Chapter 20 Collateral Damage

Sitting on a stone on the lawn nearby, he reached out and took the linen handed over by Kirill and wiped the mud and dirt from his face. Malashenko, who had never thought that the German air attack would come so quickly and so fiercely, was there. He sighed softly and then asked.

"What are the casualties of the troops? Have they been counted?"

After listening to Malashenko's question, they couldn't help but look at each other. After thinking for a while, Nikolai, the electromechanical technician, finally decided to tell Malashenko the truth.

"Sir, our armored force tanks lost 8 BT7 and one T34 tank. Another T34 tank was overturned by the German aerial bomb shock wave and fell on the side of the road. The casualties are still being counted, but most of them have already It is estimated that all the crew members who were completely damaged"

He frowned after hearing the report from Nikolai. With his brows twitching, Malashenko, who was obviously suppressing his inner emotions, continued to speak.

"What about the infantry unit? What happened to the casualties of the accompanying infantry of that company!?"

In the Soviet Western Front in 1941, armored units were actually used more often as an infantry support weapon rather than as a grouped independent unit.

From this point alone, the Soviet army's armored combat ideas were roughly the same as those of the British and American Allied forces at the same time. They both used armored forces as an infantry support weapon to carry out technical weapons to assist infantry units in combat.

Compared with the German army, which has used the armored forces as an independent group arm and has applied blitzkrieg tactics to the point of perfection, the Soviet army is indeed one level behind in the operational thinking and strategic concepts of the armored forces.

The reason why T34 medium tanks and KV series heavy tanks with excellent performance are used as infantry auxiliary support weapons is that except for the new German blitzkrieg tactics that have just been born, other powers with armored forces in the world have not yet realized this. The unique tactics will lead the trend of future armored forces’ combat ideas.

The more important point is that General Pavlov himself, then commander-in-chief of the Western Front of the Soviet Union, had wrong and extremely stubborn views on the application concept of armored forces.

The commander-in-chief of the Western Front, who was even called the "Godfather of Soviet Tanks" at the time, had extremely high prestige and popularity within the Soviet army at that time. He also won the respect and trust of Comrade Stalin, the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, so much so that he would The Soviet Union's western gateway to Europe and the Western Front, the most powerful combat force in the entire Soviet army, were both handed over to him and entrusted with important tasks.

In addition, during the Great Purge period, when the entire Soviet military and political leadership was in turmoil and people were panicking, Pavlov managed to survive unscathed by relying on Stalin's trust and reuse of him, and even rose up the ranks to become a member of the Soviet armored force. leaders and mentors.

However, in the process of building the leadership of the Western Front, the most elite army group of the Soviet Union, this Soviet general who participated in the Spanish Civil War as a Soviet military adviser and had actual combat experience, uncharacteristically directly started to reverse the history of the development of armored forces. .

Pavlov mistakenly believed that armored forces would only participate in future wars as an infantry support and auxiliary weapon. The dominant land arms in future wars would still be traditional infantry and artillery, just like during World War I.

Under his leadership, the corps-level armored units under the Soviet Western Front were disbanded, and only the division-level tank units were retained as independent units.

In addition, the wrong armor tactics and combat concepts advocated and studied by Pavlov also made the Soviet Union's most powerful Western Front, even with its KV series heavy tanks and T34 medium tanks, a whole generation ahead of its opponent, the German army. Despite the advantages of excellent tanks, they were still divided and surrounded by the German armored forces, which benefited from advanced blitzkrieg tactics for an entire era in terms of overall strategy. They were killed and defeated in succession, abandoning their armor.

It is no exaggeration to say that the reason why the most elite Western Front Army of the Soviet Union was killed after the German army launched Barbarossa invasion and retreated continuously was because Pavlov, the commander-in-chief of the Western Front Army, had poor command and wrong decisions. The guiding ideology of armored force construction occupies a very critical position in the causal loop.

It was precisely because of the guiding ideology of armored force construction promoted by General Pavlov, who was the commander-in-chief of the Soviet Western Front at the time, that another Soviet motorcycle team accompanied Malashenko's troops during this air strike. The total strength of the chemical infantry detachment is the same as that of the armored force commanded by Malashenko.

In order to be light and simple in order to keep up with the rapid maneuvers of the armored forces, this Soviet infantry riding in trucks or even directly "mounted" on the engine compartment of the T34 tank did not carry much heavy equipment.

There were originally a large number of 37mm anti-aircraft guns and 76mm anti-aircraft guns in the Soviet motorized infantry divisions. Naturally, because of their large size and inconvenience to transport, none of them were carried. They only carried four guns on some truck bases. The combined Maxin anti-aircraft machine gun was better than nothing, thus laying the hidden danger for the subsequent rampage of the Stuka fleet when the Germans attacked.

The Soviet infantry, which were originally mounted on tanks and trucks in a dense formation without protection, became the focus of attention of the German Stuka fleet during air strikes due to the scarcity of anti-aircraft firepower.

Whether it's the 50kg small fragmentation aerial bombs raining down, or the barrage of two 92mm aviation machine guns from the Stuka's wings.

These Red Army soldiers, who were exhausted from the sudden air raids, suffered heavy blows and suffered heavy casualties in less than half an hour.

Although Pavlov's view of defining tanks as auxiliary weapons for infantry is a mistake in reversing history, from another perspective, it is an undoubted fact that tanks need infantry to cover them in group operations. The relationship is as interdependent as the lips are dying and the teeth are cold.

Without the support of infantry, tanks with narrow vision and forward-looking tanks can easily be destroyed by anti-tank grenades or even Molotov cocktails in the hands of infantry in close combat.

On the contrary, infantry who have lost the cover of tanks will also face an extremely difficult situation in battle. The result of being beaten into a sieve by various light and heavy anti-infantry weapons is a foreseeable final outcome.

Because of this, Malashenko, who had just taken a break from dizziness and gradually recovered, the next thing he thought about was the casualties of the infantry unit.

If these accompanying light infantry units suffer excessive casualties and are even wiped out, this will undoubtedly make matters worse for Malashenko's next operations.