Chapter 1067: A Belated Warning

A Soviet soldier, standing on the east bank of the Volga, rubbed his sore eyes and then continued to gaze boredly at the distant sky. This was a Soviet anti-aircraft lookout post, providing early air defense warning for the long Volga defense line.

After all, the radar that the Americans had provided was a precision, expensive piece of equipment. Although the Soviet Union was scrambling to copy it, there was simply no way to spread this kind of thing over the entire German-Soviet front. The Soviet air defense warning in most areas still relied on manpower, using equipment from the First World War era to provide a relatively vague early warning.

In some places, large horns were aimed at the sky to collect the sound of aircraft engines, to judge whether enemy planes were coming. In other places, air-raid warning posts were set up to provide this kind of intelligence by lookout. These manual posts were scattered throughout the entire German-Soviet front, providing the hard-pressed Soviet army with early intelligence on German aircraft movements.

Unfortunately, with the rapid rout of the Soviet ground forces, this warning system had also collapsed. Too many of the temporary defense lines had no such anti-aircraft posts, and the Soviet army had become more and more indifferent to the movements of the German planes. After all, if a man couldn’t even get enough to eat, he wouldn’t have the heart to care if he had new sheets on his bed. The Soviet army was in the same situation now: they couldn’t even stop the German ground forces, so they had no heart or energy to care where the German bombers were flying.

The German Air Force’s strategic bomber force, in fact, had a very limited role on the Eastern Front. Because even if the German planes could take off from Ukraine, by the time they had flown over countless mountains and rivers to the Soviet heartland, it was estimated that they would have been almost completely wiped out by the Soviet anti-aircraft units. They did not have the cover of the sea, so they could not afford the greater casualties and the higher cost of the bombing.

So even if Hitler, in another timeline, had given the German army strategic bombers, the German army would have been unlikely to go to the Eastern Front to find trouble with the Soviet Union. After all, the price the Allies had paid in bombers was something the German Air Force, with its shallow foundations, could not afford. If they lost a hundred pilots every day, then not even by the beginning of 1945, but probably by the end of 1940, the German Air Force would have existed in name only.

But the situation that Akado and his Third Reich Air Force faced was completely different from that of another timeline. They had the crude oil extracted from Libya as a reserve for consumption, and their forward bases for departure were the Caucasus region and Saint Rudolph. They did not have to fly a long overland route to be able to attack the important Soviet rear industrial bases.

And so this Soviet lookout, after rubbing his eyes and once again looking at the horizon, saw some small, indistinct black dots appearing above the clouds on the horizon. He frowned, and then continued to stare at that distant place. His lookout post was not equipped with binoculars, so he could only use his own eyes to observe the suspicious targets in the distance.

Not long after, he saw those black shadows become clearer and clearer, bit by bit, turning into small black dots. Now the Soviet lookout soldier could already confirm that those were German planes, but he still stared over there, trying to identify the specific number of German planes.

One after another, the German planes were flying at high speed, at an altitude of ten thousand meters. They had taken off and formed up at dawn, and now they had finally crossed the Volga and were flying towards their distant target. The roar of the engines echoed in the space above the clouds, and the German planes trembled slightly with the airflow, like eagles, proudly patrolling their territory.

“My God, where is going to be unlucky this time?” This soldier in the Soviet lookout post finally got a clear look at the number of German planes in the distant sky. He couldn’t count the specific number, but he knew it was a lot, a whole lot. And so he hurriedly began to crank the manual air-raid siren in his observation post, to remind the surrounding Soviet positions to take cover and disperse.

“Wooo… Wooo…” The piercing siren once again echoed over the Soviet positions. Many of the soldiers who were still washing their faces came out of their hidden barracks, looked up at the sky, at the small black dots that looked like flying insects. Those were the German planes. They looked like a swarm of insects around a light in summer, so dense it made one’s hair stand on end.

“They’re not bombing us. If they were coming for us, there would be countless Stuka II bombers screaming and diving down to drop their bombs by now,” an officer said, comforting the somewhat nervous soldiers beside him, his voice calm as he analyzed. “Those are the Germans’ large bombers. It looks like they’re going to bomb a city in the rear.”

As he spoke, he was in no hurry to put on his tunic. The bushy beard he had trembled as he spoke, making him look a bit like Stalin. This style of beard was popular in the Soviet Union, just like a certain pop star’s hairstyle. This officer’s words clearly made a lot of sense, so everyone no longer looked so tense, but with a kind of schadenfreude, they looked up at the enemy’s strategic bombers that were flying past in the sky.

“Where is going to be unlucky again?” this officer said, having finished dressing. He muttered to himself as he walked back to his officer’s shelter. “It’s been a long time since the Germans have used their strategic bombers on such a large scale. It seems that this time, our cities and factories in the rear are in for trouble.”

This time, the German army had sortied a full 400 “Butcher” bombers, carrying a large number of bombs and incendiary bombs, heading straight for an important transportation hub and industrial base in the Soviet rear—Ulyanovsk. There was a factory here that produced Soviet tanks, and it was also an important factory area for the production of the SU-76 self-propelled anti-tank gun.

Of course, this was also an important metal smelting and processing plant area for the Soviet Union. Although it did not directly produce other military products, it was providing a large number of Soviet military enterprises with raw materials such as non-ferrous metals. Once the German army had destroyed this link in the production chain, it would inevitably be a case of piling snow on top of the already-declining Soviet industrial system.

After reconnaissance and analysis, the high command of the German Air Force had found that to bomb Chelyabinsk directly was too long a journey, and would easily allow the Soviet Union to pose a threat to the German bomber force. Kesselring and Dick both felt that to bomb Chelyabinsk now was too risky, so they had directly chosen a bombing target that was relatively important, but which the Soviet Union did not have the strength to heavily defend. These planes had taken off in a mighty formation from a dozen or so airfields near Saint Rudolph, had bypassed the central war zone, which was heavily guarded by the Soviet army, had cut in from the south, behind Moscow, and were flying straight for Ulyanovsk.

The scale of this bombing was far greater than the scale of the German planes that had been sortied during the bombing of London. At that time, the German Air Force’s resources were not as abundant as they were now. Even counting the DO-217 bombers, the German force that had bombed London could not be compared to this one.

To sortie so many planes at once was also in order to, as much as possible, destroy the Soviet rear industrial production cycle in one go, to relieve the pressure on the increasingly hard-pressed German frontline troops. The large number of cheap Soviet self-propelled guns that were appearing had already begun to threaten the German tank units, which was not a situation the German commanders had hoped to see.

“Ring… Ring ring!” In a bright room, a telephone suddenly rang. But there seemed to be no one in this room, so the phone just kept ringing, but no one answered. And so this ring, stubborn, rang, and rang, until finally, a hand lifted the receiver from the phone. “Hello? This is the duty room of the High Command’s Air Defense Command. Do you have anything important to report?”

The duty officer asked the caller in a slow, drawn-out voice. The work here recently had been really despairing. The Germans were shelling the west of Moscow from not far away, and yet here they were, having to inquire about a German air raid hundreds of kilometers away—what was the point of this?

“…Hmm? Say that again, clearer? You’re saying you’ve confirmed you saw large German bombers, not the DO-217, but the even larger ‘Butcher’ strategic bombers?” This officer, after hearing the report from the other end of the line, suddenly asked in a sharp voice, “In the Volga River basin? Forty minutes ago? Why are you only reporting this now? Damn it, don’t hang up the phone. Wait for me.”

He dropped the receiver, pushed open the office door, and rushed to the end of the corridor. As he was running desperately in the empty corridor, he shouted the intelligence he had just received, “The German strategic bombers are at Stalingrad! They’ve been sortied! They’ve been sortied!”

“Hello? This is… what? We need to evacuate the factories and the workers immediately? They are working right now. I’m afraid this is not an easy matter,” a Soviet general in the distant Ulyanovsk said, holding the receiver and speaking to General Vatutin on the other end of the line. “This place is full of raw materials and factory buildings… I have no way to move everything here in ten minutes! Comrade General.”

He hadn’t even finished saying what he wanted to say when the city’s air-raid siren began to wail. It was clear that some of the distant warning posts had spotted the German planes and were sounding the alarm to remind the people in the city.

“Comrade General, your notification is too late… In theory, we should have received this news 30 minutes ago. But now the air-raid sirens are already sounding, and only now do I know that the German planes are already here,” the general continued helplessly. “If, as you say, there are more than 200 German planes, then Ulyanovsk… is already finished.”

After saying this, this general, who was in charge of the production and defense of Ulyanovsk, closed his eyes, letting the sound of the explosions drift in from the distance.

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