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Chapter 1922 Bad News Again

Kulen, the war room of the military district. Pen % fun % Pavilion www.biquge.info

When Zhang Chengzhu and Li Jinlong walked into the room, they saw An Yi standing in front of a map with red eyes, with a sad face, and couldn't help but glance at each other in surprise.

An Yi was reminded by Yang Fei, who was explaining the battle report, looked back, and hurriedly greeted: "Big brother, second brother, you are here......" Then he pointed to the map in a choked voice:

"Just this morning, Stalingrad was lost, and my teachers at Whampoa, Lyuschenkov, Hulin and Vasily...... They were killed in the city, their bodies were found by the Germans, and the latest German newspapers have published pictures of them......"

Zhang Chengzhu and Li Jinlong understood what was going on, and together they turned their attention to the large map of the Soviet Union and listened to Yang Fei's report on the battle situation.

At the beginning of April, after removing the threat of Soviet partisans in Ukraine and Belarus, the German Army Group South and the Caucasus Cluster, with a total of 58 divisions, 3,000 tanks and armored combat vehicles, 25,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and more than 3,200 combat aircraft, launched an offensive in the middle and lower reaches of the Volga River.

On the Soviet side, the Bryansk Front, the Southwestern Front, and the Southern Front, under the unified command of Marshal Lyuschenkov, were roughly equal in number to the Germans, but were significantly inferior in terms of equipment and tanks, artillery, and aviation.

According to the predetermined plan, the German army launched fierce attacks from the Kursk area, the middle and lower reaches of the Don River, and the area of the mouth of the Volga River.

The Soviet army, which was attacked by the powerful German tank and armored car group, did not repel the surprise attack of the German ** team for various reasons, and the Soviet high command, after learning of this situation, dispatched three tank corps and fighter and strike aviation to strengthen the Bryansk Front, ordering it to carry out a counter-assault and block the enemy's advance towards Stalingrad.

However, due to insufficient preparation, the hastily launched counter-assault did not achieve any results, and the Germans broke through the Soviet defenses four days later to a depth of about eighty kilometers, and the Soviet troops were forced to retreat to the east.

In view of the danger that the Germans would advance out of the Don and seize Voronezh and Barashov, and bypass Moscow's rear flank from the Volga hills, the Soviet High Command transferred three armies of its general reserve to the Don region to strengthen the defense, while the Fifth Tank Army launched a counter-assault on the flank of the German army group attacking from the Kursk area from Tula in the north.

The counter-assault launched by the Soviet army at the cost of heavy casualties achieved certain results, and part of the German forces began to move north in response to the counter-assault of the Soviet army, and the threat of Voronezh was somewhat reduced, but the German army still entered Voronezh after a few days of delay, and fought fiercely with the Soviet Bryansk Front and the Don Front on the outskirts of Voronezh.

Due to the inferiority of the Soviet artillery and aviation units, the German ** team soon expanded the breakthrough to 300 kilometers and carried out a far-reaching encirclement of the Soviet southwestern front from the north. However, unlike the encirclement of the Soviet Southwestern Front in Kiev, when the Soviet army was in a state of encirclement, it resolutely carried out Lyushenkov's orders, carried out a surprise attack, and finally broke through the encirclement set up by the German ** team after losing a large number of personnel, materials and equipment.

But at this point, the Soviet Southern Front, under pressure from the German army, had to decisively choose to retreat.

Twenty days after the launch of the German offensive on the strategic front of the Soviet army, the entire front had been broken through to a depth of 150 to 400 kilometers, enabling the German ** team to launch an offensive in the direction of Stalingrad at the great bend of the Don River.

The Soviet Southern Front withdrew to the opposite bank of the lower Don River, joined up with the Caucasian Front withdrawn from the Southern Front, and organized a strong defense in the area west of the Volga from Kurmoyarskaya to Astrakhan on the south bank of the Don River. The three armies to which the Southwestern Front belonged, together with the Southern Front and the Caucasian Front, were transferred to the newly formed Stalingrad Front, and Lyuschenkov commanded the Stalingrad defensive operation.

Although Stalin had already seen that the German army would attack Stalingrad, he was keenly aware that the two major German battle groups in the south were only a relatively active secondary battlefield, and with the fall of Leningrad, the main battlefield of the German army would still be in the direction of Moscow, and the German Central Group and the Northern Cluster were waiting for him to transfer his troops from the middle line to the south, so Stalin did not transfer the most elite Red Banner Army in the Far East to Stalingrad, but asked Lyuschenkov to rely on the existing forces, Defend Stalingrad, the center of heavy industry named after the Supreme Commander of the Soviet Union.

At the beginning of May, the German army concentrated nine divisions of tank troops and 500,000 motorized infantry in various vehicles to officially launch the Stalingrad Siege.

The Germans commanded the Battle of Stalingrad by Field Marshal Manstein, who had won the title of neutral in the capture of southern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, first by gathering heavy forces in an attempt to encircle and annihilate the Soviets west of the Don River, and then by two tank units penetrating the rear of the Soviets to form a pincer offensive in the Great Bend of the Don River.

In the face of the fierce offensive of the German army, Lyuschenkov did not follow the order of Moscow to stand by for reinforcements, and commanded the Soviet army to fight and retreat, and successively lost all the cities west of the Don River such as Karachi, Sovetsky, Verkhniy Kurmoyarskaya, etc., and retreated to the city of Stalingrad.

Manstein was not discouraged when his opponent met a good talent, knowing that the generals of the former Far Eastern Republic were veterans of defensive warfare, so he did not hurry to command the troops and continued to surround Stalingrad from the northwest, west, southwest, south and southeast.

Lyuschenkov sent his troops to the area north of Stalingrad and continued to put pressure on the German left flank.

What followed was a battle that lasted for more than two months.

In mid-May, the main German army began to attack the city of Stalingrad, and German planes bombed the city to ruins. However, it was in these ruins that the Soviet troops constantly rushed out of the sewers, from the buildings, from the basements, from the ruins and other dark places, and engaged in a fierce battle with the German army.

The Germans, who were advancing carefully through the rubble, seemed to have stabbed countless hornet's nests, each of which was deadly. The Soviets hid in the shadows, the Germans were in the open, and the offensive turned into a battle for houses, trenches and ditches.

In the blink of an eye, in June, the German army, which had suffered heavy casualties, withdrew from the ruins that had been captured with great difficulty, and planes loaded with incendiary bombs and tons of heavy bombs bombed Stalingrad again. One building after another fell like building blocks, but it provided a new barrier for the defending Soviet troops.

Then, the Germans launched a second wave of the offensive, penetrating deep into the city under the cover of the air force, and continued to be bogged down in bitter battles.

When the Germans bombarded indiscriminately, the Soviets took refuge in sewers and basements, and after the German ground forces attacked, they quickly rushed out. Lyuschenkov used every building in the city to order the barbed wire to be electrified, and not only to lay mines on the defensive line, but also to plant remote-controlled detonation devices such as **bags and nails, and the Soviets no longer threw fragmentation grenades, but modified mortar shells and large **bags.

The Soviet officers and soldiers made full use of their familiarity with the city, suddenly appeared behind the Germans through the sewers, threw the blasters and bags purchased from Nanhua behind the German buttocks, and used fake smoke bombs to lead the bombing of the German planes to the Germans themselves.

After continuous fighting, the Germans actually surpassed the Soviet army in the proportion of casualties.

In late June, brutal fighting continued, with oil depots set ablaze across the city, buildings being blasted, and German companies being swallowed up by falling buildings. The Germans also tried to enter the sewers, but were attacked by the Soviets and killed countless people.

At this time, the German Army Group Center and Army Group North, together with the servant army, totaling more than 5 million troops, had launched a fierce attack on Moscow, and the situation on the Moscow side was not good, and it was simply unable to send reinforcements and materials to Stalingrad, and with the gradual depletion of troops, it became more and more difficult for Lyuschenkov in the encirclement, and the Stalingrad Front was fighting less and less, so it could only continue to issue orders to let the main forces of the Bryansk Front and the Southwestern Front move closer to themselves as soon as possible.

However, the Germans strengthened their defense on the northern front of Stalingrad, and the two major fronts of the Soviet army fought hard for more than a month, and only advanced the front by five kilometers, and it was these five kilometers that the two major fronts paid the lives of more than 300,000 officers and soldiers, and the Soviet army as a whole was at a great disadvantage.

At the beginning of July, the Germans made a breakthrough on both sides of the gorge, the troops from the south occupied the Stalingrad South railway station and launched a fierce attack in the direction of the Volga, and in the north, tanks and armored vehicles laden with infantry poured into the city center, taking the top of Mamayev Hill and capturing the main railway station and part of the nearby Red Square.

The farther west, the slower the pace of the German offensive, every inch of land had to be fought over and over again, the railway station changed hands fifteen times in three days, the battle for the hilltop of the Mamayev Heights was going on all the time, and countless corpses were piled up on every street in the city.

On the way to the Volga, the Germans left behind those strongholds that would still be resisting that would take several days to clear, and while besieging one of the barns, they paid a heavy price of more than 900 men against the huge concrete building guarded by fifty Red Army soldiers.

By 10 July, the Germans had occupied half of Stalingrad and controlled the old town south of the Saresa River, and the focus of the battle shifted to the four major factory areas north of the city.

At the same time, the troops that carried out a counter-assault on the German blocking positions on the northern front to the south were also compressed back by the Germans, and joined up with the Soviet troops retreating from the old city of Stalingrad to hold the factory area together.

At this time, Manstein also summed up a lot of experience in attacking fortifications, and he concentrated the flamethrowers and ** for the use of the siege troops, and the air force was mainly used to bomb the Soviet Volga fleet, the Soviet heavy artillery positions and docks on the east bank. The Germans threw thousands of mines into the Volga River on the banks of the Volga River under their control, and the Soviet ships crossing the river were intensively bombarded, many of which were struck by mines, and the river was lit up by a large amount of gasoline discharged by the Germans. At the same time, the Germans sent a landing force to forcibly occupy a number of islands on the Volga River, arranged for artillery to be stationed, blocked the river with firepower, and slowly cut off the connection between the two banks of the Volga River.

More than ten days passed in the blink of an eye, and Lyuschenkov, who had set up his headquarters at the "Red October" steel plant, had no more troops at hand, so he had to lead the members of the command to live and die in this factory area that supplied a quarter of the Soviet Union's tanks and armored vehicles.

The final battle took place in the headquarters building of the "Red October" steel plant, and the Germans paid a heavy price of more than 2,000 casualties before finally capturing it. According to the German newspaper, Lyuschenkov behaved very heroically, showing his excellent marksmanship in battle, killing sixty-nine German soldiers one after another, and finally dying from a bullet in the chest.

Hulin and Vasily, shooting themselves in the underground headquarters, killed the entire Stalingrad Front, with almost no prisoners, and the severity of the war was unprecedented since the Soviet-German war.

At this time, the Soviet Bryansk Front and the Southwestern Front were still fighting fiercely with the German blocking forces on the northern front of Stalingrad, and when they learned that Stalingrad had fallen, the two fronts took the initiative to break away from the battle and retreated to the line from Saratov and Barashov to Tambov, preventing the German army from advancing to the Volga hills and the Urals, and outflanking Moscow from behind.

Zhang Chengzhu and Li Jinlong comforted An Yi, An Yi wiped his eyes, and said, "I have already informed my wife of the bad news, and Chu'er and Jieyun must have been by my wife's side at this time...... In addition, I called Führer Hitler and asked him to protect the bodies of several of my teachers, but I have not heard back so far!

"With the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, the German army could free up a large number of forces for Moscow, and the situation on the Soviet-German battlefield continued to deteriorate! We must now prepare for the Soviet Union to lose Moscow, and once Germany achieves its strategic goals, we, as part of the Allies, will be directly threatened by millions of German troops! ”

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ps: Rest assured, although the Son of Heaven opened two books at the same time, he will never relax his requirements for the quality of "Iron Bone"! And during the impact of the new book monthly pass, the Son of Heaven also worked hard to fight for the outbreak of "Iron Bone"!

Thank you!

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