The reason why the Soviet Union was in a hurry to launch the battle of Kursk in the south began with the fact that the Soviet top leaders learned that the Japanese army was attempting to attack the Soviet Far East in the north. You must know that the Soviet Union was once a powerful and huge country, which straddled the Eurasian continent and had a vast territory and huge population resources.

If, in the past period of time, even if they had known about Japan's attempt to attack the Far East, the Soviet leaders would have laughed and talked about it as an after-dinner joke for a few days. Even in the early stages of the Soviet-German war, the Soviet Union maintained superiority in forces against the Japanese in the Far East.

But now things have changed a little, the main forces of the Soviet Far East have been transferred to the Western Front, and now the remaining troops are at best reserves. Using this force to prevent a possible full-scale attack by the Japanese army, it is obvious that everyone has no bottom in their hearts.

You must know that the Soviet Union has always maintained a military superiority in the Far East, so it has always maintained a high-pressure offensive posture, which is the main reason why the Japanese Kwantung Army built fortifications in Northeast China. Now the offensive and defensive transitions between the two sides have been reversed, and those who have a defensive line want to attack, and those who have not repaired the defense need to defend -- there is really a smell of helplessness in the impermanence of the world.

Eventually, the Soviet top brass felt that it was necessary to quickly stabilize the retreating western front, otherwise the entire Soviet Union would have no effective resource supply base: the Baku oil fields near Stalingrad would have been interfered with by the Germans and would have been unable to make ends meet;

So Stalin was in a hurry, and he decided that he would rather give up Moscow than keep Stalingrad. This would at least give him the opportunity to restore the Soviet Union's supply of resources, give the Soviet Union the capital to organize a counterattack in the Far East or on the Western Front, and regain the strategic initiative. With this idea, the main forces of the Soviet Red Army began to move southward in an all-round way, competing with the main German forces for the strategic initiative on the Soviet-German battlefield in the Kursk region.

It is a pity that neither Stalin nor Zhukov expected that Germany's most powerful Army Group G would be such a hard nut to crack, and the Soviet Army did not have the ability to swallow this army group for a while when attacking on all fronts. You must know that the Soviet top brass had experience in attacking and fighting against the German Liszt Army Group E, and they generally believed that even if Army Group G was more elite than Army Group E, the Soviet Army, which was not what it used to be, was sure to completely annihilate this elite German army.

After all calculations, they still misestimated the strength of the German armored forces, and the combat capability of the German armored forces, which had been overestimated in the eyes of the Soviet high-level, was only proved after the battle had started -- they still underestimated the anti-natural combat effectiveness of the Germans.

It is precisely because of this that the battle plan to quickly secure the Baku oil fields on the Western Front has been completely shattered, and the war may not be decided within a month, and judging by the current war situation, it may even drag on into the second winter. So now the question arises - what to do with the Far East on the Eastern Front?

In the rolling hills of the Khing'an Mountains in northeastern China, the dim light shone through the dense woods on the face of an ordinary soldier of the Japanese Kwantung Army, who staggered along the soft, rotten and fallen leaves of his rifle, and looked around vigilantly.

Beside him, another Japanese soldier also held a rifle in his hand, stepped on the elastic rotten leaves, and walked forward cautiously step by step. Further afield, more Japanese soldiers, densely packed with seemingly no end in sight, were crossing the Sino-Soviet border, or rather, they were crossing what they called the dangerous "Manchurian border".

Kimura was a standard infantry member of the Kwantung Army, carrying his suitcase and an anti-tank mine behind him, dressed in standard Imperial Japanese infantry equipment. The bullets in his pocket have never been so abundant, there are more than 100 rounds, and the only regret he feels is that he has to carry these things on his back, after all, the logistics and supply problems of the Japanese army have always been in the "extremely immature primary exploration stage".

However, it was not good news for the grassroots soldiers to launch such a hasty attack on a powerful enemy, and everyone trembled when they heard that they were going to attack the Soviet Union, they had heard of the thrilling battle in the Nomenkan area, and they also knew that the battle was actually a rather ugly one for the Japanese Army to lose.

So this time everyone came again with guns, obviously they were all very nervous, no one knew what kind of situation was waiting for them, and no one knew what kind of terrible posture the Soviets on the other side would use to jump out and kill them all.

"I heard from the squadron leader when he explained the offensive route, and I heard that this time we will take a mountain road exclusively and will not fight with the Soviets' tanks. "There is a fire of gossip burning in every army, and this kind of person can chatter even in battle, and the way to stop him from shutting his mouth is to remove his jaw or break his head.

Don't have to fight enemy tanks? That sounds good. But what is the matter with the one anti-tank mine that every infantry must carry? I heard that the various units have also strengthened their engineers, and many of them have also been trained in the combat method of using anti-tank mines as explosive packs and perishing together with the enemy's tanks...... Anyway, it sounds scary, and it makes people feel uncomfortable.

"Hey! I said...... Fujiwara ......" Kimura swallowed a mouthful of saliva, carefully blocked his figure with a big tree in front of him, and then asked the gossip man next to him, "On the map, doesn't it say that there is a village here?"

"Don't you know what the map drawn by those idiots from the training department? They said there was a highway here, and you walked all the way and saw it?" the gossip man named Fujiwara pursed his lips, as if he looked disdainful. He tossed aside the plant at his feet with the butt of his gun, and continued to walk on his disapproving feet.

"Tutu, Tutu!" suddenly spewed out a faint white smoke from behind a dense plant not far away, which was the gas diffused by the machine gun when it was firing non-stop. Apparently there was a carefully camouflaged firepower point, which was approaching the Japanese soldiers dozens of meters away, violently pouring dense ammunition.

The sudden attack made these Japanese soldiers who were scattered and walking in the forest in dense formations panicked all of a sudden, they were not the elite A-division of the Japanese army a few years ago, so many people did not experience the real test of war, they practiced marksmanship with local people in China, and then came to "fight" with the Soviets with real swords and guns.

Tracer bullets shuttled through the crowd, Kimura was so frightened that he quickly held his head and threw himself on the ground, fortunately, the rotten leaves on the ground were very thick, he didn't feel too uncomfortable when he fell, he reached out and picked up the rifle he had just thrown away, and he barely saw the surrounding situation clearly. The Soviets' machine-gun position was firing heavily, and the friendly troops around him were already dead and wounded.

"Yaga...... Cover, fire! Oh my God. As for Kimura, who has participated in strict military training, the current situation has not made him too disorganized, but the friendly troops behind him are not as calm as him, and these farmers who were sent to the battlefield without training for a few days are actually no different from civilians in combat effectiveness.

So under the rain of bullets, these Japanese soldiers were in a mess, and it was not until dozens of soldiers died that they remembered that they seemed to be fighting back. So in the distance, some Type 38 rifles were the first to return fire, their bullets hitting the grass and sending the branches flying far away.

The Soviet machine guns were obviously suppressed by the dense Japanese fire, and the shooting began to become incoherent, and the Japanese soldiers had more opportunities to shoot, so many Japanese soldiers knelt on the ground with guns and fired, and some of them howled and rushed towards the grass with rifles with bayonets.

Kimura glanced at Fujiwara, a gossip man who was hit by a bullet and lying on his back on the ground, and when he heard that he still had the strength to scream, he temporarily relaxed. So he pulled the grenade from his body, pulled away from the danger, struck it on the steel helmet, and threw it hard.

"Boom!" The grenade exploded near the grass, kicking up a cloud of black dirt, and seeing that the enemy's firing point was completely suppressed by the grenade, the officer's shout came from somewhere in the distance: "All! Assault! Long live the Great Japanese Empire! Long live His Majesty the Emperor!"

With this shout, the Japanese soldiers, who had been lying on the ground and did not move an inch, staggered up from the ground as if they had been stimulated, shouted "board loaded" and rushed to their target in a frenzy.

At this time, Kimura, who threw the grenade that decided the victory, finally got up from the soft place. Leaning on the big tree, he glanced at Fujiwara, the gossip man behind him, but found that the noisy comrade-in-arms who was shouting like a pig just now had no movement. There was a shocking amount of blood on his body, and it was obvious that this kind of injury was absolutely hopeless in the deep mountains and old forests.

"Damn!" Kimura muttered, just as he wanted to bypass the big tree and continue the attack, only to find that the battlefield had fallen silent. He passed some of the soldiers who were standing in a daze, and got to the front to see the scene behind the grass. There were two dead female Soviet soldiers and an old Maxim heavy machine gun that had been blown up...... This is an isolated position, and it is obvious that the purpose of the other party here is to sneak attack.