Chapter 882: A Bad Feeling

Author: Dragon Spirit Knight

Rokossovsky now understood the Germans’ thinking. During the counter-attack, his troops had captured a good number of prisoners—some were Bulgarian, some French, and there were even some British. This let him know what kind of game the Germans were playing this time.

The German army itself was not truly bogged down in street fighting. The ones bogged down were the “Eight-Nation Alliance” and the Soviets themselves. In the struggle for a small military railway station on the western outskirts, both sides had committed nearly ten thousand men. After the entire station had been turned into a pile of rubble, the Soviet army still could not hold this iconic westernmost point of Stalingrad.

The brutal war was torturing Rokossovsky. He was losing nearly ten thousand soldiers every day. If converted into units, it meant that almost every day, an entire infantry division was completely crippled, unable to continue fighting and having to be withdrawn from the battlefield.

But in fact, the method Rokossovsky chose was more iron-fisted. He would send new recruits to replenish these old units, let them rest on the second line for a few days, and then throw them back to the front, into the endless war of attrition.

With the war having reached this point, at this juncture, Rokossovsky finally and truly realized that urban street fighting was a double-edged sword, a self-damaging tactic that hurt oneself before hurting the enemy, and a battle of immense attrition that the Soviet forces could not afford. At the very least, his elite troops were already tired and slack from the endless urban warfare.

The question now was, how many reinforcements did the Soviet Union have, and could these reinforcements wear down the motley crew that the Germans had scraped together? This was related to whether Stalingrad could hold out for six months, to drag Germany once again into the long Russian winter.

Of the 30 divisions of troops that had been rushed over from the Far East, the vanguard of three divisions had already arrived at Stalingrad. Rokossovsky, without a second thought, had first thrown one of the elite infantry divisions into the Stalingrad battlefield. Of course, as expected, this division had not been able to create a miracle. In the battle for a larger city block, nearly half of it had been wiped out by a German Ukrainian division.

There was no other clever trick or opportunity to use strategy. In the entire Battle of Stalingrad, the contest was not about the speed of the attack, nor was it about how elite the troops were, but about how many troops both sides were constantly throwing in, and how long these troops could be consumed by the other side.

The German army had begun to use naval bombers and pilots for interception operations along the Volga. This had forced the massive Soviet Volga shipping fleet, which had been operating day and night, to only be able to move at night. Moreover, these Soviet ships had to disperse and hide in some concealed places upstream or downstream before the sun rose the next day, otherwise they would be destroyed on the surface of the Volga. This made the Soviet army’s efforts to replenish its forces inside Stalingrad more and more difficult and had also led to Rokossovsky’s forces dwindling as they fought.

“We can’t go on like this. We must rush some troops over here. I’m going to launch a counter-attack, to retake the western railway station, and the field hospital near there,” Rokossovsky said, pointing at the map to several of his corps commanders. “I still have a counter-attacking force in my hands now, but the follow-up defensive troops must be prepared in advance. Otherwise, the entire battlefield will see a reversal.”

“Comrade Commander, there is still at least a month before we can commit our armored units for a full-scale counter-attack. To launch the operational plan ahead of schedule at a time like this, what should we do next?” one of Rokossovsky’s corps commanders asked with a frown, looking at the map. “This will make my army unable to carry out the next counter-attack plan.”

Hearing his question, Rokossovsky shook his head and answered his question with a sigh, “The reason a backup plan is called a backup plan is because these are means to be used later. But if we don’t act now, and wait until that damn commander of N Army Group, that fellow named Küchler, has really completed his deployment, we will have no chance to use these backup plans.”

“The Germans are really too difficult to deal with. They always seem to be able to prepare for all kinds of wars in advance. Even the urban street fighting that they have been avoiding, it turns out they are so good at it,” another corps commander sighed along with Rokossovsky.

In the engagement with the German army, the Soviet army was always on the passive side. The German army had deployed a large number of snipers and special forces to participate in urban warfare, and then, in coordination with a large number of miscellaneous troops, they had launched an auxiliary offensive. With the aim of inflicting heavy casualties on the Soviet effective strength, they had adopted a hit-and-run tactic that was difficult for the Soviet army to counter.

“The entire city is full of German snipers. If we were to attack and clear them out, we would have to cross a large area occupied by the German army. This would be no different from a counter-attack. And the other side can retreat at will and will not engage us head-on at all,” a corps commander in charge of the frontal defense said dejectedly to his superior and colleagues. “I have to reappoint more than a dozen junior officers and several field-grade officers every day. This has a great impact on the morale of the entire unit.”

This was not the first or second complaint about German snipers. If Rokossovsky could have dealt with it, he would have found a way long ago. But the result now was that, once again, when inspecting the frontline defensive system, one of his aides had been shot by a German sniper from over 400 meters away and had ultimately died. And as the commander himself, all Rokossovsky could do was to give his subordinate a proper burial and then cancel all trips to the front line.

These German snipers were everywhere. They could easily kill Soviet soldiers from hundreds of meters away and then leave at their leisure. Akado had been training the German army’s sniper units since before 1922, and now he was finally getting his due return. The German army now had the highest-quality sniper units in the world, and their overall strength was at least ten years ahead of their opponents.

It wasn’t that the Soviets hadn’t thought of using their own snipers to take out the enemy’s—but in actual combat, they had discovered an unavoidable fact: the German snipers surpassed the Soviets in both quantity and quality. Even in a trade of losses, the Soviet army was the one at a disadvantage.

After successfully hunting down more than a dozen German snipers, the Soviet sniper units had been subjected to a joint encirclement and annihilation by German special forces and snipers. In the end, the combat results of the two sides were 17 to 35. The Soviet sniper losses were more than double the German losses.

“Launch a counter-attack along the riverbanks to both flanks. Increase the vertical width of the Volga we control. Only in this way can we hide more transport ships to make up for the losses we suffer from being unable to transport troops during the day,” Rokossovsky said after a moment’s thought. “As for the enemy’s snipers, for the time being, we can only grit our teeth and ignore them. In two years, our snipers will be tempered by actual combat. That will be the time for a decisive battle!”

Recently, the German Air Force had been running rampant over the Volga, destroying a large number of the Soviet army’s transport ships. A large pile of supplies waiting to be transported across the Volga could only be hidden on the other side of the river, and tens of thousands of new recruits could also only temporarily remain on the east bank of the Volga, unable to enter Stalingrad to fight for Rokossovsky.

The dive-bombing of the planes from the German Navy on the Volga was incredibly accurate, and the strategic bombing of the German Air Force also made it extremely difficult for the Soviet army to replenish its forces in the direction of Stalingrad. Many railways had been destroyed. Because the German army would not be crossing the Volga to fight in the short term, they had begun a large-scale bombing of the railways and transportation nodes this time.

The long-range bombing advantage of the “Butcher” bombers was fully utilized. The Soviet army, several hundred kilometers behind the defense line, had been visited by this German four-engine strategic bomber. The entire Soviet rear was in chaos, and reinforcing Stalingrad had become an extremely difficult matter.

In this situation, as a commander, Rokossovsky could only help his subordinates to dream of a beautiful future. Isn’t there a saying that goes, when a person is in a difficult situation, they either like to dream of the future or to reminisce about the past?

The current Rokossovsky was either reminiscing about the past himself, or he was painting a big picture of the future for others. He knew that the days he was living were not very satisfactory, but he could no longer change anything. As the supreme commander of Stalingrad, his choices were not many. He could only turn to rubble along with this city.

With the German army slowly advancing with its superior firepower, playing the same old trick of an iron-walled encirclement as old Zeng Guofan had decades ago, the Soviet army really did not have many means to turn the tide of the battle. They could only use their greater numbers to crash against the German army’s bronze walls and iron ramparts, to buy more time for their own demise. And for the Soviet Union now, what they lacked most seemed to be time.

“Have the Guards armored units launch a counter-attack to the north,” Rokossovsky said, his confidence firming after a moment. He pointed at the map and began to assign tasks. “On the western front line, have the new infantry that have been sent up launch an attack for the western railway station. They must fight their way to the small station and hold their ground!”

He walked to the other side of the map, pointed his hand downwards, and ordered, “The two newly arrived reinforcement divisions will be responsible for attacking to the south and capturing as many of the suburban positions as possible. Whether we can expand our nighttime transport scale depends on this battle.”

Waiting for his subordinates to all leave this somewhat dim basement, Rokossovsky covered his face with both hands and let out a deep, turbid breath. Only he himself knew how great the pressure on his shoulders was. Now the entire Battle of Stalingrad had spun out of his control, developing in a direction he had never imagined.

The feeling of losing control was really very bad. At the very least, Rokossovsky himself had a premonition that the Soviet army might be defeated. For him, perhaps this was the most soul-crushing thing.

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