readx;

Chapter 1463 The Great Victory in the Far East

On this day, 17 December 1937, a major event occurred on the battlefield of Western Siberia that triggered a change in the world's military thinking. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

For a long time, there have been two popular military ideologies in the Soviet army: one is the strategy of great depth adhered to by Marshals Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, and Blyukher, who are concerned about the development of new tactics and new weapons, and believe that the future war will be a war based on motorization and mechanization under the premise of having air supremacy, and its essence is to suppress the enemy's defense in all depth with large-caliber heavy artillery, aircraft, and other long-range weapons, select a direction to break through its tactical territory, and then throw tanks, motorized infantry, and cavalry into battle to tear apart the opponent's defenses. Drive straight in, divide and encircle the opponent, and quickly develop a tactical victory into a campaign victory; One is the conservative forces represented by Stalin, Budyonny, and Voroshilov, who believe that the huge cavalry force of the Soviet Union is enough to crush all opponents, and there is no need for new weapons and new tactics at all, Stalin believes that the military reform of Tukhachevsky and others is nothing more than an empty and useless plan to waste state funds, and Budyonny even mentioned Tukhachevsky's sabotage activities against the Soviet army in the court where Tukhachevsky was tried, saying that he quickly built up tank corps at the cost of reducing the number of cavalry and cavalry expenditures, This is an unforgivable crime.

The great depth can be divided into three main points, the first is to carry out a full-depth assault on the enemy's defensive configuration. The main point is to abandon the line of operations and simultaneously destroy, suppress, contain, encircle, and completely annihilate the enemy's main groupings in all depths. As early as 10 years ago, in a report to Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky stressed the need to rely on a new material and technological base, "to abandon the past style of difficult combat in which a single person captures every base point of the enemy's battle formation, which consumes extremely physical strength, and to adopt a new and more effective style and method of fighting while simultaneously suppressing the enemy's entire depth." Yegorov, on the other hand, advocated organizing tanks into direct support infantry tank groups, long-distance support infantry tank groups, and long-range tank groups according to their operational distances, requiring them to advance in different depths and "coordinate with long-range artillery and aviation units to suppress the enemy's all-tactical depth." Five years ago, in the outline of his report submitted on behalf of the Red Army Command, Yegorov emphatically pointed out that modern anti-personnel weapons, because of their great power, rapidity, and long-range combat characteristics, "enable the army to simultaneously kill and injure the enemy in full depth and in the enemy's deployment." He demanded that tactically, with the help of the actions of fast tanks, fighters, artillery, infantry armored transport vehicles, and assault aviation, advance to the full depth of the enemy's defensive zone (including artillery positions and tactical reserve areas); In the campaign, a large number of cavalry and mechanized corps, supported by strong aviation, advanced to the rear of the enemy in great depth.

The second is to invest in the development of the victory echelon immediately after breaking through the tactical territory. Tukhachevsky and Egorov believed that in the First World War, when the line strategy was dominant, tactical breakthroughs usually could not develop into campaign breakthroughs, and the campaign was always in a state of unfinished, so it did not achieve the intended goal. Large-depth operations are complex systems that use a variety of combat forces under the condition of maintaining centralized and unified coordination on the ground and in the air; in this new form of warfare, it is necessary to establish a development victory echelon composed of tanks, mechanized infantry, and cavalry, and quickly engage in combat after breaking through the enemy's tactical territory.

The third is the need to develop a tactical victory into a campaign victory. This is a feature that is closely linked to the second feature. The fundamental purpose of investing in the development of the victory echelon is to develop tactical victories into campaign victories. Tukhachevsky and Yegorov believe that tactical operations in great depth should be developed into a breakthrough in a large-depth campaign, and if the final solution cannot be solved in the field of campaigns, that is, tactical victories cannot be developed into campaign victories, then all the achievements of tactics in great depth will become dispensable, because the open gaps will soon be closed again, all tactical efforts of the first echelon will become futile, and the offensive front will be like a bulging belly, which can only exhaust and consume the offensive forces.

The essence of the development of the battle from a battle in great depth to a campaign in great depth is to develop a campaign that leads to a breakthrough, to achieve a complete tactical victory, and to advance from the open gap to the depth of the campaign and to destroy the enemy within the scope of the campaign. In the outline of the All-Army Report six years ago, Yegorov pointed out: "There have been many breaches of the enemy's defensive zone in imperialist wars, but these breakthroughs have led only to tactical breakthroughs to the front. There have been no cases of developing an offensive in depth in order to turn a tactical victory into a campaign result. The reason for this lies in the absence of a quick battle echelon capable of developing a breakthrough, destroying enemy reserves on the march, disrupting command and supply systems, and so on. ”

In view of this, the theory of a large-depth campaign stipulates that a large-depth campaign must include several stages: breaking through the tactical defense stage, developing a tactical victory into a campaign victory stage, and developing a campaign victory (campaign pursuit) stage. Among them, the breakthrough tactical defense phase is the main stage, which is jointly implemented by infantry, tanks, artillery and aviation; The development of a tactical victory into a campaign victory is the main sign of achieving a breakthrough in all depths, and the way to achieve this is to use a large number of tanks, motorized infantry, and mechanized troops to enter the gaps opened in the defense, and dispatch long-range aviation and airborne troops: to defeat the enemy's reserves and destroy the enemy's campaign defense; In the stage of developing campaign victory, it is necessary to achieve the complete defeat of the selected campaign objectives and occupy a favorable starting position for the implementation of a new campaign. In order to develop the large-depth campaign from the first stage to the later stages, it is necessary to throw a rapid army in the depth of the enemy's defensive campaign and dispatch long-range aviation and airborne troops.

The reason why so much ink is spent on this strategy and tactics is that on the battlefield of Western Siberia, in the war within the Soviet Red Army, it was actually practiced in its extraordinary and even great.

Last year and this year, after the expansion of the Soviet Union's purge and rebellion, a large number of senior commanders of the army were affected, and Tukhachevsky, Yakil, Ubolevich, Sejakin, Gryaznov and other generals who made important contributions to the creation of the theory of the Great Campaign in Depth were killed one after another, and this theory was questioned, especially after Blyukhel openly opposed Stalin in the Far East, and Yegorov, the chief of the General Staff of the Red Army who was rescued from prison, also joined the rebel camp, all their works were banned. The military academy also quickly stopped studying the basic issues of the large-depth campaign, and some principles, such as the motorized mechanized corps acting in front of it and making a breakthrough in the depth, were completely rejected; in October, Stalin even ordered the disbandment of the mechanized corps, the main ground assault force of the large-depth campaign, and stopped the development of bombing aviation, the main air assault force.

On the contrary, the Red Army in the Far East has always followed the new military ideas advocated by Tukhachevsky and Egorov, and all tractor factories in Konsomorsk (Komsomolsk), Nikolaevsky (Temple Street), Kuibyshevka, Svobodnei, Blagoveshchensk (Hailanpao), Vladivostok and other cities were all used for the production of tanks, and there were originally four aircraft factories in the Far East, but now they have expanded to eight, producing fighters at full capacity, and steel plants and arsenals are in full operation. Artillery of various calibers was continuously equipped with troops, and rocket experts from the Gugra concentration camp even developed the "Katyusha" rocket launcher on the basis of previous test theories, and four rocket artillery divisions were specially formed.

On 13 December, Marshal Budyonny, commander of the Moscow Military District, assumed the post of commander-in-chief of the former enemy in the Ural Theater of Operations, and commanded the remnants of the West Siberian Military District, which had been drawn from the five major military districts of Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, along the Volga, and the Urals, as well as the remnants of the Western Siberian Military District, which had been defeated on the Eastern Front, totaling 1.22 million troops, to form a three-front army. Launched an offensive on the line of Petropaplovsk and Emoussk, where the Far Eastern Army was located.

Yegorov commanded 440,000 troops from the Far East and responded calmly.

In a frontal defensive battle, all front-line departments clearly defined the area of defense for which they were responsible, and used artillery and tanks to cooperate with assault clusters to carry out resolute and sudden counterattacks in the event of local defeats, or independently coordinated with anti-tank detachments, and successfully contained the attack of the cavalry and infantry units on the Budyonny side.

By the morning of the 16th, Yegorov's men had gathered a million troops, with 800,000 troops available for assault, four mechanized corps, and 2,100 tanks.

In this case, Yegorov decisively issued the order to counterattack.

At 9 o'clock in the morning of 16 July, thousands of artillery pieces fired at the rear positions of the Far Eastern Army, and the orange-red barrage formed by artillery blitz and lightning was woven into a magnificent spectacle in the air. Smoke billowed from the front of the Red Army positions in Moscow, obscuring the sky. In the smoke of gunpowder, the sun in the sky also turned gray.

Budyonny, hearing of the heavy losses of the front-line soldiers, immediately ordered the artillery to counterattack, but the overwhelming fighters of the Far Eastern Army suddenly arrived and mercilessly bombarded the artillery positions in the rear of the Moscow army.

Due to the lack of sufficient anti-aircraft weapons, by the time the fighters stationed at the airfields west of the Ural Mountains arrived, the fighters of the Far Eastern Army had already completed their mission and had successfully retreated, leaving behind a field of scrap copper and rotten iron. The Moscow Air Force tried to attack the artillery positions of the Far Eastern Army, but with the help of powerful anti-aircraft artillery fire on the ground and fighter planes rushing to fight the battle, the Moscow Air Force lost nearly half of its fighters and bombers and fled in disarray.

At half past eleven o'clock in the afternoon, the artillery fire of the Far Eastern Army extended deep into the enemy's position, and the earth-shaking sound of "Ula" of thousands of people sounded in the fields, and more than 2,000 tanks, divided into four assault clusters, launched an attack on the current enemy army if ten thousand arrows were fired at once, and the infantry followed closely behind, charging bravely.

The Moscow Red Army behaved heroically, repeatedly organizing death squads and carrying out explosions on tanks, but in vain, and soon the first line of trenches of the Moscow Army was captured, and the battle continued to develop in depth.

The four tank assault clusters showed their power in the storm, and the steel torrent penetrated the rear flank of the Moscow Army with an indomitable momentum, during which many heroic cavalrymen with sabers frantically cut the outer wall of the tank, but were ruthlessly knocked to the ground by the tank's machine gun fire.

By sunset, the tank cluster had been wedged fifty kilometers deep into the enemy's defensive position, threatening the command center of the Muscovite Army in the rear, and Budyonny chose to retreat in embarrassment. At the same time, the infantry groups of the Far Eastern Army, with the assistance of artillery, rocket artillery and warplanes, broke through the defenses of the main strip of the Moscow Army.

Early this morning, the tank clusters, which were fully replenished with fuel, divided into four routes, launched another charge, and went straight to the west, threatening Kurgan, where the former enemy headquarters of the Moscow Army was located, all the way to the city of Tyumen in the northwest, all the way to the city of Ishim in the north, and all the way to Kustana in the southwest, in an attempt to cut off the retreat of the Moscow Army.

By sunset, the Western tank cluster of the Far Eastern Army successfully captured Kurgan, and Budyonny fled again in confusion and retreated to Chelyabinsk on the front line of the Ural Mountains.

The tank clusters of the North and North-West, smoothly took Ishim, Tyumen, and the South-Western Group, took Kustana. At the same time, the infantry groups captured all strategic points, and nearly 900,000 Muscovite Red Army troops were divided and encircled in small areas.

The war had reached this point, and the final crushing defeat of the Moscow army was inevitable. The consequences of Stalin's purges finally appeared, the Moscow Red Army did not have the correct theoretical guidance of defensive operations, and lacked the necessary forces and weapons to carry out a solid defense, and from the beginning to the end, Budyonny was completely unprepared for the counterattack of the Far Eastern Army, and it can be said that the entire army turned to the defense in a panic and chaos. The quality of those commanders who were promoted by "surprise" because of the purge of outstanding commanders was extremely poor, and they could not even carry out the defensive tactics issued by the headquarters very well, let alone carry out correct deployment and operations in accordance with the reality of the war.

However, the Far Eastern Army was different, under the death threats issued by Stalin and the Subu Central Committee, the top and bottom were unanimous and all of them were united, in addition Blyukhel always adhered to the correct theory and policy of army building of Tukhachevsky and Yegorov, the troops' will to carry out the strategy formulated by the top level was incomparably firm, the high, middle, and low-level officers who led the troops had extremely rich experience in commanding operations, and the various units had been very proficient in interpreting the offensive tactics in great depth in internal military exercises on many occasions. Often, the retreat of the Moscow Army was not as fast as the advance of the tank clusters of the Far Eastern Army, and it was unable to occupy the rear defensive zone in front of the Far Eastern Army and tragically fell into the encirclement.

At the same time, due to the influence of the Great Purge, the vast majority of experts and scholars in the research departments were either slaughtered or sent to the Gugra concentration camp for ideological transformation, and Moscow's research and development of weapons science and technology, such as fighters, tanks, rocket technology, jet engines, and radio electronics, has been at a standstill. The second echelon of the reserve army on the Ural front advanced slowly and failed to occupy the pre-constructed defensive positions in time, which led to a crushing defeat of the Moscow Army on all fronts.

After listening to the latest situation of the Soviet and Russian civil war reported by Cheng Guang against the map, the more An Yi savored it, the more he could feel the extraordinaryness of Marshal Yegorov in commanding the operation.

An Yi deduced the offensive lines of the various units of the Far East Army on the map, and sighed faintly: "I found that compared with these world-class famous commanders, the generals and colonels of our An Jiajun still have many deficiencies, you must know that creating a new strategic ideological system from scratch, and grasping the fighter in time and executing it perfectly, requires extremely high tactical literacy and strategy." Marshal Egorov really lived up to his name, compared to it, Budyonny was much worse, clinging to his set of cavalry combat theories in the Great Patriotic War of Soviet Russia, no wonder there was such a fiasco!

"I am now suddenly thinking, if Tukhachevsky, known as the 'Red God of War', is in command, what kind of courage and skill it would be? Stalin's self-destruction of the Great Wall and his failure were like a wake-up call, and I think he should also understand how much mistake he made, and to put it mildly, if he clings to the old set of military ideas, he may not really be overturned by the Far Eastern Army. ”

Yin Jinan asked curiously: "Big brother, why did the Far Eastern Army win such a big and decisive victory, and you are still not optimistic about them?" With the loss of Moscow's elite on the Eastern Front, the next first-tier cities in the Ural Mountains will undoubtedly be taken by the Far Eastern Army, and then there will be a strategic situation in which the Far East will attack and Moscow will defend. ”

Lu Guang obviously also had this question, and looked at An Yi with an inquiring gaze.

An Yi patiently explained: "People learn lessons from failure, Stalin is a hero, whether it is political ideology or military strategy, it is not comparable to ordinary people, this can be seen from the fact that he successively overthrew Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and other Soviet fathers, which of those people he defeated is not a human spirit?" In the end, he was not obediently tied up, and if it were not for the unstable factor of Blyukhel and the Far Eastern Army in the end, he would have confirmed his unrivaled position in the Soviet Party and the army through this purge. Stalin's resoluteness and ruthlessness will help him to quickly change his thinking, pick up the strategy of great depth that he has abandoned, change his appearance, package the theory under any name he designates, reorganize and disband the disbanded mechanized corps, and increase investment in scientific research.

"After all, the war is a contest of comprehensive national strength, a few big victories are not enough to change the balance of forces between the two sides, Stalin's men are not without talent, Zhukov, Timoshenko, Vasilevsky are all genius generals, and at present, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Cheka are frequently pouring dirty water on the Far Eastern Republic and the army, stirring up the feelings of the people, and these will be transformed into points that determine the outcome of the war.

Speaking of this, An Yi stretched out and said with a smile: "However, even if the Far Eastern Republic loses, it will be a long time later, and we don't have to think so far...... Haha, Marshal Yegorov's great victory, congratulations, in a short time, we will no longer have to worry about the threat from Moscow, we can rest assured and boldly build Mongolia and create a solid border defense for the Motherland! By the time they come out on top, we'll have enough strength to protect ourselves! ”

Cheng Guang bowed slightly, Yin Jinan was full of smiles, and a big stone in his heart fell to the ground steadily, Yin Jinan couldn't help but feel a little more confident.