The German infantry continued to clear some of the ruins of Soviet fire, and although the bulk of the forces had retreated, some of the encircled Soviet units continued to put up stubborn resistance.

Karadzic noted that perhaps because of continuous fighting or heavy casualties, both the Germans and Austrians had become a little insane. Because sometimes they were attacked when the Soviet troops were captured, more people chose to completely kill the enemy before they stopped attacking. Sometimes Soviet soldiers are seen surrendering with their hands raised, and they are still shot and killed.

War has turned into a massacre, and it's not very comfortable.

However, the war continues, and bloody massacres continue every day.

The German-Austrian offensive was halted after crossing the Kuban, and the continuous offensive had already cost them half of their armored forces, and now only more than 2,000 tanks remained, about a third of which were incapacitated due to various mechanical failures, and about 1,300 more tanks were destroyed by the enemy. The losses of the Russians are even greater, having lost more than 5,000 tanks, almost all of the KV tanks were discarded because of their poor maneuverability, while the T34 only lost about half of it because of its excellent protection and maneuverability, and the main losses were the T26 tanks with weak defenses, and the BT-7 tanks, although they had weak protection, were lost in a lower proportion than the T26 tanks because of their excellent mobility.

Fighting on land for the time being. When the time calmed down, the contention between the two sides was concentrated in the sky, the Soviet army concentrated more than 6,000 combat aircraft, and the German-Austrian army also concentrated nearly 4,000 fighters in this area, and the two sides launched an unprecedented large-scale air battle around the air supremacy of the lower reaches of the Don River in the Kuban River basin.

On the Eastern Front, faced with a large number of Soviet-Russian armored clusters, the problem of insufficient equipment of tanks and armored vehicles of the German-Austrian army was exposed, throughout the Kuban campaign. Although the Soviet casualties and prisoners reached 450,000, the casualties of the German-Austrian-Italian army plus the Don Army also reached 150,000, which can be described as 1,000 killed and 800 self-inflicted, and the losses were extremely heavy.

In fact, in 1940, the German-Austrian military had already noticed the appearance of Soviet-made KV tanks and T34 tanks on the Eastern Front. And began to use this as an adversary, accelerating the development of new tanks.

Perhaps because the industrial production capacity has always been less powerful than that of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Army has a great difference in the design and use of tanks in Germany, which leads to a complete difference in the design of tanks between Germany and Austria. The Austro-Hungarian tank was designed with a focus on mobility, followed by firepower, which inevitably reduced the tank's protection in order to improve mobility. German tanks, on the other hand, were designed with the same philosophy as their navy, with protection first, firepower and mobility second.

In order to cope with the "T34 crisis" on the battlefield of the Eastern Front, the Germans chose to abandon the simplicity of the structure. The traditional practice of upgrading the reliable Mark IV tank was to redesign and test the 56-ton Tiger heavy tank and the Mark V Leopard medium tank, which had excellent performance but was not conducive to mass production.

The Austro-Hungarian Army, on the other hand, took the opposite approach to the Germans, choosing only to simply enlarge the hull of the mature PT35 tank, thicken the armor and strengthen the suspension system, so that it could be equipped with a newly developed 83 mm tank gun, and left enough turret space for the pre-installed 90 mm tank gun under development. Both German and Austrian tanks have been retrofitted with the latest engines. The Germans opted for the Maybach 700 hp gasoline engine, while the Austrians continued with the usual Steyr 680 hp diesel engine.

In the actual use process. Although the Steyr diesel engine is not as fast as the Maybach gasoline engine in terms of starting speed and acceleration, it is far superior to the gasoline engine in terms of passability and off-road performance.

Comparatively speaking, the Austro-Hungarian PT-39 weighing 41 tons was even more maneuverable than the German 45-ton Leopard tank, although the protection was slightly inferior.

In the design of the Austro-Hungarian tank, producibility was an important indicator, although the performance of the PT-39 tank was not very advanced. But it's very simple and reliable. In order to easily adapt to the large-scale assembly line manufacturing, the body structure of the PT-39 tank adopts a box-shaped structure that is easy to use and automatic welding, and is welded by homogeneous armor steel plates of different thicknesses, which is divided into three structural parts: cockpit, fighting compartment and power compartment, with a simple structure. It is very suitable for the production of automatic welding production lines.

The Austro-Hungarian turret was similar in design to the British "Covenanter" turret, but in fact this beveled armored turret resulted in a narrow interior turret and was not conducive to combat. But the emperor was very fond of this form design. In desperation, the designers simply increased the size of the turret so that it could accommodate a 90 mm tank gun and three turret members.

In the development of tank guns and anti-aircraft guns, the performance of German and Austrian equipment has always been ahead of other countries in the world, and in addition, the performance of the 90-mm anti-aircraft guns equipped by the Italians is also quite good. The German-Austrian tank guns were generally developed and developed on the basis of anti-aircraft guns, inheriting the characteristics of high muzzle velocity, fast rate of fire, and strong armor-piercing ability of anti-aircraft guns, but in general the design and development lagged behind the progress of anti-aircraft guns.

Lehedon was very interested in Germany's latest No. 5 tank, and after investigation, it was found that the mass production of the Leopard tank was not as difficult as imagined after the simplified process, but the problem was that the Germans had been developing some messy tank destroyers, and they could not adjust the production line to produce this high-performance tank.

In terms of tank production, Austria-Hungary is not lagging behind Germany, Germany has the four major tank manufacturing companies of Henschel, Boscher, Krupp and Rheinmetall, while Austria-Hungary has the four major tank manufacturers of the Linz Imperial Standard Manufacturing Company, the Carlsen-Skoda Tank Factory, the Salzburg Stevt Company and the Vienna Steyr Company, and the tank manufacturing capacity of the two countries is comparable, with a manufacturing capacity of about 1,600 chassis per month when the entire production line is running.

The problem with the existence of Zài in Germany was that the production of tanks IV, 5 and Tiger was very limited due to the large number of tank destroyers, self-propelled guns and deformation vehicles. Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, only focused on the production of PT35 and PT39 tanks and PB39M105mm self-propelled guns based on the PT39 chassis, so the number of tanks produced per month could reach 1,100 tanks and 500 self-propelled guns, and with the expansion of the production capacity of each factory, there is a high possibility that production will be increased.

In fact, combined machine tools and automated assembly lines have been widely used in the field of automobile, tractor and mechanical engineering in Germany and Austria since the 30s. Although as early as 1911, the Greenley Company of the United States created a combined machine tool production line for processing automobile parts, but in the field of metal processing machine tool manufacturing, Germany and Austria have always been at the world's leading level, in the popularization of automatic production lines composed of multiple combined machine tools and the use of assembly lines, in fact, opened the door to large-scale standardization and industrial production.

In another world, Germany's industrial production was greatly weakened, but in this world, as a result of the victory in the First World War, the combined industrial capacity of Germany and Austria was basically equal to that of the United States. This is also one of the reasons why the two countries are not afraid of war with the Americans, and in terms of the military industry, although the production capacity of the United States is not weak, the technological level is not flattering.

At least for now, the performance of the tanks and aircraft equipped by the Americans is still lagging behind Europe, and the Americans have always lagged behind Germany and Austria in the development and equipment of tanks, and even behind Soviet Russia and Britain, and they only "copied" the P-51 "Mustang" that broke through the sky on the basis of the design of the British "Spitfire" aircraft. In another time and space, the United States is one step ahead of the world in the field of heavy bombers and the development of atomic bombs, and it is lackluster in other military industries, but in this world, because there is no large-scale anti-Jewish movement, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Fermi, the father of the atom, are still academicians of the Royal German Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering, and honorary academicians of the Austro-Hungarian Royal Academy of Engineering in Vienna.

At least Lee Haydon felt that the Americans would not be able to build an atomic bomb before Germany and Austria. (To be continued......) R1292