PS: Thank you for the monthly ticket ^_^ voted by the book friend "Love You So Tired".

In order to take Leningrad, the mustache invested a total of 600,000 elite German Wehrmacht and 200,000 elite soldiers with no inferior combat effectiveness, in addition to a large number of servant troops from Romania, Hungary and other countries, all of which add up to a total strength of no less than 1.2 million people. At this time, the Soviet Red Army defending Leningrad had only more than 300,000 regular troops, and the gap in aircraft, tanks, and artillery was greater than the disparity in strength.

However, as Hu Weidong had predicted, the Soviet military and civilians in Leningrad put up unyielding resistance to the advance of the Axis forces. The nearly one million fully mobilized Leningrad militia fought unusually heroically in battle, often fighting to the last man to hold their ground, and countless heroes emerged, whose outstanding performance largely compensated for the lack of strength of the regular Soviet army and gave the elite troops of the various Axis powers, including the German army, a head-on blow

Under the deterrence of the 305mm cannon, the encirclement of Leningrad by the Axis army could not be completed, and the attacking force sent too much at a time would inevitably attract the fierce shelling of the 305mm naval guns and suffer heavy casualties, so that the Axis could only continue to send small units into the city of Leningrad to engage in brutal street battles with the Soviet military and civilians, whether it was Germany or the three Nordic countries. Manpower is precious, and the staggering casualties of this style of play are overwhelming.

In order to solve the threat of these two battleships, the Luftwaffe sent a large number of planes to bomb them indiscriminately, and soon sank them in the harbor, but due to the shallow water in the port of Leningrad, the two battleships ran aground directly and did not sink completely, and within a few days, they were salvaged and dragged into the shipyard by Soviet workers in the shipyard for repair. Even when it was undergoing major repairs, the two battleships continued to provide strong fire support to the Soviet soldiers and civilians in the city. Although the two battleships were not finally repaired until more than a year later due to frequent bombing by German aircraft during repairs, they fired more shells than any intact battleship in the world during this time

than killing and damaging enemies. These two old battleships, which had shone brightly in their final years, dealt a great blow to the morale of the enemy army. The Soviet soldiers and civilians in the city were deeply inspired, and fought the enemy to the death in the brutal street battles, attacking and retreating the enemy again and again. In addition, with the induction and rapid promotion of various targeted measures, the role of the German army's cloud burst bomb has been greatly reduced. Although the exchange ratio is still better than the historical attack on Leningrad. However, they were unable to capture the city before the winter of that year. And as the weather gets colder and colder. The combat effectiveness of the German army plummeted, while the combat effectiveness of the Soviet army increased, as for the Nordic army, which was also adapted to the cold climate. Although they were still very strong, the three countries were too small to continue to bear the heavy casualties of street fighting, so the Axis forces eventually stopped the offensive and turned to the tactics of a long siege as in history

At a time when Army Group North's offensive was being blocked, Army Group South, which was much weaker in strength, unexpectedly achieved major results. After the successive setbacks in the previous assault on the Soviet Caucasian defense line, Manstein suddenly realized that after the plains north of the Caucasus Mountains were all occupied by the Germans, the natural danger of the Caucasus Mountains had actually been shared by both sides, and immediately decided to switch from offensive to defensive, and established a solid defensive line in the Caucasus Mountains' own control area, leaving the partial division to hold on to cover the flank, and then he confidently commanded the main force of Army Group South to advance eastward, crossing the Volga River and approaching the Urals, the most important industrial area of the Soviet Union

Under these circumstances, the Soviet Caucasian Front had to attack northward, in order to threaten Manstein's right flank and force it to retreat to Saratov, but it was broken in front of the German "Caucasian Line", and paid more than 300,000 casualties but still failed to make a breakthrough. Manstein, who had ensured the security of the right flank with a mere army force, was able to confidently march eastward and soon took the important town of Samara, at which time Manstein could attack the Ural industrial region to the east and Central Asia, an important source of troops for the Soviet Union to the south, and put a dagger against the neck of the Soviet Union. However, Manstein had to stop his offensive at this point, for the simple reason that his troops were now running out of supplies, and there were almost no mobile forces left to attack

After the general mobilization of Germany, the total strength of the country has exceeded 6 million in the autumn of 1944, and the number of dead and missing people before is as much as more than 1.2 million, so it is obvious that the number of industrial labor in Germany has been significantly reduced, and the front line needs more and more ammunition supplies, this in and out, the German army's weapons and equipment and ammunition supply production is naturally relatively insufficient, coupled with the continuous extension of the supply line and the activity of the Soviet partisans, it is strange that the supply of the German front-line troops does not have problems

After expanding the army to more than 6 million people, the German army should have enough troops, right? In fact, on the contrary, the German General Staff increasingly felt that its forces were stretched thin, and among various reasons, it is worth mentioning the activity of Tito's guerrillas, and after Stalin agreed to hand over the leadership of the Communist Parties of all five countries to him, Tito's military genius was fully displayed, and the anti-fascist guerrilla warfare, which was originally confined to Yugoslavia alone, spread like a spark to the Balkans and even most of Eastern Europe.

Although Tito's guerrillas soon lost their glory due to the high attention of the mustache, they still stubbornly persisted in the battle, pinning down 500,000 German troops and more than a million servant and puppet armies, and effectively supporting the Allied forces in other battlefields

With the continuous expansion of the occupied area, more and more German troops were forced to disperse to these lands and were completely bound, and at the same time, because the combat mode changed to mainly infantry squads and platoons, which was obviously very unfavorable to the German army, whose combat effectiveness was more dependent on technical arms, so that the exchange ratio of the German army's original absolute advantage dropped significantly, just like the Japanese army that had turned into a "law and order war", because it unknowingly lost a lot of blood and consumed Germany's limited manpower (to be continued......