In 1934, the "Kirov" incident occurred in the Soviet Union. Stalin felt that his authority in the country was not high enough, so he launched a series of purges to eliminate those who opposed him and were not loyal to him.
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At the beginning, the Great Purge only stayed at the stage of arresting and executing senior party leaders. The author will not talk nonsense in this regard. Here I will just focus on introducing some 37 years later. The Great Purge gradually expanded to the military.
Now the senior generals and middle- and lower-level officers in the Soviet Red Army were in bad luck.
3 of the 5 marshals of the Soviet Red Army, 14 of the 16 generals, all 8 admirals, 60 of the 67 corps commanders, 136 of the 199 division commanders, and 221 of the 397 brigade commanders
, 11 People’s Commissars of Defense, 75 of the 80 members of the Supreme Soviet Military Committee, and half of the more than 70,000 middle- and lower-level officers of the Soviet Red Army were also included in the list of the Great Purge.
Most of them were executed, and the rest were imprisoned. The Soviet Red Army lost a large number of experienced commanders. Among them was Field Marshal Tukhachevsky of the Soviet Red Army. When Mustache heard about it,
After this news, he happily said: Now the German army can defeat the Soviet Red Army in two months.
Huge numbers, backward equipment, and lack of command were the situation of the Soviet army before the Soviet-German war began. In addition, Stalin also made serious mistakes in judging the timing of the German attack on the Soviet Union. In his opinion, the German army should be the first to attack the Soviet Union.
Attack Britain, and then take action against the Soviet Union. At present, the German army is frequently mobilized to the Eastern Front. It should be that Mustache is trying to confuse the British by attacking in the east and in the west.
In fact, this is human nature. Even if Stalin was slapped on the head, he would not understand why Mustache risked a two-front battle and suddenly launched another attack on the Soviet Union before the battlefield on the Western Front was completely resolved. In fact, Mustache
Not only Stalin could not understand Beard's strategy, but also most of the generals in the German Army.
I disagree. But it was this kind of truth and falsehood that could be concealed even from his own people, which caused Stalin and the Soviet Red Army to suffer a big loss. The Soviet Union had originally planned to take advantage of the German army's desperate struggle with the British on the Western Front to attack Germany's eastern defense line.
The army was actively planning offensive operations and was violently attacked by the German army without any defensive preparations.
Before the war, the Soviet Red Army divided its troops stationed on the Soviet-German border into four parts, namely the Leningrad Military District, the Baltic Naval District, the Western Military District and the Kiev Military District.
According to Stalin's judgment, if Germany attacks the Soviet Union, its main attack direction should be the defense area of the Kiev Military District. This is because there are rich grain-producing areas along the Dnieper River in Ukraine and access to the Caucasus oil fields. In addition, Stalin's hometown is Georgia. He
He definitely did not want his hometown to be occupied by the German army, so he placed most of the main force and elites of the Soviet army in the Kiev Military District.
In addition, Stalin did not arrange combat deployments purely based on his own preferences. In the Leningrad Military District and the Baltic Naval District, the terrain is very complex, and there are several very large lake areas as obstacles, making it difficult for heavy armored groups to deploy; and in central Belarus
Although the terrain in this area is flat, the area east of the border is
The vast Pripyat Swamp stretches from western Ukraine to central and southern Belarus, so it is difficult to use large-scale tank warfare in this area. Therefore, after eliminating the two options in the north and the center
, only the southwest front line can become the main direction of the German attack.
Before the war began, the Soviet army's main defense method was to build fortifications. They were very superstitious about this massive fortification defense system. This was also related to the lack of outstanding commanders in the Soviet Red Army. Tank cluster tactics had not yet been adopted.
Before widespread use, the main mode of warfare was still positional warfare. As long as the defensive side built several continuous fortification positions, it basically achieved a tactical advantage over the attacking side.
In the positional warfare of World War I, the attacking side always played a tragic role. Facing the endless trenches and barbed wire fences on the defending side, the attacking troops advancing in parallel would often be completely lost under the cross machine gun fire. This is the traditional sense of the word.
Tug of war.
However, with the large-scale use of tanks, offensive forces have many more options. They can use the tough defensive capabilities of armored forces to break through these trenches and fortress groups from one or more points, enter behind the defending party, and thus tear the entire
Line of defense. At this point, the Soviet Red Army is obviously still in the stage of civil war in the use of tactics and is somewhat lagging behind.
In addition, many parts of the "Stalin Defense Line" originally on the Soviet border had not yet been completed. Later, as the border line advanced into Poland, another "Molotov" defense line was built. As a result, steel bars and cement were insufficient. Not only was the "Stalin Defense Line"
The "defense line" could not be completed, and the new defense line was also hindered. Both defense lines were unfinished and semi-finished products, and even the equipment of heavy weapons was not completed.
The German Air Force's attack horn was also first sounded by the Air Force. When the sky just turned white, more than 60 military airports within the Soviet border were raided by the Luftwaffe, as far away as Klang near Leningrad.
Airports, railway hubs, and seaports in Stade, Izmail in Bessarabia, Sevastopol in Crimea, and other places did not escape the first round of air strikes.
Subsequently, the German artillery began to launch artillery bombardments at the Soviet NKVD border guards and other Soviet army headquarters and stations. Under the cover of the armored group, the German ground troops began to cross the Soviet-German border and launch an attack on the Soviet army.
, a large number of Lithuanians and Ukrainians who had been trained by the German army infiltrated into the Soviet Union. Their mission was to penetrate deep into the Soviet Union, destroy telephone lines, attack communication hubs, and create chaos.
Before noon, the Luftwaffe basically controlled the air superiority over the battlefield. Nearly a thousand Soviet aircraft were bombed at the airport, and only a dozen German aircraft were lost. The ground troops of the Soviet Red Army could hardly move on the road, and communications were difficult.
It was destroyed. Before many Soviet troops could figure out what happened, German tanks and mechanized infantry had already surrounded them.
At this time, the top Soviet officials were confused by the various news coming from the front line. At first they thought that the Soviet army was launching a counterattack against the German army trying to attack the Soviet Union. As a result, they deliberately launched a counterattack to the front line at around 7 o'clock.
The Soviet Army, which requested a counterattack, was not allowed to enter Germany, and the Soviet Air Force was not allowed to enter more than 150 kilometers into Germany.
But by noon, the Soviet Army General Staff and the Kremlin could no longer receive news from the front line. Due to the breakdown of communications, frontline commanders could not contact their own troops, and commanders could not contact each other.
, and the troops could not find their commander.
Moreover, not long after the Great Purge, most Soviet commanders were unwilling and did not dare to admit to their superiors that they could not even find their troops, let alone understand the actual battle situation, so they could only fool their superiors with ambiguity.
He made inquiries and even exaggerated some questions, such as saying that his troops were attacking, etc. This situation continued until the night of the 1st, and the staff and the Kremlin still believed that the German attack had been repulsed.
In the first day of fighting, the German offensive forces encountered very little resistance. The most they did was not to pull the trigger and shoot, but to collect the Red Army troops who were stunned by the Luftwaffe bombs and then capture them.
The Soviet Red Army did not counterattack at all. Their air force once used bombers to conduct counter-air raids on Ploiesti, Bucharest, Warsaw, and Gdańsk. However, without fighter escort, the counter-air raids suffered huge losses and had little effect.
Among the German offensive forces, the fastest progress was made by the two sharp knives of Army Group Center, the Second Armored Group led by Guderian and the Third Armored Group led by Hermann Hoth, which started from Suwalki and Buenos Aires respectively.
Departing from Leicester, proceed in a straight line
They entered the territory of the Soviet Union for more than 200 kilometers, then closed the two pliers near Minsk, and then cooperated with the infantry group army following them to capture all the nearly 700,000 troops in the Western Military District of the Soviet Red Army. (To be continued.
