At the end of 1941, the flames of war burned again on the banks of the Volga.

With the support of the German-Austrian Army, the combined forces of the Caucasus and Don finally drove the Russian Red Army out of the Caucasus. In the Kuban steppe, the rolling iron currents formed by the German-Austrian armored clusters, like a river bursting its banks, broke through the layers of Soviet defenses, and along the Don River, poured into Tsaritsyn, the most important inland river junction on the banks of the Volga.

In Ukraine, the German and Ukrainian forces won the Battle of Kiev in the summer and autumn, and by the beginning of October, by the end of the entire campaign, some 1.5 million Russian Red Army had been taken prisoner of war, and by Christmas, more than a million more had been taken prisoner.

Many Soviet officers and soldiers saw the war as an opportunity for Russia to change the system, and they wanted the Germans to win, so they surrendered en masse...... Many high-ranking Soviet officials also came to the enemy's side and said that they would fight against the Soviets. The Germans were welcomed by the Ukrainians and even the Russians as liberators. The Ukrainians saw Wilhelm II as the "savior of Europe", and the Belarusians were eager to fight alongside the Germans.

In this time and space, the military power of the Axis powers is much stronger than in the same period in another time and space, the German army has dispatched a total of 12 armored divisions of nearly 5,000 tanks in Ukraine and the Don River, while Austria-Hungary has also dispatched 8 armored divisions of nearly 3,000 tanks, plus the Ukrainian, Don, Caucasus and Italian armies, the number of Axis tanks on the Eastern Front exceeds 10,000, and the number of military aircraft dispatched is also as high as more than 7,000.

By the end of 1941, the Germans were armed with about 460 Tiger heavy tanks and about 800 of the latest Leopard medium tanks, as well as about 2,800 modified Mark IV tanks with 75 mm long-barreled tank guns, which far outperformed German equipment in another time and space.

The Austro-Hungarian Army is also armed with 2,000 BT35 tanks weighing 32 tons and 1,000 BT39 tanks weighing 42 tons and armed with 83 mm tank guns, and the tanks equipped by the Ukrainian, Don and Caucasian armies are themselves German and Austrian products. Only the equipment of the Italian armored forces was slightly weaker.

In the 30s, Zhuashvili, in order to prevent the army from threatening its authority, carried out a brutal purge of well-trained and most intelligent senior officers. The impact of the entire "Great Purge" on the armored and aviation units, which required a large number of excellent professional command officers and technical officers, was even greater, and the Soviet army's combat effectiveness plummeted due to the lack of professional commanders.

In terms of aviation, although the Soviet army was equipped with almost 20,000 combat aircraft, most of them lagged behind. There are only about less than 2,000 new combat aircraft, and the whole is at a disadvantage.

The war lasted only a year and a half, and these old combat planes of the Soviet army had been completely lost, and if it were not for the nearly 4,000 planes and a large number of engines and aluminum materials aided by the United States and Britain, I am afraid that the huge Soviet and Russian air force, which occupied the world's largest number of equipment before the war, would no longer exist.

Even so, the Axis air forces had absolute superiority on the Eastern Front.

Within six months of the start of the Axis Powers' massive counter-attack campaign, the Russians lost as much of their armored vehicles as their aircraft, totaling about 17,000 units. It accounted for 70 percent of the total equipment of the Soviet army before the war. Although the Soviets were also armed with a large number of KV-1 and T-34 tanks with good performance, the course of the war showed that the Russian Red Army tank personnel were extremely poorly trained, tactically unfamiliar, and the chain of command was chaotic, and they were quickly routed in battle.

For the Allies, 1941 was undoubtedly a dark year. The British completely lost their control over the sea and fell into a situation of total blockade. And although the Americans had already entered the war, they were still not ready for war by the end of the year. Its strategy remains to stay homegrown. In the Eastern European theater, the Russians have been losing ground and are now almost back to the state they were in before the outbreak of the war. In the Southeast Asian theater, the Axis powers had absolute superiority, and the Japanese Navy lost half of its aircraft carriers, with the fall of the Philippines. The Anglo-Japanese forces, who had been shouting to defend Malaya to the death, began to abandon the Malay Peninsula and retreat along the Dutch East Indies to Australia.

As in the last world war, the cold became the best weapon of the Russians, and the winter of 1941 was particularly cold. The heavy snow finally halted the Axis advance, giving the Russians another respite.

By mid-January 1942, the transportation near Dnipropetrovsk, a major Ukrainian border town and the largest railway junction with the Don republics, was completely paralyzed by heavy snowfall. Winters in Russia are frighteningly cold, often below -20 degrees Celsius, and in some places the snow is more than a metre deep. This made it difficult for the coalition forces to supply the front line.

The Axis forces fought fiercely with the Soviets on the outskirts of Kharkiv all winter, and in fact the most difficult thing was the transport of troops on the logistical supply lines of both sides.

This winter, the supply of nearly a million Axis Allied troops on the front line was mainly done by air.

In this time and space, due to the existence of Asian and African colonies, the air transport industry of Germany and Austria-Hungary continued to develop after the First World War, which also led to the prosperity of the aircraft industry in both countries, which was far more developed than in the other time and space. In Germany, the five major aircraft manufacturing companies of Arado, Dornier, Focke-Woolf, Junkers, and Heinkel all had extensive experience in designing and manufacturing twin-engine, three-engine medium-engine transport aircraft, and four-engine heavy transport aircraft before the war, while the four major aircraft manufacturing companies in the Austro-Hungarian Empire developed more smoothly due to the Reich's industrial protection policy.

By the time the Eastern Front counterattack began, the German-Austrian military had already armed about 1,200 medium transport aircraft and nearly 400 four-engine heavy transport aircraft. In order to ensure the supply of materials on the front line, the military requisitioned nearly 2,000 transport planes of various types from civil airlines, and the total number of transport planes exceeded 3,000 air supply channels, providing nearly half of the air support for the winter operations of the Axis powers, and effectively supporting the operations of the Axis coalition forces on the Eastern Front.

With the support of a large number of transport aircraft, the Axis forces were even capable of launching a medium-scale counterattack campaign, but the Austro-Hungarian side opposed a full-scale war with Soviet Russia, and always wanted to control this war within a limited range, as long as the original borders between Finland, the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Don River before the war were restored and Soviet Russia was restored, and "limited punishment" was imposed on Soviet Russia.

The German and Austrian leaders did not want a unified Russian state in the East, and the existence of the "red regime" would allow the two countries to realize their strategic intention of splitting and dismembering Russia in the name of "anti-Cloth".

Of course, Helton also hoped that the eastern country would seize this opportunity to weaken Russia and take the opportunity to strengthen itself. (To be continued......)