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The Bakhce Pass, located many kilometers west of Gaziantep, the largest city in southern Turkey, is a precipitous terrain that holds the railway and road lines connecting the Seyhan River Plain with the Islahiye Lowlands, and is the most important obstacle for the Anjia army to burn the fighting to the Toros Mountains west of the Seyhan River Plain after capturing Gaziantep and the surrounding area in early February. Pen, Fun, Pavilion www.biquge.info--Net.

The German troops stationed here formed a strong defence on both flanks of the Bakhce Pass, on both sides of the railway and road in the valley, and on the high ground.

The 49th Infantry Division, which was subordinate to the German Turkish cluster, relied on the mountainous terrain to build various fortifications, which were easy to defend and difficult to attack, and were endless.

These fortifications and firing points were so spread out that the German officers and men were condescending to attack the troops passing in front of and at the foot of the mountain at will, and the choke point to central Turkey was tightly sealed with machine guns and artillery.

There are also a large number of trenches and civil fortifications deployed on both sides of the railway and highway below, and the machine-gun fire points made of sandbags on these trenches and the anti-tank guns hidden in the civil engineering fortifications can definitely make the infantry without artillery fire cover bleed. As for the tanks and armored vehicles in which the An Jiajun is superior, will they be able to raise their heads and attack targets above? The only role is to become a living target for anti-tank guns!

Each section of these fortifications is the result of the efforts of the commanders of the 49th Infantry Division, Major Generals Walgen, von and Hastanin.

The German army in the Lianghe area was defeated too quickly and too embarrassed, and Major General Hastein, who urgently accepted the task, led his troops to rush to work overnight, because the strategic materials such as steel bars and cement in Europe could not be allocated for a while, they could only use the steel rails dismantled from the bottom of the mountain, the stones from the quarry in the mountains, and the logs cut down on the nearby mountains to reinforce all the heavy fire points, or simply use those natural caves to try to penetrate the caves. Gaps were then dug on the slopes of these caves, and sandbags were piled up at the openings to build incredible defensive positions.

Hastanin, who is only 39 years old this year, is one of the few young generals in the Wehrmacht and has a unique talent for civil engineering. He sprinkled his troops and the more than 500 anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns, cannons, howitzers, and infantry guns he received from the defeated army like beans. They are scattered on both sides of the pass and in bunkers on both sides of the mountain road. The consequence of this is to greatly reduce the density of artillery fire and reduce the damage that can be inflicted on the opponent in a single salvo, but it greatly increases the chances of survival at each fire point. Effectively avoid the huge damage that can be caused by the carpet bombing of the Anjia Army Air Force, and keep these heavy firepower units for as long as possible, so as to give the Anjia Army attacking troops the maximum damage.

Major General Hasten's intention was very obvious, that is, to take advantage of the current conditions to delay the attack of the Anjia army as much as possible, and wait for the imperial high command to recover from the panic of the unprecedented defeat, and transfer troops to build more complete fortifications in the Taurus Mountains further behind. Blocking the march of the An Jiajun into the European continent.

through internal relations. Hasstein knew that his government and army were secretly negotiating with the top brass of the Anjia Army. However, neither the army group headquarters nor the supreme command had any clear orders, and Hastein, who graduated from the Army Academy in Berlin, could only do his best to complete the task of holding on.

Of course, the construction of strong bunkers on the mountain, as well as the heavy labor of transporting artillery of various calibers to the mountain, made the officers and men of the 49th Infantry Division complain. Especially in this bloated winter, it is located at an altitude of 1,600 meters above sea level, and the surrounding summit is covered with a lot of snow. It's even more miserable.

However, Major General Hastein and his own officers and men accomplished this feat in a short period of one and a half months -- in order to prevent the vegetation destroyed during the mountain blasting and the new soil thrown out during the mountain from exposing the location of the firing point, the German officers and men used shovels, iron picks, and sapper shovels to dig up the hard frozen soil little by little, dig out bunkers one by one on the mountain, and then use such clumsy methods as shoulder-resistant body pulling, sending rails, logs, and bags of sandbags up the mountain and covering them on the bunkers to form a solid fortification. In the end, it took great effort to transport one artillery cannon and light and heavy machine guns to each firing point, and only then did a well-knit fortification group be built.

In order to make these fortifications perfect, Major General Hastenin was with his officers and men day and night, leaving his footprints on every hill, mountainside and foothill. Hastan even went to various heavy fire points to inspect the construction of bunkers and carefully calculate the extent to which the artillery in them could block the ground.

At more than 1,000 firepower points, large and small, Hastan can clearly tell the degree of resistance to strikes, the location of the firepower blockade and the angle area, and knows the position of a specific squad very well. In a way, Khastein has reached the limit of knowing soldiers.

The Germans' efforts were undoubtedly worth it, due to the complexity of the terrain, the shells fired from the ground attack could not cause much damage to the bunkers due to the angle and other problems. The German artillery tested live ammunition and found that unless the shells hit the small corner that could be seen from the bottom to the top outside the bunker, the vast majority of the shells could only explode around the bunker, and had no effect except to shake off the numerous sandbags and debris outside.

As for the curved shells, most of the newly constructed bunkers had a groove dug into the mountain, which made it difficult for the curved shells to directly hit the extended part, and the space dug out in the mountain was like a coal mine deep underground, supported by logs and steel rails to resist the collapse of the explosion.

The morale of the officers and men of the German 49th Infantry Division was high because of their confidence in the strong fortifications they had built, and they had reason to believe that their positions would still be able to stand proudly even in the face of the attack planes and dive bombers of the Anjia Air Force and the legendary wolf-like infantry of the Anjia Army.

At four o'clock in the afternoon of the 20th, Gaziantep, the headquarters of the Central Line Corps of the Anjia Army.

After the glorious victory on the two rivers, the West Asia Theater Command redivided the fronts, and the mountain cluster was mainly responsible for recovering the Transcaucasian region in northern Persia, advancing the defensive line to the Caucasus Pass area and completely blocking the road for the German army to the south.

The 18 armies fighting in Turkey, Syria, and Transjordan in the south were divided into three major combat corps.

Among them, the Northern Front Corps was commanded by General Wu Liheng, and the 28th, 29th, and 30th Group Armies that followed him from the Great Southwest to the Western Front, mainly used to fight in the mountainous areas of eastern and southeastern Turkey, and to cover the security of the northwest of the two rivers and the western part of Persia. At the same time, it plays the role of a flank cover for mountain clusters.

The Central Line Corps has the Second Tank Army and the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th Army under its jurisdiction, a total of five army groups. The goal is to occupy the pass of the Taurus Mountains in the southeast of central Turkey to the north, and advance west to the plain of the Seyhan River in the northeastern Mediterranean, relying on the Taurus Mountains, to build a strong defensive line to protect the northern and northwest routes in the Middle East.

The commander-in-chief of the Southern Front Corps is General Ye Cheng, which has jurisdiction over the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Tank Armies and the 7th, 8th, 9th, 17th, 18th, 23rd, and 24th Group Armies, a total of ten group armies, which are divided into five route armies. Each lane is responsible for fighting in one direction. Today's attack on the East Bank of the Jordan River was launched by the Fourth Route Army under the command of Lieutenant General Peng Wanjun. As for the attack on the port of Tel Aviv, it was the Third Route Army composed of the Seventh and Twenty-fourth Armies, which continued to move south from Damascus to the west to capture Tyre, Haifa, Netanya and other places.

After the various route armies have achieved their strategic objectives, they will immediately be reorganized and will be made overall arrangements by the theater so that they can respond to the operations of other front corps and various route armies at any time.

"The tortoise shells of the Germans, very well constructed - according to the feedback of our scouts, if we rashly attack. I'm afraid I'm going to suffer a big loss! ”

Lieutenant General Xiao Ruofei, former deputy commander of the 16th Group Army and current chief of staff of the Corps, stood in front of the large sand table, holding a baton in his hand, and talked eloquently: "Everyone, please see. These fortifications built along the mountain, coupled with the complex and changeable terrain, let our 82 bombers have to take into account the climbing space after the dive bombing drops, if we want to ensure that the aircraft does not hit the mountain, our bombers must increase the distance and altitude of the bombs, the consequence of this is to reduce the accuracy of the bombing, completely unable to achieve the expected effect.

"Secondly, the B, B3 bombers and Q2Q3 attack planes in level flight, in such an environment, there are not too many targets to choose from, because of the rugged terrain in the mountains, so that our low-altitude bombing fighters can only fly in a certain direction, any change in course, may lead to the destruction of the aircraft.

"Thirdly, the change in wind direction in the valley is very obvious, and if there is a sudden tailwind at some point, our aircraft will lose enough upward momentum, cause the aircraft to lose control, or become a live target for German anti-aircraft guns in the slow climb.

"According to the intelligence fed back by the reconnaissance troops, the German army has at least more than 200 anti-aircraft guns and four or five hundred anti-aircraft machine guns, such a tight firepower network is enough for our pilots to experience a stormy barrage baptism, whether it is a dive bomber, a horizontal bomber, or even a helicopter gunship, in such a terrain will face a major test."

After Xiao Ruofei finished speaking, he put down the baton in his hand and looked at the commander on the main seat.

General Yang Jiuxiao groaned for a moment and beckoned several group army commanders who came to the meeting: "Let's discuss." We have already taken all the areas east of the Bakhce Mountains, and just last night, General Yan Zilin had already commanded two divisions of the 16th Army to successfully take the city of Kahramanmaraş, and the forward successfully entered the lake mouth northwest of the city, blocking the road for the Germans to the south, so that we have basically completed the first phase of the combat mission.

"Our next phase will be to open the Bakhce Pass, advance to the plain of the Seyhan River, and take down this granary in southern Turkey and the extremely important port of Mersin, thus completely cutting off the Germans from the east."

"Why don't you use cloudburst bombs? When fighting in the Northeast and the Far East, didn't it prove that the cloud burst bomb had an obvious effect on overcoming such a barrier? Major General Ye Jian, chief of staff of the 14th Army, asked puzzled.

Xiao Ruofei replied: "According to the intelligence, the trenches and tunnels of the German army are very cleverly constructed, most of them have ventilation holes to connect with other places, and at the same time, according to the characteristics of the cloudburst bomb, there are sluice gates to isolate the air, which can block the invasion of flames and heat waves at the first time when attacked.

"Our cloudburst bombs are not invincible, they require specific terrain, and as I said before, the terrain is too complex for our fighters to deliver accurately, and the use of cloudburst bombs is not very effective."

Chi Zongyuan, Fang Jide, Qin Zhirong, Li Yuewu and other generals discussed a lot, and they all felt that the problem was thorny Yang Jiuxiao walked around with his hands behind his back, and he couldn't make up his mind for a while. If you choose to attack, grit your teeth and pay 30,000 or 40,000 casualties, there is no problem in taking the Bakhche Pass, after all, the advantage of the Anjia army is there, and the German army will not be able to resist even if the firepower is fierce. But whether it is worth paying such a heavy price in order to overcome such a pass, which no longer affects the overall situation, is a question worth discussing!

"Excuse me...... Did the Germans control all of the Bakhche Mountains, including all the peaks of the mountains on the north and south flanks and in the east-west depths, as well as those behind the mountains that were insignificant to the Germans and were on the anticline? Will our helicopters be able to reach the places I have indicated safely? ”

Major General Cheng Shiming, director of the Military Affairs Department of the General Staff Headquarters, who had come down to observe the war on behalf of the Central Military Commission and the General Staff Headquarters, suddenly broke his silence and asked meaningfully.

Yang Jiuxiao was slightly stunned, immediately came to the sand table, observed carefully, and suddenly patted his thigh after a while: "I'm confused!" Now that Keqin Behan in the south and Kahramanmaraş in the north are under our control, the enemy line is not invulnerable to us, it is just ......"