Scorched Earth
[size=+1]October 6, 1944[/size]
The precise sound of Wehrmacht boots and the clanking of halftrack treads echo through the quiet streets of Kiev as the capital of the Ukraine falls to the light divisions of Erwin Rommel while the great general himself is consolidating his victory at Leningrad. Under strict orders, damage to the city has been deliberately minimized, a task made easier by the fact that the Red Army had very little presence with the vast bulk of it trapped in the west and being mauled by the determined combined-arms assaults of Rundstedt and Manstein. Via the new Enigma coding machines that Wilhelm Canaris' technicians have completed, orders come to the detachment from Rommel to drive on to Moscow and begin probing the defenses; Rommel himself has gotten approval from Rundstedt to drive towards Arkhangelsk while Guderian swings down and makes the actual assault on the Moscow with his mechanized forces. With the Estonian capital of Tallinn already in German hands and Guderian detaching a brigade of tanks and motorized infantry to recapture Vilnius the three small Baltic republics will soon be secure enough for militia to be mustered from the liberated populations, armed with surplus small arms pouring out of Albert Speer's factories, and prepared to parry any attempt by the fleeing Red Army to dig in and fight a delaying action. As Guderian leaves Riga to drive towards Moscow, he receives word that the northern arm of the western Red Army has broken and is falling back towards the east, giving special urgency to his mission to complete the submission of Moscow before the Red Army can arrive and reinforce it.
The retreating Red Army brings issues into very sharp relief for the people of the Ukraine. In the first invasion, the Germans were brutal conquerers, merciless, almost worse than the NKVD for while Russia had been a part of their history, for good or ill, the Wehrmacht were foreigners and carried with them the frightening concept of Ukrainians as sub-humans that needed to be exterminated or driven from the intended living space envisioned by Adolf Hitler. The second invasion was a totally different thing, however, for this second wave was directed by professional generals who came bearing language deliberately Biblical and had treated them more like a people to be liberated rather than murdered or enslaved. In the wake of the fast invasion, the NKVD and the commissars were nowhere to be seen and for the first time in over 25 years, there was a real sense that the secret police weren't waiting in the shadows to make Stalin's designated enemies disappear. But the Red Army was moving east again and in their wake would come a reestablishment of Stalin's control and while the event has faded somewhat, the wounds of Stalin using famine as his weapon to punish the "kulaks" still throbbed. In short, as the triumvirate of generals had intended, the consensus was that it was easier to trust what the Germans were now doing rather than risk Stalin's police deciding that large numbers of them were "enemies of the people" for not resisting the Germans with sufficient vigor. The seeds of favor towards the Germans over the Russians had begun to sprout in the USSR's most strategically-valuable republic outside of the Caucuses (like the area of Kansas in the United States, the Ukraine is the breadbasket of the USSR) and for a leader with the mindset of Stalin and a cadre of enforcers who loyally carry out his will, the way to encourage loyalty among the unfaithful is quite simple; it is this response that the generals are counting on to push the Ukrainians into their camp and neutralize possible partisan activities during their advance.
In the meantime, however, there is much to do and little time to do it. In the far south, Halder is swinging along the border with Persia to cut off the best route the Allies have to send Lend-Lease aid to the beleaguered Soviet Union. The most welcome development in his eyes is that with Germany and their Axis partners on the ascendancy, Turkey has consented to allow shipping through the Bosphorous; with the Black Sea naval stations threatened by Halder, the Soviet Navy has abandoned the area to move through still-friendly waters controlled by England to more secure ports. Thus, when Halder's forces overrun the major port of Novorossiysk, he quickly receives a shipment of vehicles and weapons direct from the factories that gives his forces the heavy slugging power they had hitherto lacked. Having gotten as far as Sukhumi by October 12, he receives orders to begin conducted long-term interdiction of supply routes running from Persia into the Soviet Union; it isn't until several shipments of Shermans and other war materials vanish that the Allies realize that the supply route has been effectively closed to them and Lend-Lease aid slows to a trickle. In terms of relations between the Big Four, the timing could not possibly have been worse. The deception that Rommel had utilized to capture Leningrad had certainly produced a serious defeat for the Red Army but it had also produced another result, one that was entirely by design. Since the ULTRA program had been able to read Enigma messages for the entire war, the Allies giving the Soviets catastrophically bad information fits all too well into the Soviet paranoia about capitalist efforts to destroy the worker's paradise for their own nefarious ends. Objectively, the conclusion is utterly absurd but paranoia is a decidedly irrational thing and when the Lend-Lease shipments slow to a crawl, Stalin and his inner circle are already nursing suspicions that the sudden cessation of aid fuels. While the relationship is hardly broken, it is becoming strained and the Wehrmacht intends to do all they can to strain it further, looking towards the possibility of being able to broadcast their plans in the open and the Allies' warnings falling on deaf Soviet ears.
While all of this is churning in the background, Zhukov continues the withdrawal of his armies, driving himself to exhaustion trying to make sure that despite constant German attempts, the retreat is not permitted to become a rout. His exhaustion is furthered by the constant fear of the next person to approach his command vehicle being a courier from Stalin or worse, an NKVD agent to demand that he stand and fight lest he be relieved and possibly sent to the gulag. When the dreaded courier comes, Zhukov is astonished that the orders do not include relieving him of command; still further, he is being ordered to adopt a scorched-earth approach as he retreats to slow pursuit and despoil the territory of Germany and its allies. Despite all the reasonable provisions, though, it still contains a very forceful admonition to quickly find a place he can make a stand and institute a policy of "no step backwards." Zhukov is well aware that wherever his forces stop, there they will be enveloped and destroyed, especially as the air situation continues to slowly deteriorate. The easing of Allied bombing raids has allowed the Luftwaffe to begin replacing the Ju-88 light bomber with the significantly improved Ju-288 medium bomber which means that the bombing raids on concentrations of Soviet soldiers and armor are becoming steadily more severe with the introduction of the Dornier 335 Pfeil ("Arrow") to replace the older piston-driven fighters making the airspace ever more secure for large formations of bombers to operate in safely. By October 15, the Red Army is back at the USSR border with Poland at it is starting to seem increasingly possible that when Guderian seizes Moscow, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army both won't be far behind him; on October 16, Zhukov receives word that Rommel's light forces are within sight of the capital city but at the same time, receives his one piece of good news in months: fearing for the capital, Stalin has personally ordered the Far Eastern forces stripped to bare bones and every soldier that can be spared is entraining for a dash to Moscow. The deciding days will therefore determine if the Wehrmacht will finally gain Moscow... or if the Far Eastern forces can drive the Germans out of their homeland once again.
[size=+1]October 6, 1944[/size]
The precise sound of Wehrmacht boots and the clanking of halftrack treads echo through the quiet streets of Kiev as the capital of the Ukraine falls to the light divisions of Erwin Rommel while the great general himself is consolidating his victory at Leningrad. Under strict orders, damage to the city has been deliberately minimized, a task made easier by the fact that the Red Army had very little presence with the vast bulk of it trapped in the west and being mauled by the determined combined-arms assaults of Rundstedt and Manstein. Via the new Enigma coding machines that Wilhelm Canaris' technicians have completed, orders come to the detachment from Rommel to drive on to Moscow and begin probing the defenses; Rommel himself has gotten approval from Rundstedt to drive towards Arkhangelsk while Guderian swings down and makes the actual assault on the Moscow with his mechanized forces. With the Estonian capital of Tallinn already in German hands and Guderian detaching a brigade of tanks and motorized infantry to recapture Vilnius the three small Baltic republics will soon be secure enough for militia to be mustered from the liberated populations, armed with surplus small arms pouring out of Albert Speer's factories, and prepared to parry any attempt by the fleeing Red Army to dig in and fight a delaying action. As Guderian leaves Riga to drive towards Moscow, he receives word that the northern arm of the western Red Army has broken and is falling back towards the east, giving special urgency to his mission to complete the submission of Moscow before the Red Army can arrive and reinforce it.
The retreating Red Army brings issues into very sharp relief for the people of the Ukraine. In the first invasion, the Germans were brutal conquerers, merciless, almost worse than the NKVD for while Russia had been a part of their history, for good or ill, the Wehrmacht were foreigners and carried with them the frightening concept of Ukrainians as sub-humans that needed to be exterminated or driven from the intended living space envisioned by Adolf Hitler. The second invasion was a totally different thing, however, for this second wave was directed by professional generals who came bearing language deliberately Biblical and had treated them more like a people to be liberated rather than murdered or enslaved. In the wake of the fast invasion, the NKVD and the commissars were nowhere to be seen and for the first time in over 25 years, there was a real sense that the secret police weren't waiting in the shadows to make Stalin's designated enemies disappear. But the Red Army was moving east again and in their wake would come a reestablishment of Stalin's control and while the event has faded somewhat, the wounds of Stalin using famine as his weapon to punish the "kulaks" still throbbed. In short, as the triumvirate of generals had intended, the consensus was that it was easier to trust what the Germans were now doing rather than risk Stalin's police deciding that large numbers of them were "enemies of the people" for not resisting the Germans with sufficient vigor. The seeds of favor towards the Germans over the Russians had begun to sprout in the USSR's most strategically-valuable republic outside of the Caucuses (like the area of Kansas in the United States, the Ukraine is the breadbasket of the USSR) and for a leader with the mindset of Stalin and a cadre of enforcers who loyally carry out his will, the way to encourage loyalty among the unfaithful is quite simple; it is this response that the generals are counting on to push the Ukrainians into their camp and neutralize possible partisan activities during their advance.
In the meantime, however, there is much to do and little time to do it. In the far south, Halder is swinging along the border with Persia to cut off the best route the Allies have to send Lend-Lease aid to the beleaguered Soviet Union. The most welcome development in his eyes is that with Germany and their Axis partners on the ascendancy, Turkey has consented to allow shipping through the Bosphorous; with the Black Sea naval stations threatened by Halder, the Soviet Navy has abandoned the area to move through still-friendly waters controlled by England to more secure ports. Thus, when Halder's forces overrun the major port of Novorossiysk, he quickly receives a shipment of vehicles and weapons direct from the factories that gives his forces the heavy slugging power they had hitherto lacked. Having gotten as far as Sukhumi by October 12, he receives orders to begin conducted long-term interdiction of supply routes running from Persia into the Soviet Union; it isn't until several shipments of Shermans and other war materials vanish that the Allies realize that the supply route has been effectively closed to them and Lend-Lease aid slows to a trickle. In terms of relations between the Big Four, the timing could not possibly have been worse. The deception that Rommel had utilized to capture Leningrad had certainly produced a serious defeat for the Red Army but it had also produced another result, one that was entirely by design. Since the ULTRA program had been able to read Enigma messages for the entire war, the Allies giving the Soviets catastrophically bad information fits all too well into the Soviet paranoia about capitalist efforts to destroy the worker's paradise for their own nefarious ends. Objectively, the conclusion is utterly absurd but paranoia is a decidedly irrational thing and when the Lend-Lease shipments slow to a crawl, Stalin and his inner circle are already nursing suspicions that the sudden cessation of aid fuels. While the relationship is hardly broken, it is becoming strained and the Wehrmacht intends to do all they can to strain it further, looking towards the possibility of being able to broadcast their plans in the open and the Allies' warnings falling on deaf Soviet ears.
While all of this is churning in the background, Zhukov continues the withdrawal of his armies, driving himself to exhaustion trying to make sure that despite constant German attempts, the retreat is not permitted to become a rout. His exhaustion is furthered by the constant fear of the next person to approach his command vehicle being a courier from Stalin or worse, an NKVD agent to demand that he stand and fight lest he be relieved and possibly sent to the gulag. When the dreaded courier comes, Zhukov is astonished that the orders do not include relieving him of command; still further, he is being ordered to adopt a scorched-earth approach as he retreats to slow pursuit and despoil the territory of Germany and its allies. Despite all the reasonable provisions, though, it still contains a very forceful admonition to quickly find a place he can make a stand and institute a policy of "no step backwards." Zhukov is well aware that wherever his forces stop, there they will be enveloped and destroyed, especially as the air situation continues to slowly deteriorate. The easing of Allied bombing raids has allowed the Luftwaffe to begin replacing the Ju-88 light bomber with the significantly improved Ju-288 medium bomber which means that the bombing raids on concentrations of Soviet soldiers and armor are becoming steadily more severe with the introduction of the Dornier 335 Pfeil ("Arrow") to replace the older piston-driven fighters making the airspace ever more secure for large formations of bombers to operate in safely. By October 15, the Red Army is back at the USSR border with Poland at it is starting to seem increasingly possible that when Guderian seizes Moscow, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army both won't be far behind him; on October 16, Zhukov receives word that Rommel's light forces are within sight of the capital city but at the same time, receives his one piece of good news in months: fearing for the capital, Stalin has personally ordered the Far Eastern forces stripped to bare bones and every soldier that can be spared is entraining for a dash to Moscow. The deciding days will therefore determine if the Wehrmacht will finally gain Moscow... or if the Far Eastern forces can drive the Germans out of their homeland once again.
