On the eastern front, there was a busy scene on the positions of the 44th Infantry Division. German soldiers were sorting out their luggage. They received an order to retreat to the area west of the Dnieper River for defense.

Although their current location is only dozens of kilometers away from Kharkov, they still faithfully carried out the above orders and left this dangerous position before the Soviet troops on the opposite side attacked.

"Move quickly! Move quickly!" A German officer stood in the car and watched his busy subordinates transporting various arms. The degree of mechanization of the German infantry troops was not as high as that of the armored troops, and in most cases, manpower still had to solve the problem.

For example, now, the infantry of the 44th Infantry Division is helping the division's artillery transport large-caliber shells. These howitzers were transported from France. Although it seems a bit outdated now, these cannons have to some extent made up for the embarrassing situation of the German army's lack of large-caliber artillery at this stage.

Many German artillery soldiers are now using artillery from other countries, including French howitzers, Netherlands and Belgian howitzers. These artillery messed up the logistics transportation of German artillery, but they had to be used.

The German infantry life is not as easy as I imagined. These soldiers followed the armored troops and had to travel boring every day, and were also responsible for transporting a lot of other military supplies.

"Pile those tents on the carriage! Yes, pile them up! Fix them with a rope, don't fall off halfway!" A company commander of a baggage battalion was asking soldiers to put the tents used for camping on the carriage. For infantry, the equipment of automobiles is still too luxurious. Only the main mechanized regiment in the division has some equipment on the car.

Most troops are still using primitive equipment such as war horses, and some even have donkeys. They rely on these livestock to pull carts to complete the terminal transportation of most of the German troops. Don’t underestimate these carts and mule carts, they can be said to be the most reliable "Mercedes-Benz cars" for the German transport troops.

German tanks were running lightning and fighting forward. On the road behind, German infantry could only chase and chase with their legs. The soldiers were carrying rifles and wearing horse boots on the muddy land. They wanted to give the road to the car, so in most cases they could only stagger forward on both sides of the road.

Unlike armored troops who can pile up supplies on vehicles, most of their supplies have to be carried by themselves. There are raincoats, engineer shovels, gas masks, ammunition, and socks and underwear for changing. It is definitely not an easy task to rush on the vast plains with a pile of rags, so more soldiers are accustomed to discarding some less important things to reduce their burden.

In order to save these wastes, the troops had to use carriages to move forward with soldiers. One company was equipped with a carriage to load tents, engineer shovels and other supplies. Later, this method began to become more popular, so each carriage of the infantry had to help transport several shells to the artillery units of the subordinate troops, which could be regarded as making up for the disaster caused by the chaotic shell models to logistics supplies.

"It's really a mess, we retreat with an order from above?" A veteran cursed with a g43 rifle in his back and cursed: "How long has it been for hard work to get to this position? As soon as these noble men said casually, we will walk on several days."

Another young soldier smiled and piled up the ammunition box for machine guns onto the carriage beside him, and nodded: "No, we walked ten days before we got here, and dug trenches here for several days. As a result, we were ordered to go back to the place we set out a few days ago. It was really nothing to do."

With the order, a long infantry team began to set off. Several trucks rumbled across the earthy highway, rolling up dust in the sky, and drove towards the end of the distant highway amid the verbal abuse of German soldiers. More infantry were scattered on both sides of the highway, walking in groups of three or five in the direction.

Some soldiers sat around the carriage. Because of the battle for several days, their arms supplies had been consumed, so there were spare carriages used as tools to transport wounded soldiers. Of course, some thick-skinned soldiers also squeezed in, holding many rifles and smiling as the soldiers around them rushed on their way.

The soldiers around them put all their weapons in the car, so they were empty-handed. However, they still carried heavy luggage and rushed on both sides of the road with difficulty. For them, this war seemed to have nothing to do with the battle. Apart from rushing, they had no choice but to rush.

"The 44th Division is retreating. They are the closest troops to Kharkov. Soviet troops did not pursue them. They did not seem to expect our troops to retreat at this time." The staff officer handed over the documents from the front line to Guderian, who was retreating from Kharkov, giving up many occupied Ukrainian areas.

According to the combat deployment requirements of the General Staff, his G Army must retract the tentacles that were extended, deploy defensive positions along the Dnieper River, and shorten the defensive front. Although such a decision gave up almost one-third of the Ukrainian region, it can steadily deploy troops along the river and save limited troops.

"Our troops in Belarus are also shrinking and giving up positions near Minsk. Soviet troops did not pursue them either. The defensive counterattack in Poland has lost their temper. They dare not take the initiative to launch a counterattack in the short term." Guderian nodded. He had every reason to believe that the Soviet troops would not conduct counterattacks in the short term.

No general could bear the losses of more than 2 million soldiers in the short term, and launch a counterattack when the enemy retreated voluntarily - if it was a trap set by another German army, the Soviet Union would be completely doomed. The German army needed time to restore their vitality, and it was obvious that the Soviets also needed time to make up for the trauma caused to them by the war.

The large-scale flexible defensive positions arranged by the German army in Poland and the pre-ambush counterattack method adopted later left too many nightmares for the Soviet generals. Many Soviet soldiers felt their chills when they remembered the painful process of retreating hundreds of kilometers from eastern Poland. The German armored troops unexpectedly covered the attack and siege of Kiev, which was a classic defensive counterattack tactic. This process can be directly written into military textbooks.

During the entire Eastern Front for more than a month, German soldiers killed 700,000 Soviet soldiers at the cost of 110,000 and 280,000 injured, and captured 1.5 million, accounting for almost half of the troops deployed in the western Soviet Union. This brilliant result inspired the German side, and some generals even began to discuss privately, feeling that the head of state's war strategy against the Soviet Union was too conservative, and Germany was fully capable of capturing the Soviet capital Moscow before winter came.

This voice was deliberately ignored by the head of state. The guidelines of the German Supreme Command have always adopted the New Barbarossa plan formulated by Manstein, ignoring the military proposals for a large-scale invasion of the Soviet Union.

Berlin, the head of state, Akado looked at the older Augustus, and his heart was filled with endless emotion: "Prime Minister, I know those generals are muttering in front of you all day to expand the scale of the Eastern Front War. But you know our plans, we are indeed not ready to invade the Soviet Union."

Germany was indeed not ready to enter a full-scale war. Although its Western Front War seemed to have achieved a brilliant victory, there was also a problem: Germany won the entire war too quickly, resulting in the amount of some materials gradually hoarded in the war.

For example, the German team lacks cotton coats. The German senior management has been working hard to solve this problem. The officers of the Logistics Department tried their best to hoard cotton and turned the cotton into winter to transport it into western Ukraine, but it still did not meet the needs of a large number of national defense soldiers.

Don’t think that preparing cotton coats for 3.5 million troops is a very easy task. Everyone has received their own school uniforms in the school, which is just a 500-person clothing distribution project. If the scale is nearly 10,000 times and the area is so wide that it is hundreds of kilometers long, would anyone still think it would be an excessive thing to give the head of the logistics department a rank of general?

It is definitely a very logistical test for the army to spend the winter in the wild. The German army has not yet established a complete logistics supply guarantee system in the Soviet Union. If they attack Moscow all the way east, they will be taking out the elite German troops to gamble. And Akado himself knew that 80% of them was a gamble that had lost all his money.

When you are not sure, lengthen your supply transportation line and shorten your opponent's supply line. This is something that only fools will do. Attacking along the way is to lengthen the distance between your troops and the rear, the retreat of wounded soldiers, the replenishment of personnel, the transfer of materials, and the maintenance of weapons and equipment will become increasingly difficult. Under Moscow City is a finishing point, not the end of victory, but the end of the troops to hell.

"I know what the head of state means." Augustus nodded. The hard work over the past year has made his health worse and worse. Although the medical environment in Berlin can be said to be the best in the world, it still cannot stop the Prime Minister from aging: "So I recruited Blauxiche and others to hold an Eastern Front situation analysis meeting in Berlin, so that the military people will know that they are far from preparing for a huge war."

Augustus was a little sighing, and even Akado didn't know what he was thinking. In fact, what he sighed in his heart was that in 1914, why didn't Germany see the situation clearly like Akado? If there was such a person at that time, Germany might have gone further...

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The latest chapter of My Third Reich is released at high speed. This chapter is Chapter 540. If you think this chapter is not bad, please don’t forget to recommend it to your friends in QQ group and Weibo!
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