81_81266 On the Eastern Front, the position of the 44th Infantry Division, a busy scene. The German soldiers were packing their luggage, and they received an order to retreat to the area west of the Dnieper for defense.

Although they were only a few dozen kilometers away from Kharkov, they were still faithfully carrying out the orders from above and leaving this dangerous position before the Soviet troops on the opposite side counterattacked.

"Hurry up, move fast!" a German officer stood on the car, watching his busy men carry all kinds of munitions. The German infantry units were not as mechanized as the armored units, and in most cases they still had to rely on manpower to solve the problem.

For example, now, the infantry of the 44th Infantry Division is helping the divisional artillery to carry large-caliber shells. These howitzers were shipped from France, and although they do seem to be somewhat outdated now, they make up for the lack of large-caliber artillery in the German army at this stage.

Many of the German artillery now use artillery from other countries, including French howitzers, Dutch and Belgian howitzers, which make a mess of the logistics of German artillery, but they have to be used.

The current life of the German infantry was not as easy as it had been, and these soldiers followed behind the armored units, and had to travel every day with tedious hurryes and were responsible for transporting many other military supplies.

"Pile those tents on the wagons! Yes, pile them up! Hold them with ropes and don't fall them down halfway!" a company commander of a baggage battalion asked the soldiers to put the tents they were camping on the wagon. For the infantry, the equipment of the car is still too luxurious, and only the main mechanized regiment in the division is partially equipped with the car.

Most of the troops were still using primitive equipment such as war horses, and some even had donkeys, relying on these livestock to pull carts to complete most of the terminal transportation of supplies for the German troops. Don't underestimate these wagons and mule carts, they are arguably the most reliable "Mercedes cars" of the German transport forces.

The German tanks were racing their way forward. On the road behind, the German infantry could only use their own legs to chase and chase, and these soldiers stepped on the muddy ground with rifles on their backs and riding boots. They have to give way to cars, so most of the time they have to stagger along the side of the road.

Unlike armored units, which can stack their baggage on the car, they have to carry part of their baggage on their backs. There were raincoats, sapper shovels, gas masks, ammunition and a change of socks and underwear. Traveling with a pile of rags on the vast plains was definitely not an easy task, so more soldiers were accustomed to discarding less important things to lighten their loads.

In order to save this waste, the troops had to use horse-drawn wagons to move with the soldiers, and each company was equipped with a horse-drawn cart to carry tents and sapper shovels and other supplies. Later, this method began to gradually become popular, so each carriage of the infantry had to help transport a few shells to the artillery unit of the unit to which it belonged, which could be regarded as making up for the disaster caused by the chaotic shell models to the logistics supply.

"Really the mess, with an order from above, we will retreat?" a veteran soldier with a G43 rifle on his back and a cigarette in his mouth cursed: "How long did it take to get to this position, these noble lords casually said, we will have to walk for several days." ”

Another young soldier smiled and stacked the ammunition boxes for machine guns on the carriage beside him, and nodded: "But isn't it, we walked for ten days to get here, and we dug trenches here for several days, and then an order, we walked back to the place where we started a few days ago, and it was really nothing to do." ”

With the order, the long ranks of infantry began to set off. Several trucks rumbled across the dirt road, kicking up a cloud of dust, and drove to the end of the road in the distance amid the invectives of German soldiers. More infantry were scattered along the road, walking in small groups in the direction they came.

Some soldiers sat around the wagons, and because of the days of fighting, they had consumed a lot of munitions and supplies, so there were spare wagons, which were used as tools to transport the wounded. Of course, some thick-skinned soldiers also squeezed up, holding many rifles and smiling as the soldiers around them hurried.

The soldiers around him put all their weapons on the car, so they were empty-handed. However, they still carried heavy bags and struggled to make their way on both sides of the road. For them, this war does not seem to have much to do with fighting, except for rushing, they only have to hurry.

"The 44th Division is retreating, they are the closest unit to Kharkov, the Soviet units are not pursuing, they do not seem to expect our troops to retreat at this time. "The staff officer took the text of the front line and handed it to Guderian, whose troops were retreating from near Kharkov, ceding a lot of the Ukrainian regions that had already been occupied.

According to the operational deployment requirements of the General Staff, his Army Group G had to withdraw its outstretched tentacles, deploy defensive positions along the Dnieper, and shorten the defensive front. Although such a decision ceded almost a third of Ukraine's regions, it could steadily deploy troops along the river and save limited troops.

"Our troops in Belarus are also shrinking, giving up positions near Minsk, the Soviet troops are also not pursuing, and the defensive counterattack in Poland has already knocked the Soviets out of temper, and they will not dare to take the initiative to launch a counterattack in the short term. Guderian nodded, he had every reason to believe that the Soviet troops would not carry out counterattack operations in the short term.

It is impossible for any general to carry the losses of more than 2 million soldiers in a short period of time and launch a counterattack when the enemy retreats voluntarily - in the event of another trap set by the German army, the Soviet Union will be completely doomed. The Germans needed time to regain their strength, and apparently the Soviets needed time to mend the wounds inflicted on them by the war.

The German army's large-scale elastic defensive positions in Poland and the way of setting up ambushes and counterattacks in advance in the later period left too many nightmares for the Soviet generals, and many Soviet soldiers felt their shudders when they remembered the painful process of retreating hundreds of kilometers from eastern Poland. The surprise cover of the German armored forces and the encirclement of Kyiv can be called a classic defensive counterattack tactic, and this process can be directly written into military textbooks.

On the Eastern Front for more than a month, German soldiers killed 700,000 Soviet soldiers and captured 1.5 million at the cost of 110,000 killed and 280,000 wounded, almost half of the Soviet army's troops deployed in the west. This brilliant result encouraged the German side, and some generals even began to discuss in private, feeling that the Führer's war strategy against the Soviet Union was too conservative, and Germany was fully capable of capturing Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, before winter came.

This voice was deliberately ignored by the Führer, and the guidelines of the German High Command had been based on Manstein's plan for the "New Barbarossa", ignoring the military construction of a large-scale invasion of the Soviet Union.

Berlin, the Führer's Residence, Accardo looked at Augustus, who was getting older, and his heart was filled with a sigh of emotion: "Prime Minister, I know that those generals have been muttering in front of you all day about expanding the scale of the war on the Eastern Front. Still, you know our plans, we really weren't ready to invade the USSR. ”

It is true that Germany was not ready to enter into a full-scale war, and although it appeared to have won a brilliant victory on the Western Front, there was a problem: Germany won the whole war too quickly, and some of the materials that were gradually hoarded during the war were actually very limited.

For example, the German team lacks cotton clothing. The German leadership has been trying to solve this problem, and the officers of the logistics department have tried their best to hoard cotton and turn it into winter clothes to ship into western Ukraine, but it is still not enough to meet the needs of the huge number of Wehrmacht soldiers.

Don't think that it is very easy to prepare cotton clothes for 3.5 million troops, everyone has received their school uniforms in schools, and it is just a battalion of 500 people to distribute clothes. If this scale is expanded by nearly 10,000 times, and the area is as wide as hundreds of kilometers, does anyone still think that it is too much to give the head of the logistics department the rank of general?

Spending the winter in the field is definitely a very logistical thing, the German army has not yet established a perfect logistics supply support system in the Soviet Union, and if it goes all the way to Moscow in the east, it is to take out the German elite troops to gamble. And Accardo himself knows that eighty percent is still a big gamble with no money.

When you are not sure, stretching your own supply and transportation lines and shortening your opponent's supply lines is something that only fools do. Attacking all the way is to lengthen the distance between one's own troops and the rear, and it will become more and more difficult to retreat the wounded, replenish personnel, transfer materials, and repair weapons and equipment.

"I know what the Führer meant. Augustus nodded, his health was getting worse and worse after more than a year of hard work, although the medical environment in Berlin can be said to be the best in the world, but it still could not prevent the chancellor from aging: "So I brought back Brauchitsch and others to hold a conference in Berlin on the shape of the Eastern Front, so that the military people knew that they were far from preparing for a huge war." ”

Augustus was a little embarrassed, and even Accardo didn't know what he was thinking. In fact, he lamented in his heart that in 1914, there was no figure in Germany who could see the shape as clearly as Accardo. If there had been such a person at that time, Germany would have gone even further.......