training on the mainland of the United States, and it was also very well established, with a total of 88 B-17 bombers in four groups.

Now the 305th Wing is stationed at this airfield outside Tbilisi. 88 B-17 Pei-8 heavy bombers belonging to the 8th Long-Range Bomber Aviation Division of the USSR Air Force, lined up neatly on the oversized tarmac of the airport, and they are ready to take off!

"In an hour and a half before we get out," Colonel Li Mei said, taking a sip of his coffee and then taking a puff on his cigar, "if all goes well, we should fly to the Kirkuk oil field at six o'clock in the morning." ”

Comrade Stalin, of course, did not forget about the bombing of the Kirkuk and Khuzestan fields. The two large fields now produce more than 2 million tonnes of oil per month, all of which are sold to the Wehrmacht Reserve Agency, which is then distributed by the German High Command as needed.

If these two large oil fields were blown up, then the German war machine would be half-paralyzed, if not paralyzed, and the Soviet Union would be quite sure that it could win the war.

So Stalin took out 2 valuable bomber aviation divisions this time, plus 6 American bomber wings, a total of 240 Pe-8 and 520 B-17s were ready to be dispatched, and there would also be 72 P51s and 150 Soviet MiG-5 fighters of the American fighter wing as escorts. The total number of sorties is as high as 982, which is almost a thousand planes bombing!

"Are you sure to blow it up?" Major General Golovanov asked with some uncertainty. Although he was confident when he drew up his plan, he believed that 760 bombers dropping three or four thousand tons of bombs at a time would be enough to destroy two large oil fields. But the Luftwaffe has also played a great role in recent years, and it looks difficult to deal with.

"Once impossible," said Li Mei, shaking her head, "the Luftwaffe is not easy to deal with...... Especially at medium and low altitudes, both the Fokker Zero and the FW-190 are very powerful, and the P-51 does not necessarily have a chance of winning. ”

The P-51 could take on the Fokker Zero and the FW-190, but the P-51s deployed by the Americans to the Soviet Union were all high-altitude models with Grayback Falcon 60 engines. The aerodynamics of high-altitude aircraft are not the same as those of medium and low-altitude models, these P-51s can play at high altitudes, and when they go down to low altitudes, they are certainly not opponents of the Fokker Zero.

After the P-51 went to the high altitude, it was not at a disadvantage against the high-altitude model of the FW-190. The B-17 is very strong and has strong self-defense firepower, as long as there is P-51 cover, even if it encounters the blocking of the FW-190, it will not lose too much. What really worries Li Mei is the recent appearance of the HE-219, this kind of aircraft is too fierce, and the speed at high altitude is fast, once it bites the B-17 and bombards it with 30mm and 20mm cannons, it can be shot down.

However, the Americans were still prepared to act in spite of the losses -- even a loss of more than 20 percent would be bearable in Roosevelt's view, as long as they could destroy the Germans' Middle East oil fields.

But Li Mei was still a little worried that the Soviets would not be able to bear it, he said: "Our B-17 and P-51 can fly very high and drop bombs at an altitude of 11,000 meters. But your Pei-8 can't fly high, and the MiG-5 is a twin-engine aircraft, so it's not flexible enough......"

What he means is that you Soviets can't bear it, don't go, just let the American planes bomb it. However, Major General Golovanov misunderstood him and said that the Soviet planes were not good, which is not good.

"The MiG-5 is a good plane!" Major General Golovanov confidently said that "it can fly up to 680 kilometers and have a range of up to 2,800 kilometers, and it can also hang 800 kg of bombs, and even carry out long-range bombing missions alone." ”

Li Mei nodded noncommittally, he knew that the MiG-5 aircraft, which had received technical assistance from the United States during the development of this kind of aircraft, and the engines used were all imported from the United States, so it was more successful than the historical MiG-5 and met all the design requirements. It was successfully put into production at the beginning of 1942 and is now a trump card in the hands of Soviet long-range bomber aviation, and it is indeed a good aircraft. But the Germans apparently had a killer trick to restrain it - the Mosquito Killer (He-219) must also be a MiG killer......

……

"Commander, commander, the Soviets have begun shelling! Our war with the USSR broke out! ”

The headquarters of Rommel, the commander of the German Middle East Front, was in Kirkuk, which was the most heavily fortified place in the Middle East, along with Abadan in Huzestan. There are more anti-aircraft guns than in Berlin, there are also state-of-the-art anti-aircraft search radars, and several large airfields have been built nearby.

In addition, General Rommel's own command and the commander of the 4th Air Force, Alexander Brown. General Lehr also sat separately in Kirkuk and Abadan - firmly watching the oil fields!

When the Soviets started the war, Rommel was sleeping soundly, he was woken up by his adjutant, and then put on his military uniform, sleepily walked into the war room, and found that the chief of staff of the Middle East Front, Lieutenant General Bismarck, was already there, talking to someone on the phone.

When Lieutenant General Bismarck saw Rommel, the call had already been made. He hung up the receiver and said to Rommel: "It was General Lehr who had called from Abadan and asked to send planes to bomb the Soviet oil fields of Baku, Batumi and Grozny. ”

The Soviets wanted to bomb the Middle East, and the Germans, naturally, wanted to bomb the Caucasus oil-producing regions of the USSR! Although the second Baku of the Urals has been developed, the oil regions of the Caucasus still contribute more than half of the Soviet oil, and if the Caucasus oil regions are destroyed or occupied by Germany, the Soviet war machine will be devastated.

However, it will not be easy to destroy the oil-producing regions of Baku, Batumi and Grozny. Since the French did it once in 1940, the Soviets have now strengthened their air defenses in that area, deploying high-performance fighters such as the MiG-3 and La-3.

In addition, after the bombing of Batumi in 1940, Stalin, realizing the vulnerability of the Batumi Oil City, began to transfer oil refining operations to the Ural industrial region. With the support of a large number of oil refining equipment provided by the United States, the construction of the second Baku oil industrial zone is progressing rapidly. According to the estimates of German intelligence, by the end of 1943 at the latest, the Soviet Union would be able to get rid of its dependence on the oil city of Batumi.

"How many aircraft is planned for the 4th Air Force?" Rommel walked to the map table with his hands behind his back and looked down at the map of the situation in the Middle East.

The situation is still good, and Muscat, the last stronghold of the British in the Middle East, was recently replaced by Alfred. Feng. The 26th Army under the command of General Golz captured. Now that the route from Abadan to the Suez Canal has been opened, the largest oil field and refinery in the Middle East (which has also been repaired) can now finally supply the German Empire's war machine with continued fuel.

Moreover, before the opening of the Persian Gulf shipping lane, the large oil fields and refineries in Abadan have resumed production one after another. There are now as many as three or four million tons of crude oil and refined oil products stored in Abadan -- fuels that were unplanned by the High Command and were used to meet the needs of operations on the Eastern Front.

"The 4th Air Force is preparing to dispatch 96 Do-217s and 64 Fokker Zeros to bomb the Baku oil fields; 72 JU288s and 32 HE219s were dispatched to bomb the Batumi refinery. ”

The oil wells in the Baku oil field are scattered, so there is no dense anti-aircraft artillery fire cover, so the Do-217 and Fokker Zero, which have better performance at low altitudes, were sent to bomb.

The facilities of the Batumi refinery are quite concentrated, and there is a large number of anti-aircraft artillery cover around it, so the high-altitude vehicles of JU288 and HE219 were used to destroy them with wire-controlled glide bombs.

"What about the Navy?" Rommel asked again, "When will the Mediterranean Fleet be dispatched?" ”

The navies of the European countries, which were now on the side of Germany in the war, had formed a combined fleet, known as the Combined European Fleet. Several theater fleet commands were also established under the Combined European Fleet, namely the Atlantic Fleet Command, the Baltic-North Sea Fleet Command, the Mediterranean Fleet Command, and the Indian Ocean Fleet Command.

Among the commanders of these four fleets, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet is the commander of the European Combined Fleet. Marshal Lütjans concurrently. The commander of the Baltic-North Sea Fleet was also German, and now Rolf . General Kars. Admiral Laporte of France, commander of the Indian Ocean Fleet. And the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet was, of course, the Italian admiral Inigo. Compioni.

According to the provisions of the "Blue Plan", the Mediterranean Fleet, with Italian naval ships as the main force, would enter the Black Sea through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, and then use naval guns to Batumi, a major Soviet oil town on the Black Sea coast. (To be continued.) )