By this point, Colonel Schmidt, who was in charge of the rear of the palace, had very few troops left, most of his young men were wiped out by the Red Army, and only a handful of soldiers escaped from the encirclement, some of Colonel Schmidt recalled that Captain Friedz, whose legs had been blown off by shells, said to his comrades at the last moment: "Leave me and them (referring to the other wounded), all those who can walk quickly flee for their lives, Germany still needs you!" ”

Captain Friedz was soon captured by the Red Army, and when the Red Army heard the story of the captain, they also gave him a considerable degree of courtesy, and after the end of the war, in 1945, as the first batch of German prisoners of war to be released, Captain Friedz returned home.

The fate of Colonel Schmidt's other units was equally tragic, as the 85th Reserve Battalion resisted stubbornly from its own positions for a night and could not escape total annihilation, and the few survivors (including the battalion commander) became Red Army prisoners of war. The last to perform belonged to the 1st Battalion and 1st Company of Captain Meyer's 290th Grenadier Regiment, which fought and retreated along its own lines, and at one point made a last-ditch effort at an abandoned airfield, hoping for assistance from the air.

Unfortunately, the Romanian sky was already dominated by the Red Army's Jacques and Lag, and soon the airfield was surrounded by Red Army tanks, shells rained down, and Captain Meyer, who knew that there was no hope of breaking through, committed suicide with his gun after giving the order to surrender to his subordinates.

By noon on 12 May, the blocking force under the command of Colonel Schmidt was basically gone, and to the disappointment of the Germans, they had not been able to complete the blocking mission. In fact, it was not even possible to delay the footsteps of the Red Army. It can be said that the losses of the Schmidt battle group were not worth it. Or even pointless. In the end, only 37 people were able to escape from the Ascension to join the main force of the division, including Colonel Schmidt himself.

The flames of the battle soon reached Babadag, where they were garrisoned by a group of defeated soldiers who had fled from the front line in disarray, and soon they would face strong pressure from the entire 37th Army of the Red Army. Soon the remnants of the 111th Infantry Division were overwhelmed by the Red Army's mechanized units, and if it had not been for the arrival of the German 198th Grenadier Regiment and about three brigades of Romanian infantry to support, Babadag would have fallen on the first day of the battle.

At this time, the confrontation with the Germans was the 37th Tank Division of the 59th Army, and about a hundred tanks were gathering momentum. In order to hold back the advance of the Red Army, the Germans concentrated all the artillery they could find for a heavy bombardment, repelling several attacks from the Red Army Panzer Group with powerful firepower.

Soon the 59th Tank Division was provoked, and it also began to return color in a targeted manner, and in the evening, dense and heavy artillery fire swept through the German positions, and the 198th Grenadier Regiment, which bore the brunt of the attack, was quickly suppressed, and almost all the artillery was ruthlessly destroyed by the Red Army. Seeing that the disparity in strength was so great that the commander of the regiment's artillery battalion had to give the order to retreat, and soon the trucks fleeing to the west were crowded with the battalion's gunners.

At the same time, the Romanians did not have a good time. Their direct artillery fire was slightly lighter, but at the same time it must be seen that their weapons were also inferior to those of the Germans. Their defensive line was maintained mainly by anti-tank guns that lay flat. However, at the critical moment, the Romanians began to have inexplicable convulsions again, repelling the armored assault of the Red Army several times in a row, and even knocked out 12 tanks of the Red Army, and several rounds of charges launched by the Red Army infantry were also repulsed one by one.

The Romanians seem to be going against the odds again, but we all know how unreliable they are, and after a brief outburst, all sorts of brain-dead miracles will soon occur. At the critical moment of the battle, the Romanian commander, Colonel Obstogg, suddenly disappeared, and according to insiders, the colonel left the headquarters in a hurry under the pretext of contacting German friendly forces, and then never returned, and the Romanian veteran's opinion was: "Our brigade commander may have fled to Constanta ...... at this time"

The brigade commander's escape seriously dampened the morale of the troops, and soon many Romanian artillerymen who had been possessed by gods one moment were urinated the next moment. Only Captain Jihad and a handful of soldiers were unwilling to bow to the Russians, and they quickly hung up the anti-tank guns they could take with them to the trucks, and then magically moved to the second line of positions, relying on this position they repelled three more attacks by the Red Army, until they had exhausted all the shells before calmly retreating.

From the early morning of the 13th, the general rout of the German and Romanian armies began, and the remnants of the 198th Grenadier Regiment and several other disabled grenadier regiments rushed all the way from Babadag under the cover of night in the direction of Baya.

Fortunately, the exhausted Red Army did not continue the pursuit that night, because the German army of Akermann continued to resist, and the logistics of the Red Army were always intermittent, and the fuel supply was relatively tight, so they could only watch the Germans turn in at high speed.

Looking back at what happened to the German army in the past few days, for them this is a life-and-death struggle, and whether they can survive or not depends entirely on these dozens of hours. This gave the German soldiers who had escaped from Romania a good habit from then on: they had to retreat quickly, and if they were to be left behind, they would either be crushed to the slag by the Red Army tanks that poured in, or they would go to a prisoner of war camp that was more terrible than death.

From then on, the German soldiers were always ahead of their brothers, fleeing from Romania to Hungary and then to Czechoslovakia, and finally returning home like a wolf. Although I was a little embarrassed, I finally went home.

In fact, for the German troops with rich combat experience, they were not afraid of the Red Army's ferocious firepower, but they were panicked by the Red Army's increasingly obvious battlefield superiority -- there was no air support, no artillery cover, no reserve to receive or reinforce, so to speak, how could such a battle be fought? No matter how you look at it, it's all pills!

Of course, despite being the unjust side of the war, even the historians of the Red Army admit that the German infantry was very good at military quality, and that they were able to absolutely obey the orders of their superiors even in very difficult circumstances, as evidenced by Charles' ability to effectively control their subordinates when the entire division had collapsed.

For example, the aforementioned Colonel Schmidt. Upon arrival in Babadag. Once again, Charles gave him the task of breaking off. It is difficult to imagine how Colonel Schmidt carried out this order, but the fact is that he still obeyed the command honestly, and once again remained on the outskirts of Babadag with fewer soldiers to stop the Red Army.

Of course, what is even more amazing is that this Colonel Schmidt escaped alive again, of course, thanks to the Red Army's tank fuel shortage. But even so, this quality of hard work and obedience to command is also worthy of recognition.

Note that the story about this Colonel Schmidt was not finished, when the Germans retreated to the brave township of Mihai. The mechanized units of the Red Army were again mobilized, and this time he took the initiative to ask Charles to block the attack (it is likely that the colonel knew that this unfortunate task would definitely fall on him in the end, and it was better to take the initiative).

Eh, some comrades may say that you are very, Lao Ma, how can there be such a place name as "Brave Mihai Township" in this world, this is what you made up blindly, right? Well, answer responsibly, this place name is really not nonsense, but there is, and the brave Mihai is a national hero of Romania. Isn't it normal to name a city after a national hero?

Of course. As a digression, this brave Mihai did not end well. Even though he united Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia for the first time and laid the foundation for the so-called Romania, he still failed to survive in the end.

The fate of the brave Mihai is very similar to that of Romania at this time, and how to survive in the cracks of the great powers will be one of the skills that Romanian politicians must learn in the future.

Back to the point, in the brave village of Mihai, the disgraced Colonel Schmidt took on the task of the rear with 120 soldiers and five machine guns. However, Schmidt knew that he could not expect such a small force of 100 men to hold back the Red Army's iron hooves, but he still wanted to buy his comrades more time.

The same thing happened with Colonel Bert and his battle group, north of Schmidt, who also spontaneously stayed behind to hold off the Red Army, setting up his position on a mound in the hope of taking advantage of the favorable terrain to slow the Red Army's pace.

But both Bert and Schmidt's forces were too fragile to be expected to perform any astonishing feats under the weight of the Red Army's armored forces, and to put it bluntly, they would have been worthy of the audience if they could collapse without a single touch.

The most important thing for Charles and the rest of the Germans to get out of here was to run faster. Let's look northeast, and it's all chaotic along the way. The roads were filled with numerous German and Romanian stragglers, heavy weapons pulled by livestock were mixed in with motor vehicles, and congestion and panic caused severe traffic jams.

It is conceivable that the last thing the Germans want to see at this time is those Black Death who swooped down from the sky. Everyone wants to run forward as soon as possible, but the faster they try, the faster they can't get up, and as the so-called haste is not reached, this so-called retreat is more like a big rout, and there is no order at all.

Forced to desperation, Charres could only make up his mind to give up those precious heavy weapons, and the artillerymen destroyed 14 small-caliber guns and 6 large-caliber howitzers with a complicated and heavy heart. Almost all of the non-moving vehicles were abandoned (because there was no fuel), and their drivers witnessed this with tears in their eyes, while the extra artillerymen and drivers were rushed to the various companies for infantry use.

Looking at the Belte and Schmidt side, from noon onwards, they exchanged fire with the vanguard of the Red Army, and they succeeded in attracting the attention of the Red Army, and indeed bought some time for their comrades in flight.

However, as the main forces of the Red Army arrived on the battlefield one after another, the tremendous pressure also forced Colonel Schmidt to recognize the reality, and he quickly sent a telegram to Challes asking for permission to retreat, and after permission, he led his troops to abandon their positions and quickly pursue the main force south. Late that night, Schmidt caught up with Charres with more than 100 fighters, and Bert was not so lucky.

In the afternoon Bert's troops were surrounded by the Reds, and at eight o'clock that evening, Bert sent Charles a farewell telegram and was never heard from - captured, or all killed, and the German unit was lost forever.

On the night of the 14th, Charles' men fled to a small village ten kilometers north of Tergushor. The division commander probably felt that he had gotten rid of the pursuit of the Red Army. He ordered the troops to stop and rest for a while. But this rare break also made the Germans restless. Soon there were gunshots around the village, could it be that the Red Army was catching up?

Soon after, the village was shelled again, and Charles, who had suffered a severe nervous breakdown and breakdown, was determined to fight the Red Army to the death. Just as the German soldiers were digging bunkers around the village to build fortifications, gunfire came from inside the village again, and Charres immediately realized that he should not have been caught up by the main forces of the Red Army, and now it was only the Red Army's vanguard reconnaissance unit that attacked him. The clever ones are the best at torturing people in similar ways.

At that time, grenades were flying in the sky, and from time to time machine guns poked their heads out of windows and in the grass to carry out a burst of heavy strafing, explosions everywhere, first of all a few trucks parked on the side of the road, soon by a pile of scrap metal, and then a constant stream of exposed German soldiers were attacked with cold guns.

In the darkness, panic quickly spread among the Germans, but fortunately there were some veterans with rich combat experience, who quickly set up firing points at some key points with the help of flares. -for-tat fire strikes forced the Red Army reconnaissance units out of battle.

Soon, all the noise was gone. It was as if they had never existed, but even so, Charres did not want to stop and rest, and he quickly ordered a further retreat to the south.

The bright morning sun shone on the depressed faces of the German soldiers who had broken all the way, and the roads they had walked along were full of flaming motor vehicles and some mules and horses that were dying or already dead, and some desperate soldiers had even begun to burn their packages and everything they could set on fire.

At this time, the Germans were tired and hungry, and the continuous fugitive life not only exhausted them, but also prevented them from having a full meal. Of course, most of the food is also discarded as a burden. In order to give the soldiers the strength to continue fleeing for their lives, Charres ordered the "superfluous" horses to be shot.

But there were no horses to spare, and the actual result of the order was, in Major Meyer's words, the killing of all the horses and mules for their stomachs: "Look at the 'poor' horsemen and grooms, who have seen all this with tears in their eyes. It was a heavy and merciless blow to these people who were doing everything in their power to try to save these loyal animals. Let's put it this way, that order caused the entire division to lose all its motor vehicles and horses, and we have become a veritable infantry division! ”

On the 15th, the Germans, who had finally rested peacefully for the night, finally regained some strength, and after looting the nearby villages and looting enough food for a meal, the retreating army began to squirm again, and marched mightily in the direction of Constanta.

Lieutenant Novak, who was part of the 111th Infantry Division, relived this final journey: "We threw away everything, except for our own lives and the gun in our hands. Soon, the Red Army Black Death and bombers reappeared, riding around our necks and '', but this could no longer cause panic or any other negative emotions among us, we have become accustomed to this inhuman treatment these days. After a few rounds from the anti-aircraft machine guns, these pesky enemy planes disappeared, leaving some of their comrades, who were only a few steps away from Constanta, to stay in Romania forever......"

By the 17th of May, the last of the fleeing German troops had entered the port of Constanta, and the joy of the aftermath of the catastrophe was on everyone's face, and despite the trailing pursuers and the heavy losses, they thought that they could finally breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that Constanta was a safe refuge.

However, these poor fellows had absolutely no idea that this momentary joy would be followed by endless suffering, that Constanta was not a paradise and could not shelter anyone, and that the goal of the Red Army from the very beginning was to wipe out the Nazis cleanly and completely, and not to spare a single one!

Just as the Germans were pouring into Constanta, a Romanian submarine docked at the port, carrying Admiral Jenek and his senior staff. Before the fall of Akerman, Hitler ordered the German navy to take the admiral out of the encirclement, because the Führer could not tolerate another high-ranking general being captured by the evil Bolsheviks.

When he arrived in Constanta, Jenek was in a state of limbo, because just now, he had received the news of the fall of Jakermann, and that 50,000 troops, including more than 20,000 German soldiers, had been dumpled by the Red Army, which was quite a blow to Jenecker.

The admiral blamed himself for believing that his judgment had caused this evil result, and he felt so guilty that he even thought of resigning or committing suicide. It's just that what Jenek didn't expect was that Hitler actually handed over another heavy burden to him - the Führer appointed Jenek as the commander-in-chief of the city defense of Constanta, and asked him to make every effort to hold this important military port and bridgehead! (To be continued.) )

PS: Bow and thank you to the giants of giants, a cart of rice cakes, old students, southern rangers and comrades of Juventus!