In production news, three infantry production lines are currently in progress. Industrial capacity is shifting from our abandoned naval plans to more infantry (really, in true Soviet fashion this should be MOAR INFANTRY). Another eighteen lines will begin putting divisions on the field in July and August. Single divisions of motorized infantry will hit the field a bit later. We got this event (and three others like it), too, which is good:
I've drawn down forces in Turkey and slightly reduced our strength in the Far East. Another fifteen or twenty divisions, to bolster the approximately two hundred presently on the German front, ought to be arriving in early to mid-May.
Onward to the usual faux-history book style:
Though the war declaration with the Axis would ultimately prove to be the main event, and the American invasion in the Far East merely a sideshow, it was that latter region that would provide the bulk of the news in the first two weeks of the Second World War.
Georgy Zhukov remained in command of the fifty-odd Soviet divisions in the Far East, and from the 7th of April until the 11th led a spirited defense of Khabarovsk, using the mountains and his superior forces to great effect.
It was more than a week before the war with Germany and its allies progressed into something more than bombing actions against the Soviet garrison in Finland. The Soviet high command suspected an attack would come toward Brest-Litovsk along the Moscow axis, but in fact it developed from three other directions over the course of the 16th through the 18th.
On the 16th, at 8:00 London time, the Germans attacked Lvov in the Ukraine, whose defenders fought a two-day delaying action.
Hours later, a small Italian force commandeered local boats and launched an attack from the Dodecanese into western Anatolia, while Italian paratroopers dropped into the mountains to the east soon after. The forces pinning the remains of the Turkish army in Istanbul began to disperse to defend against this new threat; the highly mobile action in Turkey was to provide an interesting counterpoint to the slugfests in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Far East.
Immediately following the Soviet retreat from Lvov, the Germans were to make an attack on Grodno. Soviet counterattacks against the German salient proved unsuccessful, but the delaying action in Grodno was nevertheless a success.
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Topic: Arsenal of Democracy LP (1 October, 1944: Vperyod!) (Read 96035 times)