"Panzers, forward!"

Just when Wei Lihuang's 22nd Army was caught in a bitter battle under the attack of the Soviet tank cluster, the 134 Cheetah tank destroyers, 67 Panther tanks, and 134 Chaser tank destroyers of the 7th Panzer Army under the command of Lieutenant General Zhang Zhonglin had already formed a standard wedge-shaped offensive formation, and 335 steel behemoths formed an assault formation with a frontal width of 8 kilometers, dragging the smoke and dust into the rear of the 22nd Army's defense line at a speed of 20 kilometers per hour.

"Tanks! Tank clusters for the Chinese! ”

Seeing the billowing smoke and dust rising from the sky, Konev, who was directing the onslaught of the troops, gasped. The armored reserve of the Chinese actually appeared in front of themselves!

With the deafening roar of engines, the largest tank battle in the Battle of Moscow, and the last tank battle in this world war - the Losino-Petrovsky tank battle finally reached its best.

Although he knew that there would be more than one bad luck, Konev was still determined to face the Chinese tank group. He immediately gave the order to adjust the formation, so that the tank clusters that were attacking the Chinese line would retreat and set up the same wedge-shaped offensive formation on the open plain north of the town of Losino-Petrovsky. At the same time, he pulled out a part of the Su-76 and infantry to pull a covering horizontal formation on his right flank. While the Soviet tank cluster was busy adjusting its formation, the Chinese sappers, under the cover of the tank cluster, clearly understood the anti-tank mines they had planted in front of the position, clearing the way for the tank attack.

At 9:30 a.m. on August 6, 1936, 134 Gepard tank destroyers first crossed the line of defense of the 22nd Army. Bombard Soviet tanks at a distance of 1500 meters with their 71x caliber 88mm cannons! Unlike the Stalker, which relies on cost-effectiveness to win, the total combat weight is as high as 45.5 tons (which is three times the full combat weight of the Stalker, due to the complex construction and small production volume). The Cheetah Tank Destroyer is an expensive but powerful weapon. The power of its 71 times caliber 88mm main gun can only be described as excessive.

In fact, the purpose of the Chinese Ministry of National Defense to develop and manufacture this heavy tank destroyer was not to deal with the T-28 series or Su-76 series of Soviets, but to deal with the legendary Soviet heavy tanks. According to earlier information obtained by German intelligence and China's National Intelligence Service, the Soviets began as early as 1933 to design a heavy tank that could replace the T-28 to defeat the increasingly powerful Sino-German armored forces. According to intelligence, at the beginning of 1935, several heavy tanks with a combat weight of more than 50 tons, armed with 85mm caliber cannons, 122mm caliber howitzers and even 152mm caliber howitzers, were tested at the Kubinka weapons test site near Leningrad. It is said that Trotsky was very pleased with the test results. The Soviet weapons production department was instructed to put these new tanks into production as best they could. However, I don't know what the reason is, until the Panther tanks and Cheetah tanks of the Chinese and German armies hit the city of Moscow, and the heavy tanks of the Soviets did not show up.

By the post-war period. China and Germany learned that the original Soviets weighed 53 tons and was equipped with an 85mm cannon T-100 heavy tank, as early as the end of June 1935, all design tests had been completed. And it's finalized.

But the commissioning of the T-100 heavy tank was repeatedly delayed. By the time China and Germany began to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviets, the T-100 heavy tank was still not in production. The main reason for this situation was that Marshal Vatsettis, the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR for Labor, who was in charge of the military-industrial production, opposed the investment of increasingly strained Soviet industrial resources on this T-100 heavy tank, which was a super "wasteful" of resources and man-hours, and had little reliability and a high failure rate. He prefers to continue to produce the Su-100, which consumes only about one-third to one-fifth of the T-76 in terms of raw materials, to cope with the increasingly tight situation. And this opinion was also supported by Marshal Tukhachevsky, the chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, who was already stretched thin by the end of 1934 with the available armored forces, and was constantly worried about the shortage of tanks and armored vehicles, and of course did not want to make a big break in the tanks that were driven off the factory production line every month. In that case, seventy percent of the Soviet tank forces would probably have to switch to infantry.

Other than that. From 1934 onwards, the biggest enemy of Soviet tanks on the battlefield was not the enemy's tanks or artillery, but the air forces of China and Germany. According to the statistics of the General Staff of the USSR. About 55 percent of all tanks and armored vehicles destroyed on the eastern and western fronts were blown up by enemy planes, and the less mobile and huge tanks were, the easier it was to be destroyed by enemy planes.

While Vatsettis and Tukhachevsky's decision should have been the right one from a strategic point of view, for Konev and his tankmen, who were on the front lines in the Su-76 themselves, what they wanted most now was probably a few dozen T-100 heavy tanks that could compete with the Cheetah tank destroyers.

"Cheetah, it's Cheetah! Back in the middle, the wings don't move! At the first sight of the Cheetah's huge size, Konev made the most correct decision, his own tanks and high-attack artillery in the middle of the wedge-shaped formation reversed, while the wings remained motionless, and continued to bombard the Chinese Cheetah with 76.2mm or 57mm guns. This style of play was the experience of the Soviet tank crews after repeated battles with the Chinese and German tankers, that is, they wanted to take advantage of the shortcomings of the small angle of fire of the tanks and destroyers to strike them from the flank.

However, the tanks of this era could not fire during the retreat, and the power of the 71-caliber 88mm gun was too great. Even at a distance of 2000 meters, it is easy to penetrate the front face of the T-28/1935 and Su-76, in fact, at a distance of 2500 meters, the 88mm tungsten steel armor-piercing projectile is still very powerful, but the accuracy of the shelling will be greatly reduced because the distance is too far, in order to save ammunition, the Chinese Cheetah Tan Jian and Panther tanks usually will not attack moving targets 2000 kilometers away. However, for the Soviet tanks, which began to retreat from a distance of 1,500 meters from the Cheetah, a short distance of a few hundred meters was an absolutely fatal journey.

Boom Boom Boom ......

With a loud bang, fireballs suddenly rose on the battlefield, and each fireball meant that a Soviet tank had been destroyed and killed! After only four rounds of shelling, there were more than 120 burning fires on the battlefield.

"Attention all Panthers, attention to all Panthers, strike from the right flank, carry out artillery strikes at a distance of 1000 meters!" Lieutenant General Zhang Zhonglin, deputy commander of the 7th Panzer Army, was also an expert in tank warfare in Central Asia and Siberia for four years. When he formed the Wedge Formation before, he had already left a hand and placed all 67 Panther tanks at the end of the Wedge Formation as a reserve. When the Cheetah Tan Jab bombarded the Soviet tank cluster with its 88mm cannon, he ordered all the Panthers to quietly move to his right flank and formed a small wedge-shaped assault formation. Seeing that the middle of the Soviet tank cluster began to retreat, he immediately ordered the formed Panther tanks to attack, rushed to about 1,000 meters in front of the left flank of the Soviet tank cluster and opened artillery bombardment.

Seeing sixty or seventy Chinese Panther tanks rushing towards his left flank, Konev knew that his left flank was about to suffer, but at this time he had no time to make any major adjustments, so he had to give an order to attack his left and right flanks at the same time, hoping to use his left flank to entangle the Chinese army's Panther tanks, and give his right flank a chance to break through the left flank of the Chinese army's tank cluster -- at this time, he already roughly knew that the Chinese army's tank cluster was still far inferior in number to his own side.

Fierce tank battles soon began. The first to attack was the 67 Panther tanks of the Chinese army, their 70 times caliber 75mm guns were enough to observe 140mm thick armor at a distance of 1000 meters, and no Soviet tank could withstand such a blow, and at this distance, the main guns of the Soviet Su-76 and T-28/1935 could not touch the 80mm armor steel arranged at an oblique angle on the front of the Panther tank. The only way was to attack the Panthers' firepower and rush to within 500 or even 300 meters before opening fire. As a result, the commander who commanded the left flank of the Soviet tank cluster immediately gave the order to charge. "For the Motherland! For Russia! Ulla! Come on! "These Red Army soldiers, who were supposed to be internationalists, are now shouting the slogan "Long live Russia" and launching a decisive assault, perhaps in their minds, the USSR and the Soviet GCD have been completely abandoned, right?

"Back off, back now, distance." Seeing that the Soviet tanks were about to rush up and fight hard, the Chinese army's Panther tanks began to reverse one after another, trying to keep themselves at a safe distance. At the same time, the left flank of the Chinese tank cluster composed of 134 Chaser tank destroyers, in the face of the Soviet tanks that also rushed over, chose to defend on the spot, their 48 times the caliber of 75mm cannon penetration and 60mm frontal armor at a 55-degree angle have been a little powerless in the current war, and can no longer provide a safe distance for the Chaser tank destroyers, but every Chaser tank destroyer under the control of the Chinese armored forces, It's still a powerful killing machine! (To be continued......)