Quickie this morning...
Chapter Twelve
Early June '41
After nationalists switched sides, it was inevitable the Allied would turn to north and strike to France, while it was uncertain if they would respects Vichy's neutrality, Germany could hardly affect that, and chose to only take advantage of the fact, that for time beeing, they seemed to be happy to leave it alone.
Thus 3 of Germany's brand new panzer divisions, with the double motorized infantry section, were sent to hold the passes in Pyrenees, the command in France was sure they would be enough, to hold the Americans there to infinity, with backup from the VIII. Armeekorps holding ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle, as well as providing second line of defence, should the Pyrenees defence fail...
Alas, British were not quite happy to duke it out on those Pyrenian slopes, instead, they staged a landing south of Bordeaux, swiftly cutting the german divisions to south out of supply and taking port of Bordeaux from the single division defending it.
Now this was highly worrisome turn of events, and required drastic action, which was unfortunately slightly delayed, as the initial thought was that they would not be able to take the port, by the time they did, plans were drafted to get a second line of defence to barricade them from entering france, and to somehow extricate my divisions from south.
First was to send the single Luftwaffe transport wing in existence to fly airdrop missions to the troops cut off. Secondly divisions defending coast of English channel and few from Brest were dispatched to south, in hopes they could reach North side of Charente, or at very least, banks of Loire.
The divisions retreating from pyrenees were harassed by chasing Americans, and eventually failed to push through to north to connect with rest of the army, and transport wing got shot down, after succesfully supplying them for a month, all this had done, was delay the inevitable. On north, things were slightly better, the divisions managed to put up a shake line on Charente, and at least slow down the british, alas, they are sneaky people those british, and staged yet another landing, behind this defence line aswell, and forced a retreat to Loire, fighting retreat, certainly, retreat nonetheless.
At this point, I was starting to catch up on the british tactics, but there was no force in France that I could use to push back the invasion force landing behind lines, or if there was one, it was the one encircled in Champagne.
On July 6th, the situation was approaching serious in west front;
As you can see, the Line at Loire is not ready, and will almost inevitably get encircled, and it would, forcing a fast paced retreat all the way to Seine, this line of defence was better prepared, having some actual fresh divisions raised to from french volunteers to boost up the line, and and infantry corp was expected to manage redeployment from east in time to support this line, after all, there would be only the Maginot line left before German proper should this fall.
So, what's going on in east then, with all this distraction going on in west?
Alot, so let's start from north, Leningrad, is now surrounded, few infantry divisions having finally circled lake Ladoga. And yes, all those engineer brigades are heading there, to bust that fort...
...alone? no, but their counterpart reinforced infantry divisions are not quite ready yet, and they were built separate since the doctrine for having five brigades to a division was still considered too unorthodox. There had also been small lapse in the equipment list for those divisions, somewhere along the requisition list, the 88mm AT guns had turned into 88mm AA guns, which in the armor rich east front was serious lapse, but alas, this was only realized when the equipment arrived. So yes, my 'masterplan' for finally breaking the fort cities of Leningrad and Moscow were those 10x 2inf+AT(AA)+Art+Eng divisions. And as you can see, the soviet armor around Moscow, has managed to push me back off, I would eventually fall back all the way to the riverline again, but as far as I remember, they didn't actually succeed in pocketing any of those divisions falling back, while it looks awfully bad in that picture (might be wrong and lost division or two, but nothing major anyways).
And to south, the pocket failed to close, Romanians were pushed back, but managed to stabilize the front as soviets were forced to swing north, smaller pocket to engulf the divisions there is tried, but despite hard trying, it would fail to completely close, soviet divisions did occasionally run out of supply and did take a heavy beating and losses there, but none were outright destroyed this time, a bit closer look here, it would have been decisive, but it was also an overreach, didn't have the troops to close it, forced the eventual fallback from moscow, stretching things that thin.