Case Red
[size=+1]September 30, 1944[/size]
It is a little over a week since the devastating ambush of Soviet armor at Sibui and increasingly, it appears to Marshal Zhukov that the offensive in the west is effectively over although he dare not even hint such a thing lest the belief make its way to Stalin. Every day, reconnaissance reports Halder, Guderian, and Rommel advancing on their objectives apace. From the North, even an attempt by the Americans to slip forces into Hammerfest and pull Kesselring's offensive back has not seriously delayed the German general's advance through Finland towards Helsinki with the object of freeing up the mixed Finnish and Wehrmact garrison there and then sweep down passed Leningrad to join the offensive. Rommel, meanwhile, is driving his forces hard towards the iconic city, his lead elements slipping through the Red Army lines and making contact with the diversionary force holed up inside. While the diversionary forces were always relatively light and quite incapable of taking on any great amount of Soviet soldiers in a straight-up fight, they were unusually well-equipped with detailed winter gear and the very latest in Wehrmacht armaments which allows them to engage an entire Soviet army, giving ground very reluctantly and falling back to the next heavily-fortified line a couple yards away. They are holding, the Oberstleutnant assures Rommel's representative, and know that with the majority of reinforcements and supplies flowing to the all-important effort in the west, the Soviets penning them in are sparingly supplied and vulnerable. Rommel, however, had already suspected this from doing one of his familiar personal reconnaissances but did not want to take any chances considering the overwhelming numerical disparity between the Germans and the Soviets. Therefore, his representative came bearing an older Enigma machine and verbal instructions for how to take advantage of the Allies' apparent aptitude with decoding the older Enigma ciphers.
On October 1st, Ultra obtained an intercepted conversation between Rommel and the commander of the diversionary force outlining a fairly detailed counteroffensive that was trademark Rommel, a bold assault where it seemed like madness to attack--but the British generals in North Africa were on hand to recount the numerous times when such "madness" had caught them looking the wrong way and sent them into retreat. The intelligence was deemed credible and a warning of the exact plan was passed to Zhukov who forwarded it to the northernmost commander. Aware of the opposing general's gifts, the Soviet commander duly shifted to meet the expected attack, digging in and preparing to ambush the "Desert Fox" as he drove into what he thought was a weakness. Rommel, however, had cleverly instructed his correspondent to disregard every word from his headquarters using the Enigma machine except for every third one and drafted his messages accordingly. The deception had drawn the Red Army dangerously far from the shelter of the dense Leningrad apartment complexes, allowing the Wehrmact in the city to sneak into the positions and haul weapons into the towering buildings. To keep the Soviet general looking the way he wished, Rommel committed some of his more impressive-looking assets, chiefly some mechanized infantry and armored cars, to the fake assault and the Red Army was feeling quite good about itself, throwing back what the soldiers believed to be the famed German general's assault, when the heavier armored cars and light tanks came charging out of the city, having cut off and brushed aside the thin line of infantry guarding their intended approach. The Soviets were well-equipped for fighting armored vehicles but the shock had just the effect Rommel had predicted: throwing aside their fears of the ever-present commissars, the soldiers broke and ran for cover, their cohesion shattered and with armored vehicles swarming everywhere, destroying anti-tank guns and gunning down soldiers that tried to organize a defense, the shattered cohesion turned into a panicked rout. Leningrad was effectively in German hands by October 4th with the Soviet manpower numerically large enough to drive them back out but so scattered and fragmented that even the tactic of trying to overwhelming German lines with pure numbers would be an exercise in futility; there were simply not enough men armed and supplied and able to go into the offensive. Worse still, Kesselring's forward elements had begun skirmishing with the Soviet lines around Helsinki and with his numbers, plus those that could be freed up from Leningrad as the Wehrmacht grip tightened, there was no way to prevent the combined Finnish and German garrisons from being released for offensive operations. The news for Zhukov seemed to be getting worse all the time but for the famed marshal, the disintegration of his northern front was the least disastrous situation before him.
As the separate armies of Halder, Rommel, and Guderian had advanced into the USSR, the largest bulk of the Red Army had been kept locked in combat with the Wehrmact. The Luftwaffe, reinforced with the advanced HS-129s and improvements upon the deadly HE-162 and ME-262 fighter-interceptors, German airspace was effectively closed to American and British heavy bombers, the genius of German aerospace and rocketry engineers paying rich dividends in the form of a grim harvest of veteran bomber crews and fighter pilots. As pressure eased, the tireless effectiveness of Albert Speer continued to augment production and the lull gave the Third Reich precious time to gather its nerve and its war machines for still greater feats. But most importantly, the air supremacy meant that even as they remained giving as good as they got on the ground, the Red Army was suffering almost daily raids on their remaining armor, on their supply dumps, on their lines of communications, and when German pilots were feeling especially vengeful, Ju-88s were dumping incendiary and conventional bombs on any Army concentrations they could find. Worse yet, Ju-390s were making their way into the prototype phase which meant that in a time not too distant, the Allies would feel the pain they had only been inflicting up to that time. They did, however, get a respite: regarding constant V1 and V2 bombardment to be a waste of production resources that could be better spent making turbojet engines and manufacturing heavy rockets for Raketenwerfer 56 batteries, the last vengeance weapon hit England on October 1st but the rocket research facility of Peenemünde, the Allies observed with a sense of dread, seemed to be getting more busy than it had been. All this added to rumors that the German offensives to the East were proceeding to actually liberate the various ethnicities of the Soviet Union severely harmed Soviet morale and conversely, encouraged German soldiers. Even more than their successes in the east, however, the arrival of reinforcements, especially crowds of WW1 veterans, gave the Wehrmacht its first taste in a long while of the sense of invulnerability they had enjoyed during the 1939-41 period.
With things running strongly in their favor, Rundstedt draws up a strategy of attack to drive the Red Army back into the USSR called "Fall Rot" (Case Red). It calls for a simultaneous assault by both 1st Army Group and 2nd Army Group on their respective concentrations of Soviet soldiers which they have been very slowly and deliberately encircling as the more dramatic advances are happening in the east. The new waves of reinforcements, especially the Judegruppe comprising a significant amount of veterans, convert this plan from being a possible victory to a very plausible one. On October 1st, just as Rommel is preparing his attack against Leningrad, Rundstedt pulls the trigger on the massive offensive and heads east to take more personal command of the battle in the north which will be the more difficult as it is where a majority of the Red Army is concentrated. With the pipelines from Romania open, the Luftwaffe has all the fuel it needs and not an hour goes by without Stukas and Panzerknackers diving in on any Soviet attempt to push back against the oncoming waves, supported amply by the relatively slow-moving but seemingly invincible Tigers and King Tigers. Focke-Wulf and Messerschmitt fighters roam the battlefield at will, watching the battle and conveying their observations to commanders on the ground, opportunistically strafing any Soviet soldiers they see, warding off feeble bomber attacks from Russian aircraft. And when it gets dark, the two armies fight by the light of 80cm rockets screaming down on the heads of the demoralized Red Army. It is the southern portion of the Red Army that begins to crack first, the growing panic fueled by the growing feeling of the Soviet soldiers that they are completely surrounded; although the Wehrmacht never gets anywhere close to doing this, the damage to the fighting spirit of the infantry is done. On October 3rd, the arrival of the heavy armor sent to ambush the bulk of Soviet armor arrives in the rear of the southern arm and the strain finally pushes that half over the edge: a full third of the Red Army disintegrates and flees towards the east with Manstein throwing every last wheeled or tracked asset he can after them to harry and drive them, trying to provoke a full rout while he combs out the foot infantry and sends them north. When Zhukov receives the dread news of Leningrad on October 5th, he is reading the panicked cascade of cables from generals in the northern half reporting that their commands are breaking and advising that he prepare to move east to avoid capture. With the fall of Riga on October 2nd and Kiev on the 3rd and reports of Hadler's forces overwhelming the scanty garrisons struggling to block capture of the USSR's primary oil sources, there is no choice and the Red Army begins the long retreat east.
