At nine o'clock in the morning of the 22nd, the temperature in Minsk was minus 39 degrees, and if you stand on a high place, you can see that the eastern sky has just dewed and the fish belly is white! In the early morning of 9 o'clock, this can be regarded as one of the "Soviet characteristics", and in the Soviet lands further north, it is still early in the morning, and near the coast of the Arctic Ocean, there is no day at all! And as soon as the early risers go outside, they can even faintly hear the "crackling" sound of the water vapor exhaled by the cold instantly being frozen into ice slag!

The bitter cold in Belarus reaches its extreme in late January, and today is not the coldest!

Lin Jun had already gotten up at six o'clock in the morning, and it was impossible for him to sleep any lazy. The pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info couldn't feel the cold outside at all in the headquarters, and the stoves in each room burned all night, but Lin Jun went outside two hours before dawn: the biting cold made the whole city of Minsk quiet, except for those soldiers on duty, there was no living thing to see!

This would take him to the roof of the office building of the machine factory, where an anti-aircraft guard post was set up, and two anti-aircraft positions armed with two quadruple anti-aircraft guns of the old and massive Type 1910 7.62 mm water-cooled anti-aircraft machine guns were placed in the most prominent position. But they were just decorations, and the machine gunners were cooking in improvised bunkers made of sandbags at the top of the office building, and even the observers hid in the bunkers and looked at the sky with their glasses.

The edges of the factory are the strongest, and the bunkers and positions are built here without fear of collapsing the roof.

As soon as he saw a team of people coming up, the sergeant major on duty hurriedly got out of the bunker and reported, and when he saw that it was the deputy commander, he almost couldn't speak clearly!

"It's nothing, the Germans won't come, watch and let the comrades roast the fire."

Lin Jun didn't mean to blame the sergeant major and his subordinates, being exposed outdoors for too long in such extreme temperatures would be unbearable even for elite soldiers from Siberia who were accustomed to the cold. Besides, the Germans will not come to Minsk idlely, and it will not be easy to fly the plane, not to mention that it is no longer of much practical point to come to Minsk, unless you want to drop bombs on your own people.

If it is a reconnaissance aircraft, it is the business of those large-caliber anti-aircraft guns, and it is a dead end to get into the sky over Minsk from a height that a 7.62-mm anti-aircraft machine gun can threaten.

Through the glasses, Lin Jun saw a group of German prisoners in the distance moving slowly, and the scene was spectacular! However, compared to yesterday, the number of these captives has been reduced by at least two or three thousand, and the severe cold will allow the souls of the old, weak, sick and sick who have survived frost, hunger, and injury to return to their hometowns, and will not have to suffer the pain of being escorted from the cold for medium and long distances!

Perhaps for them to become dust in the firelight in Minsk, they are more fortunate than those compatriots who are struggling in the bitter cold!

"A lot of people will die, without our bayonets and butts." Lin Jun, who put down the binoculars, said to the people around him, and his cold tone was just like this temperature. The sergeant major who heard this didn't know what it was like, but he couldn't and didn't dare to think about it: to the enemy, he had to be as ruthless as this bitter cold!

What the sergeant major didn't know was that the deputy commander didn't want to kill, but unfortunately why not summer, so that more free labor could be sent to the places where they needed to atone for their sins!

It's like a monster devouring people's lives!

Turning around and taking two steps, he pulled back the tarpaulin covering the bunker, and saw that the snow on the roof was melting in a burning cauldron inside, and a layer of bricks was underneath it.

The sergeant major saw that the deputy commander noticed the cauldron and hurriedly reported: "Marshal, we are boiling cooling water." ”

Lin Jun nodded: Those two quadruple anti-aircraft machine guns are very difficult to serve in this weather - no water in the water jacket can't work, but it can't be done if it freezes, if you want to keep it available for 24 hours, the machine gunners have to be burners all the time! If the water in the jacket is allowed to freeze, the ice can burst the steel casing!

During the day, it was impossible to fill the sleeve with water, so the soldiers used torches to bake the sleeve every hour or two - between reducing the life of the sleeve and being able to use it, the army had to choose the latter.

The soldiers in front of the queue are all bloated, trying to maintain a majestic military appearance, but they cannot be compared with the might of the military parade on Red Square - obviously there are many "non-military" clothes under the cold winter clothes; It can be baked on fire, and there are still fine ice slags on the cold hats of several warriors' old sheepskins.

Lin Jun's outfit was much simpler than that of the soldiers, and he wore a conspicuous high barrel hat on his head, which was the first time he had worn a special winter cold hat for a senior Red Army officer since entering the war (he didn't want to wear this warm and beautiful, "Tsarist general-style" top hat in a crossfire, which would be the ideal target for a sniper). ）。

It was too cold, and when he got up in the morning, Lin Jun dressed himself a lot, and even put on a special jacket made of mink fur: it was given to him by Uncle Ivanov before, and it is said that it was given by an old friend of the uncle, and it has been some years. Ivanov didn't need it himself, so he just stuffed it to Lin Jun, which would be just right.

That jacket was a very peculiar garment, like an extra-long waistcoat, but it had two more sleeves than the vest, and it was worn inside the uniform, and the hair was very warm. But the style is not fashionable at all, and it can even be said to be ugly! And it is not used to make the tailoring method of fashion fur (cutting a piece of leather into hundreds of large and small pieces, and then thousands of pieces of "small skin" are spliced into a coat according to the color and shape of the coat, so that the fur can be used to the greatest extent, and the hair color is uniform and the texture is soft. Rather, it's made from whole pieces of skin: mink fur is economically wasteful and unaesthetically pleasing to make such clothes, but it's really practical!

It seems that Ivanov's old friend used to be a hunter with good conditions in backward areas, otherwise he would not have made such a large number of precious mink skins into such clothes.

Because he was wearing a uniform outside, others couldn't tell what Lin Jun was wearing, let alone wearing the winter coat of the Soviet marshal. Unlike the cold-proof felt liningzi boots of the soldiers, Lin Jun wore marmot skin-lined boots given by Kong Xiangxi a few years ago.

Although the two pairs of boots have been worn for several years, because I have new boots every year, there are not many days when I actually wear them, at least there are seven or eight percent of them new. Wearing a layer of thin socks and a layer of warm wool socks inside, it is just right for those two pairs of new boots, even if it is minus 40 degrees in the wild, you don't have to worry about frostbite feet.

However, under such "full armament", Lin Jun's face was still red from the cold, and his treatment on this issue was not as good as that of an ordinary private outdoors - soldiers could wrap thick scarves around their faces, and no matter how bad they were, they could cover them with several layers of torn curtains, but Lin Jun couldn't, which would damage the image of a marshal.

Lin Jun was very envious of the Red Army commanders and fighters in front of him in some places, and he especially admired the creativity of two of them: two comrades obviously didn't realize the outrage of their outfits because they were overly excited to see the deputy commander: the two of them sewed themselves a cold-proof hood by hand, revealing two eyes and a mouth, and they were two "counter-strikers"!

The hood made of torn sweaters, although Lin Jun saw that the needlework skills of the fighters were rough, but it was very practical. With a sheepskin hat with ear protectors, lift the piece of fabric on your chin when you need it, and you will be completely protected except for the eyes that are the most resistant to the cold in the human body!

Lin Jun walked into the bunker and saw some potatoes and hard bread on the side, obviously this sentry post had some food stockpiling.

"Did you prepare it yourself?"

"No, deputy commander-in-chief, the superiors have specially assigned to the posts. The night guard was too cold, so we agreed to get some extra food. ”

"Not enough calories is a problem." Lin Jun seemed to be talking to himself. Ignoring the report of the sergeant major, he left the bunker and went downstairs by himself, and Alyosha hurriedly followed.

、、、、、、

Last night, after talking with Chuikov, Lin Jun went to the field hospital to take a look, and the hospital was completely packed with wounded. Although the battle has ended, the number of casualties of the troops will continue to increase: the reason is not only "wounded" but "sick".

Yesterday he assured Budyonny and Zhukov that the troops would receive sufficient logistical supplies, and he could do it, but there were some things that made me worry when I thought about them: those were all food saved from the mouth of the rear -- a few days ago in Moscow, Lin Jun found that it was the first time that he hated or even hated Russia in winter, and he estimated that he should have reached the "level of the Germans"!

The Russian winter was the most loyal ally of the USSR, but again the white man-eating devil!

Why hate Russian winters? Because although there are special personnel and departments in charge, Lin Jun is still nominally responsible for the logistics supply of the entire Soviet Union, and he is the logistics steward of the entire Soviet Union! He was the supreme person in charge of both weapons and equipment and grain production, and as soon as he returned to Moscow, someone would naturally hand over to him statistical reports on various aspects -- he didn't have to decide anything, this was a step, but a step that could be omitted if Lin Jun was not in Moscow.

After suffering heavy losses in June last year, coupled with the implementation of the material aid treaty between the Soviet Union and Britain and the United States, the Germans decided that it was necessary to block as much as possible the Soviet Union's access to external support, and tightly sealed the shipping from Britain to Murmansk, which was almost a year ahead of history! As a result, the cargo fleet of the West transporting aid to the Soviet Union suffered heavy losses, and almost half of its cargo sank into the sea for several months!

If the army wants to fight, it must have food to eat, and once the army has no food, it will lose the war, and all wars from ancient times to the present day have followed this immutable law!

The same is true of Germany, which began to pay attention to plundering the food resources of the Soviet Union from the beginning of the war, and in history from June ~ November 1941, Germany not only occupied Ukraine, the largest grain producing area in the Soviet Union, but also plundered 84% of the sugar production area of the Soviet Union, 38% of the large livestock and 60% of the fat pigs!

As a result, by 1942, the Soviet Union had not only lost nearly 50% of the country's agricultural land, but also more than 40% of its agricultural machinery, and most of the remaining tractors and cars were requisitioned by the army; At the same time, a large number of young and strong laborers and horses on Soviet farms were also requisitioned to the front by the army.

In the end, only a few women and half-grown children were left in the fields of the Soviet Union, without the help of any machinery or animal power, to produce food in the most primitive way!

But this is not the worst thing, the worst thing is that the Soviet Union has not transported as many as 6 million tons of grain before the war because it was not transported in time, most of it was either stolen by the rapidly advancing German army, or burned by the panicked Soviets themselves. As a result, by 1942, there was almost not a single grain of grain left in the grain depot of the Soviet Union, which can really be said to be "poor and white"!

However, now the Germans are not as thorough as in history, Lin Jun's "preparation for war and famine" has hoarded a lot of grain for the Soviet Union, and the arable land has not been robbed as much as in history, and the retreat is not a collapse, but the situation is still grim.

As we all know, the Soviet Union, with its vast land, was an agricultural power, but it was not an agricultural power in terms of natural conditions. This is mainly due to the overall shortage of agricultural light energy resources in the Soviet Union: in the main agricultural production areas of the Soviet Union, the days when the sunshine temperature is above 0 degrees are only 4~6 months, so most of the crops in the Soviet Union can only be ripened once a year.

Lin Jun listened to the reports of several professors of the Soviet Agricultural Academy two years ago, and learned about the characteristics of Soviet agriculture, and compared with the United States, which has a superior environment, the frost-free period on Soviet land is also very short, and the overall conditions are average.

The annual precipitation in 4/5 of the Soviet Union was only 500 mm, so the average index of bioclimatic potential of Soviet farmland was very low, only 149, which was 38% lower than Germany, 53% lower than France, and 60% lower than the United States!

But this did not prevent the Soviets from growing food suitable for their own consumption, crops such as potatoes were very suitable for cultivation in the vast black soil of the Soviet Union, and they were very adapted to the cold environment of the Soviet Union, so the yield was particularly high.

"Potatoes have pulled Russia back from the brink of famine more than once in history as "life-saving food", and it was the same during the war! "At the very beginning of the war, Lin Jun said such things to the person in charge of agricultural production.

Potatoes, the USSR needed potatoes!

During the period of 1942~1944, when the Soviet Union was the most difficult in grain production in history, the output of potatoes alone reached about 100 million tons, which alone was 25 times the total amount of Western aid, so the Soviet Union was able to feed a large number of troops and rear workers during the war - the Western media often said that if it were not for their assistance, the Soviet Union would have collapsed completely: this is too exaggerated: it is not so much the credit of Western aid as the credit of the Soviet Union's own potatoes.

"Potatoes, grain, beef!"

His brain was a little messy, and Lin Jun hadn't eaten breakfast until now, and he was already very hungry. Thinking about the data in the reports that Moscow had seen, he ignored the standing salute of the officers he met on the side, and walked back to the headquarters with his head covered.

"Marshal, Commander Zhukov, please dine with us."

A captain reported in front of himself. Nodding his head, he walked to Zhukov's office: the long contact made me know that Comrade General always had breakfast in his office.

A large piece of hard bread, a few large potatoes and a plate of warmed red winding beef, obviously a "combination of local and foreign".

Lin Jun didn't have any polite words, he sat directly opposite Zhukov, picked up the knife on the table and cut two large slices of black bread for himself; I scooped some beef and soup with a spoon and poured it over the bread, and ate two slices and two sandwiches.

It's hard, biting, and hungry, but it only provides barely enough calories! -- This is what Lin Jun is worried about.

"Gusev, what is the latest daily food standard for our front-line troops now?"

Lin Jun's brainless question made the confidential secretary who had been eating with Lin Jun unable to answer: he was a confidential staff officer, but not the chief of logistics.

"Ask you what to do, huh." Just a second later, Lin Jun was a little self-deprecating.

"I remember the latest standard for tank troops, which was issued just last month, and the rest can't be said at once, why don't you let the logistics department report it personally?" Zhukov asked.

As soon as Lin Jun said the word "En", Gusev had already left his seat and walked to the telephone.

"How is the standard of a day for our tank crews?" Lin Jun seemed to want to know.

"The ration for a day in winter is 1,000 grams of bread and 600 grams of potatoes, and it depends on the specific situation of non-staple food, and it is difficult to have an accurate time."

"Not enough."

According to Lin Jun's habitual "city catties", this is a staple food of three catties and two taels a day, that is, a big man like Alyosha can eat enough - but being able to eat enough does not mean that he can fight, and being able to eat is not the same thing as being able to fight!

It's like a T-34 tank loader, a day's ration is 1000 grams of bread + 600 grams of potatoes, with these grains he can be fed, but when fighting, a loader needs to fire 5 shells per minute, and each loaded shell weighs about 20 kilograms, that is to say, he has to toss 100 kilograms of shells in 1 minute, and it won't take long to be dizzy and weak.

The reason why the filler has weakness in his limbs is because there are too few calories in the food he eats! Although the Soviets tightened their belts, potatoes and flour alone could not meet the soldiers' caloric needs, because in the cold and snowy Soviet Union, these starchy foods simply did not last long!

The supply of non-staple food is the biggest problem, but meat is a major supplier of energy -- soldiers will have no strength without heat, and they will not be able to fight without strength, not to mention that the weapons made in the Soviet Union are often associated with the word "heavy", and soldiers must have the same strength as "cattle" for daily maintenance and combat use!

And in order for soldiers to have the strength of cattle, they must be allowed to eat cattle, and only by eating beef can they use "ox strength"! Everyone in the Soviet Union understands this dialectical relationship, but the Soviet Union can't afford to raise cattle!

A few years ago, when Lin Jun was "preparing for war and preparing for famine", he was able to reduce the supply of meat and hoard starchy grains, because in the difficult training and working environment, a large number of potatoes and a small amount of meat just made a few fat men among soldiers and civilians, but not in a state of war!

This will make the country's meat production old and not go up, and the grain used to raise livestock will have to be deducted from the rations eaten by people, because the Soviet Union even has to take care of the food eaten by people, where is the surplus to feed to the cattle to eat?!

"We will not have enough meat products, and the meat products in the diet of the troops will not be enough, and they will provide too few calories. We also have a relative lack of meat concentration and packaging technology, which directly contributes to the lack of canning capacity. At present, only about 10% of the meat is canned, and the canned meat produced every month is unlikely to meet the meat needs of the front-line troops in any way. ”

Zhukov felt a little strange why the deputy commander was talking to himself about this today: as far as he knew, although the food supply for the troops was difficult, most of the time it had not reached the point where the lack of energy would affect the operation.

"At the moment we are fighting in the hinterland of our country, where most of the meat can be processed locally, and there is not so much pressure on storage and transportation, so the problem is not so obvious. But if the line is extended, we will not be able to get enough meat in the territories currently occupied by the Germans in the west and Poland, and we will have to rely mainly on canned food, and the problem will be serious. ”

The Germans had swept the occupied areas as if they were cleansing, and when they marched westward, they would not find even a grain of wheat, and they would have to provide life-saving necessities to the people in those areas, and the logistical pressure would increase dramatically.

Zhukov already understood what the deputy commander-in-chief was worried about, and it was obvious that as the commander of the front, he did not need to think about the logistics supply of the entire country, but the problem would be tasted by next year.

The distress does not only come from the lack of supply of the army, but the greater difficulty comes from the supply of ordinary civilians!

This would be a situation where all the grain in the Soviet Union were to be distributed equally among all the people in the Soviet Union, and there would certainly not be enough to eat. Stalin's solution to this was to mercilessly snap out the peasants' rations, using them to give priority to the food supply of the army and the workers in the rear.

Fortunately, Lin Jun's foresight a few years ago, otherwise there would have been such a situation: most of the young and strong laborers in the Soviet countryside had already gone to the front, and the rations of the peasants were actually the rations of women and children. In order to ensure the supply of troops, Stalin concentrated Soviet agricultural products to the maximum, such as in 1942, 12.51 million tons of 29.7 million tons of grain, 1.2 million tons of 1.8 million tons of meat, about 1 million tons of sugar beets, and more than 2 million tons of milk were all concentrated in the hands of the state.

All of this food was focused on supplying the Red Army, and Stalin left only 2 million tons of grain for the women and children who were still doing heavy labor in the fields, and who could only get a maximum of about 800 grams of bread and 300 grams of potatoes a day without any side food.

Because of this, the Soviet countryside during the war was generally in an extremely miserable situation, and hungry children even licked the shelves where bread had been spared with their tongues! Many people die of malnutrition, but even so, women have to work nearly twice as hard as normal to engage in agriculture, which can be said to be unreasonable and cruel!

But these Soviet women silently withstood it, because they understood that if the war was lost, nothing would exist! They tightened their belts and gave every grain of food they could save to the country and the army for free.

At that time, Western food aid only made up for part of the food gap in the Soviet Union to a low extent, and did not play a decisive role, and the so-called theory of the collapse of hunger in the Soviet Union in later generations was somewhat alarmist!

However, now it is only a little better than Lin Jun's memory, and the women's supply standard is up to 800 grams of bread and 300 grams of potatoes a day, and there are very few non-staple foods - but the difference from history is that the supply standard in history has basically never been met, and sometimes the women comrades who work 14 hours a day can only get half a kilogram of potatoes, and nothing else!

Moreover, at that time, there was often a situation where only the laborers were fed, and the elderly and children could only rely on the little food brought back by the laborers at home - it was not that the officials did not give it, and there was no humanity, because there was none!

Now the standard can basically be implemented, because there is grain in the grain depots in various places, although some of it is the stock of the previous year, but it is still grain! Children and the elderly can also get life-saving rations, and it is absolutely not permissible for a large number of children to die of starvation in the nursery school in the rear!

The Soviet Union will be able to fill its belly with potatoes and women, but if you want to completely solve the problem of eating, you must raise more cattle and produce more canned food! But for the Soviet Union, these cattle are not only expensive to raise, but also have a very low processing rate -- rather than slapping their own swollen faces and becoming fat, it is better to be cheeky and directly reach out to others, and it is more practical!

According to Moscow's statistics, as of last month, the meat and fat food donated by the West to the Soviet Union had accounted for 20% of the Soviet Union's meat production during the same period, and it was packaged into a canned form that was easy to transport from the day it arrived, saving the Soviet Union a lot of processing and transportation troubles.

As soon as the canned meat arrives from the ports of the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean, it is loaded onto trains and sent all the way along the railroad to the front. But the transport also seemed to be cruel, because women and children who were not well fed and tightened their belts could be seen everywhere along the way, but not a single can of food could be distributed to them, and all of them had to be supplied to the Red Army on a priority basis.

The meat and vegetable combination of "potato roast beef" + "lard with bread" meets the minimum caloric needs of soldiers for a day, and for the sake of war, the country and the people can only bear the torment of hunger!

"On the basis of the basic starch grain supply, it is also necessary to ensure the supply of pure meat of at least 250 grams per person per day for the Red Army soldiers in the severe cold season, so as to maintain the combat effectiveness of the troops!" After listening to the detailed report of the deputy director of the Logistics Department of the Front Army, Lin Jun could be said to be saying in a non-negotiable tone, "Don't think about storing the inventory and all the things that are transported, and I will find a way to supply the logistics." ”

How to figure it out? Ask the Americans! The youth delegation is about to set off, and it is necessary to put some pressure on Molotov! Increasing the naval and air forces in the Arctic Ocean means losing even more naval and air forces!

Lin Jun: This is "tanks, cannons, canned food, Lao Tzu wants it!" (To be continued, if you want to know what will happen next, please log in to the www.qidian.com, more chapters, support the author, support genuine reading!) (To be continued.) )