Permanently Operating Factors - A Soviet LAN AAR

trekaddict: Sounds pretty good

ColossusCrusher:

Discomb: Thanks! Though we'll see if I can keep the quality up

Next update, Sunday.

16 kilometers east of Suwalki
May 4, 1942

The final vestiges of the German counterattack had been brutal. The battalion had been shifted in trucks three kilometers to the south, speed had been of the essence, when the final, punishing, German attack struck. Five German tanks and dozens of infantrymen disgorged themselves from a nearby village that was supposed to have been deserted. Mortar fire immediately bracketed the lead and rear trucks and five MG42s began spewing their hideous payloads. Conflagration ensued as trucks burst apart under fire and men were skewered upon the vectors of German bullets. Trucks overturned and dazed men scrambled all across the sudden battlefield for some sort of cover. Weak retribution fire was blown away by the ferocious German advance, the tanks advanced until they had broken the line of trucks in five different places, bulling their own paths through. It a crescendo of carnage, perfectly orchestrated by a veteran German unit.

Yet something had changed since the day before. The soldiers the Germans were attempting to rout were not the primordial warriors of the day before, easily led to victory and just as easily thrown back into defeat. They had seen things that shocked them, shamed them and stiffened them. Nikifor was no exception to this. A tank shell had wrecked the truck he and his squad mates had been sitting in, casting them out from that dubious protection to the wolves themselves as the truck burst into flames. Nikifor found himself behind the minor escarpment whose path the road closely traced. Laying still for a moment, recovering from his brief flight, he could hear horrified screams and the hideous churn and squeal of tank treads moving closer. His heart was fluttering, but not with fear. Not this time. Instead, he was feeling anger and hate. He was feeling an overwhelming need to prove to the enemy that they could not simply mop up entire Soviet units. He needed to retaliate.

Grabbing his rifle, he rolled over onto his stomach and peeked above the level of the road, finding himself behind an empty but intact truck. Moving deliberately but quickly, he lined his rifle up with one of the dark blobs that was spewing incessant fire and squeezed off a shot. He was rewarded as that machine gun halted firing, if only for a moment as the ammo feeder pushed away a German corpse and positioned himself to continue the onslaught. The tanks, however, were getting closer. With a crunch, one began pulverizing the truck Nikifor was hiding behind as it broke through the line of Soviet transports. Nikifor desperately scrambled away as the tank bludgeoned its way onto the Soviet side of the escarpment and turned, proceeding to enfilade the Soviet soldiers with its coaxial machine gun and main gun.

Suddenly Nikifor found himself clambering up onto the tank, how or when he had gotten up he could not remember. The world was reduced to a red haze through which everything was only an indistinct shape. Priming a grenade, he shoved it into the short barrel of the tank and jumped off, rolling away as quickly as he could. Through some incredible chance the main gun fired at that exact moment, and the subsequent explosion splintered it. Nikifor was dimly aware of Suvorin dashing past him, only a pistol in his hand. He jumped onto the tank himself and shoved the pistol into the driver’s view slit, pulling the trigger repeatedly until even Nikifor could hear the screaming from inside. Suvorin then jumped off and rushed away, screaming at Nikifor to get to his feet and back into the fight.

Like a beast, Nikifor threw himself back into the fight. His blood was boiling with the need to not only stop the Germans but to defeat them, slaughter them. He was only dimly aware that the battle was escalating. The Germans were shoving reinforcements across the flattened fields, eager to effect the destruction of the battalion. Soviet artillery thundered in the distance, adding to the incredible cacophony of battle. Explosive rounds were sundering the earth everywhere between the village and the road, yet Germans still slipped through the pillars of fire and earth, as did the harsh fire of their machine guns. Nikifor had no idea where the squad was. He chased after Suvorin, passing a German struggling weakly with a dagger embedded in his chest. Nikifor’s heart jumped into his throat as he lost sight of Suvorin in a geyser of earth caused by a mortar bomb, but then caught sight of him standing on another German tank, somehow finding a PPSh he was firing quickly across the barricade of fractured trucks.

Nikifor rushed to join him, knowing only that he would stand and live, or die and fall, with Suvorin. The chaos of battle did not allow for any greater ambition. He had just reached the tank when Suvorin, taking a break from his firing, yanked open the foolishly unlocked tank hatch and dropped a grenade into it before hammering it closed again. He leapt off the tank and fled the scene as fire poured from all its apertures, the grenade massacring the crew and causing the ammunition to detonate and the fuel to ignite. Nikifor dashed after him, shielding his face from the heat and force of the explosions as he passed the devastated tank. Smoke was hanging thick across the battlefield and he could only indistinctly see a running figure within it.

Suddenly a German appeared in front of Nikifor, shouting in German. Undaunted, unthinking even, Nikifor simply raised his rifle and beat the man’s face in with a single heavy blow without even slowing down in his run to catch up with Suvorin. He could see the shade in the smoke merge with another blur as the two grappled together in hand-to-hand combat. The two shadows went down, but then one staggered up and began running, toward Nikifor. Suddenly Suvorin was with him and then beyond, shouting to Nikifor that the Germans had to be stopped as he waved his pistol in one hand and his PPSh in the other. Suvorin then abruptly stopped and, turning toward the village, rushed past the trucks into the field. Nikifor dived through as well, to witness something he had never seen before.

The Germans were pulling back.

Only two tanks were visible but they were laying down smoke to cover their withdrawal, and the specters of German infantry disappeared behind it as well. Nikifor simply gaped. As he turned toward Suvorin’s standing form, a breeze caressed the scarred battlefield and dispersed the roiling clouds of smoke emitting from the burning wrecks of truck and tank alike. It was only then that Nikifor conceived of their accomplishment. As other Soviet defenders, dazed but triumphant, emerged from whence they had been fighting they too witnessed it. Corpses, twisted, blackened and primarily German, populated the broken landscape and lay thick everywhere around the road. Everyone was quiet, overcome by their triumph.

Weakly, someone began cheering. It picked up strenuously until the entire battalion was roaring their victory to the setting sun that was shading the battlefield crimson. It was their battlefield.

BritishImperial, trekaddict: Thanks!

Discomb: Maps will come again soon

Edzako: My drawing skills are about inversely proportionate to my operational skills. So whereas my operational art is supposed to hurt you and not me and indeed does so, anything related to art is supposed to not hurt anyone and my (especially hand-drawn) art/maps would probably hurt you

Sorry for the lateness, but this is my first time online since Sunday morning. We had a plumbing problem. Also, I'm not sure if I'll have an update for tomorrow but I'll try.

18 kilometers east of Suwalki
May 5, 1942

Despite the check to the final German counterattack, the Soviets kept withdrawing until they were further away from Suwalki than they had been two days before. The men had not slept since the night they had stormed the isolated German outpost, on the 3rd. Everyone was wilting with exhaustion, and Nikifor was no exception. The previous night had been spent locked in a hunt with a largely hidden enemy, the darkness hiding each side from the other until they happened to meet in localized orgies of fury. Men were abandoned where they fell and many isolated units did not receive the word to withdraw so that the battalion could take stock at sunrise. Nikifor had found himself toward the end of that long dark with soldiers he did not know, save for Afonka Basmanov.

There had been seven of them all told and they had lain down in a hollow near a field of tall grass to await the dawn that would aid them in rejoining their disparate parent units. Accidental noise had, however, brought the Germans down upon them. Grenades had scattered the frail cohesion of the group and the soldiers had scattered their own ways in the final chaos of the night. Nikifor had originally stayed with Afonka yet at some point in the pre-dawn Afonka had disappeared from his side. The next Nikifor remembered, he was pulling himself up from the hard ground as the sun cast its deceptively warm glow down upon him through the tall grass. Nikifor stood up straight yet the grass was taller than he was. Nikifor was alone, and hungry. He did not know where he was and decided simply to stumble along in an arbitrarily chosen direction until he found someone friendly.

At some point that morning the rumble of artillery commenced yet Nikifor was still lost. His world of lonesomeness was, however, shattered when he accidentally tripped over something. Struggling amongst the grass to retrieve his dropped rifle and turn around at the same time, he perceived that it was a corpse. It was Afonka’s corpse. Nikifor stared blankly at it, uncomprehending. It was simply too shocking a transition; Afonka was alive in one memory, dead in the next. Nikifor felt a need for tears yet none came; he was too exhausted and battered from the previous days to expend such energy on a secondary effort. Instead, he kept bulling ahead dully through the grass. Suddenly, the grass as well as himself were buffeted by a shockwave. A geyser of earth reached toward the languishing clouds before collapsing back down and pummeling Nikifor.

Realizing he was in danger, Nikifor suddenly sprang forward, his dullness of moments ago forgotten as yet another shot of adrenalin surged through his veins. He charged forward, bursting from the ocean of grass and stood at the edge of a precipice. The hollow was before him, the stiffened corpses of three within it. Further from it lay a trench, teeming with Germans and overseen by a tank. A shout of Teutonic surprise brought the Germans to stare at him; one lifted his rifle and aimed carefully. Nikifor simply stared in horror. A sharp report echoed through the ambient roar.

Nikifor was thrown forward.

Suddenly, a man toppled with an agonized scream right next to him. Boots pounded the ground as rank upon rank of men charged from the grass, screaming their ‘urrah’s. A rough hand grasped his shoulder and pulled Nikifor up, who looked and saw Suvorin’s grim face. Suvorin then disappeared, rushing forward toward the German trenches. Nikifor instantly saw what was occurring even as he again ran to catch up with Suvorin; it was a last-ditch assault. A wave of furious humanity was cresting toward the German breakwater and Nikifor was part of it, bellowing until his lungs were bursting. The Germans had barely time to bring their machine guns into action before the Soviets were upon them and the fight degenerated into a deranged close-quarters brawl.

Men blended together and tore apart, wielding bayonets, knifes and spades in brutal combat. Nikifor slid into the trench right at the feet of two men locked in a death grip, each unwilling to let go of the other until he was dead. Nikifor got up and jumped past them, sliding like an eel past individual duels until he found himself at the entrance to a communications trench toward the German rear, which suddenly began boiling with even more irate Germans. Nikifor fumbled with his rifle, throwing the safety off, and then fired from his hip at the German throng. He was rewarded with a scream as one of them collapsed, but then they were upon him. Nikifor was thrown aside and they charged into the wild melee. Men stabbed, kicked, punched, bashed at each other as each side kept feeding more men into the battle. Nikifor soon somehow found himself near the German tank, which was looking on helplessly for fear of hitting Germans.

Out of the blue, Suvorin flashed by and clambered onto the hapless tank. He forced a primed grenade into the driver’s window and jumped off, letting the vehicle shatter with a stunning explosion behind him. He disappeared back into the swirling fray, leaving Nikifor stunned and blinking, half in amazement and half in confusion. He was suddenly set upon by a German whose attack he automatically parried and booted him at the burning tank with red-hot armor plate. With a triumphal shout, the Soviets seemed to take care of the last of their enemies and rushed forward toward the next trench but the Germans there were ready for them and soldiers were scythed down in terrible gunfire. Men went to the ground and attempted to crawl forward, but could make no more progress without exorbitant casualties. Already shattered by the trials of the past days, the soldiers ground to a halt in the teeth of vicious German resistance.

They held their ground despite mortar fire until nightfall, then the Germans finally allowed them to creep away. The battle for Suwalki would be over soon after; the survivors trekked back to Grodno to lick their wounds. Despite going into battle fresh, the exhausted German defenders had outlasted them.

BritishImperial: Thanks! I thought it was a bit crap though, being stuck between two ideas so I couldn't do either terribly well. And the Russian tank exploits I actually stole from General Raus' memoirs, during the push toward Leningrad when he had an isolated bridgehead and came under attack from several Soviet divisions. A German NCO did actually jump up onto a Soviet tank and fire his pistol point-blank into the driver's slit until the tank withdrew

Discomb: Yes indeed

Unfortunately, it seems this one-update-per-week situation will carry on a little longer. Fortunately however, both my summer work and my initial spate of dissertation research will end with this week and I'll be more available for more frequent writing. Of course, by sod's law the week after that I'll likely not be terribly available (if at all) and then the week after that I'll be in England again, where uni will be like a vacation for me.

trekaddict: Hah, true, true

Delex: I'm anticipating that we'll get back to the bigger picture with the next update (on Sunday)

3 kilometers south of Roslavl
May 6, 1942

Vasilevskij coughed, somehow he had gotten a sore throat in the past couple days and it was aggravating him. Drawing a deep breath, allowing the humid summer air soothe his tortured throat, Vasilevskij turned away from the column of armor he was watching pass on its way southward and toward his aide, who was squatting and precariously balancing a bulky typewriter on his knees. Vasilevskij could not help but grin impishly at the sight before feeling sorry for the poor and no doubt tired man. Nevertheless, he would have to stay on duty until his compatriot came back from Roslavl, where Vasilevskij had sent him on an errand. Vasilevskij had been dictating an overall report for Stalin’s benefit of the past several days of general operations when he had turned to simply enjoy the spectacle of watching dozens of tanks and miscellaneous vehicles pass by the hill he was situated on. His presence drew cheers and ribald greetings from those who noticed him. Vasilevskij knew they were eager to go into battle and hoped to fulfill their wishes soon. But first, he had a report to dictate.

He had decided to dissect the report into three discrete segments for ease of reporting and reading. The first of these segments covered the events of May 3rd, the second May 4th and the third May 5th and 6th. Of these, the second segment would be by far the longest; May 4th was a very eventful day, more so than the two after it combined, whereas May 3rd would certainly be the shortest report. Vasilevskij smiled again, knowing that his aide would be glad of that. Vasilevskij coughed again, partially because of his throat but mostly to regain the young man’s attention. He was gratified to see the man’s head snap back to focus on him; he too had been watching the tanks.

“Read to me what you’ve already written, Pyotr.”

“Yes, sir. Quote: May 3rd witnessed only two events of any note. End quote.”

Vasilevskij nodded sagely. “Yes, very good. I will begin dictating again, are you ready to type?”

Pyotr nodded and Vasilevskij began, talking slowly so that he did not overwhelm his aide. “These two events occurred largely simultaneously, though separated by a great distance. Another battle for Suwalki began, augmenting its already confirmed, if dubious, distinction of being one of the most fought over towns in the border regions. The two mechanized corps of Timoshenko’s 1st Belarussian Front attacked two German panzer corps. These two mechanized corps were the 2nd under the command of Badanov and the 23rd under the command of Baranov V.I. Each consisted of two motorized rifle divisions and one mechanized rifle division. The two German corps consisted of two armored and one motorized infantry division each under the overall command of a Lieutenant General von Mackensen. Of these units, our two mechanized corps were fresh from the reserve whereas their German counterparts were exhausted from having been involved in constant battle already. Furthermore, each of the four armored divisions was estimated at having lost approximately ten percent of their full strength already in previous fighting, whereas their two motorized infantry divisions had already been hit even harder, one having lost nearly thirty percent strength and the other perhaps as much as forty percent. End. Did you get all of that, Pyotr?”

Pyotr’s fingers clumsily attempted to cover the entire keyboard as he furiously pounded it as quickly as he could. “Almost done, sir. There, I’m finished with that.”

“Good, I’ll continue now. The purpose of this attack was two-fold. Firstly, it would prevent the Germans from advancing to exploit the gap in our front that had been identified at the STAVKA meeting on the 2nd. Secondly, the reconquest of Suwalki would allow the 1st Belarussian Front to threaten the northern flank of the great German thrust, which is based in Lomza just to the south. End.”

Pyotr finished typing and then sighed, massaging his fingers.


Yet another battle for Suwalki.

“Are you ready to continue, Pyotr? Good, I’ll begin again now. The second event, occurring at the same time, was a German attack made in the Ukraine, in the area around Vinnitsa. The German commander was Field Marshal Ulex, and he commanded 27 divisions. This represented 9 German armored corps in the usual two armored and one motorized infantry division split. Ulex’s thrust was parallel to Knochenhauer’s thrust against Tolbukhin around Tarnopol, pushing northwards from Mogilevi Podolski against twenty-one defending divisions under the overall command of Field Marshal Koniev. Among the formations was his own 2nd Tank Army, as well as elements of the 2nd Ukrainian Front and perhaps some other formation. The situation is still very confused in that area. From these preliminary reports, it seems that the Germans are serious about turning northward and meeting up with their northern thrust. They are pivoting their forces on a wide front from an eastward axis to a northward axis. End. Do you have all that, Pyotr?”

“Almost, sir. All right, I have it all.”

“Good, I think I only have one more statement to make before it’s done.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir.”


The battle for Vinnitsa and the German pivot northward.

Vasilevskij chuckled. “All right, here it goes. Of course, if the Germans continue their northward push, their mobile units will run straight into the Pripet Marshes. End.”