Chapter 857: Attrition

“Have you reached the west bank of the Don? How is the fighting? Is it fierce?” Guderian’s army group was currently on a full-scale offensive to the west, so he was busy and needed to be briefed on many matters. Just a few hours ago, several of his attacking infantry divisions had been cut off from supplies, and he was in the process of solving this problem.

“The news from there is that about 3,000 Soviet troops are crossing the river. One of our armored reconnaissance vehicles immediately launched an attack on this Soviet force,” the staff officer said, looking at the battle report in his hand, his tone uncertain. He didn’t know if the person who had sent the message had made a mistake, for an armored car to have attacked 3,000 men.

Guderian had commanded troops at the front before. Back in France, he was still the commander of the 1st Panzer Corps and would often take an armored car to the front to look around. Once, his aide had even driven the armored car into a ditch due to friendly artillery fire. So Guderian did not question this news but just gave a friendly smile.

He walked over and looked at the message sent by his subordinates. It had the location, the people involved, and the number of prisoners. This was clearly not a deliberate deception for April Fool’s Day, so Guderian nodded in acknowledgment of the validity of this battle. “So, from the beginning of the attack until we reached the west bank of the Don, we have not met with any decent resistance, is that right?”

This staff officer was also full of anger when he mentioned this matter. The speed of the 1st Panzer Corps’ offensive could be said to be very rapid. If there had really been elite Soviet troops in the area west of the Don, they would have been surrounded and annihilated by the German armored forces long ago.

But the reality was that the German army had not encountered any decent resistance. The main force of the Soviets had disappeared as if they had evaporated. As for the reason being that the Soviet troops had retreated too quickly, the staff of G Army Group would never believe it. There was only one hypothesis that could explain this phenomenon—the Soviets had withdrawn their main forces in advance.

In the brief time that the German forces in the southern theater were waiting for supplies to arrive, the Soviets had abandoned their positions, leaving only some units to delay the German offensive, while their main force had retreated back to the Don defense line without a second thought.

In this way, it was as if Germany had not annihilated a single main Soviet unit in the process of its offensive. And on the Don defense line and in the subsequent street fighting in Stalingrad, the German army would have to face the various main Soviet forces that Rokossovsky had scraped together.

To have failed to annihilate the enemy’s effective strength in a war of movement was not good news for the German army, because it also meant that in the future, the German army would have to face all the elite Soviet troops that should have been eliminated now, all at once. To fight a street battle for every inch of land with these troops in a city or a nearby area was something that all German commanders were unwilling to see.

“To have to fight with all our might to break through the Don defense line is still acceptable,” Guderian said with a sigh. “But when we start to head north and hand Stalingrad over to N Army Group, it will be difficult for Küchler.”

“Yes!” The staff officer agreed with Guderian’s words and chimed in, “We did not, as planned, annihilate about a hundred thousand Soviet troops. This force will now fall on the shoulders of General Küchler.”

“The Soviet commanders are getting smarter and smarter as they fight,” Guderian said with some resignation. “At the beginning of the war, the Soviet Great Purge had not completely ended. At that time, the high command structure of the Soviet Union was in chaos, and our army could easily fight a battle of annihilation on the scale of a million.”

What he didn’t say was that by the time of the hard-fought battles in Ukraine and Belarus, the German commanders had become much smarter. Especially in the central region, to fight an encirclement battle of hundreds of thousands was no longer possible. They could only rely on some specific environments to fight some large-scale battles of annihilation in the southern region.

By the time the Khrushchev group was annihilated in Crimea, and then the Battle of Kharkov and the Battle of Donetsk had ended, the German army had no more encirclements of hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands, of Soviet troops. The war had become more and more bloody and stalemated. The places where the two sides fought were mostly in and around cities. The large-scale battles in the open field became fewer and fewer, and the cities that were fought over were often turned into a pile of rubble.

“Send the situation here to the High Command. Tell the Führer the trouble we’ve encountered,” Guderian finally gave the order. He then urged his convoy and guard units to continue to advance at the fastest possible speed, to get to the Don defense line as soon as possible to inspect the German army’s preparations for the river crossing.

In Akado’s office, he, several operations officers, and Brauchitsch were discussing the situation on the southern front. When Guderian’s message arrived, Manstein’s had already been there for half an hour. The situations the two of them had encountered were similar, or rather, the situations the troops under their command had encountered were similar.

The Soviet army was contracting its defense line in the entire southern theater. In many areas, they had not left any resisting troops at all. They had blown up bridges and even railways and roads, completely paralyzing the transportation in the entire region.

This damn tactic had hit the German army’s soft underbelly. First, the German army relied heavily on the smooth flow of transportation lines to ensure the success of its offensive. Second, they were very reluctant to engage in street fighting in cities and to waste their manpower.

“The Soviet army’s retreat this time is very clever. They have concentrated their forces and have also extended our transportation lines,” Brauchitsch said, pointing at the map. “The problem that General Manstein’s M Army Group has encountered is particularly obvious. They have rarely encountered any Soviet troops on their way south. There is news that the Soviet army is setting up defenses in the Georgian region.”

Akado, with a cold face, looked at the constantly changing markers on the map. Two female NCOs were using long wooden poles to move the positions of several of the already-identified main Soviet forces on the map. These troops were all retreating, and they generally only moved at night to avoid the interference of the German Air Force.

This method was a bit like the German army’s in another timeline in 1944. Suppressed by the overwhelming air superiority of the Allies, they could only use night operations to reinforce the Normandy region. If they were to face a German attack, then this method of only being able to march at night would clearly slow them down. But if they were turning and fleeing, then they could run a long way in one night.

“Kesselring’s air force… can they destroy these railways and bridges and block the Soviets on this retreat route?” Akado asked, pointing at the map. When it came to such specific tactics, he mostly did not express his opinion, because compared to the other German generals, his tactical level was about the same as Khrushchev’s.

A primary school student should not be giving a higher mathematics lesson to a group of PhDs. This was the reason why Akado was reluctant to express his views too much. But sometimes he would still ask some questions to let the frontline generals give him a reasonable explanation. This had taught him many professional command skills, as well as some modern-day problems of military trade-offs.

Sure enough, Brauchitsch began to explain, “My Führer, Kesselring has indeed carried out destructive bombing on some stations and transportation hubs, but the effect has been very unsatisfactory. Many of the Soviet units are purely infantry. Their baggage is very light, so they do not completely rely on railways and road transport.”

“So our army’s limited bombing cannot stop them from continuing to retreat,” Brauchitsch said, pointing to the places Kesselring had bombed and further explaining to Akado. “Here, and here, we have bombed, but the main Soviet force has only slowed its retreat, and is still retreating south.”

He then sighed and continued to explain to Akado with resignation, “But after our army has lost these bombed-out railways, the supply and transport of materials has become even more troublesome, which has also caused the speed of Manstein’s troops to decrease in their pursuit.”

The gains did not make up for the losses. This was the reason why the German army did not send its air force to bomb the railway transport lines. Germany would still have to repair these destroyed roads in the future and would have to rely on these roads for supply and transport. The destruction caused by the Soviets themselves was already making the German repair units complain endlessly.

“So, the troops in the southern theater will have to inevitably encounter the urban street fighting that we are most unwilling to see?” Akado asked, looking at one familiar city name after another, including Grozny, Baku, and others, finally muttering as if asking a rhetorical question.

“Yes, my Führer. But we have a targeted plan for this,” Brauchitsch said, walking behind Akado and trying to persuade him. “This plan can allow us to temporarily not have to worry too much about the consumption of street fighting.”

Akado nodded. This plan had been drawn up jointly by some of the army’s radicals and the SS. To say it was a plan was not quite right; it was more of a means to adapt to street fighting in a disguised form. The army planned to cooperate with the SS to develop a new force composed of retired adult men over the age of 40 and non-conscription-age children over 15 and under 18, to be thrown into urban warfare.

Because these units were not the expensive armored forces, and they did not require a large-scale training cost, they could theoretically withstand any consumption—to put it bluntly, it was to get some cannon fodder to fight a war of attrition with the Soviets, to have the non-main force units bear the terrible losses of urban warfare. Of course, for Germany itself, this plan was very inhumane, which was also one of the important reasons why Akado had been slow to approve of such an action.

“Call Vlasov to my office! I need to talk to him!” Akado said to Brauchitsch after a moment’s thought. “If we must consume our manpower, I am not willing to needlessly consume the great people of Germany.”

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