The attack on important German targets in the Middle East, Turkey and the Caucasus began at 10 a.m. Gulf time. At this time, most of the German Air Force's fighter jets just returned to the airport. The frontline airport commanders who were panic-stricken after the air attack failed did not dare to spend any more unnecessary time.
Fighters and pilots had to report the news one by one and wait for the next order from the Air Force Command and the Supreme Command.
The army originally counted on the air force to destroy all obstacles on the offensive path. When they heard that the air strike failed, the officers and soldiers who were actively preparing for the war were heartbroken. The self-confidence that had been full of them suffered a huge blow. Many people suddenly became worried about the prospects of the war.
stand up.
Raqqa City is located at the confluence of the Baylih River and the Euphrates River, more than 20 kilometers west of Lake Assad, the largest freshwater lake in the Middle East. The area is full of ravines, has developed agriculture, and has convenient water transportation. It is a famous land of fish and rice. However, since the Three
Beginning in the 9th year, years of war continued, and the Japanese army looted, massacred and enslaved the people many times after the occupation, resulting in most of the land being barren and the urban population plummeting from more than 30,000 to more than 2,000.
In a two-story earth-and-stone building with a West Asian architectural style near the mosque in the east of the city, Marshal Rundstedt, commander of the German Wehrmacht's Middle East Army, was standing in front of a stone wall, looking up at the staff marking the map built by the Anjia Army.
The conditions of the barrier mainly include the depth of the barrier and the location of the exposed anti-aircraft guns.
Next to Rundstedt, Marshal Lister, commander of Army Group A, and Marshal Manstein, commander of Army Group B, looked serious. After the news of the failed air force raid reached the headquarters, every general knew what was going to happen tonight.
The attack will be a head-to-head battle.
Army Group A consists of General Kleist's First Armored Group and General Ruf's Seventeenth Army. Their mission is to break through the solid defense line built by the Anjia Army along both banks of the Euphrates River, along the river and the East-West Railway.
Main line, direct to Baghdad; Army Group B
Commanded by Marshal Manstein, it consists of General Huth's Fourth Armored Army, General Weikes's Second Army, and General Paulus's Sixth Army. Its mission is to break through the Tigris River defense line and cover Army Group A.
’s northern flank, while echoing the operations of the Turkish cluster.
Behind the two army groups a and b, there is a second line of troops, consisting of the Hungarian Second Army, the Italian Eighth Army, the Romanian Third Army and the Bulgarian First Army. In addition, in the Damascus area, there is also the Zal
General Mutter's Eleventh Army and the Romanian Fourth Army can cross the Shamiya Desert at any time and raid Baghdad from the direction of Anbar.
The total strength of the entire Middle East Army is sixty-two German divisions, including fifteen armored divisions, ten motorized divisions, and forty-eight divisions of client state troops, with a total of 3,500 tanks and assault artillery, and 20,000
Five thousand cannons and mortars, and more than three thousand combat aircraft.
Looking at the depth of the barriers and the increasing number of firepower points on the map, Manstein said with some worry:
"According to the feedback from the air force, the enemy's border barriers not only have three to four layers and spread for more than ten kilometers, but each fortress is extremely strong and 500-kilogram-level aerial bombs cannot cause fatal damage to them.
At the same time, the number of anti-aircraft guns deployed by the enemy was beyond imagination.
"So far, in the entire air strike operation, the number of crashed fighter planes during the attack on the border barrier and subsequent flight over the area has reached an astonishing number of more than 900. Once so many anti-aircraft guns are fired horizontally, it will be difficult for our tank troops to achieve a breakthrough, and the war will
It will turn into a wall war of World War I!”
In this time and space, since the war in Ukraine and the Don River was going smoothly, Rundstedt was not stripped of his position as commander of Army Group South by Hitler. This year, he and Marshal Werner von Blomberg worked together to defeat Stalingrad.
, he enjoyed great success for a time and was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross again.
After the secret transfer of Army Group South to the south, Marshal Rommel, who was originally responsible for the Middle East and African theaters, took full charge of the African war. He took over the entire Sudan in one fell swoop, eliminated the allied forces in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, and pushed the front line forward.
to Tanzania and Congo.
Since a large number of enslaved Soviet and Arab people were used to build railways and roads, which fully ensured material supplies, Rommel worked steadily and advanced step by step. If there was no external help, Rommel was very hopeful that he would approach the South African border in the coming year and achieve his "desert"
The prestigious name of "Fox".
As the various units involved in the war on the Eastern Front were gradually put into place, Army Group South was renamed the Middle East Army, Marshal Bloomberg's Caucasus Group was renamed the Turkish Group, and the first section of Army Group Center, which quietly moved south after making decisive progress in the Battle of Moscow,
Adapted for Caucasus cluster.
In this war, the Middle East Army is responsible for the southern front, the Turkish cluster is responsible for attacking from Van in eastern Turkey to the northwest border of Persia, while the Caucasus cluster is heading south from the Caspian Sea coast, directly into Tehran, and at the same time, its troops are directed towards Central Asia. If conditions permit,
In this case, it can penetrate directly into Afghanistan from the east coast of the Caspian Sea, cutting off the retreat routes of the Anjia army in the Mesopotamia plain, the Arabian Peninsula and Persia.
Rundstedt pondered for a long time and said to Lister and Manstein: "Tonight we will conduct a saturation bombardment for two hours, and then conduct a tentative attack to find out the enemy's situation...
.I have a vague feeling that, just like the failure in obtaining intelligence about the Soviet Union, a lot of our intelligence about South China is also out of date! Just like the scene that just happened, who knows what kind of weapons the other side actually used, which actually allowed us to launch a super-large-scale air attack
The raid failed?"
Lister was born in the 1980s. He joined the army when he was eighteen years old. He graduated from the Bavarian Military Academy at the age of thirty-two. He served in the Bavarian Second Army during the last European War. After the war, he served as a military commander in Dresden.
The principal of the Don Infantry School and the division commander and corps commander of the Wehrmacht held a neutral attitude toward the Nazi Party. Five years ago, Lister was responsible for the invasion of Austria and the Czech Republic.
The commander of the German Army Group in the Sudetenland of Slovakia, he later served as the commander of the Fourteenth Army and participated in the invasion of Poland. The following year, he was appointed the commander of the Twelfth Army, participated in the attack on France, and was promoted to field marshal. In 1940, Lister led the army to invade Yugoslavia and Greece.
He then served as the commander of the Balkan occupation forces. This time he was directly transferred to the Middle East as the commander of Army Group A.
Lister, who had never experienced the cruelty of the Soviet-German battlefield, said with great confidence:
"The entire border between the enemy and ourselves is more than 2,000 kilometers long. It is absolutely impossible for the enemy to deploy defenses at all locations, especially in the arid desert areas of the south. Due to the lack of drinking water, the enemy cannot defend for a long time. Therefore, it seems that
The enemy's impregnable defense line is actually full of loopholes. Under my absolutely superior strength, the enemy's collapse will be inevitable!
"However, it is good to conduct a tentative attack tonight. In addition to checking the enemy's details, it can also attract the enemy's attention to the frontal battlefield, allowing us to carry out flank maneuvers! We must be convinced of the fact that what we just experienced
The Nanhua Army, which has been involved in the war in East Asia, will never be able to send so many troops to the Western Front to make up for the leaks. As long as one breakthrough is made, the enemy's entire front will be placed under our front."
Rundstedt nodded appreciatively and was about to speak when suddenly a shrill air raid siren sounded.
Lister glanced out the window and said nonchalantly: "The enemy's air force must not be outdone and is preparing to launch a counterattack across the border...Although we lost more than 3,000 fighter planes in today's operation, we
There are still more than 9,000 fighter planes, occupying absolute air superiority. The enemy's air force is like a moth flying into a flame, bringing about its own destruction!"
Rundstedt strongly agreed with this view and had no intention of evacuating at all.
Manstein was frightened for no reason. The keen sixth sense he developed on the battlefield prompted him to grab the hands of Rundstedt and Lister and said loudly: "No matter what, since the air raid siren sounds,
, we should hide for a while..."
Without any explanation, Manstein asked the staff in the war room to pack their things quickly, and then he carried the two marshals and ran out quickly. Manstein followed the struggling Rundstedt and Lister and entered.
There was a newly built air-raid shelter more than 200 meters away. I took the elevator to the second underground floor and the uneasy feeling in my heart disappeared.
Lister was very annoyed and was about to say something sarcastic when he suddenly heard a huge explosion. The whole ground was shaking like a sieve, and the sand and dust fell down in a "swish".
The huge shock wave coming from the ground actually caused the electric light above the basement to explode, causing panic in the air-raid shelter.
After about two minutes, the earth returned to calm, but the entire basement was filled with smoke and coughs.
I don't know who lit the candle, and the light returned to the basement.
Manstein held on to his crooked military cap, patted the dust on his body, and walked quickly outside. Due to the huge vibration that caused the elevator to malfunction, Manstein walked through the stairs to the air-raid shelter on the ground floor, and was immediately attracted by his eyes.
The scene was shocking - the headquarters they had been in before had been razed to the ground, and the two-story West Asian-style building made of strips of stone had turned into ruins. It was hard to imagine what they would be like if they were still inside at this moment.
What does it look like.
Lister came to Manstein and was stunned when he saw the miserable state of the headquarters and his face turned pale.
Rundstedt, who was helped by his staff to the entrance of the air-raid shelter, was thankful to have survived the disaster. He pointed at the ruins and asked puzzledly: "What weapon caused this? Could it be the enemy's high-altitude bomber? Our air force and air defense
What are the soldiers doing?"
After Rundstedt finished speaking, while everyone was still thinking, there was another loud noise from the northwest.
The three marshals looked at each other and immediately and cautiously came to the high ground behind the air raid shelter. They saw a huge mushroom-shaped smoke cloud rising in the direction of the airport, thick smoke billowing, and explosions one after another.
Just as the three of them looked at each other in horror, another loud noise was heard from the military camp where the First Armored Group was stationed on the banks of the Euphrates River in the south of the city, and another huge column of smoke shot straight into the sky.
At this time, the communications staff quickly reported that both the airport and the military camp were attacked by a mysterious missile with a flaming tail. Among them, the missile at the airport happened to hit the oil depot, causing the aviation fuel to catch fire and explode, and the sputtering flames ignited the ammunition.
warehouses and hangars, and then violent explosions destroyed 77, 88 aircraft on the airport, which is why the momentum was so great.
The missile that was aimed at the military camp missed the camp by more than 30 meters. Although it also caused the death and injury of nearly a hundred officers and soldiers, relatively speaking, the loss was much smaller.
At this time, the three of them were almost certain that Nanhua had an ultra-long-range attack weapon. Manstein suddenly remembered an experimental weapon being carried out in China, broke out in a cold sweat, and said loudly:
"This is an offensive rocket. When I communicated with SS Commander Marshal Reinhard Heydrich, he told me that we in Germany are developing this kind of weapon at the rocket base in Peenemünde. The latest
The A-4 rocket has been successfully developed, and the previous model A-3 rocket
The arrow weighs 750 kilograms, has a diameter of 0.7 meters and a length of 6.5 meters. It can carry high-energy ** warheads and shoot to targets more than 100 kilometers away. Obviously, Nanhua has mastered this weapon and has put it into practical use. Now
They're attacking us with rockets like this!"
Rundstedt suddenly realized:
"Are you referring to the research conducted by von Braun and von Braun's team? Dornberger was still a captain when he was ordered to accept the task of leading the development of rocket weapons. Later, the head of state appointed him to the Peenemünde Rocket Development Center and
The commander of the test base is fully responsible for the rocket development, production and troop training of the Ordnance Bureau.
"As far as I know, the intended target of the A4 rocket is a range of 175 kilometers, a maximum shooting height of 80 kilometers, and a payload of 1 ton. The enemy's weapon may have a range and power that far exceeds our A4 rocket. It seems that
Our intelligence agencies have seriously failed in their duties and are not even aware of such important information."
Manstein said: "I suggest reporting this situation to the head of state immediately... Alas, the enemy has this weapon and can attack us from a long distance, but we are unable to fight back. Now things are difficult to handle.
!”
"Oops!"
Lister's face changed drastically and he said urgently: "Since the enemy can attack us more than 250 kilometers away from the national border, then naturally he can attack any target within this distance... The Baku oil field is in danger.
!”
Rundstedt and Manstein looked at each other, feeling a hint of fear in the other's eyes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
ps: Since this chapter contains quoted information, I wrote more than 900 words. Please don’t say that the emperor cheated money!