At the southernmost point of the Eastern Front, the German 1st Mountain Division was climbing the wooded terrain in front of them, and behind the mountain was the terminus of the expedition they had always hoped to reach: Baku.

This is the root of the Soviet Union's short-term emergence as a world industrial power, and this is the oil-producing region that the Germans have always aspired to. As long as the German army's swastika flag is planted on this land, then the Soviet Union, which is rich in oil in this world, will switch positions and roles with the oil-poor Third Reich.

So when the Soviet Red Army soldiers stationed on the top of the hill saw the German soldiers, a fierce gun battle broke out between the two sides again. Everyone wants to fight for these lands, so it is only up to blood to judge who is more suitable to rule the land. The Germans launched a fierce charge, and the Soviets launched the most stubborn counterattack.

"News came from the 402nd Regiment that they had appeared German troops in front of them. A staff officer pointed to the location of the 402nd Regiment on the map and reported to his commander the battle that had just taken place: "The Germans launched a tentative attack, but the fire was quite heavy. ”

"Shall we start blowing up the oil production equipment?" the commander asked, glancing at the head of the engineering unit, "Comrade Colonel, just to be on the safe side, if you agree, we should have signed off on blowing up the oil extraction equipment here." ”

The Germans had already surrounded the area, and a few oil carriers had been sunk near the pier. Baku can be said to have been completely isolated from the world, at least they haven't received any decent additions for half a month. This put Baku's defense system in danger of total collapse, so several Soviet generals present here had a sense of powerlessness due to the lack of troops and major generals.

A large amount of supplies were taken and sent to Moscow to fight the battle that would determine the fate of the Soviet Union. So the value left in this remote oil-producing area is nothing more than the destruction of all the equipment, and not a drop of oil left to the Germans. But after all, this is a huge project that requires systematic planning, and it is not as easy to operate as expected.

Even if you blow up a bridge, you need to weigh the pros and cons repeatedly, let alone such a huge thing as blowing up an entire oil field. That's about the same scale as blowing up a city yourself, and it's even more than blowing up a huge city in terms of economic value and possible future impact.

"The headquarters of the 51st Army called, and they spotted enemy troops in German SS uniforms in front of them, judging that they were the main force under Manstein, the 8th Panzer Division of the SS. Another Soviet officer, with a document in his hand, walked into the messy headquarters, bringing news that the situation was deteriorating further, and that the main German forces had bypassed the rolling mountains and appeared on the narrow plains near Baku.

It was not an unknown unit of some kind of miscellaneous brand, it was the 8th Panzer Division of the German SS! When this unit moved south into the Caucasus, it once played a fantastic advance speed that exceeded the offensive speed of Rommel and Guderian, and this unit went all the way south, a few points faster than the 200,000 defeated Soviet Red Army, and completely disrupted the Soviet deployment of Baku's defensive operation.

What's even more terrifying is that this unit is generally used as an offensive fist by Manstein, a general known as a German general, and behind this unit is the main force of the famous M Army, the 13th Panzer Corps of the Wehrmacht.

Including the 13th Panzer Army, Manstein had more than 800 tanks of various types and assault guns in front of him, and these heavy armored vehicles happened to be an absolute superior force that the Soviet Red Army did not have. It is a great pity that these Soviet troops, who are stationed near Baku, do not have even enough anti-tank weapons.

"Damn, this Manstein is too steady! When we first started south, this guy was advancing very fast, and we deliberately gave up the flaw, wanting to fight guerrilla warfare in the mountains and disrupt his supply lines, who knows......" A staff officer looked at the map angrily and whispered to himself.

Another officer standing next to him shook his head, and also quite agreed with what his colleague said: "At the beginning, the advance speed was extremely fast, but as soon as he entered the mountainous area, he was steady to the point of advancing step by step -- the most infuriating thing was that he took advantage of the opportunity to advance step by step, and he even turned around and ate up all the hundreds of thousands of our scattered troops surrounded by him! He had already calculated our ideas before he would be so accurate!"

Those who are not familiar with Manstein must be completely confused by the frenzied advance of the first ten days of his southward journey. This staff general, who did not make a name for himself in France and did not have great ambitions in Ukraine, was not really known to the top of the Allied forces until he was in charge of the offensive and defensive battles on the Crimean Peninsula alone. The general, who liked to quantify his attack with precision, was a true master of the campaign, and his greater advantage over Rommel and Guderian was the precise control of his troops.

He had been working as a staff officer within the Defence Force, and had been delegated from the General Staff Headquarters to the troops. So he has more experience and ideas as a staff officer than generals like Rommel Guderian, who has been on the front line. He attaches great importance to the supply of his troops, and is good at thinking about the enemy's ideas and what measures should be taken, and he is convinced that he does not make mistakes and waits for the enemy to make mistakes is the truth of victory on the battlefield.

Therefore, when his troops were about to enter the mountains to fight, he immediately cautiously restrained his advance, and then turned around, mobilized the infantry to follow, and completely swept away the Soviet troops scattered in his rear. The reason is simple, he does not want to leave his troops' logistical supply lines exposed at the guns of the enemy partisans, so he prefers to postpone the advance to the Baku side.

However, in fact, he should not have been silent for so long, and the more complicated reason was that in order to organize the battle of Gudeli to install Army Group G to the north, the fuel supply of his southbound troops was cut off for several days. So he ordered the armored troops to detour from Chechnya to the Baku Plain, and had to wait for a long time halfway before they started the journey again.

Of course, this was not the inside information that the Soviet defenders in Baku could know, they only knew that Manstein stopped where he should have stopped, and stopped his progress just right, leaving them with a huge defeat and an almost one-sided battlefield situation.

"Have you contacted the Caspian fleet? If they are willing to help, there should be some equipment that can be snatched away......" A Soviet general sitting in his office spoke, since General Rokossovsky's defection at Stalingrad (as is understood within the Soviet Union), there were no decent senior generals in the Southern Theater of Operations, and in the early days Timoshenko had been ordered to take command of Baku, but before he could get here, Stalingrad fell.

It is precisely because of this that all the defense affairs here have to be resolved through consultation between the commanders of several armies and the front armies, and the speed of dealing with problems has become more slow. For example, on the issue of how to deal with the oil refining equipment in Baku, there are two opinions: to transport it away and to blow it up.

Ever since the German FW-190D fighters began to appear in the skies of the Caucasus, the blue skies and white clouds here have been dominated by German fighters in gray camouflage. These damned Third Reich planes visited the Caspian Sea around Baku every day, destroying everything they saw on their ships.

Thanks to the Stuka and Stuka 2 bombers piloted by these German pilots, fewer and fewer ships dared to go to the ports near Baku to load and unload oil equipment, so the plan to remove the large equipment became unusually slow. As the German ground forces approached, the opinion of blowing up these equipment became more and more prepondering.

"During the night, there are two more ships that will venture to the shore, but the tonnage is limited, so they can't carry anything, and the wounded have been delayed for two days, if it is not arranged tonight......" The officer in charge of liaising with the Caspian Sea maritime transport fleet quickly replied to all the information he knew, for many days, he could only say something frustrating, and today was no exception.

"Then we will have to blow up all the equipment! Start with some important, immovable large equipment, first dismantle the important parts, and then blow them up with explosives!" The general, who had been temporarily elected to handle affairs, opened his mouth and ordered: "If there is not enough explosives, use shells! In short, we have nothing to leave the Germans ......."

The atmosphere in the room became oppressive, after all, it was a very worrying thing to blow up the equipment. The soldiers who now have steel guns in their hands and plant explosives on these devices may have been the workers who assembled these equipment, who spent ten years building today's Baku, but after one order, they had to blow up all the youth they dedicated to the motherland with their own hands.

"But. At this time, a middle-aged man in a suit, but who could enter and leave this headquarters, suddenly spoke up and said a different opinion in his heart. He is not a soldier, but he represents many government officials here: "If we blow up this equipment, we will have no leverage to negotiate with that General Manstein!"

His words turned everyone's eyes on him, and under Stalin's order to destroy Baku and live and die with it, he was no different from treason in saying this. But he still spoke calmly, and continued to say the words that made everyone's eyes shine: "The Germans want oil, and we will give it to him." Everybody's going to live, isn't it?"