Beethoven1
Posts: 754
Joined: 3/25/2021 Status: offline
|
End of Soviet Turn 1 --- Late on the evening of June 22, 1941, after Operation Barbarossa had been in progress for a day, Comrade Stalin was cowering in his dacha and was not responding to messages from the Red Army and VVS high command. But by this time, it was already apparent that the situation was grim and that a disaster was unfolding. Something simply had to be done, so General Zhukov called a quiet and informal meeting of STAVKA officers. Over the course of the day, it had become clear that the situation at the front was one of total chaos, with communications thrown into total disorder. Though STAVKA could issue orders, they were often not be received by commanders on the ground, and if they were received, were often so delayed that they were no longer relevant to the actual situation on the ground (if they were relevant in the first place). When everyone was present, Zhukov began as follows: "Comrades, we will begin with the air. We must complete the air phase of the turn before the ground phase can begin, and after that we cannot and will not reconsider the air war for the rest of the week." Many of the officers looked at Zhukov in puzzlement and confusion at this statement and wondered a bit about his sanity, but given the stress and extreme circumstances of the day, let it slide. Zhukov continued: "All the level bombers in the Soviet Union shall be gathered under the auspices of General Gorbatsevich's Long Range Air Command. General Gorbatsevich: I have a simple and clear directive for you: Bomb early, bomb often. And in particular, bomb the German Panzer divisions. The time to use our bombers will be over the coming days while they penetrate deeply into our territory, before too many of the German fighters can be re-based to bases within Soviet territory; this way we can bomb them without being shot down by their fighters. In addition, in general the time to bomb is in the early turns, when the weather is clear. Within a few months, the weather will worsen and at that point, both we and the Germans will fly a lot less. If we don't use our bombers and get them shot down now, rather than later, we will enter winter with a huge stock of excess bombers just sitting there uselessly." "Comrade General Gorbatsevich, I further direct you to bomb, speciifically, the units, and not to interdict them. You may be wondering, why not interdict them, surely this would slow down their pace of advance into our territory? Well, I conducted some tests earlier today and determined that by bombing Panzer divisions, we can interrupt many of the divisions' elements. If we bomb them sufficiently heavily, this can have an effect of reducing the German movement points on their Panzers by up to 16-17 movement points." By this point, the looks of puzzlement and confusion lining the countenances of the officers were universal. Zhukov's behavior had simply become too much to fathom. General Gorbatsevich sheepishly raised his hand and interjected, "I am sorry, Comrade General Zhukov, I don't understand what you mean at all. What are these 'movement points' you speak of?" Zhukov brusquely responded, "Well, Comrade General Gorbatsevich, I have determined that reality is probably not quite what you think it is. You may find it hard to believe, but we live in a computer simulation... And... well, don't you concern yourself with that or with the details. Just listen to what I say and follow my orders." General Gorbatsevich again interjected, "But, Comrade Zh..." Zhukov cut him off before he could begin, and began to raise his voice. "Comrade General, you are wasting time while the Fascist invaders are annihilating our troops at the front, at a time when we must mount a coordinated and quick response. You will listen and follow my orders. If you do not, I will tell Comrade Stalin that you betrayed the Soviet Union and are responsible for the disasters presently unfolding. You don't want to find out what the consequences of that will be." The expression on Gorbatsevich's face turned somber, and he quietly murmured, "Yes sir." Zhukov: "Now, where were we. Ah, yes. You will bomb the German Panzer divisions, and shall not under any circumstances interdict them. Interdiction basically just reduces admin movement for the most part (if even that), and that will have much less of an effect than reducing German Panzer division movement points from, for example, 40 to 24. And moreover, interdiction would only hamper the movement of the Germans within territory that they already conquered, not without territory that we still hold, and the main thing we want to slow down are the leading Panzers, not the infantry behind them. Plus, if you get lucky when bombing the units, maybe your bombs will even destroy an AFV or two. Mostly, you will bomb the Panzers in this manner. However, you will also bomb the railyard in Minsk and the port in Riga to try to worsen German logistics slightly." Thus began the Great Soviet Level Bomber Mass-Suicide of June 1941. Over the course of the next week, Zhukov monitored the official STAVKA Air Execution Phase Summary closely. Many hundreds of level bombers flew tens of thousands of sorties over the course of the week, resulting in only minor direct damage to the German Panzer divisions: In total, 838 Soviet planes and 704 pilots were lost in this first week of relentless bombing: This brought total air losses, including the German air phase, to 2,800 pilots and 3,703 planes: In total, the tens of thousands of Soviet bomber sorties had only killed barely more than a thousand German troops, destroyed 34 guns, and destroyed 15 AFVs. However, Zhukov rested secure in the knowledge that the German Mobile division MPs would be lower: Zhukov looked at reports from individual battles and noted the German ground elements that had been disrupted by the bombing, secure in the knowledge that all this bombing would (or should) be lowering the German movement points significantly and should greatly diminish their capacity to continue forward the subsequent turn. For example, here was one single mission of 368 bombers launched against 1 leading German Panzer division. There were 8 other such missions against just that single division alone, in addition to all the others against the other Panzer divisions (and in some cases motorized divisions): ut that was in the future. This was now, the STAVKA meeting was ongoing, and with the Air Phase dealt with, General Zhukov still had to coordinate the land phase. While the front was in chaos, fortunately communications with Soviet reserve troops was easier to manage, and coherent orders could be given and followed (though coordination was still difficult, given the nature of the surprise attack). General Zhukov continued: "Now to the situation on the ground. Vitebsk and Smolensk are under direct threat, given the collapse at the front and the imminent fall of Minsk. Accordingly, we will send all of our best troops from across the Soviet Union to the Vitebsk-Smolensk sector and the Land Bridge between the Dniepr and Dvina rivers. And we shall do this immediately, right away." A staff officer got up out of his chair, looked at Zhukov, picked up his papers, and appeared to be intending to leave the meeting. As he was doing this, he said, "Yes Sir! I will draft up the orders to send all the elite, high morale mountain divisions, our best Mechanized Corps, and the rest of our best trained and best equipped troops, and have it sent out without delay!" Comrade General Zhukov motioned the officer to sit back down, and quickly replied, "No, no, no! You misunderstand! I will paraphrase the Capitalist Statue of Liberty:" "Give me your tired, your poor, your NKVD border guards Your huddled airborne brigades yearning to be thrown - without proper anti-tank equipment - directly in front of German Panzer divisions, Send the small anti-tank brigades, preferably with as few guns and as few men as possible. Send your unready, the homeless, beaten up tempest-tost routed divisions with only a few thousand unready routed men to the Land Bridge, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Here's a screenshot of the Land Bridge at the end of the Soviet turn, but before I re-assigned generals. This allows you to see where the troops came from, e.g. there are paratroopers and NKVD border guards railed up from the Southwestern front and from the Kharkov military district, etc. I would have also sent the paratroopers from the Southern Front etc, but unfortunately they were locked. As an example, an yellow-colored unready division that had been previously routed from the Northwestern front, with a CV of only 0.01 is selected: There are also some higher quality divisions, in particular I put some better divisions on the front every-other-hex because there was a line of swamp and rough terrain there, so this could actually potentially stop some attacks with decent defensive CVs, and could not be bypassed without ZOC locking any divisions that tried to go right through the Land Bridge, and there are also some higher quality tank divisions etc behind the Dniepr and the like. But the mass of the Land Bridge defense wall is formed from low quality troops. Because, if you are going to rout, as basically almost anything is in the first turn or two, it is probably better that the units that do the routing be low strength and/or weak units, since those can lose fewer maximum men. But at the same time, they force a battle that drains German MPs if they attack them, and can create a combat delay. In the Bialystok pocket, insofar as orders could be given (not much, given the non-existant communications), units were ordered to run to the east and try to block the rail line connecting Brest-Litovsk and Minsk: In the north, such defenses as were practical were set up. It was not much, but it seemed that most likely Germany would be focusing primarily on Moscow and the center (not Leningrad), so the priority was on forming the Land Bridge defense. I wanted to try to defend the Baltics, at least to some degree, because I expected that Germany/Bread might not really focus on trying to take Pskov and go that direction to Leningrad, but he might still try to take the Baltics in order to capture the ports (and as many rail lines intact as possible) to help his logistics. In addition, there is a lot of swampy-foresty terrain there which is suitable for defense, if you can just get units there. In my previous games, I didn't defend the Baltics basically at all, which is another reason to defend there so as to not be too predictable. However, on turn 1, the most you can really get there is a light screening force: In the south, I basically just ran away, the reason being that it is not really possible at this stage to defend on clear terrain, and in addition I was pretty sure the main German focus would be on Moscow. It was important to get as many troops into the center-north as quickly as possible, and that meant stripping the Southwest Front. Pretty much every division possible was either railed out to the north or transferred to reserves: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/852343679913426945/855574654802198548/unknown.png Here is the Gomel area, since I didn't really show it in the previous screenshots: And here is the south. In the part south of Proskurov, I also transferred to reserves and railed units out to escape, but I sent a good # of the railed out units to try and protect the southern front, and hopefully to be able to reduce how much of it would be encircled on the 2nd turn while it was frozen. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake, as we will see with the next turn, I don't think I really saved much of anything extra. Some of those NKVD border guards you can see on rails would have been useful further north against the main center German Panzer thrust (even if it may have taken them more than a single turn to get there in some cases). Now, as far as transferring units to reserves goes... Where exactly was I transferring them? I did transfer some divisions to the National reserve, in particular high morale ones that I wanted to redeploy to the center-north. However, we are playing with Theatre Boxes on this time, so I also decided to transfer some extra divisions to both the Transcaucasus and the Far East. 3 mech and 3 tank divisions (all with relatively low morale) are headed to the Transcaucasus, and will arrive there on Turn 3: And there are also 8 tank divisions which are being transferred to the Far East, set to arrive on Turn 5. These (and the Transcaucasus ones) are all low morale divisions from the southern part of the map (also includes some that were in the North Caucasus): When they arrive, they will be traded out mostly for other non-mobile units. Part of the reason for doing this is to hopefully lose fewer battles with tank/mech divisions. If Germany beats an infantry division, it should capture fewer trucks than if it beats a tank division, which should both hurt German logistics later on, and also help mine. Many of these divisions may come back, however, but that will be later on when they have full morale, maybe for the Winter Offensive for example. In the meantime, we will be fighting with fewer tanks and more infantry (at least, more once replacement troops can be transferred back from the theatre boxes). It will take a while for them to transfer, but regardless, I would not particularly want to be fighting with these low morale mobile units until they started to recover higher morale in any case. Basically this means I won't be defending the south too much. In an ideal world I would like to defend it more, but I think it is just not defensible in the early turns at all, and there is basically no possible way to avoid losing places like Kiev, Odessa, and Sevastopol early. That is partly because rivers seem to be a lot weaker defensively than forest/swamp/rough terrain, partly because of bugs with fortress cities that make Odessa/Sevastopol apparently not work as well as they are designed to do so, and partly because clear terrain in general is obviously the least defensible terrain. So therefore, in effect my strategy is to try to slow down and stop the German advance in places where it is possible (the north and the center) as quickly as possible, and get entrenchments going there with a continuous and increasingly strong defensive line there. And then once Soviet troops are stronger, I will start defending more in the south. Defend where you can defend. Abandon where you can't defend, and the only thing in those areas (the south) that can stop the German advance within the first 10 turns or so are really the German logistics. I used my turn 1 AP on making the Western Front an assault front and on building 3 depots in the center-north area. Unfortunately, the Western Front HQ was trapped in the Bialystok pocket during turn 1, which meant I could not assign new troops outside of the pocket to the Western Front. I had planned on making the Western Front an assault HQ. I think that if you are going to make fronts be an assault HQ with Soviets prior to winter at all, you should try to do it as early as possible, because then the troops fighting under that front will start gaining CPP more quickly from turn 1. The main disadvantage of Assault Fronts is you can't dig higher level defensive fortifications, but on the first turn or two that is not a drawback at all on the first turn or two, because you don't even have level 1 forts yet. So may as well start getting the benefit while it is a pure benefit. Since the Western Front was trapped, I considered making a different front be the assault front instead (e.g. Northwest), but I am hoping that Pavlov will get killed by Stalin and replaced for free by a better front commander general soon. Finally, here is a screenshot of the land bridge after I re-assigned generals. Many of the better troops near the front on the good defensive terrain (plus a few de-trained paratroopers) have Zhadov as a corps commander, and are under the Western Front: Purkayev commands many of the other best troops (yellow northwestern front), since he is the best general I started with for free (not sure if you always start with him, or maybe it is randomized?), and has the 7th mech corps under him (4.0 skill corps command, not bad by Soviet turn 1 standards) commanding the best tank/mech divisions behind the Dniepr. Also you can see I cut off 3 divisions that were furthest forward. If you combine the effects of the bombing reducing MP plus them being cut off from supply, that should hopefully limit their MP significantly on Turn 2:
|